Contingency in Madagascar
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Contingency in Madagascar
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Overview
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781841504742 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Intellect, Limited |
| Publication date: | 07/23/2012 |
| Series: | Critical Photography |
| Pages: | 159 |
| Product dimensions: | 8.60(w) x 8.60(h) x 0.50(d) |
About the Author
Alfredo Cramerotti is a writer, curator, and artist based in Wales.
Max Pam teaches photography and media at Edith Cowan University in Western Australia. He is the author of numerous books, including Atlas Monographs.
Read an Excerpt
Contingency in Madagascar
Photography ? Encounters ? Writing
By Stephen Muecke, Max Pam
Intellect Ltd
Copyright © 2012 Intellect LtdAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-84150-474-2
CHAPTER 1
INTRODUCTION
Michael Taussig
If the decisive blows are stuck with the left hand, as Walter Benjamin declared, then this book from the southern oceans, Contingency in Madagascar, is very much a left-handed book, a gift, one might say, to all right-minded thinkers. Ostensibly a book about anthropology as travel, and travel as anthropology, it is also about the ways we decide to shuttle back and forth between the strange and the familiar in trying to sort out new experiences as we keep pushing on in our travels, which, it turns out, are as much philosophical as geographical, as much about our craft as writers and picture-makers, as it is about the role of chance in the craftiness of craft.
It is a deft, indeed shocking, move to settle on the unstable ground of chance and, politely enough, set aside the magisterial claims to authority that accrues with prolonged immersion in a foreign culture that an anthropologist would like to claim. For what we have here is the result of a mere three weeks in Madagascar, inflamed by the different sort of immersion that accrues to a writer obsessed with writing for some 30 years and to a photographer obsessed with photography for the same amount of time. What does all that obsession with craft have to say about what the craft is ostensibly about, in this case Madagascar, or should I say 'Madagascar'?
Over the decades both the author and the photographer have travelled far and wide in Indian Ocean, studied outside of their native Australia and Muecke has published extensively on indigenous Australia as well, beginning with that greatly uniquebook Reading the Country, co-authored with a watercolourist, Krim Benterrak, and the indigenous man, Paddy Roe. These books have been every bit about how you go about writing about the colony and postcolony, and it is this mix that makes their focus on chance extraordinarily interesting.
Wherever we turn here, analysis gives way to poiesis, also known as 'fictocriticism'. The best way of settling a philosophical problem of representation is through art, whether that be the art of storytelling or photography – so long as you have your eye on the role of the contingent in human, historical and, of course, in your own affairs. This crucial theme is not belaboured but gently makes itself present like light rain falling on the parched fields of determinism, whether in criticism or social science.
Contingency in Madagascar settles into a way curious zone where magic and empiricism not only coexist but also flourish. Hence language, spirits, sorcerers and the dead are no less present than Nietzsche, Deleuze, Roland Barthes and Michel Serres, together with anthropological writers such as Greg Dening, Kathleen Stewart and Michael Jackson. This unseemly, left-handed mix, is made possible because of the way that contingency straddles what we westerners tend to call mystical and what we call chance – as in one of William Burroughs' last books called Ghost of Chance, a book like this one ostensibly about Madagascar. Burroughs, of course, found magic congenial to his craft as a writer working with montage, no less than to his disdain for Church, State and Family, those grand institutions upon which Hegel rested the grand edifice of his philosophy carefully built so as to repel the slightest whiff of the contingent.
Then there is beauty. For just as romanticism is licensed once one is attuned to the contingent, so the concept of beauty acquires a specific meaning, one that has everything to do with craft. 'Beauty for us', write Muecke and Pam at the very end of this book, 'is in the complexity of the contingent situation; it is neither "out there" in Mada[gascar], nor shored up inside us. It is available here and now'.
Which is why there is a lot of attention to form and photography in the crafting of this book. The text exists (can one rightfully say 'proceeds'?) as a montage of encounters, events, meditations, side by side with Max Pam's photographs and explanation of why he takes photographs the way he does – by asking permission and allowing people to pose themselves, contingently.
Michael Taussig
Madagascar is one of the poorest countries in the world, with a ranking of 171 out of 180 on the 2009 International Monetary Fund list. It has a per capita gross domestic product of US$412 compared to the United States' US$46,000. It is the fourth largest island in the world, situated in the Indian Ocean, sometimes identified as part of Africa, sometimes as an Indian Ocean nation and sometimes remembered for its colonisation by the French from 1890 to 1960. The first settlement possibly dates back to the fifth century ce, with Austronesian peoples travelling by canoe from South-East Asia; their language and culture have links right through to the Pacific. Africans, Arabs and eventually Christians joined this initial population, creating a unique ethnic identity. This is further reinforced by the strange and wonderful floral and fauna, always under threat because of a lack of resources to protect and sustain them. At the time we visited, Madagascar was in an optimistic period. It had a new president, Marc Ravalomanana, who was attracting overseas capital and attempting some reforms to combat the entrenched corruption and nepotism among the ruling 'noble families'. But his own weaknesses allowed him to fall foul of a coup d'etat in 2009, and an illegal government was installed, attracting condemnation from the United Nations and withdrawal of most of the investments. Today, Madagascar continues to struggle as a precarious State and with an even more precarious, poverty-stricken citizenry.
