by Faun Rice
children later owe to their parents and ancestors, in turn, could be collectively
referred to as valim-babena: “the answer for having been carried on the back.”
36. Original Malagasy: “ny Havanandriana no toy ny zaza taizainy ny raiamandreny,
dia tahaky ny fitondrana ny zana’ny hiany, dia atao ny hoe Zanak’amam-para; ary
koa ny ambaniandro no mitaiza sy mamelona sy manampy ka manome voninahitra
ny Havanandriana. ” Note here the term for “nurture” is literally “nurse,” but the
word for “taking care of ” is literally “carrying.” Compare the same collection, “Fa
ny vahoaka no mitaiza ny andriana, ary ny andriana koa sady mitondra no mandidy ny
vahoaka rehetra” [“for it’s the people who nurture the king, and the king, too, both
carries and commands the whole people”] (Callet 1908: 366). As in all subsequent
cited Malagasy text, the translation into English is my own.
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ON KINGS
Alternately, they can be called loloha or lolohavina, “things carried on one’s head”
(and it’s important to remember here that carrying on the head was considered
paradigmatic of women’s work in particular; men carried packages and similar
burdens instead on their backs and shoulders). The term lolohavina was used
as way of referring to any responsibility to support others, but particularly the
obligation to maintain ancestral tombs, and provide the ancestors within with
cloth and other gifts at famadihana (during which they were, as noted, symboli-
cally rendered children once again).37
Perhaps unsurprisingly, some nineteenth-century documents use the term
filolohavina, “things carried on the head,” to refer both to one’s responsibilities
to one’s ancestors, and to one’s responsibilities to provide taxes and labor to the
state.
There’s kind of a continuum here from carrying as pure subordination, to
carrying as nurture, to carrying as outright authority. It’s the second term, the
woman with the baby on her back, that marks the point of transition between
the other two. She is precisely the pivot around which one flips over, and turns
into its opposite.
I would argue that the exact same thing happens in royal ritual. If one re-
turns to the most prestigious ceremonial moments of fanompoana, where labor
becomes most emblematic, and different ancestries defined their place in the
kingdom as a whole, one finds these are also the moments where the idiom of
nursing or nurturing ( taiza) is most likely to be evoked. This is true above all in
first-fruits ceremonies ( santatra), where various representatives of the kingdom’s
many ancestries “carried” not just the first of the rice crop:
Once the first rice harvest is brought in, then the people present the first-fruits
to the Andriana, each variety of rice crop, and it’s only once they have done so
that the people can eat of it. . . . This was the custom from olden times: to honor
him, as he is the child nursed by the people, as he is the master ( tompo) of the
land and the kingdom.38
37. Compare Cole (2001:214-15) and Lambek (2002) for parallels among the
Betsimisaraka and Sakalava, respectively.
38. “Dia manome santa-bary ny andriana ny vahoaka, isan-karazana ny mamboly vari-
aloha, vao izay no maka ho hanina. Raha tsy ny andriana no manantatra, dia tsy mahazo
homana ny vahoaka . . .. izany no fomba fanao hatr’ izay hatr’ izay: fanajana azy fa izy
no zanaka taizany ny ambanilanitra, fa izy no Tompo ny tany sy ny fanjakana” (Callet
1908: 61–62).
THE PEOPLE AS NURSEMAIDS OF THE KING
289
As in most Austronesian societies, sacrificial ritual is a way of invoking the gods’
power only to banish it again; most often, in order to lift some taboo those gods
might otherwise impose. First-fruits are a variation: in principle, the entire crop
could be said to belong to the gods (because the gods caused it to grow) or the
king (because he owns everything). By accepting a small symbolic sample, the
true owner ( tompo) releases his claim over the rest.
This ritual, too, is modeled on household practice, where the eldest mem-
ber of the family receives the same santa-bary from the family’s lands after the
harvest, and must taste it before anyone else is allowed to eat. Now, the process
of the “ripening” and harvest of the rice crop is spoken of in much the same
terms as the gestation and birth of infants, and the ceremony of first-fruits, as
several of my own informants emphasized, is identical in form to an infant’s
first haircut, conducted when he or she is three to six months old (Graeber
2007a: 284–85; cf. Standing 1887a: 35–37; Camboué 1907: 988; Molet 1976:
37–39). This is the ceremony that marks the child’s debut as an autonomous
social being (it’s sometimes the occasion for giving a child a name). Like the
rice, the clipped hair is cooked with milk and honey, though while the rice is
first eaten by the head of the household, who then releases the remainder of the
harvest to everyone else, the hair is placed in a banana-leaf spoon and sampled
by everyone, particularly young women, since it is said to convey fertility. In the
case of the rice, then, a release of ancestral authority; in the case of the haircut,
a general distribution of human vitality.39 Yet each implies the other, and in the
case of the royal santatra, the two are, at least rhetorically, combined. Much as in
the famadihana, where ancestors were turned into infants so as to free the living
from their (often petulant, arbitrary) demands, here the monarch, “owner” of the
land and the kingdom, is presented with the product of those lands in a way that
39. There are other parallels. The bearers of first-fruits, for instance, had to be velond-
rai-aman-dreny, that is, men and women both of whose parents were still alive. This
is true also of those who conduct the haircut ritual ( fanala volon-jaza). The ceremony
is also a sort of foreshadowing of the circumcision ritual to be conducted perhaps
two or three years later, when another part of the child is removed, though in this
case, the precipice should be swallowed instead by the child’s mother’s’ brother.
