CHAPTER 8 CONCLUSION: T HE C ONSTRAINTS …...three catered meals a day served by a staff of young...

CHAPTER 8

CONCLUSION: T HE C ONSTRAINTS AND P OSSIBILITIES OF D EMOCRACY

In July 2008 the minister of mines and hydrocarbons (MMH) and his wife insisted on unbuckling from their Cessna jump seats to make sure I was looking down to earth at their mansion and Olympic -sizedswimming pool and not the much smaller estate next door. We were all returning by private plane to the capital from Tsimiroro, a sparsely populated (by the living) but extremely culturally rich expanse about an hour west of Antananarivo. This region of Madagascar is a vast swath of grassland, home to widespread slash -and-burn rice agricul-ture, violent cattle rustling, and impoverished but spirited villages who survive on beef, rice, and cassava. Tsimiroro is also home to a US -based oil company who established a secure luxury camp for its foreign workers there to tap Madagascar ’s oil reserves, the likes of which are thought to surpass the number of barrels in all of West Africa (Bloomberg 2006). The camp is fi lled with righands, jughounds, drill-ers, derrickmen, geologists, surveyors, and more oil patch workers, nearly forty in all, who hail from far -off places like Alberta, Canada, Tucson, Arizona, and Zagreb, Croatia. Paid at least $80 an hour, they man the patch alongside six to ten local Malagasy men who earn $1 a day. In 2008 the company had negotiated with the Ravolomanana administration to tap the multi -billion barrel resource volumes known

Political Oratory and Cartooning: An Ethnography of Democratic Processes in Madagascar,First Edition. Jennifer Jackson.© 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Published 2013 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

Conclusion: Language and Democracy 215

to be in place in what transnational oil companies refer to as a “fron-tier petroleum province. ”

Perhaps named frontier because this vast arid region was as much an island as the big island itself, Tsimiroro is only reachable from the rest of Madagascar by walking, lifting a ride with a truck from the coast, or taking one of the private company six -seater planes that leaves from the capital once a week. Juxtaposed to the villages nearby and the wide expanse of harsh, burned grasslands that characterizes this place, the oil company ’s camp offers to its residents shade, air -conditionedhard-sided tents for living, satellite television and Internet, warm showers, a full medical clinic and paramedic, an outdoor gym, and three catered meals a day served by a staff of young women brought from the capital city. The company tried to make it as much like home as possible. In fact, the locals are more foreign than the foreign-ers with such an encampment in place. No one who is not employed by the company can pass through the gates of the camp, eat from the camp kitchen, bring their children for treatment at the clinic, or enjoy any amenity of the camp.

I had joined the camp for the month to follow how these foreign companies negotiate land use and mineral extraction in places where land is never considered property but sacred grounds through which to commune with the ancestors. The company had engaged in discus-sions with local elders, sacrifi ced the obligatory zebu cow, attended the elders ’ kabary, performed their own approximation of a kabary,and continued to send out local PR representatives to make certain everyone was content with the business of oil exploration. Frequent kabary were necessary because, as the elders with whom I spoke argued, the company sometimes ventured away from the areas they were permitted, and the ancestors and land spirits would cause the drill-bits that churned half of a mile below the surface to break. Regardless of policy agreements by those in the capital, spoken nego-tiations, especially through formal kabary between oil managers and elders, served as the critical provenance of politics. Policy was the product of such discourse, back in the statehouse and especially there in Tsimiroro (Comaroff and Comaroff 1997: 135). Just as in Imerina, kabary and the agreements that came from it pointed to a negotiation to participate, a site for ongoing discourse, and that space for contesta-tion in which living rulers ’ power – business or political – is negotiated and given (or denied) social currency (Comaroff and Comaroff 1997:135). The minister was there for the afternoon to play along with

216 Conclusion: Language and Democracy

these formal sorts of interactions and to visit the company ’s manage-ment to make sure their objectives were still in place. Without them, his pool and the fi fty or so others that had sprung up in the last three years would not stay fi lled. And nor would their pockets.

Ravalomanana’s US -mentored rise to power, the economic deci-sions he negotiated and made in the name of development and modernity, and his ideologically driven shifts in speaking to and about the country came to threaten the country both practically and in spirit. Iconic of Ravalomanana’s company logo on the national currency, the obvi-ously imbalanced contracts for petro -resourcing on and offshore were just one example. His policies opened up opportunity for transnational investment into the country, to include land ownership by foreigners and uneven trade through currency devaluation. Exponential to this, the president agreed to massive land grabs of ancestral lands and resources by private foreign corporations. The most contested was an agreement the president made to lease 3.2 million acres of farmland, equivalent to nearly half of Madagascar ’s arable land, to a private South Korean company for 99 years at no cost. Daewoo Inc. would use Malagasy labor to cultivate corn and palm for South Korean citizens to remedy some of the food security issues in that country. In exchange, the Malagasy would have jobs on farms and may benefi t from the infrastructure necessary to operate commercial farms. Adding insult to injury, Ravalomanana ’s interventions into the country ’s governance structure – from changes in parliamentary arrangements to the place of its oratorical styles of address used to deliberate issues – made the process for any diplomatic protest, even by representatives in his own party, all the more opaque.

Many blame Ravalomanana ’s near monopoly on all things infra-structural, edible, and packaged, and his giant footprint in mass media capital on local and international cronyism. It was also pinned to the passivity of the provinces, affi rming that national politics in Madagas-car is really capital city politics. The self -proclaimed andriana class (now since Ravalomanana more determined by economic class in the city than history), particularly those whose businesses could benefi t from state contracts and subsidiary links to Ravalomanana ’s own projects, alongside government ministers, senators, and even staffers, stood to gain as neoliberal governmentality took hold: this hybrid zone of interaction between government and the private sector fed a culture of secrecy and concealment (Ferguson and Gupta 2002: 211); the peak of such surreptitiousness was the Daewoo deal.


