Lambek OnBeingPresentWithHistory 2016

2016 | Hau: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 6 (1): 317341
SPECIAL SECTION
On being present to history

Historicity and brigand spirits in
Madagascar
Michael Lambek, University of Toronto, Scarborough
This article explores the unexpected arrival of new spirits in possession of young spirit
mediums at an annual ceremony in Majunga, Madagascar. I explore the significance of the
event for local politics, but also use it to exemplify a form of historicity distinct from that of
Euro-American historicism, with respect to both the structure of historical temporality and
the nature of historical truth/knowledge, experience, responsiveness, and action. I argue
further that the action of the spirits or mediums is simultaneously an interpretation of
circumstances and that we might think more broadly of historical action as interpretive.
Keywords: historicity, history, responsiveness, interpretation, spirit possession, Madagascar
If we define spirituality as being the form of practices which

postulate that, such as he is, the subject is not capable of the
truth, but that, such as it is, the truth can transfigure and save
the subject, then we can say that the modern age of the relations
between the subject and truth begins when it is postulated that,
such as he is, the subject is capable of truth, but that, such as it
is, the truth cannot save the subject. (Foucault 2005: 19)
In July 2012, participants at the week-long Great Service commemorating Saka-
lava royal ancestors held annually in Mahajanga (northwest Madagascar) were
confronted with a band of some thirty spirits who darted through the crowds and
attempted to exert some control over them. The spirits appeared in the bodies of
human mediums (who were in a state of dissociation while possessed). Malagasy
are used to seeing spirits, especially at events like the Great Service, but these spirits
were unexpected and different. They were bare chested, carried sharp spears, and
drank the spurting blood of the sacrificed cattle. Perhaps most disconcerting, they
possessed the bodies of youths and even children rather than adults. Their pres-
ence was unprecedented, and unlike most spirits, who are named and individuated
his work is licensed under the Creative Commons | Michael Lambek.

T
ISSN 2049-1115 (Online). DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.14318/hau6.1.018
Michael Lambek 318
ancestors of the reigning Sakalava monarchs, their identity was unknown, their
number large, and they did not speak but only grunted. The spirits were observed
with a mixture of fascination and apprehension. They were called jiriky, described
alternatively as brigands or wild and primitive, possibly nonhuman, forest dwellers.
In this article, I attempt to understand this event. I use the presence of the spirits
to speak at multiple levels of generality, about immediate politics at the shrine and
royal politics more broadly, about the national situation in Madagascar, about the
nature of Sakalava historicity in comparison with Euro-American forms of histori-
cal consciousness, hence about the relation of historicity to historicism, structure
to event, and anthropology to history as disciplinary forms of inquiry. However, I
take these more or less in reverse order.
In her novel Bel canto, Ann Patchett writes of an event that it was the interpre-
tation of their lives in the very moment they were being lived (2001: 156). This
remark is suggestive for how we might approach an anthropology of history, such
that the historical event is constituted not simply through interpretation after the
fact, as part of a retrospective narrative, but as itself an active and immediate inter-
pretation of the context, the historical climate or moment, in which it takes place.
I apply Patchetts insight to the historical event just described, an event that I, too,
witnessed.1 I argue that the possessed enacted an interpretation of the climate of af-
fairs in which they were caught up, an act of interpretation that was simultaneously
an intervention that changed the climate itself. I mean here in the first instance the
arrival, indeed irruption, of the spirits as a historical act or intervention that was
simultaneously an interpretation of the historical moment, but additionally the in-
terpretations of the onlookers as simultaneously active historical responses to the
presence of the spirits.
Such acts are history as it happens. But because the original interpretation
and intervention occurred by means of spirit possession, that is, through a form
of passion or what Foucault calls spirituality, acting through and transfiguring the
subject rather than objectively discerned by the subjecthence as apparition or
revelation rather than representation2the context is one that is quite different
from historicist formulations of deliberate effective action (historical agency) and
empirically verifiable truth (historical records and scholarly historical accounts).
Sakalava history, qua events and interpretations, is here constituted by means of a
different historicitya different way of collectively being in time: a being in time
that includes its own understanding of being in time. This understanding is con-
stituted by means of a different relation to truth than the historicity that affords or
goes under the name of history in Euro-America, and particularly as the latter
shapes and is shaped by the discipline of history as it provides dominant under-
standings of what happened, how and why it happened or happens, and how, pace
1. I have used Patchetts line elsewhere (Lambek 2014) to describe the practical constitu-
tion of everyday lives as people live through interpreting (selectively and judiciously
appropriating or avoiding) the exemplars, means, and media their culture makes avail-
able to them.
2. I am indebted to Ato Quayson for the formulation of revelation versus representa-
tion in remarks delivered during a symposium on Living Structuralism, Toronto,
October 3, 2015.

319 On being present to history
Marx, people make their history, and also record and verify it, as well as how schol-
ars and lay people narrate and think about it.3
In the next section, I offer a brief contextualization with respect to how people
in northwest Madagascar acknowledge history. I take history here both with re-
spect to predecessors and the past and with respect to what is happening in the im-
mediate present (as history, as we say, is made). In subsequent sections, I describe
and reflect on the singular event noted above. I do not problematize the concept of
event itself. However, although the event at hand was somewhat extraordinary,
I take it to further develop what I have elsewhere (Lambek 2010a) called ordinary
ethics, that is, the relatively preobjectified ethical dimensions of everyday life as
constituted through criteria and performative acts. The ethical is immanent in the
social (Lambek 2015a); intrinsic to practical judgment, embedded in the performa-
tivity and temporality of action, and evident also in the ironic acknowledgment of
the limits of criteria for action and judgment. Along this axis (largely implicit in this
article), the argument is not to demonstrate something of the difference between
Malagasy and Euro-American historicity but rather to demonstrate something of
the sameness of human action (and being) as it unfolds and is interpreted in time.
It is the explicit conjunction of these taskselucidating difference, clarifying simi-
laritythat perhaps best serves to distinguish anthropology qua discipline or tra-
dition from that of history. In this case, the universalism in question is grounded
neither in abstract reason nor in ostensibly deeper reaches of human psychology
or biology, but in the human lifeworld. Ethics is entailed in human socialityin the
temporality of language and action and in the recognition of the limits of what we
can know (about ourselves) and of what we can do.
Sakalava historicity
This essay is part of a larger project that I think of as an ethnography of northern
Sakalava history and historicity.4 My understanding of Sakalava historicity is drawn
from participant observation research conducted in the cosmopolitan port city of
Majunga (Mahajanga) in northwest Madagascar. Since 1992 (over a total of eleven
visits and a sum of some nine months duration), I have followed the community
of practice that continues to reproduce the ancestral northern Sakalava polity of
Boina under conditions of encapsulation within an increasingly impoverished and
3. There is an extensive literature on the relationship of anthropology to history. From

