by Faun Rice
mon pattern where time is, as it were, layered; accounts do not begin with some
great cosmological epic full of gods and primordial beings, where fundamental
institutions such as cooking or marriage or death came into existence, move on
to a heroic world where cities and nations are founded, and only then, finally, to
the more modest imitations of such primordial gestures by the lesser beings of
today. Quite the contrary. The earliest beings, in such stories, were disorganized
primitives known as Vazimba, and the conquering invaders who displaced them,
ancestors of the hova and andriana, were led by rulers who were said to have
gradually created the basic institutions of society—everything from ironwork-
ing to circumcision rituals to the protocols of deliberative assemblies—all by
themselves (Delivré 1974: 185–99).
Kings were thus expected to be innovators and inventors.
All this is familiar enough to scholars of Malagasy, but it seems to me few
are willing to consider the full implications. If it is possible for kings to be in-
novators and inventors on this scale, it is because the powers of creativity that in
so many traditions exist only in a distant illo tempore (as Mircea Eliade famously
named it), that is, in mythological times, are distributed evenly across history.
But if this is true that means that for all intents and purposes, Malagasy people
were still living in mythological times. I think the same is true today. It took me
82. Andriambahoaka actually just means “Lord [of] the People,” but in some of the
myths recorded in the nineteenth century this name is given not just to a legendary
king of Imamo, but to a kind of generic all-powerful king of the center, matched
by princes of the north, east, west, and south (Dahle and Sims [1877] 1986). The
argument is that this is an essentially Javanese conception of sovereignty. It’s never
been clear to me what the Andriambahoaka concept is actually supposed to tell us
that we don’t already know.
THE PEOPLE AS NURSEMAIDS OF THE KING
337
a while to come to grips with the situation when I was conducting my own re-
search in Betafo. I had been taught to look for cosmological myths, and then try
to understand ritual as small-scale, latter-day imitations of the great primordial
gestures they encode. I found it quite impossible to apply this sort of cosmologi-
cal analysis. Almost no one knew anything that might be described as a cosmo-
logical myth, and if they did, they did not take them in any way seriously. It was
only gradually I came to realize that any wondrous powers—to cast lightning,
become invisible, transform landscapes, speak with animals, turn bullets into
water, etc.—that might have featured in such stories, and that still featured in
historical stories about “Malagasy times,” were still believed to exist today. Now
as then, they were simply a matter of knowing how to manipulate medicine
( fanafody).83 And such knowledge could be acquired, if one knew where to look,
had a knack or natural facility, or were just willing to pay a great deal of money.
There was no fundamental difference between the present and the mythic past.
In such a world, the role of ancestors is necessarily ambivalent. On the one
hand, who one is in the world depends largely on the status and location of one’s
ancestors. On the other hand, to achieve anything significant in life, one must
break away from one’s ancestors’ shadow at least to some degree. This is all the
more the case for royalty. In fact, most of the mpitaiza andriana who created
royal ritual—the astrologers, diviners, keepers of charms—were technicians of
the future, not guardians of the past. And as Charles Renel (1920: 157–58) as-
tutely pointed out, the secret of the santatra borne by the guardians of the royal
tombs was the desire to propitiate the royal ancestors, to effectively get them out
of the way, so that one could create something radically new.
But since one is living in mythological times, one also must accept the pos-
sibility that the ancestors might not accept this, even that the dead might per-
sonally intervene to bring matters back under their control.
This is the final implication of the king as child: sheer potentiality. One does
not really know yet what a child might become. Royal children were expected to
do something new and surprising. Thus perhaps it only stands to reason that once
the Merina court was in direct contact with Europeans offering new and pow-
erful social and mechanical technologies, young princes would tend to eagerly
embrace them, identify with them, fancy themselves enlightened despots, toss
aside old technologies for new. Neither is it particularly surprising that women
83. So characters in legends with wondrous powers are often specifically said to have
acquired them through ody, or charms, and even when not stated, it could be said to
be implied.
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ON KINGS
regularly appeared to remind them that these old technologies they were toss-
ing away were an intrinsic element of a vast system of caring labor that began
with commoner households, but culminated in their own. What is surprising,
perhaps, is that so many of the men in power were forced to acknowledge this.
Placing queens on the throne, then, was above all a way of acknowledging
this. Even the traditionalists who supported Ranavalona I were not conserva-
tives in the strict sense of the term—the queen didn’t abandon the tradition of
royalty as a source of innovation; she even sponsored her own crash industri-
alization program—but they ensured that no one in the kingdom could forget
what the kingdom ultimately was: an intricate system of ritualized caring labor.
