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5 — Provisional Autonomous Zone: or, TheGhost-State in Madagascar

Shortly before I left for Madagascar I was talking to Henry Wright, an archeologist who hadworked there for more than a decade. “You have to be careful,” he said, “poking around the countryside.”State authority was dissolving. In many parts of the island, he said, it had effectivelyceased to exist. Even in the region around the capital there were reports of fokon’olona—villageassemblies—beginning to carry out executions.This was one of the many concerns forgotten almost as soon as I actually arrived in Madagascar.In the capital, there was quite obviously a functioning government; almost every educated personseemed to work for it. When I moved to Arivonimamo, a town about an hour to the West, thingsdid not seem particularly different. Certainly, people talked about the government all the time;everybody acted as if there was one. There was an administrative structure, offices where peopletyped up documents, registered things, kept track of births and deaths and the number of people’scattle. One even had to get permission to carry out the most important rituals. The governmentran schools, held national exams; there were gendarmes, a prison, an airfield with military jets.It was only after I had been in Arivonimamo for some time—and even more, in retrospect, afterI’d left—that I began to wonder whether what he told me might actually have been true. Perhapsit was simply my own bias, the fact that I had always lived under an efficient and omnipresentgovernment, that made me read the cues the wrong way. Perhaps there really wasn’t a state inBetafo at all; perhaps not even in Arivonimamo—or anyway, not one that behaves in any waylike what I or other Westerners have come to assume a state is supposed to behave.Before I explain what I mean by this, though, perhaps it would help to set the scene.Arivonimamo and BetafoI arrived in Madagascar on June 16, 1989. For the first six months, I lived in Antananarivo,the capital, studying the language and doing archival research. The National Archives in Antananarivoare a remarkable resource. In their collection are thousands of documents from thenineteenth century kingdom of Madagascar, most from the highland province of Imerina, whichsurrounded the capital. Almost all of it was in Malagasy. I went through hundreds of folders, carefullycopying out everything concerned with the district of Eastern Imamo, the part of Imerinain which I intended to work. Eastern Imamo seemed, at the time, to have been a rather sleepyplace, a rural hinterland far from the tumultuous political struggles of the capital, but at the sametime insulated from the unstable fringes of Imerina, half-empty territories full of raiding bandits,industrial projects, and periodic revolts. It was a place where not much ever happened—and, thus,the perfect field on which to study the slow-moving processes of social and cultural change I wasinterested in.123Once I felt I had a minimal command of Malagasy, I set out for Arivonimamo, the major townof the region. It was not at all difficult to get there: Arivonimamo is only an hour from the capitalby car. Before long I had established myself in town, and had begun making regular trips to thesurrounding countryside, gathering oral histories, keeping an eye out for a likely place to domore detailed research.Arivonimamo is a town of some ten thousand people that clusters around a stretch of themain highway leading west from the capital. In the 1960s and 1970s, it had been the home of thenational airport, which sat in a broad valley to the south of town; but though the airport broughtmoney and employment, it never seemed to become an integral part of the town’s economy. Itwas largely a thing grafted on. The road from the airport did not pass through Arivonimamoitself; there wasn’t even a place for travelers to spend the night there. In 1975, the airport wasreplaced by another, nearer the capital. The old airport was given to the military, which rarely,however, had the funds to use it. By 1990, all that remained to show that foreigners had oncepassed through here was the battered plywood shell of an empty restaurant, standing where theairport road merges with the highway just on the outskirts of town.The current town centers on a taxi station, a wide asphalt expanse flanked by two greatchurches, Catholic and Protestant. At most hours, it was crowded with vans and station wagonsfilling up with passengers and bags and crates and heading off the capital, or further west downthe highway. On the southern edge of the taxi stand is a wide spreading amontana tree, a veryancient sycamore that is considered the symbolic center of the town, the mark that it was oncethe place of kings. To its north is a marketplace with food stands and red-tiled arcades, whichevery Friday fills to overflowing with rural people and vendors under white umbrellas. The townitself clings to the road (the only place there is electricity); its houses are mostly two or three stories,with graceful pillars supporting verandahs around the second floor, and high-pitched roofsof tin or tile.Arivonimamo is the capital of an administrative district of the same name. It contains severalgovernment offices and three high schools: one state school (CEG), one Catholic lycée, and oneProtestant one. There is a clinic and, on a high bluff somewhat to the west of town, a small prison.Together with a gendarmes’ barracks nearer the old airport, a post office, and a bank, these constitutethe government presence. There was once a factory nearby but it had been abandonedfor years by the time I was there; no one I knew was quite sure what, if anything, had everbeen produced there. The town’s commercial economy fell almost completely outside the formal(taxed, regulated) sector: there was a pharmacy and two large general stores, but that was aboutit. Otherwise, the population conformed to the general rule for Malagasy towns: almost everybodygrows food; everybody sells something. Streets were fringed with dozens of little boothsand stores, all stocked with the same narrow range of products: soap, rum, candles, cooking oil,biscuits, soda, bread. Anyone who had a car was a member of the taxi collective; anyone whohad a VCR was a theater operator; anyone who had a sewing machine was a manufacturer ofclothing.The province of Imerina has always centered on the gigantic irrigated plains surrounding thenational capital, Antananarivo, which have long had a very dense population and been the centerof powerful kingdoms. In the nineteenth century, the Merina kingdom conquered most ofMadagascar; since the French conquest of 1895, Antananarivo has remained the center of administration,and the surrounding territory remains the ancestral lands of most of Madagascar’sadministrators and educated elite. The territory that now makes up the district of Arivonimamo124was always somewhat marginal. It was late to be incorporated into the kingdom, and it was nevermore than weakly integrated into the networks of cash and patronage centered on the capital.So it remains. Now, as then, it is a political and economic margin, a place where not much everhappens.To the north of Arivonimamo is a rolling country of endless red hills, some covered only withgrass, others wooded with eucalyptus trees, stretches of tapia—which look like dwarf oaks—andoccasional stands of pine. The hills are cut by narrow twisting valleys, each carefully terraced forthe cultivation of irrigated rice. Here and there rise granite mountains, supposed to have beenthe seats of ancient kings.In this back country, there are no paved roads. People walk—very few can afford bicycles.Goods are transported in ox-carts, along mud paths that are, even in winter, too rutted for anybut the toughest automobiles. With the start of the summer rains, they become impassable. Itis largely because of the difficulties of communication that there is no large-scale commercialagriculture, despite the proximity of the