by Faun Rice
or as a category. The reverse was never heard. I once asked a woman if the phrase
“lazy woman” even existed, and she seemed rather taken aback. “That,” she said,
“would be outrageous. It’s not even all that insulting to call a man lazy because all
men are lazy really; in the case of a woman it would be a genuine insult.”
24. Traditionally, modes of carrying are also strongly gendered: it’s often noted that
women carry objects on the head or hips; men on the back or shoulders.
25. Hence the well-known proverb, Manan-jandry, dia afak’olan’entina; manan-joky,
dia afak’olan-teny: “if you have a younger sibling, then you’ll have no problems
with carrying, if you have an older one, then you’ll have no problems with speech”
(Cousins [1876] 1963: 37; Camboué 1909: 385; Houlder [1915] 1960: #1901).
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ON KINGS
obligation: a younger sibling ( zandry) has the right to demand an elder ( zoky)
speak for them in court, or in a communal assembly, an elder sibling has the
right to demand the younger one carry their bags. But it is also considered scan-
dalous for a zandry to speak for zoky, a zoky to carry a zandry’s things—at least, if the zandry is old enough to carry anything.
In fact one could define the first stages of a child’s life through the gradual
application of this principle. I observed this even in contemporary households.
Infants were themselves carried by their mothers or older sisters, toddlers were
often sent off on play-tasks of fetching and carrying things, greeted as heroes
if they succeeded, or with indulgent laugher if they refused or wandered off;
then, gradually, play-tasks turned into real ones, and as soon as a child is physi-
cally capable, she finds herself thrust into situations where the youngest sibling
is, paradoxically, expected to carry the heaviest burdens. This happens earliest,
again, for girls, and it’s not uncommon to see girls even of eight or nine toting
baskets on their heads or infants on their backs. But the same thing eventually
happens to boys. “By the age of about ten, children begin to help in the gardens
and rice-fields by carrying burdens and packages. What is remarkable about
the practice is that: it is to the youngest that the heaviest parts usually fall”
(Camboué 1909: 385).
The Malagasy word for “oppression” is, precisely, tsindriana, to be pressed
down. And it makes a great deal of intuitive sense that it should, since one can
only imagine the first deep feeling of injustice a child will have is at precisely
this moment when being a child suddenly pivots from having no responsibili-
ties, to having the most onerous responsibilities of all (Graeber 2007a).
This opposition between speech and carrying is crucial. It runs through all
political affairs. Speech, particularly formal speech, is seen as essentially consti-
tuting political society. Public assemblies are called “kabary,” which is also the
word for formal rhetoric. On the level of the kingdom, the opposition between
speaking and carrying was even further elaborated because speaking was paired
with making, what we’d call “production,” and the carrying of burdens became
instead the general figure for any sort of labor that, rather than being creative,
was about nurturing, sustaining, and maintaining things.26
26. Many of the paragraphs that follow in this section are adapted from an essay called
“Oppression” (Graeber 2007c). Normally I don’t like to reproduce whole paragraphs
of my own work, but in this case it seems justified since as far as I can make out the
article has never been cited by anyone, and I have no reason to believe that even
many scholars of Madagascar have ever read it.
THE PEOPLE AS NURSEMAIDS OF THE KING
277
* * *
Highland kingdoms were organized around a figure called the Andriana. The
word, as I’ve mentioned, literally means sovereign, or king. But as much as a
quarter or third of the free population in the heartland of the kingdom were
also called andriana, either because they could claim descent from the royal
line, or because their ancestors had been ennobled because of some outstanding
service to royalty. By the end of the eighteenth century, these andriana were
divided into seven ranked orders. Other free subjects were referred to as hova,
or “commoners.” Like the lesser andriana, hova were divided into ancestries
(called foko, or firenena), each with their own ancestral lands. While all but the
very most exalted andriana were expected to do some form of royal service, or
fanompoana, hova were defined first and foremost as those who performed work
in the service of the king.27 Slaves were those who did not do so. Slaves served
their masters. In fact, royal service was considered the primary mark of free
status within the kingdom: legally, if a slave could demonstrate that he or she
had been part of a royal work crew, especially if it was engaged in something in-
timate like clearing ground for a royal palace, then that was considered grounds
for manumission in itself.
