Anthropology & Sociology

Michael Lambek. The Weight of the Past: Living with History in Mahajanga, Madagascar. New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2002. xxi + 319 pp. Photographs. Bibliography. Index. $29.95. Paper. The promise of anthropology has always been that by looking at various ways of thinking or being in the world, one can actually learn something new about the human condition. Most of us who ended up as anthropologists were drawn to the discipline by such a prospect; most of us also tend to forget it (except perhaps when teaching undergraduates). But every now and then a book comes along and reminds us. The Weight of the Past is such a book. It is, on the surface, an ethnography about "living with history" on the west coast of Madagascar, around the ancient royal capital and port city of Mahajanga. As such it is in the great tradition of Malagasy ethnography, which has long focused on the peculiar Malagasy fascination with history. Much of the material here will be familiar to readers of Gillian Feeley-Harnik's work on a related Sakalava kingdom: the hidden relics of ancient kings, royal spirits endlessly reliving the moments of their death, descendants of slaves and commoners endlessly reenacting royal "services." The Sakalava become, and remain, a people through the endless celebration of their own subjection to rulers no longer physically among them, at least in living forms. But where Feeley-Harnik grappled (quite brilliantly) with questions of colonialism and the "political economy of death" thrown up in its face by an apparendy passive but ultimately profoundly defiant population, Lambek is writing a book about ethics. This is a book about what humans owe to history, about the past as a responsibility, a burden that has to be born, as the Malagasy idiom puts it, even at the same time as it is a source of power, and hence freedom. In this sense, the tacit allusion to Marx in the title is quite exact. Lambek sets out to demonstrate how Sakalava people make history, despite the fact that the weight of the past generations does indeed weigh like a nightmare on the brains of the living. He does it, though, less by an appeal to Marxian categories than by a return to the very origins of dialectical thought in Aristotle. The key theoretical terms are poem, or creation, and phronesis, the ethical qualities of action. Sakalava society, like any other, is continuously in the process of its own creation. But the peculiar quality of Sakalava poesis, above all its reliance on the practice of spirit mediumship, ensures that this involves the continual invocation of an intricately layered past that becomes continually present in the most immediate ways possible. …