Slavery and Essentialism in Highland Madagascar

Slavery and Essentialism in Highland Madagascar PDF Author: Denis Regnier
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000182428
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 154

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Book Description
This book explores the prejudice against slave descendants in highland Madagascar and its persistence more than a century after the official abolition of slavery. ‘Unclean people’ is a widespread expression in the southern highlands of Madagascar, and refers to people of alleged slave descent who are discriminated against on a daily basis and in a variety of ways. Denis Regnier shows that prejudice is rooted in a strong case of psychological essentialism: free descendants think that ‘slaves’ have a ‘dirty’ essence that is impossible to cleanse. Regnier’s field experiments question the widely accepted idea that the social stigma against slavery is a legacy of pre-colonial society. He argues, to the contrary, that the essentialist construal of ‘slaves’ is the outcome of the historical process triggered by the colonial abolition of slavery: whereas in pre-abolition times slaves could be cleansed through ritual means, the abolition of slavery meant that slaves were transformed only superficially into free persons, while their inner essence remained unchanged and became progressively constructed as ‘forever unchangeable’. Based on detailed fieldwork, this volume will be of interest to scholars of anthropology, African studies, development studies, cultural psychology, and those looking at the legacy of slavery.

Slavery and Essentialism in Highland Madagascar

Slavery and Essentialism in Highland Madagascar PDF Author: Denis Regnier
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000182428
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 154

Get Book

Book Description
This book explores the prejudice against slave descendants in highland Madagascar and its persistence more than a century after the official abolition of slavery. ‘Unclean people’ is a widespread expression in the southern highlands of Madagascar, and refers to people of alleged slave descent who are discriminated against on a daily basis and in a variety of ways. Denis Regnier shows that prejudice is rooted in a strong case of psychological essentialism: free descendants think that ‘slaves’ have a ‘dirty’ essence that is impossible to cleanse. Regnier’s field experiments question the widely accepted idea that the social stigma against slavery is a legacy of pre-colonial society. He argues, to the contrary, that the essentialist construal of ‘slaves’ is the outcome of the historical process triggered by the colonial abolition of slavery: whereas in pre-abolition times slaves could be cleansed through ritual means, the abolition of slavery meant that slaves were transformed only superficially into free persons, while their inner essence remained unchanged and became progressively constructed as ‘forever unchangeable’. Based on detailed fieldwork, this volume will be of interest to scholars of anthropology, African studies, development studies, cultural psychology, and those looking at the legacy of slavery.

History and Memory in the Age of Enslavement

History and Memory in the Age of Enslavement PDF Author: Pier Martin Larson
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Madagascar
Languages : en
Pages : 456

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Book Description
This text explores how incorporation into global mercantile networks compelled people of highland Madagascar to reshape their social identity and their cultural practices.

Austronesian Paths and Journeys

Austronesian Paths and Journeys PDF Author: James J. Fox
Publisher: ANU Press
ISBN: 1760464333
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 366

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Book Description
This is the eighth volume in the Comparative Austronesian series. The papers in this volume examine metaphors of path and journey among specific Austronesian societies located on islands from Taiwan to Timor and from Madagascar to Micronesia. These diverse local expressions define common cultural conceptions found throughout the Austronesian-speaking world.

History and Memory in the Age of Enslavement

History and Memory in the Age of Enslavement PDF Author: Pier Larson
Publisher: Greenwood
ISBN: 0325002177
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
In this story of the impact of slave trade on an insular African society, Larson explores how the people of highland Madagascar reshaped their social identity and their cultural practices. Copyright © Libri GmbH. All rights reserved.