the side of anthropology, notable contributions include Sahlins (1985) and Comaroff
and Comaroff (1992). From the side of history, Hobsbawm and Ranger (1983) was a
landmark work. A helpful recent discussion of historicity is Hodges (2015).
4. The first phase of this ethnography of history has been published as The weight of the
past (Lambek 2002). There I drew on a set of conceptual tools, including chronotope,
poiesis, historical conscience, and orchestration of voice, to unpack how Sakalava con-
ceptualize, perform, live, suffer, enjoy, play, speak, and acknowledge their history, in
sum howin a word that is closest to their own imagery they bear or carry it. I take
the development of such terms as part of an anthropology of history no less than an
ethnography of history.

Michael Lambek 320
weakened but still functioning postcolonial state.5 Here practical ethical issues have
to do with maintaining deference to the past, in several of its distinct periods and
manifestations, in face of the contingencies of the present. Indeed, that past serves
as an ethical anchor in the face of a troubled present characterized by endemic con-
flicts among members of the royal clan over succession to office and among spirit
mediums over access to relatively wealthy transnational clients.
Spirit possession, in which human mediums speak periodically as the others
who possess them and live in close relation with those spirit others the rest of the
time, is widely prevalent. Malagasy spirit possession has a privileged place in ob-
serving, manifesting, and thinking about history insofar as many of the spirits are
figures who were formerly alive, locate themselves within a clear and extensive ge-
nealogy of the ruling clan, and index particular times past. These figures bring
the past explicitly into the present, in what I have elsewhere (Lambek 1998, 2002)
called a poiesis of history.
Spirits embody and give voice to the past, and spirit mediums channel, respond
to, and live with the past, deferring to it but also sometimes regretfully acknowl-
edging the termination of prior commitments or modes of doing things. Spirit pos-
session offers a kind of frame for a privileged account, practice, and expression of
personhood and historicity, a regional and embodied Geertzian textual production
through which to compose and read things critical to, for, and of particular histori-
cal events, political circumstances, and social arenas, and also perhaps the world
more generally.6
Sophie Goedefroit and Jacques Lombard say of Sakalava that the living and
the dead of the same lineage are contemporaries (2007: 79).7 This is, in effect, a
form of heterochrony, the copresence of original non-contemporaries from vari-
ous temporal periods. The past is manifest as former monarchs who rest together
in mortuary villages but return periodically and in a partially reanimated form.
Sakalava historicity is neither strictly cyclical and reversible nor strictly linear and
irreversible, but folded (like an accordion, the favored instrument to draw the an-
cestors who lived during the colonial period). The present remains beholden to
and in conversation with a steadily accumulating past (somewhat in the manner
5. In brief, Sakalava is a term that now marks ethnicity but originally referred to a politi-
cal organization, one offshoot of which expanded from the southwest to the northwest
around 1700 CE and created the kingdom of Boina, which subsequently fragmented
into multiple related polities. Affiliation in northwest Madagascar is bilateral and hence
not exclusive; terms like Sakalava in practice operate at multiple levels of abstraction.
Moreover, many people who do not otherwise consider themselves Sakalava partici-
pate in the community of practice concerning royal ancestors and spirits.
6. For additional compelling accounts of possession along these lines, see Lan (1985) and
Boddy (1989), and on mimesis, Kramer (1993) and, more generally, Taussig (1993).
7. Les vivants et les morts dun mme lignage sont des contemporains (2007: 79). Go-
edefroit and Lombard are speaking of southern Sakalava, at great distance (some 500
km) from the northern Sakalava of Majunga, and drawing on fieldwork conducted over
a decade earlier than mine. For further depictions of Sakalava death and temporality,
see Lambek (2001, 2015b). Important work on northern Sakalava includes Bar (1977),
Feeley-Harnik (1978, 1991), Sharp (1993), and Jaovelo-Dzao (1996).

in which we draw upon dead but not forgotten theorists) that itself moves forward
in time.
The demise of royalty and the disposition (curation and storage) of royal bod-
ies, along with the determination of who will be their successors, produce a set of
events and moments of crisis at which history is placed at risk even as it is repro-
duced. The former monarch is absorbed more fully into the objectified yet personi-
fied past for which he or she had served as the living representative and trustee.8
The successor exemplifies both rupture and continuity, and in the continuous com-
petition between lineage segments there is a challenge as to which of these modali-
ties will prevail.
An ethnography of succession, then, is an ethnography of how history is con-
ceived, maintained, reproduced, and challengedlived, made, debated, voiced,
and sometimes annulled or voided. Such ethnography both elucidates historicity,
as it is conceived and represented, and documents history, as it happens, as it is
continuously made, practiced, and interpreted. Along with an abstract, structural,
and idealized account of historicity (as folded and the like), it must consider what
constitutes historical acts and interventions and how they happen. It examines, in
a phrase (Sahlins 1985), the relation between structure and event, a relation that
is itself historical and historicizedand deeply contested and political. Sakalava
events coalesce around the deaths of monarchs, conflicts over their remains, acts
of curation of ancestral houses and enclosures, and so forth. Occasionally there are
unexpected actions on the part of the spirits themselves, like the event with which
I began.
It is perhaps worth remarking on the similarity between the temporality of the
ancestral world and one with which we are much more familiar. The ancestral world
is a grammatically imperfect (continuous) past rather than a grammatically perfect
one, and it contains primarily intransitive rather than transitive forms of action.9
In these respects, it resembles the shadow world of anthropological fieldwork and
its own form of historicity, known as the ethnographic present. The ethnographic
present is a form of historicity that merges the historical present with the physical
presence of the ethnographer into a kind of hyperpresent, hyper (to ethnographers
and perhaps their readers) for both its intensity and its durability. Similarly, the
Sakalava ancestral world merges the historical present with the embodied presence
of the historical ancestral spirits.
Sakalava historicity is further characterized by a mode of address, not only
the way people address time, history, and change, but more saliently how they
are addressed by history. Such address has both model of and model for as-
pects, respectively retrospective and prospective. Modes of address derive from
a certain construal of temporality and hence also of what constitutes an event,
acts, and actors, and they exhibit a set of criteria, acts, and actors for moving on.
As Malagasy recognize the present and look toward the future, working toward
8. Mortuary disposal is significant for all members of the royal clan and all can become
spirits, but I am thinking specifically about reigning monarchs.
9. As one reviewer correctly remarked, Isnt the Malagasy world of the living also dom-
inated by intransitive action? Individual agency always seems relatively obscured or
minimized in grammar, the event more important than the doer.