This all sharply affected everyday local standards of living for most Malagasy and also thwarted how identity, belief, and memory were locally maintained through certain land and language -based practices informing how any arrangement of publics could be realized. Ravalo-manana’s policies threatened what people saw in land and language as both public and sacred resources and property, both of which gave them sustenance, material and symbolic. He shook the arena of, albeit always uneven, but still vocal forums of open, discursive communication among strangers – in essence, the public sphere (Calhoun 2005: 1). With this, he blocked and even mocked political kabary that commune with the proverbs of ancestors in favor of that which is in fellowship with Jesus Christ through scripture. He dimin-ished the integrity of political oratory as a form of democracy through the privileged opportunity of acta non verba. And, the ultimate shake came without talk and extreme action when in March 2009 Ravalo-manana ordered his private security forces (most not from Madagascar)

Figure 8.1 The character depicts the ease of fl ow – from resources to legal agreements – between Malagasy offi cials and foreign private and public entities. The stylization of drawings of Malagasy is meant to parody the ways in which these foreign entities imagine native people. Source: Reproduced by permission of Elise Ranarivelo.


to open fi re on peaceful protesters (mostly extremely poor workers in the city ’s informal economy). Twenty -six people were killed and countless others wounded. Violence of this sort was extremely uncom-mon in Madagascar, and certainly had not been seen coming from the government since Ratsiraka ’s secret killings of a martial arts master and students in the 1980s. All the while, Ravalomanana remained steadfast in his argument about democracy, development, and transpar-ency (see table 8.1).

At the root of the crisis was Ravalomanana ’s complete mishandling and abuse of nearly all public entities, social and economic. At a larger scale, the chaperoned democracy he supported from abroad may have been the goal, but it came along with other motives with greater impact. The US -style nation -building through democracy, for which Ravalomanana was the fl ag bearer, came linked to the advancement of market economies and US global interest by donor agencies. And as well as easing the fl ow of goods and ideas across borders, it also creates that distance between the decisions of formal political institu-tions and other local social actors, undermining rather than enforcing a substantive version of democracy (Paley 2002: 483). Such violence and the differences among local understandings and competing global constituents’ ideas of economic and political negotiation and agree-ment – from privatization and structural adjustment to governance reform informed by a model of neoliberal modernity and development – fueled the coup in March 2009 and the structural transformations it presupposed and will surely entail.

The aim of this book was to explore how talk, talk about talk, and representations of talk constitute and shape democratic process in a postcolonial nation. The interactions between national and international political speechwriters and political speakers, and political cartoonists (as audiences and to audiences) tell the unfolding of democracy as it was organized and experienced, and what is at stake, locally in Imerina and as it is construed (or misconstrued) by bi -national government and NGO development experts. Much of this points to a major imbalance between corporate interests, locally and transnationally and those of virtually all other groups (Crouch 2005: 104). The concrete, daily variation on kabary politika and political cartooning indexes this social change occurring under the auspices of a neoliberal mission cloaked in the discourses of modernity and its political imaginary, democracy. Motivated to serve particular interests, voices of modernity and idioms of democracy are embodied, instantiated, and contested in the daily


Table 8.1 January 31, 2009, Sambava, Madagascar. Ravalomanana kabarypolitika regarding the threat of coup

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“Hanonga-panjakana” dia haka ny fahefana hono, dia izao fa angaha izy ity tany tsy misy lalàna rey olona an? Maninona raha mba manaraka tsara ny lalan ’ny demokrasia, izay dradradradraina etsy sy eroa, ny lalan ’nydemokrasia dia miainga avy amin ’nyconstitution, dia miainga avy amin ’nyfi fi dianana, ny safi dim -bahoaka, ary tsy maika maika, mihazakazaka ohatran ’nydiadian’ondry, na tonga dia hitsambikina ery ambony ery na hanidina nefa tsy ary elatra, tsia!Aza matahotra ianareo fa tsy hilaozan’izay saonjo iray loha - saha hamarara, ary tsy hoe manta vary akory dia handevi-tsotro-be, fa aza matahoatra ianareo hoy aho, izay indrindra no nitsidihako anareo aty hampaherezako anareo ilazako ny zava -marina, milamina daholo ny tany manerana n’I Magdagasikara, resaka be daholo izany na avy amin ’ny radio avy any ivelany, na ilay resaka avy amin ’ny telefaonina iny, izay koa mantsy no afi tsok ’ity ilay sms ity, dia mampitahotra, fa tsisy n ’inona n ’inona izany matoa aho tonga aty.

It is said that one will practice a “coupd’état,” and will take the power. But dear people, is it a country without a law? Why not follow the way of democracy correctly which is said again and again here and there? The way of the democracy is starting from the constitution, and start from the voting, the people ’s choice, and not to be in a hurry, running and running like the sheep’s step, or directly jump up there, or fl ying without wings, no!

Don’t worry about this because as the saying goes, saonjo iray lohasaha tsy ilaozan’izay hamarara, and “it is not that once your rice is not well cooked that you are going to bury your soup ladle, ” but as I said, don ’t be afraid, that is exactly the reason why I visit you here in order to cheer you up, so that I tell you the truth, it is safe all around Madagascar; it ’s all bla bla [wrong] either it is from the radio abroad or what is written in the telephone; that is also the inconvenient of this message, worrying! But if I arrive to come here that means that there is nothing to worry about.

interaction between genres such as oratory and political cartooning. As we see in the ethnographic story, the process of democracy by way of modernization is reinforced by discursively transportable idioms that evoke particular images and shape the participant frameworks of dem-ocratic participation by representatives of the state and civil society.