capital. Farmers do end up carting a fair proportionof their crops to markets in town, and much of this ends up helping to feed the population ofAntananarivo, but it’s all piecemeal, individual cultivators selling to very small-scale merchantsin an endless multitude of tiny transactions, almost as if people were intentionally trying toensure that the meager profits to be had from buying and selling local products ended up dividedbetween as many hands as possible.As I have said, my first work was on oral history: I started visiting villages usually accompaniedby one or two Malagasy friends from Arivonimamo. I ended up fixing on the village of Betafo inwhich to carry out my intensive fieldwork: a community that fascinated me, in part, because itwas divided almost evenly between andriana (usually translated “nobles”) and the descendantsof their former slaves. Betafo lies along the southern flank of a long mountainous ridge calledAmbohidraidimby, most of it only a thirty- to forty-minute walk from the center of Arivonimamo.It is close enough that one can live in town and still cultivate one’s fields in Betafo—as manypeople do—or have a house in both places and move freely back and forth between them.Most rural communities in Imerina have some economic specialization, which occupies peopleespecially in winter. In one village, the men will all be butchers, in another the women all weavebaskets, or make rope; spaces in the marketplace in Arivonimamo are mapped out as much bythe origin of the vendors as by the goods they have for sale. The people of Betafo have beentraditionally known as blacksmiths. Nowadays, roughly a third of its households still have asmithy out back. Of those who do not, a very large number are involved in supplying smiths withiron ingots, and selling the plows and shovels they produce in markets and fairs in other parts ofImerina. What had started as a local effort had, by the time I was there, expanded dramatically,since in most of the region to the west of the capital, Betafo was mainly known for selling plows,despite the fact that no one in Betafo itself actually produced plows—they were all manufacturedin other villages in the vicinity of Arivonimamo, with iron supplied by speculators from Betafo.The intensification of commerce is one response to the economic crunch that has caused a dramaticfall in standards of living throughout Madagascar since the 1970s. It led to a great increasein side occupations, so that in any one household, one woman might be spending much of hertime running a coffee stand in town, or weaving, another making fermented manioc to sell tovendors in the market, one man driving an ox-cart part time and spending several months a yearselling pineapples in a different part of Imerina, while yet another might only drop by in thecountry occasionally, spending most of his days refilling disposable lighters near the taxi-stand125in town. All this makes membership in a community like Betafo a bit hard to define. Not thatI was trying to gather much in the way of statistics. In fact, one of the peculiar effects of mysituation was that I had some fairly detailed bits of information about the demographics andproperty-holdings of the inhabitants of Betafo in the 1840s and 1920s, culled from the archives,I never managed to get such statistical information for the time I was actually there. This fact isimportant. I think it reveals something quite profound, actually, about what sort of place I wasactually in.While I was living in Arivonimamo and working in Betafo, I spent a lot of time thinking aboutthe political aspects of conducting research. Almost all anthropologists do. In my case, it wasespecially hard not to be a little self-conscious in a milieu where urbanites seemed to find a specialjoy in telling me how terrified country folk were of Vazaha (people of European stock, such asmyself)—and country folk, in telling me how terrified children were. For most Malagasy, thevery word “Vazaha” evoked the threat of violence. Fortunately for me, it also had as its primarymeaning “Frenchman,” and (as I endlessly had to explain) I did not even speak French. Speakingonly in Malagasy took a bit of the edge off things. But even more crucial: conducting researchitself had associations. On the one hand, Imerina is a highly literate society: no one had anyproblem understanding what I meant if I said I was an American student carrying out researchfor his doctorate in anthropology. Nor did anyone seem to doubt that this was a legitimate, evenan admirable thing to be doing. But techniques of knowledge were very closely identified withtechniques of rule, and I quickly got the impression that there were certain sorts of inquiry peoplewere much more comfortable with than others. Perhaps I was overly sensitive, but as soon as Igot the feeling I was moving onto territory someone didn’t want me delving into, I desisted. Iwould rather people talked to me about the things they wanted to talk about. As a result, I knowmore about the distribution of property in Betafo in 1925—or even 1880—than I do for the timeI was there. Property surveys were the sort of the thing governments would carry out, backedby the threat of force, in order to aid in the forcible extraction of labor or taxes. This meant thatthere were extensive records in the archives; it also meant it was exactly what people wantedto be sure I wasn’t ultimately up to. Even the act of systematically going from door to doorsurveying household size would have been… well, nothing would have been more guaranteed toget people’s backs up. Lack of hard numbers seemed a minor price to pay.The Very Existence of the StateLet me return, then, to the initial question of the state.Was there a government in Arivonimamo and the surrounding countryside? On one level,the answer was perfectly obvious. Of course there was. There were government personnel, governmentoffices, and at least in town, government-run schools, banks, and hospitals. Almostall economic transactions—even if they were generally off the books—were carried out usinggovernment-issued Malagasy currency. The territory as a whole was claimed under the sovereignauthority of a Malagasy state that was recognized by all other states in the world, and no one,in this territory, was openly contesting that state’s sovereign authority. Certainly, there was nobodyelse claiming to represent a different state or claiming to represent a political alternative:there were no insurrectionary communities, no guerilla movements, no political organizationspursuing dual power strategies.126From a different perspective, though, the situation looked quite different. Because the Malagasystate, in this region at least—and this was a region quite close to its center of power in the capital—was either uninterested in, or incapable of, carrying out many of what we consider to be a state’smost elementary, definitional functions.The key issue in most Western definitions of the state is its power to coerce. States employ“force”—a euphemistic term for the threat of violence—to enforce the law. The classic definitionhere is Weber’s: “A compulsory political association with continuous organization will be calleda ‘state’ if and in so far as its administrative staff successfully upholds a claim to the monopolyof the legitimate use of physical force in the enforcement of its order” (1968 I: 54). But Weber’sdefinition was itself really just a matter of repeating the conventional jural wisdom of his day.In fact, he seems to have been drawing directly on the work of an earlier German legal theoristnamed Rudolph von Ihering, who in 1877 had defined the state this way:The State is the only competent as well as the sole owner of social coercive force—the right to coerce forms the absolute monopoly of the State. Every association thatwishes to realize its claims upon its members by means of mechanical coercion isdependent upon the cooperation of the State, and the State has in its power to fixthe conditions under which it will grant such aid (cited in Turner & Factor 1994:103–104).A definition like this is mainly a way to focus the mind; it is not of that much use for determiningwhether or not any particular organization is a state, since for that, everything dependson whether or not one feels a would-be state has been “successful” in claiming its monopoly.Nonetheless, these definitions do capture the implicit common sense behind modern Westerninstitutions of government—one in no way foreign to the Malagasy state, which was organizedvery much on this same model under the French colonial regime, and whose current form isbased largely on colonial institutions. And most Malagasy, I think, would have agreed that theability to apply force in this way was, essentially, what made a state what it was. This made it allthe more striking that, in most of the Malagasy countryside, the state had become almost completelyunwilling to do so. Far from maintaining an absolute monopoly of the right to coerce, orto authorize others to do so, the state simply did not exercise what was ostensibly its primaryfunction there at all.In the capital, there were police. Around Arivonimamo the closest thing to a police force was aunit of gendarmes who had a barracks somewhat to the west of town. Mainly, they patrolled thehighway. Occasionally, I was told, they would fight bandits further west; but they did not like totravel off the paved roads, over the rutted dirt tracks that led into the countryside where almosteveryone actually lived. In the countryside, gendarmes would never show up unless someone hadbeen murdered. Even then, it would usually require something drastic—like a large number ofwitnesses appearing at their doorstep demanding they take action, and, usually, having alreadyrounded up the culprit(s) themselves—before they would actually come and take anyone away.Even in town, they did not act much like police. In Arivonimamo I heard a lot about a bullynamed Henri, a large and powerfully built man, perhaps insane (some said he was just pretending),who had terrorized its inhabitants for years. Henri used to help himself to merchandiseat the local shops, daring anyone to stop him; he was a particular danger to the town’s youngwomen, who lived in constant fear of sexual assault. After much discussion, the young men of127the town finally decided to join together and kill him. This took some time to arrange because,in fact, there was an informal tradition in that part of the highlands that if one wishes to lynchsomeone, one has to get their parent’s permission first. Normally this is just an effective wayto reinforce parental authority, a kind of ultimate sanction—or, a way of allowing someone’smother or father to inform them that it’s really time one should be getting out of town—but inthis case, after many vain efforts to apprise his son of the seriousness of the matter, Henri’s fatherthrew up his hands and allowed things to take their course. The next time he provoked a fight, acrowd immediately appeared armed with knives and agricultural implements. As it turned out,they didn’t quite succeed in killing him: badly wounded, Henri managed to take refuge in theCatholic church and demanded sanctuary, claiming persecution due to mental illness. There, noone was willing to follow him. The Italian priest hid him in the back of a van and smuggled himout to an insane asylum. He was soon discharged (he beat the other patients), but didn’t dareshow his face again in Arivonimamo for many years to come. The first time I heard the story Iwas mainly interested in the details of parental permission. Only later did it occur to me that thisevent took place in a town with an actual police station. How could Henri have managed to terrorizethe town for years without anything being done about him? “Why hadn’t the gendarmesdone anything,” I asked? “Haven’t you seen Henri,” people would reply. “He’s enormous!”“But the gendarmes had guns!”“Yes, but even so.”Events like this were in every way exceptional. The most significant thing about violencearound Arivonimamo was that there was very little of it. Murders were shocking, isolated events;there were very few Henris. Nonetheless, rural assemblies had to develop all sorts of creativestrategies to overcome the reluctance of the forces of order to enforce the laws. Towards the end ofmy stay, there was a fokon’olona meeting in Betafo—a village assembly—to deal with an instanceof violence. A man named Benja, notorious for his fiery temper, had a quarrel with his sister oversome mutual business arrangement, and, the story went, had beaten her to within an inch of herlife. Actually, stories varied considerably about how badly she was really beaten, but the matterwas considered a very serious affair requiring immediate attention. After much deliberation, thefokon’olona ordered Benja to write an undated letter confessing to having murdered his sister,and then, brought the confession down to be lodged at the local gendarme station in town. Thatway, if his sister was ever to be found the victim of foul play, he would already have confessedand could simply be delivered to the authorities. The message was that his sister’s safety and wellbeingwere to be his personal responsibility from then on. In this case, the state was being used asa kind of ghost-image of authority, a principle but not a threat, since if his sister was found dead,the fokon’olona themselves would have to be the ones to arrest him and carry him down to thegendarmes’ office; the papers would merely make it much more likely that he would then have tospend some time in jail. In other cases, the state authorities were bypassed entirely. The 1980s, forexample, began to see the revival of collective ordeals. In a case of theft—for instance, in Betafo,after someone had made off with the entire contents of a rice storage pit belonging to a prominentelder—elders would gather a whole community together, and each would drink from a speciallyprepared bowl or eat a piece of a specially prepared liver, and call on their ancestors to strikethem down if they were guilty. The next person who died a sudden death was thus presumed tobe a victim of ancestral vengeance. Two such collective ordeals had been held in Betafo alone inthe decade before I came there. There were even rumors, further out in the countryside, of therevival of actual poison ordeals. Everywhere, one began to hear about invisible powers enforcing128justice—buried charms, standing stones, ancient places of sacrifice newly charged with the powerto detect and punish evil-doers. Almost anyone of any wealth or political prominence startedto begin hinting that they might have access to dangerous magical powers: hail or lightningcharms, vindictive ghosts, access to the protection of ancient kings. Anyone who intended toamass—or maintain—a great deal of wealth had almost by definition to be able to at least createthe suspicion in others’ minds that they might have access to dangerous hidden powers of somesort or another. But it was a very delicate game: since anyone who boasted openly of such powerswas assumed almost by definition not to really have them, and anyone who employed dangerousmagic against their fellow villagers was by definition a witch. I even heard rumors of wealthymen deep in the countryside who so infuriated their neighbors by dark hints of magical powersthat those neighbors eventually sought counter-medicine, disguised themselves as bandits, andattacked and ransacked their possessions.The State as Guarantor of Property RelationsTheories of social class almost always assume that a key role of the state—perhaps, its mostimportant role—is to underpin property relations. For a Marxist, certainly, this is a state’s primaryreason for being. Contractual, market relations can only exist because their basic ground, thebasic rules of the game, are enshrined in law; those laws in turn are effective only in so far aseveryone knows they will be backed up—in the last instance—by clubs and guns and prisons.And, of course, if the ultimate guarantor of property relations is state