Michael Lambek 322
specific goals, they understand that present acts and future goals must be vali-
dated by means of acknowledgment of and by the past, and sometimes protected
or corrected by the past. The past is, in a sense, both immanent in the present and
imminent, threatening to irrupt and interrupt. Maintaining a balance in response
to the respective calls of past, present, and future is a general and perhaps univer-
sal matter of ethical and political commemorative practice (Lambek 1996), but
the immediacy and vocalization of address is something distinctive of this part
of the world.
To invoke the ethical is not to idealize the situation. In the course of fieldwork, I
have found myself continuously in the midst of messy things, strong disagreement
over how to conduct the annual Great Service and over the redistribution of the
gifts that arrive (Lambek 2002), and quarrels over burial and succession (Lam-
bek 2013b). Succession itself can only be validated by custodianship over the past,
specifically over ancestral relics and corpses that have been subject to dispute for
decades (Ballarin 2000), and by the ancestral voices manifest in spirit possession.
I do not know what the immediate end of these disputes will be, though I have
learned that quarreling itself will be endless. Such quarreling is intrinsic to what an
earlier generation of anthropologists referred to as segmentary structures, charac-
terized by processes of fission and fusion (Evans-Pritchard 1940; Gluckman 1963).
Whereas I was first called to Majunga in the hope that I might contribute to resolv-
ing conflict or restoring justice (Lambek 1997), I have come to realize not only the
insignificance of my position and the navet of my politics but also that the nature
of the system is such that there is no possibility for permanent resolution and no
privileged place from which to speak objectively of justice or know what that would
be. There is only a series of interested, excitable voices, speaking from the present
and the past, and including, at any given moment, some voices of reason, compro-
mise, or genial disinterest.
In sum, Sakalava historicity is characterized by several distinctive features.
These include ethical responsiveness as people are impassioned by their situation
or subject to the emotions, will, and address of the spirits. There is also ethical re-
sponsibility, in the sense that people must care for the past, conserve the remains,
and listen to and please the ancestral spiritsas the ancestral spirits, in turn, care
for the present, as manifest both implicitly in human flourishing and explicitly in
direct appearances. This historicity is further characterized by the folding of lin-
ear historical time, such that figures who lived and reigned at earlier periods can
appear together in the present. This folding is a form of heterochrony, insofar as
figures from different periodsarticulated in a linear genealogy that is carefully
maintainedcan appear alongside one another. That is, there are contemporary
encounters that include the copresence of figures recognized as noncontemporaries
to one another (when they were alive). This poiesis of history, constituted by the
visits of ancestral spirits from multiple locations in the past, each with its distinct
voice, clothing, assumptions, prejudices, and habits, is characterized by the sort of
irony that Kenneth Burke (1945) attributes to drama, with multiple characters and
voices each contextualizing the others and all of them setting off the authors voice.
However, among Sakalava, there is no single dramatist, no master compositor, but
only the distributed voices of the various spirits and mediums. Sakalava poiesis is
theater without an individual author or director, history without a master historian,

The embodied and personified quality of history also lends it vitality and
affords an affective register, which, in the event at hand, as I will show, is one
of danger and vigilance but also hope and resilience. Those who encounter the
spirits, their spectators and addressees, respond with mixtures of fascination,
terror, affection, amusement, bemusement, attention, and impatience; or, on
some occasions, simple indifference. Finally, it needs to be emphasized that his-
toricity of this kind exists alongside other modes of historicity, including those
maintained by people who have refused subsumption in the Sakalava political
order (and hence possession by royal spirits) and those who objectify Sakalava
historicity as culture or custom within a historicist model or simply recog-
nize the additional force of local, regional, and national politics and the subjec-
tion of national sovereignty to transnational bodies like the International Mon-
etary Fund.
The voices of the individual spirits, from precolonial and colonial times and
from what inhabitants of Madagascar refer to as the period of lindpendance,
acknowledge this multiplicity and irony, speaking simultaneously, but less often
directly to each other than alongside each other. Among the most charming is
the popular man-about-town Ndrankeindraza, who by special ancestral fiat is
uniquely allowed to manifest simultaneously in multiple mediums. During the
annual Great Service, his presence is everywhere, as he doffs his fez to friends and
admirers and poses for his audience as the quintessential Sakalava hybrid, not
Kisilamo (Muslim) so much as Kosilimo, as he once explained to meMuslimish,
Muslim-lite, a playful, cosmopolitan, good-humored position so characteristic
of Majunga and the possession milieu. Alive in the mid-twentieth century, and
a genealogical coeval of currently reigning Princess Amina, though chronologi-
cally several decades earlier than her, Ndrankeindraza is a bon vivant, the kind
of minor royalty (he never reigned) without a steady income, kept in drink and
taxi money by his subjects (notably by spirit mediums, both before and after his
demise). Drink, yes, for alongside the fez, Ndrankeindraza carries a bottle, which
he conceals beneath his clothing when he encounters his stricter ancestor Ndra-
maavakarivo, who lived in the early nineteenth century and is portrayed today in
Majunga as a more serious and devoted Muslim, disapproving of his descendants
easy ways.10
You can glimpse the way history qua linear succession is displaced or coun-
terpoised with history as folded dramatic irony in Majunga. Sometimes, as with
the insouciant Ndrankeindraza, this is light and comic, albeit now with serious if
indirect allusion to contemporary Islamic movements, and sometimes it is heavy,
disturbing, and tragic. I speak of this temporal counterpoint as historicity, and I see
it as one of the tasks of anthropology to record and interpret diverse historicities
along with, and perhaps in direct relation to, linear event histories and structural
transformative ones. In this project, I believe I am not so far from one of anthropol-
ogys own strongest and most ironic voices, namely that of Marshall Sahlins, as he
says, different cultures different historicities (1985: x).
10. Both the heteroglossia and the earthy quality of many of the spirits bring to mind the
voice of Bakhtin.

