Search

Drawing from data gathered in South Western Madagascar in 2011, the work explores the combination of poverty and traditional gender roles as a critical factor in determining unequal school access a...

This article explores strangeness-familiarity relations in the context of global wine consumer culture. While observing wine as a deeply familiar foodstuff and consumer commodity that is part of th...

Drawing on ethnographic data collected among a group of coastal villagers in Southwest Madagascar between 2006 and 2011, this article looks at the relationship between hospitality towards strangers and land dispossession, a major issue of concern in Madagascar, especially given the comparatively recent mineral, energy resource, and stone mining rush in the country. Belief in spirits plays a role in this.

Drawing on ethnographic data collected in a coastal village in southwestern Madagascar, the work explores the concept of memory through a study of contemporary hospitality practices aimed towards western tourists and other outsiders. The key observation is that memory is shaped by the interactions between two forms of colonial legacy. One is defined by the socially inscribed memory of past relations with powerful outsiders, mediated through myth and oral history. The other is defined by socially incorporated practices formed in the pre-colonial and colonial realms of the 19th and 20th centuries (and hence constitute a memory of such pasts in the present), and that today shift in the context of contact with western tourists and other foreigners. The main argument is that socially inscribed memory provides a highly flexible operational metaphor to mediate and also reproduce the socially incorporated practice-memory of hospitality, especially when historical symbolic functions - for example domesticating royals, colonial administrators, settlers, merchants or clerics - are shifted into contemporary contact zones with western tourists.