Almost everyone who writes about the Merina kingdom emphasizes the
importance of fanompoana, since it really was the central organizing principle
of just about everything: the political system, the economic system, the status
system as well. The rank and character of any given ancestry was determined
by the kind of service it traditionally performed for the royal family. These tra-
ditional tasks were especially important because, while in theory a local king
could demand most anything from his subjects, evidence suggests that—at least
before the nineteenth century—a ruler’s ability to extract goods and services
from anyone who did not happen to live in the immediate vicinity of a royal
residence was actually quite limited. Therefore, those services they did receive
revolved largely around these traditional emblematic tasks, especially those in-
volved in building and rebuilding royal houses and royal tombs, or participating
in great public ceremonies like the circumcision of royal children or the annual
27. There were other groups, such as the Mainty Enin-Dreny, who are often referred to
in European sources as “royal slaves,” but are actually specialized groups of warriors
or retainers with a direct relationship to royalty. The Manendy, whom we have
already encountered, and Manisotra, whom we shall meet in the next section, were
among their numbers.
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ON KINGS
New Year’s festival. It’s important to bear in mind that in terms of how they
earned their livelihoods (again except for those who belonged to the very high-
est andriana orders), nearly all of these groups were almost exactly the same. All
devoted most of their energies to growing rice in the summer, and to handicrafts
or petty trading in the agricultural off-season. It was largely during these rituals
that each was assigned some specific task or set of tasks as emblematic labor,
which was seen as defining their place in the kingdom, and, hence, what kind
of people they ultimately were.28 As a result, even though subjects might flee or
mutiny if rounded up for certain tasks, like clearing out d
rainage ditches, the
same subjects might come to physical blows over the privilege of carrying out
other ones—say, being allowed to raise the central pillar in a royal house (Kus
and Raharijaona 2000; cf. Clark 1896.)
So the next question is: How did emblematic labor define the nature of
groups, and what did this say about the structure of the whole? Our material
is uneven, but there’s enough of it to see that the speaking/carrying division is
indeed reproduced on the level of the kingdom. Andriana were seen as monopo-
lizing powers of creativity. Andriana spoke first at council and were seen as being
the masters of oratory and poetic speech (Callet 1908: 288; Rasamimanana and
Razafindrazaka 1909; Andriamanantsiety 1975; Domenichini-Ramiaramanana
1982). At the same time, andriana also fashioned beautiful objects. Hova con-
veyed things from place to place.
What this meant in practice is that while carrying out work for the king,
tasks involving what we would consider “productive” labor, the actual making,
shaping, or fashioning of material objects, were almost invariably assigned to
those at the very top of the social hierarchy. The building and repair of royal
tombs might serve as an example—just because we happen to have a fairly
good breakdown of how those tasks were divided up. Malagasy accounts writ-
ten in the 1860s divide the necessary work into two broad categories. The first
involved the actual building of the tomb and manufacture of the objects that
would be placed inside. These tasks were monopolized by andriana. The noble
orders of the Andriamasinavalona and Andriantompokoindrindra, for example,
provided the stonemasons and carpenters who made the tomb itself; the Andri-
anandranado provided the smiths who produced the huge silver coffin in which
28. The notion of “emblematic labor” might be compared to Barth’s idea of ethnic
“diacritics” (1969), where one or two apparently minor features can become the
reference to distinguish otherwise overlapping or similar social groups.
THE PEOPLE AS NURSEMAIDS OF THE KING
279
kings were buried, and, later, who made the tomb’s tin roof; women of the An-
driamasinavalona and Zazamarolahy orders wove the mats that would be hung
on the walls inside. Three others were expected to provide the silk shrouds used
for wrapping the dead (Callet 1908: 260–62, 267, 1213–14). The second set of
tasks were phrased as matters of “carrying”: especially, carrying off the tattered
mats and other rubbish from inside a tomb when it was opened or repaired, and
gathering and conveying baskets full of the red clay that was used to seal it af-
terward (ibid.: 164, 307, 490, 534–53, 812–31). These tasks were never assigned
to andriana but always to hova, though, since having the right to do any sort of
labor on royal tombs was considered an extraordinary privilege, generally only
hova ancestries who had rendered some extraordinary favor to royalty.29
In such ritual moments, andriana were indeed defined as the kind of people
who make things; commoners, as those who fetch and carry them. These em-
blematic tasks could influence what people were considered apt to do outside of
royal ritual as well. The Andrianandranado, for instance, the order of andriana
who provided the smiths for royal rituals, also produced all the gold and silver
objects used at court; as a result, they eventually managed to win a formal mo-
nopoly on gold- and silverworking within the kingdom. During the nineteenth
century, other branches of this same order provided almost all the tinsmiths and
a large number of the skilled ironworkers in the capital. Similarly, the Andri-
anamboninolona, the andriana group with whom I did my own fieldwork, were
famous as smiths, and ironwork was considered not just an art but something
of a privilege; while there was no formal monopoly and little way to enforce
one, if anyone not of andriana descent were to have taken it up, it would have
been considered quite presumptuous (Graeber 2007a: 99–100, 338). Similarly,
Andrianamboninolona women were seen as having a de facto monopoly of the
weaving of native silk. But in other places such a monopoly did not exist.