violence, then the same istrue of social classes as well.But, in the countryside around Arivonimamo, the state simply did not play this role. I cannotimagine a situation under which it would dispatch armed men to uphold one person’s right toexclude another from their land—let alone to enforce a contract or investigate a robbery. This, too,was something whose full significance dawned on me only afterwards, because everyone actedas if the government did play a crucial role in such matters. The government kept track of whoowned each piece of land: whenever someone died, the division of their fields and other propertywas meticulously recorded at the appropriate offices. Registering property, along with births anddeaths, was one of the main things such offices did. There were all sorts of laws concerning land,and no one openly contested them, just as when talking in the abstract, they always spoke asif they felt land registration did give an accurate picture of who had ultimate rights to what.In practice, however, legal principles were usually only one, relatively minor, consideration. Ifthere was a dispute, legalities had to be weighed against a welter of “traditional” principles (whichusually provided more than one possible solution to any given problem), the intentions of formerowners, and not least, by people’s broader sense of justice—the feeling, for instance, that noaccepted member of the community should be completely deprived of the means of making aliving. Certainly no one would think of taking the matter to court—except in a few rare caseswhere one of the disputants was an outsider. Even then, the court served mainly as a neutralmediator; everyone knew no police or any other armed official would enforce a court decision.11 One might contrast the situation here with what obtains in, say, much of rural Brazil, where the situation isquite the opposite, since police, effectively, are only interested in enforcing property rights, and can be expected toignore mere cases of murder—unless, that is, the victim is a member of the property-owning elite.129In Arivonimamo, in fact, there was one man with a gendarme’s uniform who would occasionallyrent himself out to money-lenders or merchants to intimidate people into paying debts orsurrendering collateral. An acquaintance of mine from Betafo was terrified one day when heshowed up in the company of a notorious loan-shark—even after his neighbors explained to himthat the man could hardly be a real policeman, because, even if you could find an officer willingto trudge out into the country on such a trivial matter, lending money at interest was against thelaw for private individuals and a real gendarme would have had just as much cause to arrest hiscreditor as he. This struck me as a particularly telling case, because it underlined just how littlethe forces of order cared about economic affairs. Normally, there is nothing more guaranteedto infuriate police than the knowledge that someone is going around impersonating an officer.Doing so strikes at the very essence of their authority. If this particular impostor got away withit—as he apparently did—it appeared to be because he confined his activities to a domain in whichthe gendarmes had no interest. After all, the gendarmes never did anything to protect shopkeepersfrom Henri, either—and that was in town; the counterfeit officer seems to have confined hisactivities almost exclusively to the countryside.There are various ways one might chose to assess this situation. One would be to concludethat people of rural Imerina, or in Madagascar in general, had a different conception of the statethan Marxists and Weberians are used to. Maybe the protection of property is simply not oneof the functions anyone expects a government to fulfill. To the extent people seemed to sayotherwise, they might just be paying lip service to alien principles imposed by the French colonialregime. But, in fact, the pre-colonial Merina state was veritably obsessed with protecting property.King Andrianampoinimerina, its founder, emphasized this role constantly in his speeches (Larson2000: 192). Law codes, beginning with his own, always made the regulation of inheritance, rulesabout buying and renting, and the like, one of their most important areas of concern. Even theregistration of lands predates the colonial period; records began to be kept in 1878, seventeenyears before the French invasion.On the other hand, existing evidence gives us no reason to believe that people then paid muchmore attention to this elaborate legal structure than they do today—although neither is there anyrecord of anyone openly challenging it. Legal systems have always been accepted in principle,and appealed to only very selectively in practice. Mostly, people go about their business muchas they had done before. It is this phenomenon, I think, which gives the best hint as to what’sreally going on.Let me make a broad generalization. Confronted with someone bent on imposing unwantedauthority, a typical Malagasy response will be to agree heartily with whatever demands that personmakes, and then, as soon as they are gone, to try to go on living one’s life as if the incidenthad never happened. One might even say this was the archetypically Malagasy way of dealingwith authority: one’s first line of defense is simply to deny that the event in question (a governmentofficial coming to count cattle and announce the required tax payments, or negotiate therequisitioning of laborers to replant trees or build a road) ever occurred. Admittedly, it is hardlya strategy limited to Madagascar. Something along these lines is often considered a typically“peasant” strategy: it is an obvious course to take when one is in no way economically dependenton those trying to tell one what to do. But there are many other routes to take, all sorts ofpossible combinations of confrontation, negotiation, subversion, acquiescence. In Madagascar,where there is often a strong distaste for open confrontation in daily life in general, the preferredapproach has always been to do whatever it takes to make the annoying outsider happy until130he goes away; then, insist that he had never been there to begin with, or if that doesn’t work, tosimply ignore whatever one has agreed with and see what the consequences might be. It eventakes on a cosmological dimension. Malagasy myths on the origins of death claim that life itselfwas won from God in a deal that humans never really intended to keep (hence, it is said, God killsus). Here is one, drawn early in the century from the Betsimisaraka of the east coast. There areendless variations, most obviously tongue-in-cheek, with the Creator often bearing an uncannyresemblance to the sort of passing colonial official who would periodically show up in villages,with armed retainers, demanding the payment of taxes:Once upon a time, a Vazimba [aboriginal] couple were the only two occupants of theearth. They were sad because they had no children, so one day they found some clayand gave it human form. They made two figures, one a little boy, the other a little girl.The woman blew in their noses to animate them but she wasn’t able to give themlife. Then, one day, she happened to meet a god who was traveling on the earth. Thewoman asked him to give life to the two statues and promised him, if he succeeded,two cows and a sum of money. So he did so.When the children grew up, the parents married them to one another. Then the godreturned to claim his payment.“We have no money,” the parents said, “because we’re old, but in twelve years ourchildren will pay you.”“Because you have tricked me,” replied the god, “I will kill you.” And he did.After twelve years the god returned to again ask the children for his payment.“You’ve killed our parents,” said the couple, “so the money we’ve gathered up to payyou has all been spent. We have to ask you for ten more years to acquit our debt.”Ten years later, the god returned and the couple had three children but no money.