Doubting among the Zafimaniry

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Maurice Bloch

Sunday, 16 May 2010

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In 2003, I organized a series of group discussions on psychological matters - thought, language, memory, dreams, ancestors, etc. - among Zafimaniry villagers, a group of forest dwellers in Madagascar who, for historical reasons, are fairly distinct and relatively isolated from other Malagasy. In spite of the presence of a church school, the villagers can be considered as either unschooled or as very little exposed to schools, since the actual school is now hardly ever in proper functioning order. In spite of this, I found that on the whole, my Zafimaniry interlocutors were exceptionally coherent and self-assured in the views they expressed.  In this post, though, I would like to describe two different types of shared public manifestations of doubt that arose in the course of these common intellectual journeys.

Type 1 doubt - Doubt as a step on a progression towards truth

Once, we had been discussing the relation of language to thought in people, and I had discovered, somewhat to my surprise, that the Zafimaniry villagers shared a clear theoretical position concerning the question. The more vocal among them told me that thought and language were very different matters and that language was not necessary for thought.  It seemed from the general approval with which some statements were greeted that everybody agreed about this and there was no air of doubt that I could detect among the small crowd that had gathered in the house where the experiment had taken place.

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Picture of the week: Rebuilding a house among the Zafimaniry... and rethinking cognitive approaches to kinship

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Maurice Bloch

Thursday, 25 December 2008

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This photograph shows the preparations for the rebuilding of a house in 2006 in a Zafimaniry village in Madagascar. The Zafimaniry exemplify what Lévi-Strauss has called "house based societies" since it is the material house, often richly decorated, which symbolically represents the nub of the continuation of life through progeny. Every stage involves the ancestors and the man on the left is invoking them in order to bless the future generations at every stage. (see Bloch in The Anthropology of Landscape. eds. Hirsch and Carsten).

The existence of house based societies shows the limitations of an approach that seeks to understand the representations of kinship cross-culturally, as revealed in inferences that can be studied experimentally, without also taking into account the relative prominence and placing of kinship concepts in different cultures. In house based societies the genealogical aspect of kinship cannot be understood unless we also take into account the fact that it is relatively subordinated and that talk about relatedness evokes, above all, the image of the material structure of the house, the villages in which these are located and the people it contains involved in practical domestic activities.