Michael Lambek 324
Presence and responsiveness

Through spirit possession, the work of history, no less than the working through of
history, is manifest, but less in deliberate acts of execution or commemoration than
in forms of response (responsiveness and responsibility) and, in the first instance, of
sheer presence. In this ethics of history, neither freedom nor conformity, opposed
terms in Western thought (Laidlaw 2014), is the central issue. Spirit mediums are less
directly agents of truth or history than its subjects or patients, caught up in an ethics
of passion, in the sense in which Talal Asad has described the passionate perfor-
mance of an embodied ethical sensibility (2003: 95), in contrast to ideas about indi-
vidual responsibility in fully intentional self-creating and self-empowering subjects
(Lambek 2010b: 731). This historical patiency manifests between spirit and medium
as a mutuality of responsibility and care, but sometimes also as punishment or threat.
Philosopher Thomas Schwarz Wentzer (2014) describes a similar kind of his-
torical encounter in terms of substitution and the displacement of pathos with re-
sponsiveness.11 There is substitutive and successional witnessing such that, in the
autobiographical case about which he so beautifully writes, Wentzer was his fathers
witness as his father was Wentzers. But whereas in the European case such respon-
siveness is generally limited to the personal domain or channeled through genres of
memoir and fiction, in Madagascar it extends to the public sphere and carries more
authority. The responsiveness and reciprocity of historical being can be experi-
enced as and through a kind of public interruption. Here the mutuality highlighted
in Wentzers case can be contemporaneous as onlookers and spirits each respond to
circumstances and acknowledge and invite responses to each others responsivity.
Responsiveness is not restricted to the discursive realm. A truth that transfigures
the subject may be seen or felt rather than spoken or heard; sometimes words are in-
sufficient or unavailable. But not everything we see is equally transfigurative. In what
sense, or how, are some interruptive presences powerful or true? What are the rela-
tions between appearing and revealing, vision and truth? When is response truthful
or performance real? And, to borrow from Stanley Cavell and philosophy of lan-
guage, (how) can or must we know what we see? When is seeing it knowing it?12
The spirit in the body of a medium is fully present. The relation between the image
and what it isthe ontology of the imageis thus different than in a Jewish or Chris-
tian vision, and different from the kind of image found or sought in Sufism, painted
on an orthodox Christian icon, or materialized in a Hindu or Buddhist statue. It is
different also from the appearance of ghosts. In Malagasy spirit possession (as in much
of Africa and Southeast Asia), the manifestation of the spirit is real in the sense of fully
realized, at once iconic and symbolic of what it is, but most of all indexical. The spirit is
here, and now, embodied and fully present to its audience. It addresses its onlookers in
words or gaze or merely by its sheer presence. The presence of the spirit is a response to
circumstance, but it simultaneously demands a response from those who encounter it.
The presence of spirits, that is, their making an appearance, raises the following
questions: Who are they and why have they come? Why do they arrive at just this
moment and not another? And what does such presence signify? Is the apparition
11. He draws on the ideas of German philosopher Bernhard Waldenfels (e.g., 2011).
12. Cavells famous question (1976) is Must we mean what we say?

the thing in itself? Is it auratic, in the language of Walter Benjamin (1969a), or some
kind of refraction, theatrical representation, or copy? Is it a truth that, as Foucault
says (see epigraph), can transfigure the subject? Does sheer presence determine
truth, as a kind of Heideggerian disclosure or unconcealment?13 Or is the appari-
tion in this case, the spiritsomeone to be known interpersonally or something
to explained objectively? Answers to these questions refer to what Webb Keane
(2007) has called semiotic ideology. And as the concept of ideology suggests, fur-
ther questions are then: Who articulates the responses, who discriminates among
them, and who legitimates or authorizes a conclusive answer?14
These were the kinds of questions that arose in the face of the sudden appear-
ance of the new band of spirits in Majunga. No one challenged their existence, the
force of their presence, or their indexical truth. And no one (except the anthropolo-
gists!) tried to displace this with a symbolic truth, worried excessively over what the
interruption meant, or tried to capture a truth about the spirits. And yet no one,
except the mediums themselves, was transfigured either. What was most at issue
was the spirits iconic status: the forms in and through which they manifest.
The Great Service of 2012

At the annual Great Service held at the shrine of Ndramisara Efadahy, just outside
Majunga, living humans and ancestral spirits (manifestations of deceased members
of the royal clan) come together to celebrate their mutual ancestors, the founders of
the royal lineage and the Sakalava polity of Boina. At the celebration, humans and the
more youthful and junior spirits (present in the bodies of spirit mediums) rub shoul-
ders in the crowds. People generally delight in observing the spirits, and many of the
spirits delight in being seen, sometimes playing up to their viewers, striking disinter-
ested poses (almost like fashion models) or, conversely, accosting the living, touching
them, initiating conversation, sometimes drinking or dancing together. In general,
the more junior the spirits, the more they want to be seen and heard, the more they
call attention to themselves and say, in effect, look at me! The older and more powerful
the spirits, the more self-contained, aloof, and disinterested they are. But unlike the
spirits to be described shortly, all of these spirits have names; they are known, individ-
uated persons, and by tacit arrangement, and with the exception of Ndrankeindraza,
each of them appears on the shrine grounds in only one medium at a time.
One of the characteristics of visions as described by Yoram Bilu (2012) and
Gabriel Herman (2011) is that they are events. Thus an apparition of the Virgin
Mary can be highly marked and consequential, leading to new pilgrimages and
pilgrimage sites. Spirit possession can also produce events rather than mere repeti-
tionsnew presences and new appearances that are markedly distinct and conse-
quential. The Great Service in Majunga is an annual event but each time it takes
place it is also eventful, a liturgical ritual that must be carried out according to
13. For further discussion, see Lambek (2010c).

14. The answers can change, as when presence dissolves into mirage, a dreamer awakens,
or an iconoclastic movement dismisses previous truths.