Finally, it is probably relevant that this is a presentation of vary aloha, that is, of a
double-cropping system said to have been developed by rulers who used fanompoana
to drain the swamps surrounding the capital, and thus from fields the monarch
would have laid particular claim to. In this context, Andrianampoinimerina was said
to have declared, “me and the rice are the same” ( izaho sy ny vary dia mitovy, Callet
1908: 746).
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ON KINGS
transforms him into a dependent child, helpless but for the nurturant support
of the kingdom’s inhabitants.
Reflections on the king as toddler
How, then, do we think about this notion of the king as child nurtured by the
people?
In much of Madagascar, kings typically represent themselves as foreigners:
they trace their genealogies to far-away kingdoms, exotic half-forgotten lands
like Mangalore or Mecca. As Marshall Sahlins (1981b, 2008) has demonstrated,
this circumstance is not at all unusual
. Most kings insist they come from some-
place other than the lands they rule. In myth, and also ritual, the stranger-king
scenario, as Sahlins describes it, follows a fairly predictable narrative sequence:
the king first arrives from far away as a kind of holy terror, an alien, outrageous
power, whose absolute vitality is signified by a tendency to engage in arbitrary
acts of violence. But in conquering his people, he is also, subtly, conquered by
them; often this culminates in his marriage to a daughter of the people of the
land, who thus become the closest thing he has to parents; in the process, he is
surrounded, incorporated, domesticated, even symbolically killed and reborn as
a child of his people.40
Might something like this be happening here? It’s tempting to make the
connection. But there’s a problem: Merina sovereigns didn’t really represent
themselves that way. In other parts of Madagascar, royal lineages certainly did.
They tended to see themselves as conquering outsiders, imposing their domin-
ion on an autochthonous population who were seen as the true “owners of the
land” ( tompon’tany)—and who therefore, nonetheless, maintained certain crucial
ritual privileges, such as the right to nominate or install the king. While there
are traces of such arrangements early in Merina history, by the late eighteenth
century, at least, traces were all that remained. Official histories instead repre-
sented the entire Merina population, andriana and hova alike, as foreign in-
vaders, and the country’s true aboriginal inhabitants, the Vazimba, as elf-like
40. Hence in the original essay, about Fiji, Sahlins notes “the usage that long puzzled
Hocart, that the Fijian nobility are styled ‘child chiefs’ ( gone turaga), while the
native owners of the land are the ‘elders’ ( qase). The relation is one of offspring to
ancestor, as established by the gift of the woman” (1981b: 119). Kings in Benin were
also addressed as “child” (Bradbury 1973: 75). No doubt other examples could be
compiled.
THE PEOPLE AS NURSEMAIDS OF THE KING
291
primitives who had been defeated and driven from the country. Merina kings
claimed absolute command of everything, including all land and labor, within
their kingdoms (Fugelstad 1982).
Still, one could say that the image of the king as child—and particularly the
king as naughty child, like Leiloza—takes the two moments of the stranger-
king story—the king-as-extramoral-outsider and king-as-tamed-by-the-peo-
ple—and effectively fuses them together.
In my essay on the divine kingship of the Shilluk (chapter 2, this volume),
I suggested a slightly different way these same pieces often come together. One
can also pluck two more general principles out of this scenario that are always
simultaneously present, and in constant mutual tension. I referred to these as di-
vine and sacred kingship. The first applies not so much when kings are taken to
be gods (this happens surprisingly rarely), but rather when they act like gods—
that is, with arbitrary impunity. Divine kingship corresponds to sovereignty in
Carl Schmitt’s sense in Political theology ([1922] 2005); it is something that
stands entirely outside the legal order, and can therefore, constitute it. Sacred
kingship is very different. To be “sacred” is, as Durkheim long ago recognized,
drawing on the logic of Polynesian taboo, to be “set apart,” and what setting the
king apart as a sacred being always means in practice is surrounding him with
such an elaborate system of restrictions, protocols, and taboos (“not to touch the
earth, not to see the sun”) that it becomes extremely difficult for a sovereign to
exercise that arbitrary divine power except in very carefully circumscribed ways.
In fact—and this is true particularly in nonbureaucratized kingdoms—the more
elaborate the court ceremonial, the less effective personal power the monarch
was likely to wield.
