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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... trade, 1980-1992 5.6 Madagascar's direction of trade, 1989-1991 5.7 Madagascar's external debt and debt service, 1975-1991 5.8 Foreign assistance disbursements from OECD, OPEC, and multilateral sources, 1986-1991. Maps. Madagascar and ...
... trade winds into a rain forest that receives from 1,500 to more than 3,500 millimeters of precipitation a year. West of that escarpment, the land flattens into high plateaus, including the area around Antananarivo (Tananarive in French) ...
... trade, and piracy during a millennium. From Zanzibar or the Tanzanian mainland (Tanganyika), settlers, traders, missionaries, and predators hopped to the Grand Comoro, Moheli, or Anjouan, and finally to southeasternmost Mayotte, where ...
... trade system linking the Red Sea and the Indian east, these Indonesian peoples probably came with the monsoons in outrigger canoes along the coasts of southern India, Northeast Africa, and the Comoro Islands. There is no direct evidence ...
... trading by Arabs extended to Madagascar even into the late nineteenth century despite British efforts to sweep the ... trade in the major cities. Together with the Europeans, these so-called Karana (people of the Koran) represent the ...
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 | |