“I will kill you,” said the god, “you and your descendants, whether you be old oryoung.”Since that day, humans have been mortal, and when one quits life, Malagasy peoplesay, “they are taken by the god that made them.” (Renel 1910 III: 17–18; my translationfrom the French).The mythological point is, to say the least, suggestive. One might well argue that this wholeattitude is ultimately one with the logic of sacrifice, which at least in Madagascar is often explicitlyphrased as a way of fobbing off the Divine Powers with a portion of what is rightfullytheirs, so as to win the rest for living people. The life of the animal, it is often said, goes to God;hence (implicitly), we get to keep our own. Consider, then, the curious fact that all over Madagascar,sacrificial rituals—or their functional equivalents, such as the famadihana (reburial) ritualsof Imerina—always seem to require government permits. The fact that this permit has been received,that the paperwork has been properly done, is often made much of during the ceremonyitself. Here is a fragment of a Betsimisaraka speech, spoken over the body of a sacrificial ox:For this ox is not the kind of ox that lazes in its pen or shits anywhere on enteringthe village. Its body is here with us, but its life is with you, the government. You,131the government, are like a great beast lying on its back: he who turns it over seesits huge jaws; so we, comrades, cannot turn that beast over! It is this official permitthat is the knife that dares to cut its hide, the ax that dares to break its bones, whichcomes from you who hold political authority (Aly 1984: 59–60).Not only is the state figured simultaneously as a potential force of violence and its victim; theact of acquiring a permit becomes equated with the act of sacrifice itself. The main point I amtrying to make here is about autonomy. Filling out forms, registering land, even paying taxes,might be considered the equivalents of sacrifice: little ritualized actions of propitiation by whichone wins the autonomy to continue with one’s life.This theme of autonomy crops up in any number of other studies of colonial and postcolonialMadagascar—notably, those of Gerald Althabe (1969, 2000), about these same Betsimisaraka, andGillian Feeley-Harnik (1982, 1984, 1991) on the Sakalava of the northwest coast. But in theseauthors it takes on a sort of added twist, since both suggest that, in Madagascar, the most commonway to achieve autonomy is by creating a false image of domination. The logic seems to bethis: a community of equals can only be created by common subordination to some overarchingforce. Typically, it is conceived as arbitrary and potentially violent in much the same way as thetraditional Malagasy God. But it can also be equally far from everyday human concerns. Oneof the most dramatic responses to colonial rule, among both peoples, was the massive diffusionof spirit possession; in every community, women began to be possessed by the souls of ancientkings, whose will was considered (at least in theory) to have all the authority it would have, hadthey been alive. By relegating ultimate social authority to entranced women speaking with thevoices of dead kings, the power to constitute communities is displaced to a zone where Frenchofficials and police would have no way to openly confront it. In either case, there was the samekind of move: one manages to create a space for free action, in which to live one’s life out of thegrip of power, only by creating the image of absolute domination—but one which is ultimatelyonly that, an image, a phantasm, completely manipulable by those it ostensibly subjects.To put the matter crudely, one might say that the people I knew were engaged in a kind ofscam. Their image of government had, at least since the colonial period, been one of somethingessentially alien, predatory, coercive. The principal emotion it inspired was fear. Under the French,the government apparatus was primarily an engine for extracting money and forced labor fromits subjects; it provided relatively little in way of social benefits for the rural population (certainly,from the point of view of the rural population it didn’t). In so far as it did concern itself with itssubjects’ daily needs, it was with the conscious intention of creating new ones, of transformingtheir desires so as to create a more deeply rooted dependence. Nor did matters change muchafter independence in 1960, since the first Malagasy regime made very few changes in its policyor mode of operation. For the vast majority of the population, the common-sense attitude wasthat the state was something to be propitiated, then avoided, in so far as it was in any way possibleto do so.It was only after the revolution of 1972 that things really began to change.An anti-colonial revolt in its origins, the 1972 events introduced a succession of state-capitalist,military-based regimes—from 1975 until 1991, dominated by the figure of President Didier Ratsiraka.Ratsiraka found his political inspiration in Kim Il Sung of North Korea. In theory, his regimewas dedicated to a very centralized version of socialist development and mobilization. From thebeginning, though, he was uninterested in what he considered a stagnant, traditional peasant sec-132tor with little revolutionary potential. In agriculture as in industry, his government concentratedits efforts on a series of colossal development schemes, often heroic in scale, involving massiveinvestment, funded by foreign loans. Loans were easy enough to get in the 1970s. By 1981, thegovernment was insolvent. Ever since, Malagasy economic history has mainly been the story ofnegotiations with the IMF.There is no room here to enter into details on the effects of IMF-ordered austerity plans. Sufficeit to say their immediate result was a catastrophic fall in living standards, across the board.Hardest hit were the civil service and other government employees (who made up the bulk ofthe middle class) but—aside from a narrow elite surrounding the President himself, who stoleliberally—pauperization has been well-nigh universal. Madagascar is now one of the poorestcountries on earth.For Ratsiraka’s “peasant sector”—rural areas not producing key commodities—this whole periodwas marked by the gradual withdrawal of the state. The most onerous taxes from the Frenchperiod—the head tax, cattle tax, house tax—intended to force farmers to sell their products andthus to goad them into the cash economy, were abolished immediately after the revolution. Ratsiraka’sregime first ignored rural administration; after 1981, it increasingly became the objectof triage. The state, its resources ever more limited as budgets were endlessly slashed, was reducedto administering and providing minimal social services to those towns and territories itsrulers found economically important: mainly, those which generated some kind of foreign exchange.Places like Arivonimamo, where almost all production and distribution was carried outoutside the formal sector anyway, were of no interest to them. Indeed, it is hard to imagine anythingthat could happen there—short of the area becoming the base for armed guerrillas (hardly apossibility)—that would seriously threaten the interests of the men who really ran the country.2Resources for rural areas dried up. By the time I was in Arivonimamo, the only sector of administrationthat was receiving any significant funding was the education system. Even herethe sums were paltry: the main government role was to post the teachers (who were sometimespaid, at least in part, by parents’ associations), provide curricula, and administer the tests. Thelatter, particularly the baccalaureate examination, were of particular concern to the center becausethey were the gateway into the formal, state sector: those who passed their baccalaureatewere obliged to undergo several weeks of military training and then carry out a year’s “NationalService,” though—as I’ve pointed out—this mainly consisted of lounging around in meaninglessmake-work jobs. But National Service was, I think, important. It was a way of marking passageinto