onkings

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.

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  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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  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,