By Michael Lambek
Within the Weight of the prior, Michael Lambek explores the complicated ways in which heritage shapes, constrains, and allows everyday life. concentrating on ritual performances of spirit mediumship in a multifaceted spiritual panorama, Lambek's research finds the a number of ways in which Sakalava "bear" background. In Mahajanga, Madagascar, to endure historical past is right now a weighty legal responsibility, an artistic re-birthing, a scrupulous cultivation, and an exuberant functionality of the past.This publication describes the department of work, inventive creation, and moral perform entailed in imagining, embodying, and serving the prior. it really is immediately a shiny ethnography of Sakalava lifestyles and an important intervention in anthropological debates on tradition and historical past, constitution and perform, advocating a theoretical strategy knowledgeable through Aristotelian different types of realizing.
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Extra resources for The Weight of the Past: Living with History in Mahajanga, Madagascar
Example text
When spirits from distinct epochs arrive together, persons and events formerly separated in time are juxtaposed in the same spaces. Conversely, spatial exclusions, where two spirits cannot appear together or on each other's territory, signal either past conflicts or delicate balances of power. Consequently, spatial relations today make contiguous what was once temporally distinct, and separate what was once contemporaneous. To say that the chronotope is organic is also to say that it is meaningful, and specifically that it contains complex political messages.
I hope that rendering the centrality of poiesis enables me to evade the twin risks of ethnocentrism-the exoticization of Sakalava achievement, on the one hand, and its reduction to Western terms, on the other. Turning this around, I want my account to preserve and illuminate all of the complexity, sophistication, authority, and significance of Sakalava history, as well as its difference from the kind of work we are accustomed to describing as history. Knowledge I wish neither to reduce Western or Sakalava history-making to a single mode or dimension nor to oppose them to each other.
Ndramisara was sometimes spoken of as an outsider, possibly from Africa or Arabia (one man suggested Kuwait). It is appropriate that as an outsider it was Somotro who attracted outsiders to the shrine. Somotro was, however, notable for his down-to-earth quality. He discussed spirits With me but was more preoccupied with finding thatch for a guest house where he was planning to host visiting clients. He also wanted to construct a more solid house in town for his family. He would continue to live at the shrine but visit them and occasionally sleep there.