That we may still live in mythic times, but, as women know and men tend to
forget, myth is founded on work.
In part, this was effected by a startling reversal. The royal household at the
very pinnacle of the kingdom became an exact inversion of the households on
the bottom, being composed of a child-queen served and supported by her male
“nursemaids.” That arrangement itself operated as a kind of magical charm that
transformed even the most onerous unpaid male work assignments—dragging
trees, toting fuel, digging ditches, carrying baggage, military service in distant
garrisons—into caring labor, analogous to their own mothers’ or mpitaiza’s
when they had been infants carried on a woman’s back.
In the end, this was not successful as a geopolitical formula to fend off
European aggression; but it’s not clear that any other approach would have
worked particularly better. The resulting system was certainly oppressive. But
if nothing else, reformulating all free labor as care and nurture to the queen,
that is, establishing principles that were exactly the opposite of those of Euro-
pean political economy, also made it absolutely impossible for such commercial,
agricultural, or industrial relations to make any significant headway while the
island did remain independent. Even after Queen Ranavalona II’s conversion to
Protestantism in 1869, which led to Christianity effectively becoming the state
religion, Britis
h missionaries tried in vain to explain concepts such as capital
and wage labor to their parishioners, and complained endlessly of the impos-
sibility of convincing the queen’s freeborn subjects that working for wages was
fit for anyone but slaves.84 Even after sixty-five years of French colonial rule, and
over a half-century of independence, many are still convinced this is the case.
84. For instance, the very first issue of the Malagasy-language mission journal Ny
Mpanolo Tsaina (“The Advisor”) began with a piece explaining the concept of
THE PEOPLE AS NURSEMAIDS OF THE KING
339
* * *
It would be interesting to consider the case of the Merina kingdom in relation
to contemporary theories of caring labor. Feminist theories of caring labor, from
Nancy Folbre (1995) to Silvia Federici (2012) to Evelyn Glenn Nakano (2012),
have tended, for obvious reasons, to examine how these matters are framed in
the terms of political economy, since this is the logic behind the institutions that
affect the vast majority of women today. In the world as imagined by political
economy, (tacitly male) “productive” labor is always assumed to be the primary
form, and (tacitly female) “caring” or “reproductive” labor becomes its usually
unacknowledged mirror image. Still, even if one does acknowledge both sides
of the equation, that primary division remains. This is by no means the only way
to divide things up. In the highlands of Madagascar, everything was different.
Labor was assumed to be first and foremost women’s business; the paradigm for
work was bearing burdens; but bearing burdens was seen as combining a range
of activities that we would classify into such different domains as transport,
building, digging, and nurturance. Moreover, labor was also seen as continu-
ous with ritual, the ritual element was seen as making it truly creative, and the
ritualization of labor—and the most ritualized forms of labor as well—was pre-
ponderantly the domain of men.
Even under the queens, powerful men were obviously the primary benefi-
ciaries of the system. One would not wish to idealize it. But it was only because
it was based on fundamentally different assumptions about what labor, and what
we call an “economy,” is basically about that it both allowed women such power-
ful ways to influence politics, and managed to resist the incursions of those who
would have reduced Madagascar to a plantation economy so effectively for so
long.
* * *
Once the queens were no more, the entire ritual apparatus simply disintegrated,
and the concept of fanompoana as caring labor appears to have been forgotten
capital, followed in the next issue by a piece on the nature of wage labor (Anon.
1879a, 1879b). Missionary accounts are full of complaints about how difficult it
is to convince government officials to contemplate eliminating forced labor and
substituting a regime in which the government taxes and then hires its subjects.
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ON KINGS
almost instantly.85 Memories of the old kingdom quickly came to center on
male figures like Leiloza, unjust oppressors who, insofar as they were seen as
children, were anything but lovable.
I’ve been emphasizing relations with the outside world as crucial in set-
ting off the crisis in Merina kingship. But one could make the argument it all
really began with Andrianampoinimerina, who knit the various principalities
into something that is universally acknowledged to qualify as a state. Maurice
Bloch (2006) has made a case that, historically, something about the creation
of states in particular had the effect of disorganizing domestic ritual, causing it
to become partial and incomplete, and that, at least in the case of powerful and
successful states, matters simply could not be put back again the way they had
been—and that this remained the case if those states themselves collapsed or
otherwise passed from history. (He argues that religion, as an autonomous in-
stitution, first emerged to fill the resultant gap.) The Merina kingdom is one of
his prime examples. The more elaborate and beautiful its royal palaces became,
Bloch argues, the less care and ritual attention subjects tended to invest in their
own houses, until, finally, when the kingdom collapsed, houses never recovered
their former ritual importance, but instead, the ritual focus shifted to ancestral
tombs (Bloch 1995).
