Madagascar: Conflicts Of Authority In The Great IslandThe world's fourth largest island, with a unique biological and physical endowment, Madagascar is home to an extraordinary insular civilization that has struggled for more than a century against external domination. In this sensitive introduction to the Indian Ocean's "great island," Philip Allen shows how family affinities and community loyalties at the foundation of Madagascar's culture have influenced Malagasy nationalism and forged islandwide traditions. These same principles have nonetheless engendered social cleavages and resistance to economic and political change. In chapters on modern Madagascar, Allen analyzes the inability of a series of regimes to maintain authority among a people deeply bound to rituals of communication with their spiritual environment. He demonstrates how the first Malagasy Republic became stigmatized by its lingering identification with French colonialism and how the nationalist revolution in 1972 soon hardened into autocratic radicalism. Allen explores the complex challenges facing Madagascar's resurgent democratic forces–including a need to conserve the island's irreplaceable biodiversity and to facilitate authentic participation in public affairs without offending ancestral customs and local precedents. Finally, he discusses efforts to end Madagascar's economic and political dependence and to improve living conditions for its tragically impoverished population. |
From inside the book
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... Society in Modern Madagascar An Itinerary of Ethnic Groups Authority of Ancestral Tradition Landscape of Classes and Minorities Impacts and Transformations in Malagasy Society Notes 5 Madagascar's Economy: Flight from Reality Economic ...
... societies. The junior officer was of course entirely innocent of the nomenclatural abuse. His superiors enjoyed this April Fool's jest less at his expense than at the expense of the remote Indian Ocean islanders— the point of the ...
... society as a whole must be perceived above all in terms of geographic, linguistic, and cultural homogeneity, a phenomenon which places the great island very much on the margin of Black Africa."13. Enigmas. of. Malagasy. Settlement. Lacking ...
... societies are defined by their relation to an explicit environment , a relation that evolved over centuries . They ... society on patrilinear and patrilocal clan loyalties ; they are all Malagasy . The fact that one group , the Merina ...
... society in its contemporary senescence as diviners and healers. After the mid-seventeenth century, when Malagasy rulers and their Antalaotse communities began controlling the southwest corner of the Indian Ocean trade, the Sakalava ...
Contents
From Paternalism to Revolution | |
Revolution as Myth | |
Society in Modern Madagascar | |
Flight from Reality | |
Continuity as Revolution | |
Revolution and Continuity in International Relations | |
Notes | |
Selected Bibliography | |
Index | |