By looking to linguistic variants in the interdiscursive play between kabary politika and political cartooning, I have examined the conditions in which power is organized, reproduced, legitimized, and institution-alized. A part of this will -to-power is a controlled framing of moral order predicated on signs inscribing a sense of community fortifi ed to stand, even for just a transformational moment, as a public in relation to the dominant politic. The ritual performance of kabary, by virtue of its structure and style, is imbued with an authority toward claims to identity and social order, naturalizing an essentialized moral collec-tive as though it has always already existed in this way. Such images


of community are performatively and ideologically appropriated by political speakers and pundits to objectify and invigorate social imagi-naries of the nation, of democracy, of progress. It is through the partial awareness cultivating these idioms and laying claim to a total moral order that we fi nd the conditions of rule; it is also how we come to understand the mediation through which these “publics,” a concept I will unpack below, reproduce or resist that rule (Taylor 2004).

The recent stylistic and contextual changes in kabary politika per-formances in highland Madagascar serve as a means for measuring structural transformations in vernacular political process and as an index for understanding how folk theories and epistemologies of lan-guage emerge, take shape, and transform. The socially productive roles of older and new styles of kabary politika side by side reveal not only how this performance genre is shifting as new forms of government are established in urban Madagascar, but also that the very ways people relate meaningfully to this practice are changing. Focusing on local politics in the context of globalizing democracy and modernity, we see how features of old and new kabary styles co -articulate with imported democracy and governance models purporting to fi ght cor-ruption in postcolonial countries.

This book has presented several themes in an anthropology of democracy that decenters Western models of democracy and shows how democratization practices differ from place to place. To question what democracy is – both conceptually and how it is operationalized – urges one to take as a starting point the notion that all forms of political process are vernacular, both materially and ideationally. First and foremost, any formation of a political system, in both its concep-tual contours and practical details, is historically contingent. Second, the various modes of sociality and self -expression play a role in defi ning, proliferating, and transforming structures of assembly and organization. In this case, we consider communicative practices between auditors and orators, readers and political cartoons as structured social relations of collective political agency, the likes of which have been called publics, which accumulate to constitute the public sphere, civil society, social imaginaries, or hybrids of public affi nity groups refl ecting and generating fi elds of interaction of varying scales across local and global boundaries. Third, democracy is dependent upon what has been legiti-mized ideologically and aesthetically in various but overlapping linguistic markets as valuable, symbolic structures and styles of communicative practice. Within this market the limitations of democratic process are


realized not just through competence but also according to ratifi cation of that competence. This enables access and distribution of such resources across social fi elds cohering into publics. Lastly, even as localized practice among local actors, vernacular democracy is depend-ent upon global politics and myriad audiences abroad who serve as bystander citizen entities to local social, political, and economic deci-sions. The global politics and the discourses circulating and undergird-ing the political economy of the locality often subjugate the power and knowledge of everyday action in that locality.

History and State Formation

The history of state formation in Madagascar involves particular socio-political and economic processes that produce different possibilities for democracy than the normative model of liberal democracy exported by the West (Witsoe 2011). The possibilities for its unfolding in prac-tice, by individuals and by institutions, are shaped by an accumulation of histories – local and cosmopolitan, monarchical and colonial, national and transnational – and their aftermaths. Also, democracy is caught up in a historical and contemporary network of people, places, and interests, linked in these emergent systems of state, and govern-mental and quasi -governmental institutions. To understand the vernacular character of Madagascar ’s democratization, it is critical to consider these “broader political structure(s) within which movements of democratization are embedded ” (Nugent 2008: 22). In particular, we should consider who the groups are that assert the rights Malagasy have come to view as democratic and in the context of what kind of state polity they asserted these rights (Nugent 2008: 22). In one way, the historical overview this book offers orients one to the structural trans-formations in governance throughout Madagascar ’s history, particularly as language served as a point of reference to that change. In another way, it provides instances in everyday life that speak to how the history of language is both political and sacred, and how historicity in Imerina in general does not come from the past toward the present but layers them in time and space as co -articulating through a multi-plicity of voices, living and dead. This notion of history speaks to memory but also to the blessings of power instilled in the voices of the present by way of those in the past.


Aside from building alliances with powerful nations across the Indian Ocean and Europe, the Merina monarchy assured its own imperial domination through the fanampoana system, a labor economy that developed the strongest infrastructural network of roads through-out the island. This was a necessary endeavor for domination but was not suffi cient; rather, the monarchy gained its colonizing foothold through a far -reaching but obtuse bureaucratic administration enabled by foreign assistance, standardizing literacy projects and the organizing apparatus of ethnic and class politics. The monarchy made way for, even as it attempted to suppress, the institutionalization of Protestant Christianity. Blending this new belief system with longstanding animism rather than abandoning one for the other would come to fortify publics even up to today and inform much of how civil society might engage with political decision -making. From laying down roads and welcoming missionaries, to establishing a unique alphabet, the kings and queens of Imerina instituted and protected a system of governance and social hierarchy that would reverberate throughout future state structural transformations.

The French colonial government made use of what had been arbi-trary class and ethnic distinctions and alliances within the Merina monarchy to institutionalize social and economic control over an island of once -multiple oligarchies. As a result, the colonial project involved the construction of a “nation,” and with that, particular types of political alliances based on highland and coastal historical animosity. But it also galvanized certain movements for independence and directed the trajectory of independence and who would rule the “nation.”Postcolonial Madagascar worked from this notion of unity, and because the capital city remained in Imerina, the precolonial understanding of Merina imperialism and hegemony undergirded the formation of new postcolonial governments. Contrastively, this broader history of insti-tutionalized difference alongside the anti -colonial social imaginary of a unifi ed Madagascar nation cultivated nationalization movements throughout the twentieth century; this would give structure and a language to socialism and entail a Madagascar cosmology built upon local and global ideologies of socialism. Its history of structural adjust-ment follows a global movement to remove trade barriers by way of new forms of colonization through the exportation of liberal democ-racy and neoliberal market ventures. And it is within this political structure that the sub -alterity of the Madagascar state is subsumed by a transnational, protean, corporality motivated by the operations of a


capitalist resource economy, carrying the banner of democracy and modernity.