Michael Lambek 326
long-established procedure but whose felicitous enactment each year faces specific
problems.15 Each annual service I have attended has been accompanied by particu-
lar anxieties or conflicts. These have to do with rivalries between members of the
ruling clan and their respective factions, but also with national politics, and with
echoes of ethnic tensions. One year the issue was AIDS: the venue and occasion
were used to promote safe sex and even to offer HIV testing in the face of a strong
sentiment by some mediums that this was inappropriate. Insofar as purification is
a main vector of sanctity and theme of the festival (in which the relics are bathed),
pollution is an ever-present threat that talk of AIDS appeared to exacerbate.
In 2012, the Great Service was ill timed, not only overlapping with Ramadan
in a manner that could not have been avoided, but scheduled one Sakalava month
later than it should have been.16 The officiating monarch under whose responsibil-
ity the felicitous and propitious unfolding of the Great Service lay was Ampanjaka
(Prince) Richard, who had only recently managed to win control over the shrine
from his distant cousin and rival, Ampanjaka Guy (Lambek 2013b), who in turn
had attempted to succeed his own father, the late Ampanjaka Dsy. Richard had re-
placed the armed soldiers, uncomfortably present at previous annual celebrations,
with an unarmed garde du corps. But Guy still had his supporters among various
constituencies, ranging from senior government officials to certain local spirit me-
diums eager to criticize Richard, and there was the sense that conflict bubbled just
beneath the surface and could erupt at any time.
The tension that pervaded the shrine precinct also characterized the country as
a whole. This was the period of national transition in which deposed President
Marc Ravalomanana had been replaced by Andry Rajoelina and major interna-
tional donors had withdrawn financial aid. Political legitimacy was in question and
levels of economic insecurity had risen. The national army and police were widely
perceived as unable to maintain peace in the countryside; indeed it was rumoured
that some of their members were complicit in acts of theft and violence.
From the moment of our arrival in 2012, Sarah Gould and I kept hearing about
brigands (fahavalo, dahalo) in the countryside and were warned about violence on
the streets of Majunga as well. Brigands had even entered the main royal cemetery
and ostensibly had stolen jewels from the bedroom of Princess Amina herself.17
Some of the accounts were highly exaggerated, but in the context of the failing
state, insecurity was on everyones mind. A man from the capital described how
automatic weapons were spreading not only among bandits and former soldiers,
but also among the urban bourgeoisie, for protection. Since 2012, there have been
various reports on the Internet of violent banditry, primarily in the south of the
country where state control is weakest.18
15. As Rappaport (1999) points out, the performance of any ritual is characterized by the con-
junction of the canonical (repeated, orderly) and the indexical (unique, circumstantial).
16. Sakalava months are anchored in the solar year, whereas Muslim months are fully lunar.
17. Amina is ruler of the adjacent and related polity; both she and Richard celebrate their
mutual ancestors at the Great Service.
18. Hundreds of civilians and dozens of government soldiers have been killed by dahalo,
heavily armed cattle rustlers that often resemble militias more than bandits. They steal

It was in this context that the group of youthful spirits made their unexpected
appearance at the Great Service, dressed in red headbands and waistcloths, faces
and bodies splotched with white clay, lithe, upright, brandishing spears, and some-
times making threatening gestures (Figure 1). The crowds parted to make way and
stared at them with a mixture of apprehension and amusement. The new spirits
were present in such large number and were so visible throughout the entire week
of the Great Service that they appeared almost to take over the event. The Great
Service unfolded as it should but there was a strong sense of disruption.
Figure 1: Jiriky on guard at the Great Service, 2012.(Photo copyright Sarah Gould.)
These spirits were quite distinctive. Unlike the tromba, who are individual royal
ancestors, they went unnamed except for their generic category. They were referred to,
collectively and individually (Malagasy does not mark the plural), as jiriky, a term that
zebu cattle for commercial profit and terrorise villagers along the way. One estimate
found that there were over 160 attacks in two months, involving more than 3,000 cat-
tlefor a commercial value well above $1 million. Accurate figures are scarce, however,
as most thefts go unreported. (Madagascars unforgiving bandit lands, IRIN, 18 July
2012). Shortly after President Rajaonarimampianinas inauguration, fifteen dahalo were
killed in a firefight with government forces (Vangaindrano: Quinze dahalo abattu dans
une fusillade, LExpress de Madagascar, 8 February 2014). Without adequate govern-
ment security, affected communities have formed self-defence units, known as zamas
(The Zebu and the Zama, IRIN, 14 April 2014). The situation has reportedly continued
to deteriorate (Madagascar: la situation scuritaire se dgrade dans le sud, RFI, 8 May
2014) (Crisis Group Africa 2014: 19). Zama is the term for mothers brother. The issue
of security is more extensively discussed in Sarah Goulds analysis of the jiriky (2013).

Michael Lambek 328
means something like wild forest dweller (olo di aala). In contrast to the majority
of spirit mediums, most mediums of jiriky (and the jiriky themselves) were male, but
a few were young women. The vast majority came from the distant countryside, and
were not people my friends and I knew. What was most remarkable was their youth.
The jiriky were in possession of young mediums, mostly adolescents plus a few chil-
dren and older people. It has been quite unusual for active spirit mediums in Majunga
to be young. People explained that the mediums needed to be physically strong given
the exertion of the jiriky. More significantly, youth and vitality are part of what the
jiriky themselves signify. They are part of the symbolic register that Maurice Bloch
(1986, 1992) has identified as the overcoming of wildness epitomized in youth as a
central theme of rituals elsewhere in Madagascar. The wildness was further indicated
by the fact that unlike spirits in the royal clan, jiriky did not speak to the living but only
grunted, blew whistles, or gestured when they wanted to communicate with the crowd.
People were visibly surprised by the presence of the jiriky and initially unsure
how to react. Moreover, they were uncertain and could not agree on who the jiriky
were. Sarah Gould and I had a difficult time learning anything definitive about
them beyond their appellation as jiriky. What was immediately salient was their
sheer presence. At the Great Service of 2012, they seemed to be all over the place.
They darted and loped through the crowds, their movements all the more striking
in that running is strictly forbidden on the shrine premises. They held their spears
poised, threatening the crowds, anticipating the arrival of the sacrificial cattle,
guarding them, and then eagerly drinking blood and eating raw meat from the
carcasses. Some even drank the blood spurting from the throats of the cattle as they
were cut, directly incorporating their vitality (Ruel 1990) (Figure 2).
Figure 2: Jiriky with cattle blood 2012. (Photo copyright Sarah Gould.)

