LEARNING TO BE VEZO THE CONSTRUCTION OF TILE PERSON AMONG }TSIIING PEOPLE OF WESTERN MADAGASCAR RITA ASTUTI SUBMI FrED FOR THE PH.D. IN SOCIAL ANTHROPOLOGY LONDON SCHOOL OF ECONOMICS AND POLITICAL SCIENCE UNWERSITY OF LONDON 1991 (j:t;. ABSTRACT The dissertation studies the Vezo, fishing people who live on the western coast of Madagascar. It examines Vezo identity and Vezo notions of persorthood. These are shown to be construed around two apparently incompatible principles: the flexible principle of learning and the rigid principle of descent. The first part of the dissertation discusses the fact that Vezoness is learnt, acquired and lost, and that people are rendered Vezo through learning and knowing Vezo knowledge. Ch.l describes the knowledge that renders the Vezo Vezo and discusses how this knowledge is acquired. Ch.2 examines Vezo livelihood as one of the defining features of Vezo performative identity. Ch.3 treats Vezo political attitudes from a similar perspective. Ch.4 discusses some of the implications of defining identity on the basis of learning and practice, in particular the fact that although people are profoundly shaped by Vezoness, the latter does not become a permanent and essential characteristic of Vezo persons. The second part of the dissertation analyzes Vezo kinship, contrasting kinship among the living with kinship among the dead. Ch.5 explains how people come to be related to one another in life through links of common 2 generation which are undifferentiated and ungendered. Ch.6 argues that unilineal descent only determines people's affiliation to a tomb. Descent is therefore a domain that concerns the dead, while the living are only shadowed by descent in anticipation and preparation of their death and burial. Chs.7 and 8 examine the ritual activities -- funerals and the construction of tombs -- through which the living imagine the existence of the dead and the latter's longing for life. The Conclusion argues that the undifferentiation and flexibility of Vezoness and the divisiveness and fixity of descent rather than co-existing within the Vezo person, constitute two opposed realms of experience, life and death. Although separate and irreducible to one another, these two realms are nonetheless linked. 3 TABLE OP CONTENTS Acknowledgments 6 List of maps and figures 7 INTRODUCTION. "WHAT RENDERS THE VEZO VEZO?" 8 CHAPTER 1. LEARNING AND KNOWLEDGE 34 CHAPTER 2. FISHING AND FORAGING 77 CHAPTER 3. OF SOFTNESS, TIES AND BONDS 121 CHAPTER 4. CONTINGENCY AND PEOPLE'S MALLEABILITY 160 CHAPTER 5. KINSHIP AMONG THE LIVING 175 CHAPTER 6. THE SHADOW OF THE RAZA 191 CHAPTER 7. SEPARATING LIFE FROM DEATH 234 CHAPTER 8. WORKING FOR THE DEAD 271 CONCLUSION. THE SHADOWS OF DEATH AND LIFE 326 REFERENCES 333 4 LIST OP MAPS AND PIGURES MAP 1. Vezo settlements (quoted in text) 11 MAP 2. Area of fieldwork 27 PIG.1. The laka 41 PIG.2. Sailing 48 FIG.3. Fishing 57 PIG.4. The cross ritual 294 FIG.5. Time in Vezo kinship 328 5 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I am grateful to Jean-Aimé Rakotoarisoa, director of the Musée d'Art et d'Archéologie, Université d'Antananarivo, for his help in making my research in Madagascar possible and successful; my thanks go also to the staff of the Musée. I also wish to thank Mme. Pénélope Simon, who first taught me Malagasy in London; Rosa Stevan for her friendship and material support in Antananarivo, and Gion Cabaizar and Shirin Sotoudeh for theirs in Morondava; Flavia Grassi, who was my first visitor in Betania; Natalie and Miranda Poizer, Nick Stargardt 1 Saras Narsey and Anand, for being in Cambridge. I thank my fellow- students and teachers at the LSE for their searching questions and criticism at the Thesis Writing Seminars, and the participants of the seminars at the Programme for Malagasy Studies (LSE), Pier Giorgio Solinas (University of Siena) and Paola Tabet (University of Arezzo) for stimulating discussions. My friend Charles Stafford knows what I thank him for, as do my parents, Carlo and Fernanda. Those I can find no adequate way of thanking are my friends and relatives in Betania and in Belo, and Maurice Bloch, who taught me that I could become Vezo and showed me how. I thank Lorenzo Epstein for learning about the Vezo, liking them, and understanding my immersion into 6 Vezoness. Maurice Bloch also helped through the frustrations of writing what resisted to be written, and Lorenzo Epstein helped shape the outcome. Finally, I thank Solo and my father for their drawings of the Vezo canoe. My studies at the London School of Economics were made possible by an LSE Graduate Studentship. Field research was funded by a Wenner-Gren Grant-in-Aid (1988), and by grants from the Central Research Fund, University of London; the Centro Nazionale delle Ricerche (CNR), Rome; the Istituto Italo-Africano, Rome; and the University of Siena. Writing-up was aided by a grant from the Radcliffe- Brown Memorial Fund. 7 