In each of these shifts, as I have shown in chapter 2, language mediated change, even when the change was to language. Then and now, even as kabary was defanged as a mode of state address and political cartooning was banned, both forms stood as modes of social-ity and as contextual fi elds of democratic practice. Throughout, their practitioners were susceptible to the contingencies of rule, just as today. The variabilities within these communicative practices, both in the participant roles inhabiting and instantiating them, and in their potential for political effectiveness, are all socially and historically con-tingent. But, as they unfold in daily practice, they are also productive of the conditions that mediate social relations and bring people together as collective agents. The presupposed forms themselves, mass -mediatedand re -entextualized at multiple levels through those who listen to kabary, read the cartoons aloud, talk about them, against a background of other texts motivate such cosmologies into being. However, beyond the forms themselves, as this research has shown, the presup-posed “tradition” indexed through kabary structure and style, the register of the Christian sermon, and new deployments of development -speak refl ect and shape how the place of oratory and cartoons coheres self-organized assemblies of agents in specifi c ways. Even at the start, the performance of kabary and the frames of cartoons trump any ref-erentially focused idea about truthfulness, as fulfi lling responsibilities trumps adages or ideologies about transparency. Only by approaching historically and ethnographically the ways in which these practices refl exively circulate and are made legible within a multiplicity of dis-courses can we begin to understand the preconditions of a functional intelligibility of this process within the Imerina political context (Warner 2002: 9).

Collective Agency and Democracy

This question, in fact, has been a focus recently for scholarship in the anthropology of democracy. Namely, this interest has been around the myriad collective entities within variable social contexts that emerge through common discourse and through the circulation of that discourse with other discourses, and how they inform democratic


process (Bate 2009; Calhoun 1993; Chakrabarty 2007; Fraser 1990;Gupta 1995; Hardt and Negri 2004; Hasty 2005; Kaviraj 1992;Paley 2001, 2002 ; Taylor 2004; Warner 2002; Witsoe 2011). In this research, I identify these cosmologies of collective agency as “publics” operationalizing the less institutionalized, self -organizedaspects of civil society. Publics are those spaces in which strangers are joined through refl exively circulating discourses such as a public speech event. The event itself is thought to motivate a refl exive “con-sciousness of stranger -sociability” by the multitude constitutive of a social imaginary (Warner 2002). They require a medium of discourse circulation. Their assemblage is generally not rationally based and never inclusive of all members of society as past theories of collective agency might describe; rather they are ideologically based “poeticworld-making” through the moral order that provides the thrust to a shared social imaginary (Taylor 2004: 23; Warner 2002: 114). Tying the possibilities of political structure to the ways in which publics are drawn according to ideas of person, group, and belonging, this book has followed how local theories and practices of politics, circulating discourses on personhood, representation, and changing forms of power constitute the very empirical modalities constituting the state, civil society, the quality of citizenship, and, in turn, democracy (Paley 2001: 470).

In anthropology, the focus has been on the mediated ways in which large-scale groups of people, who may or may not come face to face, imagine and act upon a shared notion of political identity and belong-ing, as publics. Past and current theoretical discussions concerning the production of such large -scale sociopolitical orders – organized as publics, public sphere, civil society, imagined communities, and com-munities of practice – speak to this focus (Anderson 1991; Bourdieu 1977a, 1977b ; Eckert and McConnell -Ginet 2004; Habermas 1989;Taylor 2004; Warner 2002). This book has addressed this issue by elaborating the semiotic modes of organizing vis-à-vis the creative intertextuality of register and contextual shifts. From these examples, the project points to the role of these modes in collective group experience, alliance, distinction, membership, and belonging across the Imerina polity, all aspects of a moral imagination constituting and affecting democratic practice in urban Madagascar.

Anthropology’s interest in the production and function of these entities came with the advancement of J ürgen Habermas ’s (1989)concept of a rational public in the rise of the bourgeois public sphere


and Benedict Anderson ’s (1991) link between mass -mediated print capital and the emergence of a deep and horizontal imaginary of comradeship between citizens who may never see one another but through shared material experiences would feel connected as a nation. For Anderson, the transformation allowing a disparate citizenry to cohere as a national community is the advent of printed mass -mediatingtechnologies like newspapers, magazines, and serial novels. The stand-ardization of the language of these media carried a homogenizing force through which these ideas of a national community could be conjured (Anderson 1991: 6).

For Habermas, the public sphere is that theatre in modern societies in which political participation is enacted through the medium of talk. He writes of its peak in eighteenth -century Western Europe. It is the space in which citizens deliberate about their common affairs, hence, an institutionalized arena of discursive interaction. In this sense, the public sphere is a site for the production and circulation of discourses, “publicity,” that can be critical of the state. Critique out of the concern for a common good is possible because this arena is concep-tually made up of “private” citizens and therefore distinct from the state. People (white property -owning men) assemble in coffeehouses, read the same papers, and discuss political issues in order to build rational understandings, arguments, and actions regarding political policies. The development of a liberal model of the public sphere was, to Habermas, the requisite structure necessary for democracy. For Anderson, the concern was not democracy but the nation.

Habermas’s ideas initiated more profound and longitudinal studies in anthropology that sought to understand through ethnography across societies the relationship between leaders and led and the specifi c condi-tions for effective collective assembly and political process. However, his arguments have brought about more constructive intervention than corroboration. This ethnography builds upon these criticisms. Haber-mas describes the public sphere as singular and inclusive – multiple spheres suggests a weakening of democracy – yet the Malagasy public sphere is made up of an accretion of publics precisely because social inequality inhibits the kind of open zone of contact between all citi-zens. Yet, Habermas presents this collective as “utterly bereft of any specifi c ethos as to accommodate with perfect neutrality and equal ease interventions expressive of any and every cultural ethos ” (Fraser 1990: 63). Anderson follows similarly in that he assumes information fl ows with equal opportunity access. Of course, the assumption made


by Habermas that any public sphere might be constituted as totally open and accessible is a false one. The imagined community of the public sphere may feel total but the reality is only partial. An aspect of this partiality comes from both scholars ’ limitation of discur-sive interaction to formal inclusive public arenas or media rather than what Habermas refers to as politics defi ned by “pressure from the street ” (Fraser 1990: 63). This ethnography is precisely about the dialogical interaction of state leaders and that pressure from the street. It is this pressure from the street that points us to the frightened man behind the speaker whispering because he is not privileged enough to represent the voice of public reason (Fraser 1990; Hill and Montag 2000).