Discovering the identity of the jiriky

I have attended performances of the Great Service on several occasions from the
early 1990s when there were only one or two jiriky present and where they simply
wandered individually through the crowds, largely unremarked and alone. Regular
participants were startled too at the way the numbers had grown exponentially. A
shrine official said that in 2009 two jiriky attended the Great Service; in 2010 there
were six of them; in 2011 eight; and in 2012 thirty-one. Like many others, a senior
spirit medium said she was astounded both at their number and at their presence
in children. She had no idea whether they were human and indicated she was afraid
of the sharp spears and kept her distance.
A first association that people made was to bandits, and especially to the cattle
thieves who rendered the countryside unsafe. This was also the association to
which I jumped. But these were bandits who carried spears, not guns, and these
were spirit bandits who possessed the living. Moreover, rather than stealing cattle
from their rightful owners, they appeared to be protecting them on the owners
behalf. They also policed the shrine, confronting onlookers who broke prohibi-
tions, confiscating the shoes of those who wore them on sacred ground and ran-
soming them for small amounts of money, which they used to buy drinks. In
this capacity they displaced not only the military, but also both the traditional
guardians (ancestor people, razanolo) of the shrine and Prince Richards new set
of guards.
In fact, while most people seemed uncertain who the jiriky were, they appeared
less determined than Sarah and me to find out, as it were to discover the truth
rather than to simply accept their presence as true. Nevertheless, the interpreta-
tions and hypotheses they offered were all of interest, part of the interpretation of
history as it happened. In particular, there was a sharp difference of opinion as to
whether jiriky were human beings or some kind of nonhuman animal (taranaka
biby, tsy olonbelo), an attribution indicated by the drinking of raw and spurting
blood. Many onlookers said that in addition to blood, jiriky ate wild and raw foods
like honey and crabs and that they inhabited both mangrove and dry forests. How-
ever, these informants were mainly urban dwellers, at some remove from the cattle-
keeping lifestyle that has characterized many of the rural people of inland western
Madagascar for centuries. One person compared and potentially identified them
to Sarah Gould with Bara, an ethnic group far from Majunga among whom, he
explained, men rustle cattle in order to acquire bridewealth. Here theft is explicitly
in the service of social reproduction. Another person proposed that as past divin-
ers (mwas) could make both people and other things, like trees, possess people, the
original natures of the present jiriky were doubtless diverse. In my own imagina-
tion, they seemed like woodland sprites in their lightness of movement, grace, and
charm.
One person described the jiriky as formerly in the service of the founding
monarch of the kingdom, who would send them into the forest to search for lost
cattle and similar tasks. Another person suggested they were sent by this early
king to maintain order at the current Great Service. A third identified them as
members of the royal clan, and a fourth as soldiers attached to such a member
of the clan who had lived in the bush and presumably raided others. In all this it
is unclear whether the jiriky are bandits or soldiers, a distinction that may have

Michael Lambek 330
been irrelevant to most people in the past and one whose lines are indeed blurred
again today. The jiriky are thus poised very interestingly between being under
control of a centralized authority and outside it, exploiting people on their behalf
and protecting them. They are at once potential thieves, cattle rustlers, warriors,
guardians of order, and a kind of primitive rebel (Hobsbawm 1959). Some attrib-
uted to them a powerful medicine that repels gunfire or renders them invisible
to government forces, while others explained the splotches of white clay on their
bodies as marking the spots where they received wounds from soldiers guns.19
Implicitly, they raise questions of legitimacy concerning both royal and national
governments.
Another theme was the primitiveness of the jiriky. In response to a question I
had earlier posed him, Prince Richard lectured me in front of a large audience20
that they were not a different species but the spirits of deceased humans who could
be likened to cavemen from the Stone Age. Prince Richard gave the anthro-
pologist a lesson in cultural relativism, explaining that a simpler technology or diet
does not make people any less human and that the jiriky are not lawless brigands
(fahavalo), any more than were Stone Age people. Richard then shifted gears and
briefly compared them to rebels, mentioning the menalamba (red shawls) uprising
in the highlands under French colonialism (Ellis 1985).
This last interpretation is particularly interesting. Malagasy historian Solofo
Randrianja (pers. comm., June 2012) made the point explicit, suggesting that the
current influx of actual brigands (dahalo) throughout Madagascar, and including
the jiriky, could be viewed as a social movement with a political agenda. In effect,
Randrianja speaks to a claim for a moral economy. This is the contemporary mani-
festation of a deep structure that both links roving bands to royalty and opposes
them to government by evoking earlier periods of Malagasy history. It has emerged
at various times throughout that history, notably during periods of severe depriva-
tion, exploitation, and anticolonial revolt.
Sarah Gould and I did not have much luck conversing with either the jiriky (af-
ter all, they did not speak) or their mediums (who seemed to blend into the crowd
as soon as they were out of trance), but we were able to discover that the jiriky had
their place within the broader Sakalava structure. As I have described earlier (Lam-
bek 2002), one feature of Sakalava historicity is its distributed quality: each piece of
history has living people who bear the responsibility to keep it alive, and the pieces
all fit together even though each is not necessarily known beyond a small group of
bearers and no one has the whole picture.
We confirmed that most of the mediums came from the region of Marovoay,
having been sent to the Great Service by Ndramtiko, an ancestral diviner (mwas)
and member of a royal clan (and now spirit). Searching through old fieldnotes,
I came across a mention from 1994 that Ndramtiko was a Zafinifotsy, the first
19. There are many jiriky, and each one is in fact a distinct individual, with slight dif-
ferences in clothing, ornaments, and wounds. However, their individuality seems less
salient here than that of tromba, who are members of the royal genealogy.
20. The audience was significant as they were largely a contingent of men from the very
place and with the same politics as those who brought the jiriky.

Sakalava royal clan to enter the north (perhaps in the seventeenth century).21 This
anchors his authority in a period before the arrival of the fraternal but conquering
Zafinimena royal clan, whose ancestors are buried at the shrine in Majunga and
whose contemporary descendants fight over succession.
We were able to find the medium of the sole jiriky elder and to call up the spirit
in town after the Great Service. This elder, unlike the other jiriky, spent the entire
Great Service seated near the cattle awaiting sacrifice. The medium himself was a
middle-aged man named Hadja who said he had inherited the jiriky elder from his
mother. He lived in a neighborhood quite distant from our own and we had never
encountered him before, although he had a long-standing practice as a healer in
Majunga. Hadja appeared to be unconnected to the large number of young medi-
ums from the countryside. The jiriky elder in possession of Hadja explained that
the jiriky were the spirits of former people who once may have stolen cattle but
were not outlaws (fahavalo). They had brought tribute to the Great Service and
were put to work, having been sent to serve to restore order there; for the youth, he
said, it was a kind of military training.
Another person affirmed the jiriky were the soldiers of Ndramtiko and guarded
his cattle deep in the forest. In a kind of folding in of later history, many of the
jiriky were said to have been wounded or killed as a result of gunshots from the
gendarmes. Whereas the jiriky carried spears, guns are now the weapons of choice
of those terrorizing contemporary cattle keepers in the countryside.
The jiriky in royal politics: The future of the past