INTRODUCTION "WHAT RENDERS THE VEZO VEZO?" When Solo, a boy of six, carries the steering paddle of his father's canoe on his shoulder, the sail ropes hanging coiled at the paddle's broad end, there is always someone around to tell him how "very Vezo" he is being. Conversely, when Jandroake briefly loses control of the canoe while sailing along the coast in a strong wind, causing the outrigger to tilt dangerously over the water, his companion chides him that he must have become a Masikoro -- the people of the interior who know how to raise cattle and grow inanioc but who know nothing of the sea. Solo is becoming Vezo; Jandroake has momentarily lost his Vezoness. The Vezo are people who live on the west coast of Madagascar. They live near the sea (andriakv), and they know the sea (maha y rano). In this dissertation I shall analyze their identity and their notions of personhood. 8 In his seminal essay on the notion of person and self, Mauss (1985) indicated that this notion, like any other category of the human mind, cannot be assumed to be universal. Since then, anthropologists have reconstructed different models of personhood in different ethnographic contexts;' this study of the Vezo develops a further model. In what follows I analyze two aspects of Vezo identity, two components of their personhood. On the one hand, I discuss the fact that Vezoness is learnt, acquired and lost, and that people are rendered Vezo by learning and knowing Vezo knowledge -- this explains why Solo can be "very Vezo" while Jandroake becomes Masikoro. On the other hand, I show how this concept of Vezoness coexists with an entirely different principle, the principle of descent. As we shall see, the first aspect of Vezoness is emphatically non-Maussian: Vezo people, as it were, refuse to be defined by 'society'. Thus, unlike the Tallensi, the Vezo "are made aware of who and what they are as persons" (Fortes, 1973:281) with no reference to descent and status, to "moral, jural and ritual rules and observances and [to] special apparel and other distinctive possessions, corresponding to sex, age, rank, office, etc. (1973:279). However, the existence of the second principle, descent, appears to contradict and reverse the first one. The contrast and apparent incompatibility between these two features of Vezoness pose a major analytical challenge. This dissertation takes up the challenge, and attempts to make sense of the way in which 9 Vezo personhood is construed around the flexible principle of learning and the rigid principle of descent. Let us begin by formulating the question that will engage us for the whole of this work: "what renders the Vezo Vezo?" (mo inahavezo fly Vezo?). I was tauaht this question as soon as I knew enough of the Vezo language to be able to ask it -- for the people I lived with were eager to explain what sort of people they are and what being a Vezo person means. As the dissertation will indicate, asking this question is the key to understanding what Vezoness is about. This question has never been asked in the literature that has dealt with the Vezo. In the literature on western Madagascar one finds many references to the Vezo: by early western travellers who explored the region; by anthropologists who draw up lists of clans and ethnic groups, and by a few who provide systematic ethnographic studies; and by historians who reconstruct the conquest of the autocthonous groups by a foreign dynasty coming from the south-east of Madagascar, which resulted in the establishment of the Sakalava kingdoms. From the start, one is struck by the lack of agreement on where the Vezo are located (see Map 1). Douliot (1893- 96:234) described his trip along the coast from the Morondava river to Maintirano, during which he saw a number of Vezo villages. Petit (1930:206-213) referred 10 BEF instead to the people living in this area as "le[s] pêcheur(s] du Nord-Ouest" (those living further north were "le(s) pêcheur(s] de Najunga"); he seems to have used the term Vezo only for the people who lived in the region of Tulear in the south. Similarly Faublée (1946:23) wrote about the northern people, who did some fishing but were mainly engaged in agricultural activities, and contrasted them with "les piroguiers du Sud [qui] vivent exciusivement de la péche"; only the latter were Vezo. Dandouau and Chapus (1952:28) referred only to the Vezo of the Menabe, the Sakalava kingdom in the central area of the western region. In Deschamps' ethnic map (1960:295), Vezo settlements do not reach the northern region around Maintirano. Poirier (1953:23) indicated that some of the 49 clans present in the region of Analalava were Vezo, who in this region were also called Antandrano, "the people of the sea"; by contrast Bare (1980:134-146), writing about the northern Behimisatra kingdom immediately north of Analalava, distinguishes between the Antandrano of this region and "les groupes Vezo de la côte Sud-Ouest".