What I am suggesting here is that the pomp and protocol that surround
powerful figures are rarely, if ever, the creations of those powerful figures them-
selves—any more than King Tugo, sometimes credited with having “invented”
the Shilluk sacred kingship, is himself likely to have simply decided one day that
it would be a neat idea to create a body of armed executioners with the power
to kill him whenever his senior wives decided he was no longer capable of ade-
quate sexual performance. Deference is always double-edged. On the one hand,
violent men invariably demand “respect,” a certain kind of ritual deference; on
the other, the more extreme forms of such respect can easily become ways of
isolating and controlling such violent men. This continues to be true even if a
monarch remains in other respects a despot, capable of ordering executions and
similar acts of spectacular cruelty or destructiveness at whim: first of all, because
292
ON KINGS
all kings worthy of the name are to a certain degree despotic, “sovereignty” and
“despotism” being at root the same thing; and, secondly, because the tension
between the divine and sacred aspects of kingship is always to some degree con-
stitutive of kingship itself. True, it is possible for ritualization to overwhelm and
entirely hollow out the crown, leaving it a purely ceremonial or constitutional
monarchy. But the opposite cannot really happen. Even in the case of Leiloza,
who descended from monarch to something very like a simple bandit, his son’s
need to establish himself as something more than just the son of a bandit com-
pelled him to quickly pass most of his power to someone else.
One might well argue that both the classic stranger-king narrative and the
baby-king image are two different ways of elucidating this fundamental tension.
Within the Merina kingdom, that tension was above al summed up in
the phrase mpitaiza andriana, literal y, the “nursemaids of the king.” Al major
royal aides and advisors—that is, those who created and maintained that court
ceremonial—were called this. The term was applied to the tandapa, or palace at-
tendants (Cousins [1876] 1963: 50; André 1899: 55–56 n. 1; Callet 1908: 324,
361, 500, 634, 832, 895, 904, 1053, 1063, 1084, 1187, 1100; Soury-Lavergne and
de la Devéze 1913: 312), to royal councilors (Callet 1908: 425, 691, 832, 943,
962, 1028–29, 1006, 1146), and to the diviners and keepers of the charms that
protected the kingdom (Jul y 1899a: 325; Cal et 1908: 19, 165, 440; Domeni-
chini 1977),41 as wel as to the retainers assigned to support various lesser lords
assigned to menakely, or local estates (Cal et 1908: 148, 439, 492, 1043)—these
latter were said to “nurse” or “nurture” these children of the royal line in the
same way as the people did the king himself.42 The term could thus be applied
either to those who fed, cared for, and physical y sustained the king, or to those
41. This one is a little more complicated, as the mpitahiry sampy, or keepers of such
guardian “palladia” (Berg 1979), were the mpitaiza not only of the king but also of
the sampy themselves (Callet 1908: 188, 194–97, 203, 213, 222, 227). (Sampy was
the name
given to the major political charms that protected larger groups, up to and
including the kingdom.) Finally, insofar as the charms were also used to heal, one
could also speak of the charm as “nurturing” its patients, much as one would now
(ibid.: 231).
42. So, for instance, the very first andriana to receive a menakely were the
Andriantompokoindrindra, and they were assigned a lineage of attendants, the
Zafitsimaito, who are alternately described as their mpitaiza (ibid.: 149) or “those
who carry their bags” (ibid.: 1211). The subjects of those minor lords could also be
said to mitaiza them, in much the same way as the subjects of a king. I could find
only one reference, though, to slaves who mitaiza their adult owners (ibid.: 189).
THE PEOPLE AS NURSEMAIDS OF THE KING
293
who might be said to provide for the king’s ongoing education: reminding him
of his duties and responsibilities, guiding him toward appropriate conduct.43
Neither were these simply metaphors. In the histories, mpitaiza regularly speak
to kings using terms of address—notably the informal second person, ialahy
or leiretsy— which would be utterly scandalous if directed at anyone of higher
status in any other context (there is no precise English equivalent, but it would
be roughly analogous to addressing the king as “boy”44)—and kings respond
with the terms of address a child would use for a father, guardian, or elder:
ikiaky or idada.
These same mpitaiza andriana, of course, were those responsible for the ac-
tual creation of royal ritual as well.
* * *
Earlier, I observed that royal households always stand at the pinnacle of an
elaborate system of ritual labor. They also tend to be somewhat different from
the households that make up the base of the kingdom, because while in ordinary
households, the creation and sustenance of people was inextricably bound up
in the creation and maintenance of things, royal households, for the most part,
produced only people. To this we can add: but they did not produce those people
43. About the only scholarly source that discusses the use of the term is a footnote in
Bakoly Domenichini-Ramiaramanana’s book on Merina court poetry (1982:406
n. 148), which is worth quoting in full. “The term ‘ mpitaiza’ which is commonly