It is evident that the sudden appearance of the jiriky at the shrine can be linked to
a political undercurrent of concern about insecurity and disruption of livelihood
across the country, and this was the first lesson taken by many of the people who
observed them. However, the more immediate (and less widely known) reason
for their presence was connected to royal politics. Not only did they deliver and
guard the sacred cattle on behalf of the ancestors, and not only did they moni-
tor the behavior of onlookers, many of whom came increasingly as tourists or
spectators rather than as practicants, but the jiriky were also there to warn the
reigning prince himself. At a certain moment during the week, Ndramtiko rose
within the scared enclosure (valamena) in what was said to be his very first ap-
pearance ever at the shrine and called for Prince Richard. Surrounded by the
armed jiriky, and standing face to face with the reigning monarch, the ancestral
diviner chastised him for having scheduled the ceremony on the wrong date.
I could not follow the speech (which I was lucky enough to stumble on), but
apparently Ndramtiko told Richard that if he ever again made such a mistake,
the spirits would withdraw protection from the shrine. Prince Richard politely
acknowledged his error, apologized (nifona), and said it would not happen again.
After Richard withdrew, Ndramtiko gave a blessing to the spears and clothing of
21. The information came from oral historian Amady Sarambavy, who also stated that
Ndramtiko resides (is buried) at the shrine (doany) of Kalambay, located on the route
to Mampikony. He was the son of Betsoliha.

Michael Lambek 332
each of the jiriky, empowering them while simultaneously affirming their subor-
dination to him.22
The confrontation between the living monarch and an ancestral diviner with his
own phalanx of armed guards demonstrates that if historical memory is distributed
among various bearers, so, too, is authority. But what is manifest here is not sim-
ply a kind of organic division of power but also a mechanical division or balance
among rival segments of the polity (Lambek 2002). Although no one said anything
explicit to this effect, I am certain it is no accident that the person who brought the
jiriky to the Great Service was Ndramtiko. It turns out that Richards rival, Guy, is
a direct descendant (on his mothers mothers side) of Ndramtiko from Kalambay.
Hence there was a whole other political dimension to the presence of Ndramtiko
and his followers, one that I think most participants at the Great Service missed at
the time.
This point is reinforced by the identity of Ndramtikos medium. If Ndramtiko
serves as master of the jiriky, he and his medium no doubt played a role in recruit-
ing them. The medium was an elderly man who came from the rural community
of Ambalatany. Many of the young mediums appear to hail from Ambalatany as
well. Ambalatany happens to be the home (mortuary village) of Ndransinint, a very
popular spirit descended from a junior line of royalty that has held an implicit
alliance with Guy, the man who was removed as reigning monarch in Boina by
Richard and his supporters. Thus, another issue that caused much tension at the
Great Service of 2012 concerned whether the man who had been installed as chief
medium (sahabe) of Ndransinint at Ambalatany and who had been a close ally of
Guy would be allowed to officiate in this role at the Great Service or whether he
would be replaced by a medium of Richards choosing.23
Even more deeply than this, and more concealed, the claims of Ndransinints
line potentially challenge the legitimacy of the lineage that has been reigning since
the early 1700s. Ndransinint is a descendant of an older son by an earlier wife of the
first monarch, a son whose succession to rule was prevented by the acts of a later
wife on behalf of her own son who did become the second ruler and who (along
with his father) is one of the four ancestors (Efadahy) whose relics rest at the shrine
and who is venerated at the Great Service.
I do not want to argue that there is a single reason, cause, or intention that would
explain the presence of the jiriky or their salience at the Great Service. But it is also
no accident that jiriky began to attend the Great Service in large numbers only once
Richard took power. Their presence was a way of acknowledging his rule, but on
condition that he rule well. They assisted in the felicitous enactment of the Great
Service even as they interrupted it and put Richard on notice, serving on his behalf
but outside his control. The popular appeal of the jiriky and the rural interests they
22. I was kept at a distance from the speech and prevented from directly observing the
blessing because, as a vazaha (white foreigner), I epitomize those who subjugated the
kingdom to colonial rule and can still pollute its sacred force. This identity becomes
salient in highly charged situations or where people are unfamiliar with me.
23. There was suspense up until the last minute. In the end, there was a compromise
and Ndransinint appeared in the bodies of at least three different mediums, without
conflict.

represented served as a latent threat to Richards own (wide) popularity and author-
ity. Behind the spectacle that the jiriky provided and unknown to the majority of
the onlookers, and perhaps to many of the mediums of the jiriky themselves, lay a
warning to Prince Richard that he had better watch his step and acknowledge prec-
edent. Their presence stated emphatically that their loyalty lay to the Great Service
and the ancestors it honored (hence to the people, to those to whom prosperity was
granted by the ancestors in turn), and not to the immediate interests of the living
prince who happened to be currently in charge. They even hinted, as Guy himself
had done, that other shrines and other ancestors might eventually take precedence.24
Apart from the particulars of the conflict, this speaks to a more general point
that contemporary Sakalava rulers are supposed to hold themselves responsible
to both the living and the ancestors, and that in both respects they hold their po-
sition in trust and for a larger good. This is true for rulers in the country more
generally, indeed for the very understanding of government and power, albeit it is
evident more in the breach than in practice. Thus, just as the presence of brigands
may signal popular dissent and criticism of government from the perspective of
tradition, so may the jiriky indicate popular interests and dissatisfaction within
tradition. The message the jiriky bring to Richard is the same warning that, writ
large and following Randrianjas argument, underlies the presence of brigands on
the national scene, reminding those in power of their responsibilities to the people
and of the anchorage of this moral responsibility in the past, in reciprocity with
the ancestors. This is confirmed by an incident that was said to have taken place at
Ambalatany sometime before the Great Service when a jiriky hit a gendarme: sud-
denly, before the latter could retaliate, all the onlookers became possessed by jiriky
as well, and so the gendarme could do nothing. The jiriky stand outside state power
as represented by the gendarmes and they serve to protect popular interests.
Moreover, in line with the remarks about anticolonial rebellion, the jiriky speak
to anxieties over continuity. As one man pointed out, the presence of the jiriky is
less an innovation at the Great Service than a return to the past. Actually, it is less a
return to the past than the reappearance of the past, an interruption set to address,
warn, and assist the present. The presence of the jiriky is a potent force.
Nevertheless, the significance of the jiriky does not lie exclusively in the political
register. They provided a spectacle that entertained the large crowds at the Great Ser-
vice, whether by introducing a frisson of fear, indulging the curiosity of the primitive,
or charming them with their playfulness. They also offered an injection of youthful
vitality. Most salient was their sheer presence and immediacy, the kind of potency
they manifested, and the thrill they produced. People disagreed on who the jiriky
were and where they came from, but they were not worried about this, and did not
seem to need to know. Whether the jiriky were primarily human or nonhuman, brig-
ands or guardians, or how one interpreted the difference, mattered less than what
their sudden arrival indexed and what they did in front of people. Indeed the visual
aspect was played up by the spirits themselves. The jiriky shifted in their demeanor
24. Guy himself was not present at the Great Service. There were rumors that he was mak-
ing alliances with traditional rulers reigning elsewhere in Madagascar and with vari-
ous state officials in the capital, or that he might try to take back the shrine by force (as
he had attempted in a previous year), or even that he was building a new shrine.