Beauty and Wisdom
[H]ere then is a philosophy for the third and fourth worlds. The poorest worlds have more to do with our future than does the rich West, with its atomic shields and its aircraft carriers that are only used to kill the wretched. The sated sleep in the shadow of their armaments, while the most fragile are bringing grandeur and newness. Michel Serres
The philosopher Michel Serres made Hermes his guiding angel, for he is the messenger, the god of communication. He descends on winged feet, just as we are now, into Ivato Airport to begin work on a book about Madagascar. But like Hermes we are thinking and moving too fast to be interested in the illusion ofbeing 'immersed' in a culture. We are not planning to be 'participant observers' in the strict anthropological fashion, thinking of 2 years of intense fieldwork as the minimum to make our knowledge 'rigorous'. The thought that takes flight and wings its way like a carrier pigeon to somewhere else must be worth as much as, perhaps even more than, a long book on kinship repeating drearily the discourses of Oxford. We have urgent messages to deliver, messages rhythmed by our own desires just as are those of the people we will encounter. What agenda is being set for Madagascar, we ask, coming from our part of the world, and also, what agenda is it projecting outwards?
Like Hermes, we come and go, seeing a world in motion, constantly escaping us. No one is fixed in place and there can be no self-contained nation or culture, even if it is literally insular like Madagascar, for cultures can be nothing if not compositions of sets of relationships, of inside and outside, of past and future, between life and death. We will think about, write about and make images of all these things as we travel like the younger Michel Serres did in the French Navy, like Conrad or Kipling ahead of him forging ways of reporting on travel and travelling in writing. The messages fly out. I hear one now about Air Mauritius MK0941.
I turn to Max as we sit in the departure lounge and remark with a wry smile that I have a little guiding slogan for our work; we will be on the hunt for Beauty and Wisdom. I say this is the kind of thing we might say to someone we meet leaning on the bar at the Hotel Glacier (I've already mentioned my evenings at this notorious joint to him, from my last trip 2 years ago). That is, if anyone could be bothered to ask (and, of course, they will not). But there you go: nice pictures, words worth reading, is that too much to ask? Max is already wired.
Max and I are both veteran travellers and continue to be addicted to travel. We are aware too that tourism, the world's biggest service industry, creates the paradoxical effect of 'non-places', to use anthropologist Marc Augé's term (every airline is McDonaldised, every resort tropical-generic), coupled with the absolute necessity for some little token of cultural difference. And it is the latter, which breaks through the carapace of the former, as a simple gesture of hospitality or openness makes the 'whole trip worthwhile' for the traveller. But when they catch a glimpse of beauty or wisdom, it is, no doubt, also in the attitude they bring, which is one of a self-invented openness on a trip. Stephen Greenblatt might help us here, were it not for his romantic dissolution of the self:
Travel's estrangement-effect makes the external world not only more noticeable but more intense, just as poetry makes language more intense. The consequence is that the ratio of the self to everything that lies beyond the self changes: for a moment the world insists upon its own independent existence, its thingness apart from ourselves, and we are temporarily liberated from our own personal obsessions. This change in ratio – an increase in the objective exigency of the world, a decrease in the sovereignty of the ego – is why we often experience travel as a vacation not only from our surroundings but from ourselves.
We disagree, our subjectivities are intensely full, yet alert as the contingencies of travel replace the habits of home. It is something of a cliché to take 'every day as it comes' or 'embrace the unexpected', but this, nonetheless, is the procedure we will raise to the level of a method as we 'surf' Madagascar for 'links', which are like windows opening (images being formed in a viewfinder, good words falling on one's ear) as we remain alert to the intuition, which moves the eye to see, the ear to hear or the hand to become a creative tool.
We follow that wise mariner of thought, Michel Serres, our Conrad of the information age, in not using this hand meaninglessly or with the motivation to classify, to reorder or to purify, as if one were a god sorting the true from the false. So as we sit 'out the back' in a turbulent and fluid environment, waiting for the feeling of the swell rising under us and propelling us forward, demanding our skill and knowledge of the wave, we might remember his words:
One of the most beautiful things that our era is teaching us is to approach with light and simplicity the very complex things previously believed to be the result of chance, of noise, of chaos, in the ancient sense of the word. Hermes the messenger first brings clarity to texts and signs that are hermetic, that is, obscure. A message comes through while battling against the background noise. In the same way Hermes comes through noise, towards meaning.