As a rule, andriana were seen as producers, makers; it was their basic identity
in the structure of the kingdom. This fact was perhaps most clearly revealed
when, in 1817, British envoys asked King Radama I to chose a handful of boys
from his kingdom to study artisanal trades in England. Every young man the
king chose was andriana.
29. I note that one group of former andriana, of somewhat ambiguous status, did have
the special privilege of providing one silk shroud on such occasions. Another group
of similar ambiguous status receiving the privilege of actually “carrying” the royal
body to be placed in the tomb—the most exalted form of carrying, but still one not
relegated to a group considered royal kin.
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ON KINGS
Royal service as principle of government
When we turn to actual governance, however, things get a bit more complicated.
Like so many key Malagasy concepts, the notion of fanompoana was double-
edged. On the one hand, it refers to a meticulously graded system of ritual labor.
On the other, it was the power of the sovereign to make anyone do anything at all.
It’s not hard to imagine how this situation might have come about. As I
mentioned, for much of highland history, rulers’ powers of compulsion were
fairly limited. Archaeologists confirm that from the sixteenth century, most lived
on hilltop or mountaintop fortresses—the higher the better, since in principle a
king’s domains corresponded to everything he could see from the summit—and
Maurice Bloch is probably right in adding that most were little more than suc-
cessful brigands, which, as we’ve seen, is exactly the situation to which unsuc-
cessful monarchs like Leiloza would be likely to revert (Bloch 1977; Dewar
and Wright 1993: 448; D. Rasamuel 2007: 171–75). When a heavily armed
band appears in a defenseless village its leader can, of course, make anyone do
pretty much anything he orders them to do. What he can make them do when
he is not actually physically present is quite another matter. The apparent con-
tradiction at the heart of fanompoana no doubt originates in this very practical
circumstance. But that hardly explains why this pragmatic circumstance (being
able to order anyone to do anything) should be preserved as a ritual principle—
indeed, as the definition of sovereignty itself.
It’s also not hard to see how, if a ruler insists on building his house on the top
of a mountain, the real challenge entailed in constructing and maintaining that
house will not be finding skilled craftsmen to do the metalwork or carpentry,
but rounding up people to do the really onerous work of dragging the building
material, and, later, daily supplies of food, fuel, and water, up the slopes. This
is what stories like that of Leiloza are clearly playing on. Given the cultural
context in which all this took place—all those distinctions between speaking,
making, carrying, which were already so important in the internal organi
zation
of families and households—it was hardly surprising that as a result, the pro-
duction of material objects, and particularly magnificent objects, should have
ended up becoming a special privilege to be allotted to kin and loyal followers,
while bearing burdens should be seen as both the essence of real work and, in a
broader sense, the key to the creation and maintenance of actual human beings.
The fact that the arbitrary will of the sovereign remained the core of fonom-
poana allowed the principle to regularly be put to new purposes, whenever sov-
ereigns were, in fact, in a position to impose their will in any sort of systematic
THE PEOPLE AS NURSEMAIDS OF THE KING
281
way. In the late eighteenth century, King Andrianampoinimerina used the prin-
ciple of fonompoana to marshal the manpower to reclaim thousands of hec-
tares of arable land from swamps; in the nineteenth, his son Radama, to compel
children to attend mission schools and teenagers to serve in a newly created
standing army. At the same time, wars of expansion brought thousands of slaves
into the country. All of this meant that in practice, actual labor arrangements
transformed quickly and dramatically. Still, in principle, fanompoana remained
the basis of the monarchy.
As I remarked, pretty much all observers made a point of emphasizing this.
Here’s a typical comment from a late nineteenth-century missionary named
Houlder. He begins by noting actual power was held by a commoner prime
minister named Rainialarivony, who was secretly (not that secretly, since every-
body knew it) the consort of the queen:
Under the rule of this strong personality, as under that of his predecessors, no
direct taxes, or next to none, were levied. In lieu thereof came fànompòana, or
compulsory unrequited service, such as a slave renders to his master, a very oner-
ous duty and a very questionable exchange.
Fànompòana is the genius of the native government, and seemed to be its
principal end. The rulers were most concerned, not with the promotion of the
prosperity and happiness of the people, but with the proper carrying out of ser-
vice to the Queen. The whole of a native’s life is taken up with doing fànompòana
of one sort or another. . . . Anything in the nature of service was fànompòana,