It’s a compelling argument. In fact, one could argue that the two great con-
temporary ritual complexes around which I first framed my analysis of royal rit-
ual— famadihana, and the network of doany with their mediumistic curers—are
both transformations and reappropriations of royal ritual itself. Already in the
waning days of the kingdom, commoners had begun shifting their focus from
royal ancestors to their own: the habit of periodically opening tombs to rewrap
the dead (Haile 1891; Larson 2001) and defining themselves as descendants
85. As part of my research for this essay, I consulted a number of Malagasy-language
histories of Merina ancestries, compiled over the course of the twentieth century
(Zanak’Andriantompokoindrindra: Rasamimanana and Razafindrazaka 1909;
Zanak’Andrianetivola: Ratsimba 1939; Tsimiamboholahy: Rabeson 1948;
Zanak’Antitra: M. Rasamuel 1948; Terak’Andriamanarefo: Andriamifidy 1950;
Zanak’Andriamamilaza: Ramilison 1952; Antemoro-Anakara: Kasanga 1956;
Ambohitrimanjaka: Randriamarosata 1959; Zanak’Andrianamboninolona :
Andriamanantsiety 1975; Manendy: Rakotomanolo 1981), examining the language
used to describe relations to royalty. Remarkably, even in the earliest, no trace of the
language of taiza, ubiquitous in the Tantara and other nineteenth-century texts,
could be found.
THE PEOPLE AS NURSEMAIDS OF THE KING
341
rather than ancestors.86 But the deep, hidden logic of royal ancestral ritual was
preserved. Just as those bearing santatra effected a double reversal, first neutral-
izing the ancestors so that the living king could create or do something new,
then infantilizing and thereby neutralizing the king himself so that living com-
moners could enjoy the fruits of their labor, so too did famadihana rituals honor
the dead so as to ultimately lock them away and prevent their interfering with
the living. At the same time, the spectral theater created by the Ramanenjana
has now become permanent. The old cult of the “twelve sacred mountains” has
been definitively appropriated by the descendants of commoners and slaves,
who have turned its cast of characters, once celebrated in the Tantara ny an-
driana, into a kind of prolonged meditation on the moral perils of arbitrary,
coercive power.
* * *
Outside of Madagascar, the notion that kings are a little bit like children is
unusual (notable exceptions being Schwartz 1989, 1990; Springborg 1990), but
the notion that children, especially infants and toddlers, are a little bit like kings
is commonplace. In China they speak of “little emperors.” Freud referred to “his
majesty the baby.”
It’s not hard to see why: it’s for all the reasons outlined in this
essay. Mon-
archs are regularly expected to behave in ways that, were any of their ordinary
adult subjects to imitate them, would be likely to be taken as profoundly im-
mature. And all of us—women especially, of course, but everyone to some ex-
tent—are also used to reacting with love and affection to egocentric tantrums
or even outright cruelty on the part of actual children; this is true whether our
culture teaches us that the proper way to respond is with nurturant indulgence
or by stern rebuke. There’s no need to appeal to evolutionary arguments here;
it’s necessary to do this, on a fairly regular basis, in order to bring children to
maturity at all. And endlessly repeated, it can only become something of a habit.
I have suggested, in this essay, that herein lies the secret of the ideologi-
cal power of monarchy. Because it cannot be denied that monarchy is, in
86. The most telling sign here was the change in naming practices: teknonymy was
almost entirely abandoned, and especially in the early years of colonial rule,
more and more names took the form instead of, for example, Razanadrakoto or
Razafindrabe, that is, “Child of Rakoto” or “Grandchild of Rabe.”
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ON KINGS
world-historical terms, a very common form of government, and often a stub-
bornly effective one; apparently, there is something about taking one single
household, with all its inevitable household dramas, and placing it at the pin-
nacle of a political system that manages to grab hold of the imagination and
affections of subject populations in a way that few others manage to do. Part of
the reason is, of course, that monarchs actually produce babies; in almost any
other form of government, children and babies are definitively off-stage. It’s not
far from here to suggest that monarchs in many ways are babies. Childishness—
childish snits, childish indulgence, childish self-aggrandizement—is what court
life is largely about.
In the first chapter of this volume, Marshall Sahlins makes the argument
that insofar as there is a primordial political state, it is authoritarianism. Most
hunter-gatherers actually do see themselves as living under a state-like regime,
even under terrifying despots; it’s just that since we see their rulers as imaginary