In addition, Habermas describes the ethos of the public sphere as rational, detached from special interests and its representatives holding the line between this sphere and the state through a dispositional embodiment of command and status, which he called “publicity.” Yet, echoing Fraser, this ethnography shows how the public sphere in urban Madagascar during the Ravalomanana era should be read for its neoliberal, religious, and ideological characteristics, which have since before the crisis of 2002 functioned to legitimate an emergent form of public predicated on class, moral rule, and special interests (Fraser 1990: 63). As history shows and as this ethnography fi nds in contem-porary interaction between state representatives and civil society through kabary and cartooning, the public sphere has served less as a bourgeois space of debate and deliberation and more as an “institu-tional vehicle for a major historical transformation in the nature of political domination ” (Fraser 1990: 62). Local ideologies of language, class, and morality generally stand as the obstacles to rational and detached motivation to speak for a common good. Whether through productive evaluative acts through register, syntactic fashions of speaking, or arguments about truth represented in speech, kabary and political cartooning stand as prime institutional sites not only for the discursive production of some publics and the erasure or oppression of others, but also for consensual forms of domination through these publics, eventually to hegemonic ones (Fraser 1990: 62). The advent of mass -exported neoliberal democracy has glossed over any critical scrutiny of the state and left it to public relations, mass -mediatedstaged displays, and the manufacture and manipulation of public opinion (Fraser 1990: 58).


Fraser and Warner argue a contradiction to this: even as discourses dominate as representative of the total public, those held at length from interaction with the state through civil society still actively orient toward a publicity, suggesting while hegemony controls consent, it too implies a space of opportunity through which the subaltern voice might topple the senses underpinning the collective agency of the dominant. For Michael Warner, this voice is the potential voice of the “counterpublic,” one which challenges the heteronormative framework of modern culture while also availing itself of the form (Warner 2002: 18). Through the Ravalomanana victory, we see the counter-discourse of transparency displace old and motivate new publics along political, religious, and class lines, mediated by a meta-language about the discourse itself. Michael Warner ’s ruminations on what enables the public sphere, which he refers to as “publics,” speaks to this continual turnover of any hegemonic collective agency. One structural change, as we saw through political oratory during Ravalo-manana’s victory, his tenure, and the cause of his exile, brings about new confi gurations of publics. As Warner suggests in his intervention into the inclusive and timeless presumption of the Habermasian public sphere, publics work as “engines of translatability, putting down new roots wherever they go(es) ” ( 2002: 11). Some of these new roots spring branches of new social identities, which poke thorns of resist-ance at the advancement of further post -democratic imbalances between leadership, private corporations, and interests of citizens (Crouch 2005: 116).

Up against the tide of consumer capitalism driving Ravalomanana ’sdecisions, it was the heterogeneous snubbed collective, what Warner would label as the “counterpublic” coming together outside of what was legitimated, and, therefore, heard, that put down legible roots and informed the coup d ’état of this administration and the ongoing stale-mate in negotiation and reconciliation. What is more, increasingly since the coup, the attempt to model a global commons has come from a deterritorialized imaginary of democracy: Malagasy bloggers have engaged people from all over the world on the subject of democ-racy, not so much on the details of their democracy, but the fate of emancipated politics in general (see table 8.2). Intensely dialogic and across complexly different situational contexts, this discourse blows the cover of collusion, corruption, and those public –private partnerships masked behind it all in Madagascar and elsewhere (Hardt and Negri


Table 8.2 Bloggers

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#lova: I voted for TGV because he is young. We need to teach a lesson to the current regime and let them know that we are not placidly supporting them.

#tany: Traditional Malagasy songs, fashion models, all -you-can-eat buffet, 500 invitations, grand entry in the middle of photographers . . . Sure why not? But beside that, there is nothing! No detailed program, only meaningless clich és.

#enfrance: I am not afraid. It is unthinkable that nowadays, one can still live in an era of authoritarian regime and abuse of power.

#1346: Everyone is entitled to earn a living. We need to help our youth realize their dreams.

J’ai vot é pour TGV dit -elle parce qu ’il est jeune. Nous avons besoin d ’enseigner une leçon au r égime actuelle et de montrer que nous ne sommes pas aveugl ément derri èreelle.

Troupe de hira gasy, rang ée de mannequins, buffet, 500 invit és, entr ée au milieu des photographes . . . Bien s ûr,pourquoi pas . . . ? Mais à part cela? Et bien à part cela rien! Pas de programme pr écis mais des formules creuses.

Je n ’ai pas peur. Il est impensable qu ’ànotre époque on vive encore dans l’arbitraire et l ’abus de pouvoir.

Tout le monde a le droit de gagner son pain. On doit aider la jeunesse à r éaliserses ambitions.

Blog by Lova Rakotomalala. Global Voices Online. The world is talking. Are you listening? “Madagascar elections: a warning for the current regime? ” Friday, December 21, 2007 @ 03:52 UTC.