a domain where effective authority really did exist, where orders had to be obeyed. For2 The gendarmes’ occasional zeal in pursuing bandits probably did have something to do with a perceptionthat they were the only organized, armed group that had the capacity to form the nucleus of a rebellion—unlikelythough that might have been. There had been times, mainly in the nineteenth century, when bandits actually hadturned into rebels. But I suspect the concern was rooted in deeper understandings about what a state was all about:under the Merina Kingdom, bandits (referred to in official documents simply as fahavalo, “the enemy”) were, alongwith witches, the archetypal anti-state, that which legitimate royal authority defined itself against. The connectionwith witches also helps explain the otherwise puzzling fact that, much though they were unconcerned with Henri’sdepredations, Arivonimamo’s gendarmes did leap into action to arrest and interrogate a teenage girl suspected ofbeing behind an outbreak of Ambalavelona, or posesssion by evil ghosts, which affected a whole dormful of studentsat the state high school in 1979.133those not ensconced in the educational system, the government provided nothing, but it also hadalmost no immediate power over their lives.3Still, even in the countryside, government offices continued to exist. The typewriters wereoften crumbling, functionaries were often reduced to buying their own paper, since they couldno longer requisition any, but people dutifully continued to fill out forms, requesting permissionbefore uprooting trees or exhuming the dead, reporting births and deaths, and registeringthe number of their cattle. They must have realized that, had they refused, nothing would havehappened. So: why did they play along?One might, I suppose, call it inertia, sheer force of habit: people were still running the samescam, propitiating the state without having noticed its huge jaws were toothless. Certainly, memoriesof colonial violence were still vivid. I was told many times of the early days of mass executions,or of how terrified rural people used to be when they had to enter a government office, ofthe endless pressure of taxation. But I think the real answer is more subtle.Memories of violence were mainly important because they defined what people imagined astate to be about. I found little notion that the state (for all its socialist pretensions) existed to provideservices; at least, no one much complained about the lack of them. People seemed to acceptthat a government was essentially an arbitrary, predatory, coercive power. But the one themeof official ideology everyone did seem to take seriously was the idea of Malagasy unity. In thehighlands, at least, people saw themselves as “Malagasy”; they hardly ever referred to themselvesas “Merina.” Malagasy unity was a constant theme in rhetoric; it was the real meaning, I think, ofthe Malagasy flags that inevitably accompanied any major ritual (whose official meaning was tomark that the forms had been filled out, the event approved). It seems to me that it was the veryemptiness of the state which made it acceptable as a unifying force. When it was powerful, thestate in Imerina was essentially seen as something French—this remained true even in the earlyyears of independence. The 1972 revolution was first and foremost an effort to achieve genuineindependence, to make the state truly Malagasy. For the highland population, I would say, thiseffort was largely successful—if only because, at the same time, the state was stripped of almostall effective power. In other words, the government became something along the same lines asthe ancient kings discussed by Althabe and Feeley-Harnik: absolute, arbitrary powers that constitutethose they subjugate as a community by virtue of their common subjugation, while atthe same time, extremely convenient powers to be ruled by, because, in any immediate practicalsense, they do not exist.Provisional Autonomous ZoneIn contemporary anarchist circles it has become common to talk of the “TAZ,” or “temporaryautonomous zones” (Bey 1991). The idea is that, while there may no longer be any place on earthentirely uncolonized by State and Capital, power is not completely monolithic: there are alwaystemporary cracks and fissures, ephemeral spaces in which self-organized communities can anddo continually emerge like eruptions, covert uprisings. Free spaces flicker into existence and thenpass away. If nothing else, they provide constant testimony to the fact that alternatives are stillconceivable, that human possibilities are never fixed.3 Medical services for instance were in theory provided free, but had been effectively privatized by corruption,which, in turn, became universal once government salaries declined to next to nothing.134In rural Imerina, it might be better to talk about a “provisional autonomous zone,” rather thana “temporary” one: in part, to emphasize that it does not stand quite so defiantly outside poweras the image of a TAZ implies; but also, because there is no reason to necessarily assume itsindependence is all that temporary. Betafo, even to a large extent Arivonimamo, stood outsidethe direct control of the state apparatus: even if the people who live there passed back and forthbetween them and zones, such as the capital, which are very much under the domination of thestate. Their autonomy was tentative, uncertain. It might be largely swept away the moment a newinfusion of guns and money restores the apparatus; but then again, it might not. Some mightconsider the current situation scandalous. Myself, I consider it a remarkable accomplishment.After all, austerity plans have been imposed on nations all over the world; few governmentshave reacted by abandoning the bulk of the population to govern themselves; nor would manypopulations have been so well prepared to do so.Why were they able to do so? I would guess there are various reasons. One is the maintenanceof active traditions of self-governance, and what would, if it were observed in, say, European orLatin American social movements, undoubtedly be called a culture of direct democracy. The artof coming to decisions by consensus was something everyone simply learned as part of growingup. It was so much a part of everyday common sense that it was difficult, at first, for an outsiderto even notice it. For instance, there was a general principle that no course of action thatmight have negative consequences on others should legitimately be carried out without thoseothers’ prior consent; the resultant meetings were called “fokon’olona” meetings—meaning, basically,“everybody”—but despite the consistent misunderstanding of colonial ethnography, “the”fokon’olona was not a formal institution, but a flexible principle of deliberation by groups thatcould vary from five to a thousand, depending on the dimensions of the problem they were collectivelytrying to solve. Within those meetings, however, anyone, male or female, old or young,formally had equal right to speak: the only criteria was to be old enough to be able to formulatean intelligent opinion.4 What’s more, anyone engaged in an ongoing project had the powerto engage in what would in contemporary consensus process be referred to as a “block”: onecould simply declare “I am no longer in agreement” (tsy manaiky aho) with the general directionof things, and it would cause a general crisis until one’s concerns had been publicly addressed.Suffice it to say, then, that even during the colonial period, when all political gatherings weretechnically illegal, ordinary people had maintained institutional structures and political habitsthat allowed them to govern their own affairs with minimal appeal to outside force. They hadalso managed to develop forms of resistance sufficiently subtle that, when the state was emptiedof its substance, they were able to allow it to effectively collapse with minimal loss of face.I don’t mean to romanticize the situation. What autonomy rural communities have has beenwon at the cost of grinding