Lemuria
'Your first time in Mada?' asks every taxi driver and potential guide. The answer will give him a good indication of our level of experience and, hence, exploitability. Now that it is my second trip, I can trot out the universal proverb Madame Chan of the Joffre Hotel in Tamatave gave us, as she sat at the bar of her hotel tinkling a Scotch and ice: 'Once one has tasted the water of Madagascar, one will always return.' The second taxi driver question will be about our origin, and we usually make some attempt at Southern Hemisphere Solidarity, coming from the other side of the Indian Ocean, speaking of 'big islands' with appropriate hand gestures and so on.
But just how solid are our points of national origin? It is purely by chance that I recall a link from an Indigenous Australian talking about the origins of his people. David Unaipon, writing in the 1920s, has a unique theory that Aboriginal peoples were driven 'by a plague of fierce ants' from the 'ancient continent of Lemuria ... a land in the Nor-West'. 'Lemuria' is a mystical land, also known as 'Mu', well-loved by the New Age industry. It is also the name shared by Madagascar and its proto-primates, which we call lemurs. Where did they get this name?Was it because European explorers heard their weird cries as the cries of the dead and that they were recalling the ancient Roman rites as described by Ovid in his Fasti?
When from that day the Evening Star shall thrice have shown his beauteous face, and thrice the vanquished stars shall have retreated before Phoebus, there will be celebrated an olden rite, the nocturnal Lemuria: it will bring offerings to the silent ghosts.
Ovid speculates that the name has its origins in the foundation of Rome, the city, which took its name from the man who murdered his brother, Remus. In order to propitiate the spirit of Remus, Romulus agreed to give
the name of Remuria to the day on which due worship is paid to buried ancestors. In course of ages the rough letter, which stood at the beginning of the name, was changed into the smooth; and soon the souls of the silent multitude were also called Lemures: that is the meaning of the word, that is the force of the expression.
The more I want to relate a simple story about Madagascar, the more complex it becomes. I cannot disentangle the country from the signs that surround it; these spurious contingent meanings, which may connect it to a real historical place (ancient Rome) or to a non-existent mythical land (Lemuria). Madagascar disappears over the horizon of orthodox reason and gets twisted in time and even space. It seems even the name 'Madagascar' was a malostensionmade by another Italian, Marco Polo, as he voyaged around the Indian Ocean, without even reaching the big island.
One of Marco's worst errors was to mix up Madagascar and Mogadishu in the Horn of Africa: 'The meat eaten here is only camel flesh. The number of camels slaughtered every day is so great that no one who has not seen it for himself could credit the report of it.' This is exactly true of Mogadishu, but certainly not of the great island 2,000 miles to the south. (It is testimony to the influence of Marco Polo that the name Madagascar, taken directly from his writings, has survived despite being based on a total confusion.)
Thus chance has determined the fate of every Malagasy, whose name emerges out of contingency and error during the European exploration. Which contingencies are more likely to seal our fates: those errors, which are more like metaphors, creative leaps of the imagination demanding that we, surprised, take notice? Or the everyday truths, which, through constant repetition, disappear into powerful but clichéd banality?
And what necessity or chance launched the present inhabitants of Madagascar from their original Indonesian shores to arrive on the island some 1,500 years ago, paddling their pirogues in hops along the Asian and African coastlines of the Indian Ocean? This truth is enshrined in the Malagasy language, which is classified in the Austronesian group, and then you look around: the people of the plateaux look Indonesian, and we are told their funeral ceremonies might link back to pre-Muslim Indonesian ancestor worship. Imagine their delight when the ancestors came across the vast inland freshwater lakes of the pangalanes, perfect for the rice – fields, which flourish there. And all this, as far as we know, has nothing to do with the Roman ritual of the casting of black beans and the clash of Temesan bronze, which somehow gave Lemuria a name, which remains, today, only with the primates.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Contingency in Madagascar by Stephen Muecke, Max Pam. Copyright © 2012 Intellect Ltd. Excerpted by permission of Intellect Ltd.
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Table of Contents
A Note from the Editor to the Reader: From the MiddleAlfredo Cramerotti, Editor, 'Critical Photography' series
Acknowledgements
Introduction
Michael Taussig
Beauty and Wisdom
Lemuria
Composing Photography
Rethinking la femme Malgache
'Among the ...'
New Ethnography
Full Orange Splendour
'She Danced Away on the Other Side'
A Story and an Argument
Ghost of a Chance
Turning the Bones
Choreomania
Eclipse Totale
Street Life in Nosy Bé
Sex Tourism
Lapabe
Photographs
Notes
Image Captions