Ancestral Encounters in Highland Madagascar
Material Signs and Traces of the Dead

This book examines encounters between the living and the dead in nineteenth-century highland Madagascar, considering the challenges that ghostly actors pose for writing history.

Zoë Crossland (Author)

9781107036093, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 17 February 2014

394 pages, 45 b/w illus. 6 maps
26 x 18.5 x 2.8 cm, 0.98 kg

'Crossland has crafted a fascinating and richly detailed historical ethnography of the Imerina kingdom (fanjakana) of the Malagasy highlands.' Susan D. Gillespie, Journal of African Archaeology

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.

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.

Subject Areas: Social & cultural anthropology, ethnography [JHMC], Anthropology [JHM], Material culture [JFCD], Archaeology by period / region [HDD], African history [HBJH]