2004). This emergent multitude is characteristic of the recent global matrix of heteroglossic voices in political movements countering larger value systems that also have no territorial boundaries (Fraser 1990).Though this imagined community of multiple, heterodox publics may never assemble as a corporeal body of force, the cultivation of its shared discourse across time and situation and its circulation persist as “deeply entangled in the very technological, linguistic, and concep-tual means of its own self -production” (Cody 2011: 47). It is this market of means and all of its uneven distribution of resources that determines the political economy of discourse in the urban Imerina public sphere. 1


Participant Frameworks in Democratic Process and the Linguistic Market

Anthropologists and social theorists have considered this market in terms of language ’s multifunctionality beyond semantico -referentialand predication value, that is the denotative approach to meaning (Bourdieu 1977b; Friedrich 1989; Irvine 1989). Particularly, linguistic anthropologists have considered the political economy in which lin-guistic resources serve as relevant instruments of economic transactions and political interests (Irvine 1989: 262 –3). Irvine explores language as an economic resource among griots in Senegal. This work parallels her inquiry, showing the ways people deploy verbal skill in oratory and cartooning as political capital and determine the participant frameworks of democratic process. Through the events of kabary and political cartooning, this book shows how democracy is dependent upon what linguistic market has been legitimized ideologically and aesthetically as an authoritatively valuable form of capital. According to Pierre Bourdieu ’s exploration into the economy of linguistic exchanges, the speaker ’s power to engage such language as an instru-ment of transformative action depends both on the symbolic capital borne from his competence to command a listener and on his socio-political position, subsumed in the structures of the habitus (see chapter 6). Embodied in the Ravalomanana administration ’s rhetoric and resisted (but nonetheless reproduced) by cartoon satirists, the register of democracy and governance (D &G) and international business and development served as markets of resources in the service of nation -building that certainly shaped Ravalomanana ’s dispositional perform-ance of speaking to and about the country. During the president ’stenure these linguistic resources foreclosed on the otherwise authorita-tive symbols of other local markets of normally transformative linguistic resources. Also, the register of the Protestant Christian, namely the sermonic register, entered into the political economy of state rhetoric. Scripture was privileged over proverbs, ideas about plain speech dis-mantled the reason thought inherent in kabary structure. This register, which was choreographed into political kabary, eased otherwise private religious ideologies and practices into the framing of the discourse of state decision -making processes. Transnational D &G and international development fi elds of practice, the impact syntactically and the indexi-cal reverberations about class, morality, transparency, and modernity,


and the mix of church and state rhetoric to structure the participant framework of political process cornered the market of linguistic resources one had to access to be made visible and audible. They served as enregisterments, standing as productive aspects of a social process – processes of value production, maintenance, and transforma-tion – through which the scheme of cultural values is a social life, as it were, a processual and dynamic existence that depends on the activities of social persons, linked to each other through discursive interactions and institutions (Agha 2003: 231 –2).

Of course, members of a society are aware, consciously or unconsciously, of speech styles characteristic of various social strata; this perception is never neutral and we see this as they use this knowledge in building assumptionsand stereotypes about entire groups. The everyday interaction and talk about talk by orators and cartoonists provide an understanding of how apperceptions of being go along with or map onto those of doing and inform the political economy of linguistic exchange in democratic process. As we fi nd in standards of kabary grammar set and regulated by teachers like Razafy and the Mpikabary association, or the cartoon parodies of lower -class basilects and syntax iconic of their speakers, the mpikabary and cartoonists reveal this awareness and provide the ethno-pragmatic reasoning behind local theories of meaning, of person and social action. Contrasts of voice and speech styles – mapped to con-trasting character, mentality, and corresponding identities – have shown us how different genres of speaking in urban Imerina presuppose and entail a class and ethnic habitus and, accordingly, impute more or less power to members of that class. Because speech styles are mapped onto ways of being, kabary politika and political cartooning practices can be seen as activating means for confl ating evaluations of speech with atti-tudes about a speaker ’s identity, internal nature, and class. Such evalu-ations of patterns of speaking and character are motivated even at the level of syntax, as though it serves as a practical and seemingly “natural” mechanism demarcating distinctions between kinds of speakers based on their actions. These distinctions are triggered by perceived indexical links between semantic encodings in grammatical categories and speakers ’ internal nature, set in a reductionist totalizing schema linking internal selves, social selves, and patterned social action, all appearing natural.

When mpikabary and cartoonists naturalize abstract categories of being through concrete material practices, whole groups become icon-


ically and indexically reduced or stereotyped and associated with what their speech says about their internal nature and agentive capacity through iconicization, what Irvine and Gal describe as “a transforma-tion of the sign relationship between linguistic features (or varieties) and the social images with which they are linked. Linguistic features that index social groups or activities appear to be iconic of them, as if a linguistic feature somehow depicted or displayed a social group ’sinherent nature or essence ” ( 2000: 37). We see from the Malagasy example that class categories are not a stand -alone metric for disciplin-ing categories of citizens and their modes of participation in public social fi elds. Rather, patterns of social actions, particularly those of language use, correlate with apperceptions of class, which then enable disciplined fi elds of practices and members of those fi elds. These abstract categories are locally understood as concrete constructs of identity and become naturalized and foundational in reproducing broader social inequalities. In this totalizing confl ation of speaking and social categories of identity, agent -centered, active direct speech and other voicing effects then “evoke a particular type of speaker or positioned subjectivity” (Irvine 2005: 75) and the aesthetics of a person ’s speech style is explained by the fact that the speaker is of a particular group: As Judith Irvine put it, “speaking as just like that ” – or “just what one might expect from those people ” ( 2005: 75), an artifact of the history of language and slave trade in the Merina Kingdom and colo-nial literacy projects.

