Nineteenth-century highland Madagascar was a place inhabited by the dead as much as the living. Ghosts, ancestors and the possessed were important historical actors alongside local kings and queens, soldiers, traders and missionaries. This book considers the challenges that such actors pose for historical accounts of the past and for thinking about questions of presence and representation. How were the dead made present, and how were they recognized or not? In attending to these multifarious encounters of the nineteenth century, how might we reflect on the ways in which our own history-writing makes the dead present? To tackle these questions, Zoë Crossland tells an anthropological history of highland Madagascar from a perspective rooted in archaeology and Peircean semiotics, as well as in landscape study, oral history and textual sources.
• Takes a cross-disciplinary approach: this is an anthropological history, written with an archaeologist's sensibility • Offers new way of thinking about role of the dead in archaeology and history which will be of wide interest for studies beyond the regional focus of this book • Brings together nineteenth-century colonial African studies with anthropological and semiotic theory, while staying rooted in its sources
Contents
Introduction; 1. Uncertain signs and the power of the dead; 2. Recognition and misrecognition in the missionary encounter; 3. The signs of mission; 4. Conquering the Adrantsay: familiar histories; 5. Standing stones and the semeiotics of reproduction; 6. Zone Rouge: encounters on the frontier; 7. Epilogue: ghostly presences.
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