Memories of Madagascar and Slavery in the Black Atlantic

Memories of Madagascar and Slavery in the Black Atlantic PDF Author: Wendy Wilson-Fall
Publisher: Ohio University Press
ISBN: 0821445464
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 271

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Book Description
From the seventeenth century into the nineteenth, thousands of Madagascar’s people were brought to American ports as slaves. In Memories of Madagascar and Slavery in the Black Atlantic, Wendy Wilson-Fall shows that the descendants of these Malagasy slaves in the United States maintained an ethnic identity in ways that those from the areas more commonly feeding the Atlantic slave trade did not. Generations later, hundreds, if not thousands, of African Americans maintain strong identities as Malagasy descendants, yet the histories of Malagasy slaves, sailors, and their descendants have been little explored. Wilson-Fall examines how and why the stories that underlie this identity have been handed down through families—and what this says about broader issues of ethnicity and meaning-making for those whose family origins, if documented at all, have been willfully obscured by history. By analyzing contemporary oral histories as well as historical records and examining the conflicts between the two, Wilson-Fall carefully probes the tensions between the official and the personal, the written and the lived. She suggests that historically, the black community has been a melting pot to which generations of immigrants—enslaved and free—have been socially assigned, often in spite of their wish to retain far more complex identities. Innovative in its methodology and poetic in its articulation, this book bridges history and ethnography to take studies of diaspora, ethnicity, and identity into new territory.

Re-Creating Anthropology

Re-Creating Anthropology PDF Author: David N. Gellner
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000568970
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 224

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Book Description
This book makes a notable contribution to discussions of what anthropology is and should be in the twenty-first century through a reconsideration, from diverse sub-disciplinary and interdisciplinary perspectives, of the interactions between sociality, matter, and the imagination. It explores the imagination in its social contexts, how it is put to work, and how, in its embodied and material forms, it works in practice. The chapters provide detailed case studies, including film-making in Egypt; spirit-possession/exorcism in Italy; Theosophy and the production of knowledge about UFOs; the role of mistakes or glitches in public performances; humans’ varying relationships to the environment; post-coloniality, time, and crisis in anthropology; and artistic creativity.

Family Violence and Social Change in the Pacific Islands

Family Violence and Social Change in the Pacific Islands PDF Author: Lois Bastide
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1000683885
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 204

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Book Description
The Pacific Islands have some of the highest rates of family violence in the world. Addressing the contemporary mutations of Pacific Island families and the shifting understandings of violence in the context of rapid social change, this book investigates the conflict dynamics generated by these transformations. The contributors draw from detailed case studies in a range of Pacific territories to examine family violence in relation to the social, economic and political situation of native populations as well as individual, collective and institutional responses to the development of violence within and upon the family. They focus on vernacular understandings, conflicting social norms, the emergence of different types of violent patterns, the impact of violence on individuals and communities, and local attempts at mitigating or combating it. Combining ethnographic expertise with engaged scholarship, this volume offers a vivid account of ongoing social change in Pacific Island societies and a crucial contribution to the understanding of family violence as a social process, cultural construct, and political issue. This book will appeal to scholars with interests in the sociology of violence and the family, Pacific studies, development studies, and the social and cultural anthropology of Oceania.

How People Compare

How People Compare PDF Author: Mathijs Pelkmans
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1000845028
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 195

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Book Description
This book focuses on comparison in anthropology, turning an ethnographic lens onto the diversity of comparative practice. It seeks to understand how, why and with what consequences diversely situated groups of people – many of whom operate on radically different premises to professional anthropologists – make comparisons, above all, between themselves and real or imagined others. What motivates people to compare, what techniques or logics do they employ, and what are the most likely outcomes – both intended and unintended? How do comparative practices reflect, reinforce or refuse uneven relations of power? And finally, what can a rejuvenated comparative anthropology learn from the anthropology of comparison? The volume develops a dialogue between scholars with long- term ethnographic engagement in a variety of contexts around the world and is particularly valuable reading for those interested in anthropological methodology and theory.

Anthropology and the Cognitive Challenge

Anthropology and the Cognitive Challenge PDF Author: Maurice Bloch
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 0521006155
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 245

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Book Description
One of the world's most distinguished anthropologists proposes that cognitive science enriches, rather than threatens, the work of social scientists.

Remarks on Slavery in Madagascar, with an Address on that Subject, Delivered at Antananarivo

Remarks on Slavery in Madagascar, with an Address on that Subject, Delivered at Antananarivo PDF Author: Joseph Stickney Sewell
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Slavery
Languages : en
Pages : 40

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Book Description