Agha further points out that this totalizing part –whole relation occurs in productive ways compounding and extending such articu-lated rationalizations of internal states of character and agentive capacity to shape power relations motivated by and motivating participant frameworks in public culture. It also serves as a feedback loop with the metapragmatic ways in which speakers engage their speech to help shape and reproduce factors of groupness delimiting membership in the public sphere and distinguishing themselves from others. How speakers embody fashions of speaking in a particular context as ratifi ed by the social world determines the speaker ’s status and his possible “exclusionfrom the sites of power that are defi ned and locally embodied in the so-called ‘power code ’ elite ” (Silverstein 1998a: 418). And the market of this power code controls the forms of the message, which goes hand in hand with control over their means of interpretation; to a signifi cant degree, political economy is a matter of competing for


information and tropes and for the power to disseminate them to misinform audiences from the purview of partial awareness in which the political orator operates while asserting he speaks to and for all (Friedrich 1989: 304). One does not “go public ” simply as an act of will. Rather, the context of publicness must be available, allowing action to count in a public way, to be transformative (Warner 2002:63). What, then, does it mean to speak?

Jacques Ranci ère in The Politics of Aesthetics brings this question to the fore and probes it according to a political economy of language in which the apportionment of symbolic resources lends itself to audi-bility and visibility activating an aesthetic of power, identity, memory, and belonging. Ranci ère describes this process as the material and symbolic practices within a system of self -evident facts of sense -perception: “the very distribution of the sensible that delimits the horizons of the sayable and determines the relationship between seeing, hearing, doing, making, and thinking ” (Ranci ère 2006: 4). This economy is regulated by the amplifi ed assertion of “I am a man of action, 1 –2–3, not a man of words ” and against the quieting of ances-tral wisdom entextualized in the kabary event. It is the dispositional ubiquity of unmarked grammar indexing corruption versus the marked syntax of development speech pointing to accountability and progress. It is the NGO worker, like Vries in the opening of chapter 7, who equips the voices of modernity as those of morality. “Speech is every-where regulated unequally ” (Warner 2002: 52).

Rancière’s project frames the disciplining of the sensible according to what he refers to as “disagreement,” paralleling theories of stand-ardization and status of the body politic offered by Pierre Bourdieu ’s(1984) studies on the dual meaning of “distinction” and Michel Foucault’s (1971) argument about the “rarefaction” of “discourse.”“Disagreement is less a clash between heterogeneous regimes or genres of discourse than a confl ict between a given distribution of the sensible and what remains outside of it ” (Ranci ère 2006: 4). It is an entire economy of governing what and how it means to speak in a particular social fi eld.

Phenomenologies at play in the communicative practices of high-land Madagascar are strikingly different than what drives other models of exported democracy and governance projects. These differences in ideologies and aesthetics of language and its users regulate and discipline what the market looks like and how access is negotiated through the relationship between the protean structures of state and


civil society. The cultivation and circulation of the sensible aesthetics in communicative practice “determine the very manner in which something in common lends itself to association and participation and in what way various individuals have a part in this distribution ” (Ran-cière 2006: 12), rendering some visible and audible, while silencing the most vocal of others. What this amounts to then is that the actual doxic linguistically mediated constructions fi gure as a system of index-ical coordinates that determine participation viz. commonality versus erasure and invisibility viz. exclusivity, a syntax of participation, if you will.

The production of publics is a question of this system of coordinates and its distribution. As the cultivation of such aesthetics felt through language underpins notions of a shared biography, participant roles are renegotiated and the production of political publics and public opinion becomes predicated on this fi ltering, ultimately transforming how democracy is locally negotiated, understood, and experienced. The “rarefaction” of speaking subjects, Foucault would say; “none may enter the order of discourse if he does not satisfy certain requirements or if he is not from the outset qualifi ed to do so ” ( 1971: 61 –2).Marking ways of speaking as ways of being serves as “informal impedi-ments to participatory parity that can persist even after everyone is formally and legally licensed to participate ” (Fraser 1990: 63). We fi nd this in examples during Ravalomanana ’s tenure. And, the coup d ’étatthat ousted the president in March 2009 bears this out.

It is in probing this economy of the sensible that we see the emo-tional and ideological role of language in the everyday production of participation frameworks – be they positions of agentive subjectivity, publics, social imaginaries, or actual institutionalized memberships –undergirding democratic political rule. In fact, this story uncovers that form of distribution in a so -called democratic society that precedesthe actual acts of partaking in government, which is the act of what we know as the citizen. These aspects of linguistic practice act as coordinates to map the schematic of the place and stakes of politics as a form of agentive emancipation as they determine those who have a part in the community of citizens and those who do not. Within this economy of negotiating, valuing, and discounting political modes of practice predominantly set by a political and social elite, those who cannot achieve this standard are kept at arm ’s length from par-ticipating in and affecting political process. This community of citizens in the distribution of the sensible, however, is not necessarily drawn


according to a passport. Throughout its postcolonial history, Mada-gascar has negotiated its political process with the special interests and pressures from other nations who underwrite their version of democracy with infrastructural support alongside the anti -democraticexpectations that their benefi t will be considered in national decisions.

The Accretion of Actors in Malagasy Democracy

In Madagascar the political imaginary of democracy is based not only on the here -and-now but on the place of the ancestors and the his-torical accumulation of human agents and interests moving in and out of roles in the postcolonial state and civil society. Though localized practice among local actors is the pressure from the streets that moti-vates democratic process, it is dependent upon the global politics and myriad audiences abroad who are privileged by host governments as bystander citizens informing local social, political, and economic poli-cies. For example, countries such as Madagascar have a long history of democracy but have been subject to Western democratization schemas funneled through international governmental and non -governmental donor programs. These programs promote democracy and civil society according to the mission of nation -building, generally have a different emphasis on citizenship, and often use an infl exible metric for measuring what constitutes democracy. This ethnography intervenes in these essentializing approaches to democracy imported by Western programs in democracy and governance in the name of neoliberal and economic development, and the rather fl at defi nitions of democratic processes generated by political science and economic models.