poverty; it is hard to enjoy one’s freedom if one is in a constant scrambleto have enough to eat. Institutions of rule—most obviously schools and Christian churches—still functioned, and in the same hierarchical way as ever, even if they did now largely lackedthe power to back up their efforts with the threat of physical force. There were certainly profoundsocial inequalities within many of these rural communities, not to mention in town: bothdifferences of wealth (perhaps minor by world standards, but nonetheless real), and even more,4 As Jacques Dez (1975: 54–57) notes in a generally excellent summary; though in the end, he reproduces colonialassumptions by concluding that “the” fokon’olona was “invented” by the late-eighteenth century king Andrianampoinimerina.On the underlying ethos of consensus decision-making see Andriamanjato (1957).135divisions between what were called “white” and “black” people, descendants of nobles or commonersin the ancient kingdom, and their former slaves. In order to understand what places likeBetafo were like, then, one must first understand that it was a place that stood outside statepower; then, that it did not stand entirely outside it. For all the efforts to maintain zones of autonomy,the reality of coercion has by now reshaped the terms by which people deal with eachother; in certain ways, it has become embedded in the very structure of experience.In Imerina, just about everyone considers themselves a Christian (about two thirds of thepopulation is Protestant, one third Catholic). Many regularly attend church. The governmentmay no longer have the means to compel children to attend school, but attendance is still close touniversal, at least on the primary level. At the same time, however, there is a certain ambivalenceabout both these institutions, particularly the schools. As I already remarked when speaking ofthe politics of research, the educational system in Imerina has always been seen as a tool ofpower, and always, too, identified with Vazaha. The present educational system took form underthe French colonial regime. It is important to bear in mind that this was not a regime that couldever make the most remotest claim to being the expression of popular will. It was a regimeimposed by conquest, maintained only by the constant threat of force.It is worth considering for a moment what maintaining a credible threat of force actuallyrequires. It is not merely a matter of having an adequate number of men willing to use violence;not even a matter of arming and training them. Mostly, it is a matter of coordination. The crucialthing is to be able to ensure that a sufficient number of such violent men will always be ableto show up, whenever and wherever there is an open challenge to one’s authority—and thateveryone knows that they will indeed do so. But this, in turn, requires a great deal. It requiresan extensive cadre of trained functionaries capable of processing information, not to mention aninfrastructure of roads, telephones, typewriters, barracks, repair shops, petroleum depots—andthe staff to maintain them. Once built, such an infrastructure can and doubtless will serve otherpurposes as well. Roads built to transport soldiers will also end up carrying chickens to marketand people to visit their ailing relatives. But, if it wasn’t for the soldiers, the roads would neverhave been there, and at least in Madagascar, people seemed perfectly well aware of that.Most of the people who work in a state bureaucracy—pretty much any state bureaucracy,anywhere—are, on a day to day level, much more concerned with processing information thanwith breaking people’s skulls. But the same is true of soldiers and police. Rather than see thisfact as proof that violence plays a minor role in the operation of a state, it might be better toask oneself how much these technologies of information are themselves part of the apparatus ofviolence, essential elements in ensuring that small handful of people willing and able to breakskulls will always be able to show up at the right place at the right time. Surveillance, after all, isa technique of war, and Foucault’s Panopticon was a prison, with armed guards.Viewed from Madagascar, the essentially violent nature of the state is much harder to deny.This was not only because of its colonial history. It was also because most Malagasy—at leastthe ones I knew—were accustomed to different standards of perception. The best way to put itis that, unlike most Americans, they did not see anything particularly shameful about fear. Thiswas one of the things it took me longest to get used to there: seeing grown men, for instance,gazing into the street and casually remarking “scary cars,” “I’m scared of those oxen.” For someonebrought up as I had been it was very disconcerting. I may not come from a particularly machobackground, by American standards, but I had been brought up to assume confessions of fear,at least fear of being physically harmed by others, were at least a little bit embarrassing. Most136Malagasy seemed to find the subject pleasant and amusing; they took a veritable delight in tellingme how afraid some people were of Vazaha, sometimes, even, how much they themselves were.That governments work largely through inspiring fear in their subjects was simply obvious tothem. It seems to me that, in so far as Western social science has a tendency to downplay theimportance of coercion, it is partly because of a hidden embarrassment; we find it shameful toadmit the degree to which our own daily lives are framed by the fear of physical force.5Schools, anyway, are ultimately a part of this apparatus of violence.In Malagasy, one does not speak of education as conveying facts and information so muchas skills: the word used, fahaizana, means “skills, know-how, practical knowledge.” The kind offahaizana one acquires at school however was seen as an essentially foreign one, a fahaizanaVazaha, opposed, as such, to Malagasy forms of know-how. The techniques taught in school wereseen as, essentially, techniques of rule. In part this is because the school system was itself partof the infrastructure of violence: it was designed primarily to train functionaries; secondarily,technicians. The style of teaching was entirely authoritarian, with a heavy emphasis on rotememorization, and the skills that were taught were taught with the expectation they were to beemployed in offices, workshops, or classrooms organized around certain forms of social relation—what might be referred to as relations of command. The assumption was always that some peoplewould be giving orders, others were there to obey. In other words, not only was this systemdesigned to produce the competences required to maintain an infrastructure of violence, it waspremised on social relations completely unlike those current in other aspects of daily life, onesthat could only be maintained by a constant threat of physical harm.The ambivalence towards research and book learning, then, was based on a perfectly sensibleappreciation of the situation. Everyone considered knowledge in itself a valuable, even a pleasant,thing. Everyone recognized that the skills one learned in school opened spheres of experiencethat would not otherwise be available, to types of information and networks of communicationthat spanned the globe. But these skills were also techniques of repression. By training peoplein certain methods of organization and not others (how to keep lists and inventories, how toconduct a meeting…), the system ensured that no matter what their purposes, any large-scalenetwork they put together capable of coordinating anything—whether it be an historical preservationsociety, or a revolutionary party—will almost inevitably end up operating somewhat likea coercive bureaucracy. Certainly, one can, and many did, try to rework these devices to operatein a more consensual, democratic manner. It can be done, but it is extremely difficult; and thetendency, the drift, is for any system created by people trained in these competencies, no matterhow