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March 2010 Comme Victoire: Approaching a Holy Woman in Postcolonial Madagascar by Jimmy Grzelak Denise Kimber Buell, Advisor A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Degree of Bachelor of Arts with Honors in Religion WILLIAMS COLLEGE Williamstown, Massachusetts March 15, 2013 Grzelak 2 Mes sincères et vifs remerciements à tous ceux qui m’ont béni (explicitement et implicitement) pendant mon séjour à Madagascar. And also my thanks to Prof. Buell, who for all her patience and insight, I would say should be canonized – if this document did not, in part, explore the dangers of that exact gesture. Grzelak 3 Table of Contents Foreword 4 Chapter One: Pierre 8 Chapter Two: The Comic Book 37 Chapter Three: Rosette 68 Epilogue 92 Bibliography 95 Grzelak 4 Foreword This project began accidentally. I happened into walk into the chapel across from the Catholic cathedral in Antananarivo dedicated to Victoire Rasoamanarivo (1848- 1894), a popular Malagasy holy woman and Blessed in the Catholic Church.1 A cluster of water bottles standing on top of a casket caught my eye. People would occasionally approach the casket – either to retrieve or set up new bottles, or to simply cap or un-cap them. I was intrigued because, with these micro-rituals, I saw Malagasy laypeople actively and creatively managing the chapel space. I sat in the chapel for hours on end. This was not entirely bizarre; plenty of others would pass whole mornings, afternoons and days on the pews beside me. In part, I chose the chapel as my study site because I, having grown up Catholic, felt that I had some understanding of the grammar of behavior within. I certainly hoped, and hope, that one day soon Malagasy researchers – from all the island’s ethnic groups, from all the castes of Merina society – will have a more prominent voice in the academic world which still often views them as a object of inquiry. But, in the meanwhile, I aimed to find the best way I could contribute to the conversation about Malagasy religion, as a student with the sixth sensus catholicus2 of someone whose family history contains its own ancestor/saint, who would soon return to a university with access to experts on Christian history and phenomenal library resources. I could sit in the chapel and catalog lay ritual with some basis of understanding. I felt that 1 A ‘Blessed’ has been officially beatified by the Pope; this is the final step before the canonization that confers sainthood. The declaration asserts certainty that the deceased is in heaven and can intercede on behalf of the living, just like any saint – but, significantly in this case, s/he is accorded a feast day only in certain bounded geographic regions, and not in the whole church. 2 Like any sixth sense, this is awareness is sometimes unwanted, sometimes valuable. Grzelak 5 the Catholic Church’s claim to universality both authorized my presence and gave me a metric against which to measure what I saw. I was eventually asked who I was. This made sense – the chapel was a meditative, but not anonymous, space; people greeted acquaintances even while praying. I was also noticeably white. I must recognize that my race (white), gender (male), and national identity (American) were, in some sense, assets in conducting this fieldwork. My informants saw my project as an important one, felt that I deserved the privilege of access to any available information, and assumed that I was completely ignorant. Though insider ethnography certainly has its benefits, in this case, I believe that some of my informants were also more explicit about their feelings than they might have been if I were more easily locatable in Antananarivo society. I do not deny that my ability to conduct this research in the first place somehow carries with it the legacy of colonialism, but I can, at least, say that conversations about ethnicity especially would have unfolded differently had I been French, had I been Merina (with aristocratic, ‘common,’ or slave heritage), had I been of any other ethnic group, had I been Sino-Malagasy, or had I been “African.”3 Being American also meant that I was often confused; with this project, I am attempting to make use of that orientation. It is precisely the ethnographic moments that were initially hardest for me to understand, and easiest to dismiss, that I will be returning to here. I pay the closest attention to the moments where my interlocutors made the least sense to me. These moments have become tools for me in thinking through issues that I also find hard to understand and easy to dismiss, in both the Malagasy context and the 3 Malagasy people generally do not consider themselves African.