On the one hand, some of these in -place, formalized institutions in Madagascar have a long history and take on very democratic characteristics despite their origins in precolonial monarchical tradi-tion or recent socialist history; however, these have tended to be pushed out or discounted by more transnational forms because they represent remnants of what has been defeated. Kabary politika is one example. On the other hand, most institutions in urban Imerina are non-governmental organizations working alongside international state -


sponsored development and donor agencies. They generally come parceled according to another state or private industry ’s idea of what constitutes democracy. As this ethnography and other studies of democracy in anthropology have found, among postcolonial nations, “in order that a state may legitimately represent a nation in the inter-national system of nation -states, it has to conform at least minimally to the requirements of a modern nation -state” (Gupta 1995: 393). The global politics and the discourses circulating and undergirding political economy of the locality often subjugate the power and knowledge of everyday action in that locality. What is more, these institutions ’ pro-grams in democracy and governance, election promotion, and strength-ening civil society are generally driven according to objectives of neoliberal capitalist economic reform. This is such that democracy, which cannot outpace capitalism ’s rush to the global, becomes the handmaiden to free -market economies and transnational investment into what would otherwise be matters of the host -country govern-ment. In this respect, Imerina counters the taken -for-granted universal narrative of democratization and those universal assumptions about what is actually only the history and organization of the imperialist Western conceptual apparatus of democracy (Crouch 2005).

The US -led campaign for Ravalomanana and the endurance of an international development register appropriated into the style of kabaryand argued as a moral code over other local modes point to this, in particular. Changes in styles of oratorical performance and talk about this are then brought from mere modes of style to serve in the struggle between transnational neoliberal democracies and Malagasy vernacular models. And this struggle penetrates the system of political process to the level of structuring belief and moral practice (Kaviraj 2005; Sil-verstein 1998a, 1998b ; Taylor 2004). That Ravalomanana and his surrogates shifted and advocated standards of discourse more recognized by international development and import/export systems, rather than what is known at home, points to this. It also points to the postco-lonial history of compulsory economic dependence to a transnational relationship.

Though Malagasy audiences to the president stood as bystanders while the usual bystanders of foreign audiences stood as primary audi-ences, this structural shift to what constitute publics showed its backlash after the coup. When the coup effectively removed Ravalomanana from power, and mayor of the capital Andry Rajoelina stood in his


stead, without election, the transnational public sphere was most apparent. However, this was mostly because of its absence. The same bi-national commissions that brought assistance and development through civil society organizations that address healthcare, public health, education, and environmental projects have since dissolved with the undemocratic installation of the new leader. Support from the United States and other nations pulled away. At least publicly. And formally (Peace Corps and a full embassy staff remain, but without consultation through an ambassador). We see through shifts in kabaryduring the Ravalomanana administration that postcolonial democracy is susceptible to shifts in routines of interaction and membership deter-mined by a sliding scale of effectiveness in political action (Habermas 1989). That “effectiveness” is predicated on the general will of not just local but also bi -national commissions who commonly co -author(but never as principals) the legislation for policy issues regarding economic matters such as detaxation, political issues of transparency versus corruption, contract and debt practices, and spending and export. And in this they decide how best to communicate about it to the electorate and to funding agencies abroad. This “effectiveness” is conveyed based on standards of membership in an interstate system over local sovereignty (Appadurai and Breckenridge 1988; Gupta 1995: 393).

However, when we return to the dirt roads full of potential voters in Sabotsy -Namehana or the market stands at Ambohijatovo, we are reminded of this: however “effectiveness” is defi ned and determined, no matter how transnational, and therefore plurilingual, these practices may be, and however weighted the interests of multinational bystand-ers might be, we must not disregard that the modes of communicative practice mediating these frameworks are vernacularized in their repro-duction and bring about semiotic possibilities that suggest more than one center of power among groups and across social fi elds. The very dialogic of interaction between kabary politika and cartooning decenters power from the state. If democracy is a mode of action rather than an artifi ce of governmental regimes with the “power to regulate and control,” then it “is not simply a capacity stored within the state, from where it extends out to society. The apparent boundary of the state does not mark the limit of the processes of regulation. It itself is a product of those processes ” (Mitchell 2000: 90). The national political system, as its comes to play in the public sphere of urban Imerina, is best reckoned with not as a fi xed temporal or spatial structure of top -


down hegemony, but rather as relationally grounded in process, emerging and experienced in the local semiosocial matrix of public culture to which it gives rise.

The coup that ousted Marc Ravalomanana, the exodus of interna-tional aid and diplomatic entities, and the continuing stalemate toward elections remind us of the place of communicative practices in refl ect-ing and shaping power relations that stabilize or unsettle the signs of the sensible. Just like the state, the public sphere is protean, never based on a “stable foundation upon which a singular and unassailable truth can be erected . . . but rather a space of indeterminacy, hetero-geneity, and possibility ” (Hirschkind 2006: 9, 20). From cartooning to coups, there is a politics of emancipation when the relational process through which people gain access to symbolic resources in sociopolitical fi elds changes (Ranci ère 2006: 2). It changed because of the inaudible and invisible in 1960 with Independence, in 1972 with the nationalist revolution, in 2002 with a faulty election, and again now. The politics of emancipation are indeed the politics of democracy.

As my very dear friend said to me this past October, “March 2009 was not a crisis until people were killed without reason. It wasn ’t a coup, it was just people waking up, watching over Madagascar. When taboos are transgressed, and the sacro -saint of fi havanana is banged over the head, we still stay optimistic even as we act: La prochaine crise soyez plus meilleur! The next crisis will be better! ” The coup and the continued struggle Malagasy endure for a locally and transna-tionally respected electoral process remind us that any democratic system is relational and undergirded by both the debatable and that inarguable gut of how everyday power and one ’s place in it are expe-rienced. It reminds us most of all that visibility, audibility, and equality are all presuppositions in need of constant verifi cation. Hegemony is always tentatively scheduled. Look out, the sleeping locusts always awake!

Note

1 I am indebted to Frank Cody ’s (2011) thorough and insightful synthesis of the anthropological scholarship of these cosmologies to inform this section.


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