revolutionary their intentions, to end up looking at least a little like the French colonialregime. Hardly surprising then that most people wrote these techniques off as inherently foreign,and tried as much as they could to isolate them from “Malagasy” contexts.But, at the same time, there was another, perhaps more subtle effect of the existence of thesehierarchical institutions. They allowed people to make clear distinctions between everythingthat was “gasy”—Malagasy—and everything that was considered “Vazaha,” alien, authoritarian,repressive, French. They guaranteed that everyone had at least some experience of the latter, thatzone where the state was “the only competent as well as the sole owner of social coercive force”:even if it was simply a matter of being forced to stand in uncomfortable lines as a child, jump at5 In Europe or North America, this is more true of men than women; in Madagascar it was, if anything, theother way around.137orders in gym class, and dutifully copy and memorize boring and apparently pointless lessons.The experience of state-like discipline became a way of constantly reminding oneself what was,in contrast, considered “Malagasy”—the habits of consensus decision-making, for example, thereluctance to give orders to fellow adults, the general suspicion of anything that smacked ofconfrontation or even charismatic leadership (compare Bloch 1971). It is fairly clear that manyof these traits had not always been considered quintessentially Malagasy, much though I suspectthat Malagasy had, from the very beginning of their settlement of the island, always tended todefine themselves against foreigners of some kind or another.6 In this way, paradoxically enough,the provisional nature of local autonomy actually becomes, in a sense, self-sustaining. We all livein a larger world of gross inequalities of wealth and power. Malagasy rice farmers and blacksmithsand seamstresses and video operators were all well aware of that. But precisely through suchconstant reminders, people managed, to a large degree, to insulate themselves as well.A Final QuestionI doubt that the hinterland of Arivonimamo is an isolated case. As Henry Wright had pointedout to me, similar things were happening all over Madagascar: in fact, probably they had been formuch longer and in more profound ways in many other parts of the island, since Arivonimamowas, after all, with its military airport and gendarmes and prison, an hour away from the capital,one of the last places one would expect the state authority to disappear. In Madagascar itself, stateauthority appears to have ebbed and flowed, sometimes asserting itself, sometimes retreating, inthe intervening years; but in much of the country—particularly areas that, like Arivonimamo, donot contain vanilla plantations, bauxite mines, or nature preserves—the situation has remainedessentially unchanged. One wonders if there might not be hundreds, even thousands, of similarcommunities in other parts of the world—communities that have withdrawn from or drifted awayfrom the effective control of national governments and become to all intents and purposes selfgoverning,but whose members are still performing the external form and tokens of obeisancein order to disguise that fact.It is a question we might well ponder when reading the contemporary literature on “failedstates” and particular, the crisis of state authority in Africa. As James Ferguson has recently noted(2006), in many parts of Africa, about the only significant meaning of “state sovereignty” left isinternational recognition of a government’s legal right to represent its citizens in internationalarenas, and particularly, to guarantee contracts concerning access to resources within its territory,for those from other states. Few even pretend to maintain a monopoly of violence in the mannerdescribed by Rudolph von Ihering or Max Weber. The withdrawal of resources, the abandonment6 Contemporary archeologists now believe that significant human settlement in Madagascar was surprisinglylate: perhaps from the eighth century CE, and at first seem to have consisted of heterogeneous populations probablyof very different origins, Austronesian, African, and perhaps others. During this early period there was even a smallIslamic city, Mahilaka, almost certainly Swahili-speaking, engaged in lively trade with East Africa and the Arabianpeninsula. Early Malagasy thus had experience of states and world religions from the very beginning; and the momentof “synthesis,” when contemporary Malagasy culture appears to have born, seems to have occurred around the time ofthe height or perhaps even downfall of Mahilaka. After this, however, it proved surprisingly persistent throughout theisland and capable of resisting frequent Islamic attempts to convert and incorporate the island’s population. I stronglysuspect that insofar as Malagasy culture emerged as a coherent entity, it was in conscious contrast to everything thatwas considered “Silamo”—Swahili, Islamic—just as it is maintained in conscious contrast to everything that is “Vazaha”today.138of any sense that the government can or would even wish to provide equally for the basic needsof all its citizens, has had devastating effects on health, education, and livelihood. But at the sametime, even IMF-imposed austerity plans have been known to have their curious unintended sideeffects.It is, in fact, something of an irony that it is only when “anarchy,” in the sense of the breakdownof state power, results in chaos, violence, and destruction—as in the case of say, Somalia in the1990s, or many parts of southern and central Africa today—that non-Africans are likely to hearabout it. What I observed in Madagascar suggests that for every such case, there might well bedozens, even hundreds that outsiders simply do not know about, precisely because local peoplemanaged to make the transition peacefully. Like Malagasy villagers, they avoided confrontation,ensured that state representatives never had to feel publicly humiliated or to lose face, but atthe same time, made it as difficult as possible for them to govern, and easy as possible to simplyplay along with the façade. Neither is this strategy, or the existence of newly autonomouscommunities, likely to be limited to Africa. There are many parts of the world—in southeast Asia,Oceania, most notably, but even, say, parts of Latin America—where the presence of the statehas always been a somewhat sporadic phenomenon. Its visits have, perhaps, always borne lessresemblance to the forms of constant monitoring and surveillance we are familiar with in bothtotalitarian states or industrial democracies, and more the occasional, if often disastrous, appearanceof a vindictive Malagasy god. So, often, with the world-system as a whole. Such gods canrarely be eliminated entirely, any more than the monsoons or earthquakes that they are oftenseen to resemble. But their visitations can be rendered equally occasional.Of course, the institutional structure did remain: there were schools, banks, hospitals. Theyensured that the “state form”, as Mario Tronti for instance calls it, was always present: everyonehad some idea what it was like to live inside institutions that were premised on coercion, even iffor the most part these were ghostly shadows of real state institutions, since the actual violencehad been stripped away. Or perhaps one should be more precise here. The violence was still there.It had simply retreated. There were certainly still police in the city, or anywhere where there was,say, a bauxite mine, or other resource that generated significant foreign exchange. Even more,the global allocation of resources—what medicines and equipment actually appeared in the localhospital, for example—was maintained by the systematic threat of violence to enforce propertyarrangements. In a place like Arivonimamo, however, one could only deal with its distant effects,and strange, hollow institutions that largely served to remind local people of precisely how theywere not supposed to ordinarily behave.