Michael Lambek 334
between being supremely disinterested in the onlookers as they went about their
business, suspicious toward and challenging those they observed breaking the prohi-
bitions of the site, and humorously self-conscious as they posed for spectators. Thus
one of them played up beautifully for Sarah Goulds camera, nodding his head and
smiling happily, his face covered in cows blood (Figure 2). Then he wanted to look
at his photo through the lens and seemed very pleased by what he saw.
So one could say that these young people (mediums/jiriky) became visions for
others and for themselves.25 Their presence could be read as expressing anxiety
about the growing insecurity in the countryside, intervention in the politics of the
shrine, or concern over the increased objectification of the Great Service and the
incursion of tourists who did not observe the rules. But at least as important, their
presence was an expression of the vitality of youth and a positive manifestation of
social continuity and the reliability of the past as both a form of protection and a
moral grounding for the present. The jiriky were also an index of young peoples
engagement in the ancestral system, their succession to positions that bear the past,
and of the continued support by youth of elders, the significance of the countryside
for the city, and the vital role of traditional power in modern circumstances: in
sum, they were an index of the future of the past.
Conclusion: The youthful face and force of the past

An anthropology of history must examine the relationship of event history to what I
have called historicity. Here they are not opposed. The arrival of the jiriky exempli-
fies an event in the history of early-twenty-first-century Majunga, and their presence
is a manifestation of Sakalava historicity. The jiriky exemplify aspects of the structure
of that historicity, its complexity, texture, and depth; both the unexpected resources
of its archive (James 1988) and the unexpected potential of its poiesis or creativity.
Like all ancestral voices, those of the jiriky are relatively open, speaking as or from
specific positions in the past, but doing so with originality and verve to changing
present circumstances. Like all the spirits, as engaged and engaging persons they
are open symbolic vehicles or signifiers rather than closed or fixed in their mean-
ing. Their intervention is political and their performance aesthetic, but their sheer
responsiveness, their attention and total engagement, could be described as ethical.
The jiriky demonstrate that ancestral history is not exclusively royal history or
the history made and remembered by those in power. They complement royal and
state voices with subaltern ones, and if the subalterns do not have full voices ca-
pable of articulating discursively, they certainly have a presence that is powerfully
displayed. They confront members of royalty or others in power with their vitality,
reminding people that the Sakalava polity is, in its own political metaphor, a bibi-
maroloha, a many-headed beast.
The presence of the jiriky served both to warn the reigning monarch and to
signal disquiet at current circumstances in the country at large. The jiriky speak
25. While I cannot speak to the motivations of the mediums, their possession enables them
to play a public role and indexes their commitment, position, and belonging (cf. Sharp
1993).

(perform, embody) truth to history (to present circumstances) even as they speak
(embody) truth from history (the continuous past). Elsewhere, I have argued that
Sakalava call upon and acknowledge the past in order to institute change and move
forward successfully.26 Such acknowledgment is one side of a relationship in which
the past can also address the present and offer its assistance or warning. Here it is
the past that arrives unbidden (or, rather, bidden by Ndramtiko, who is also from
the past) to acknowledge present trouble and restore well-being.
At the end of the day, perhaps the most important message stems from the
youthfulness of the jiriky and especially of their mediums. Youth here is simultane-
ously indexical, iconic, and symbolic of vitality and resilience, of a future in con-
tinuity with and in acknowledgment of the past, and acknowledged and protected
by its past. The past here is vigorous, youthful, and uncompromising. There is the
sheer force and presence of the jiriky, their own enthusiasm and the corresponding
enjoyment of their presence. There is the promise of youth to succeed their parents,
to renew the present, ensure the future, and remain true to the past; conversely,
there is the promise of the past to secure the present and to be there in the future,
in the bodies of the next generation (Figure 3).
Figure 3: The promise of youth. (Photo copyright Sarah Gould.)
26. In an essay itself now twenty years in the past (Lambek 1996), I argued that individu-
als and communities exercise judicious balance between remembering past events and
letting them go. Subsequently (Lambek 2002), I described the elaborate ways in which
Sakalava do bear their past, seriously, sometimes painfully, sometimes playfully, but
also ask its permission and sanctification to move ahead in new directions. Change
should be acknowledged, not simply take place.

Michael Lambek 336
Throughout this essay, I have had in mind the remark by Foucault (2005: 19)
that served as the epigraph:
If we define spirituality as being the form of practices which postulate
that, such as he is, the subject is not capable of the truth, but that, such as
it is, the truth can transfigure and save the subject, then we can say that
the modern age of the relations between the subject and truth begins
when it is postulated that, such as he is, the subject is capable of truth, but
that, such as it is, the truth cannot save the subject.
This is as good a summary as I know of one way to depict modernity. Academic
history is one of the discourses said to exemplify modernity, and anthropology
likewise. Conducting an event history illustrates our capacity to discover the
truth, but it is a truth that manifestly does not save or transfigure us; the image
that captures history in this sense is Walter Benjamins (1969b) mournful angel
looking back at the ruins. Sakalava historicity is quite different. The Sakalava past
does not disappear; it moves forward with the present and sometimes folds or
erupts into it. And Sakalava do not so much discover the past or the truth as it
discovers them.
Of course, Sakalava are coeval with us; they read history and they are subject
to the force of global history: the neoliberal policies that impoverished Madagas-
car; the alignment of American interests with President Ravalomanana; the foreign
leases of vast tracts of land that helped instigate the coup against him; the inter-
national sanctions that followed; and so on. Sakalava discuss national and inter-
national politics, and many young people are attracted to transnational media. I
would say that their historicity is not one that creates a sharp divide between the
modern and its other. It is rather characterized by the immodern. This is a term I
coined (Lambek 2013a) to get away from both the dualism and the linearity in-
herent in oppositions like modern/premodern or modern/postmodern. The im-
modern refers to what exceeds the modern rather than what opposes, precedes, or
succeeds it. Depending on context, it can connote beyond, other than, or more
than much as words like immoderate, immeasurable, and immortal dohence
it can encompass the modern (cf. Chakrabarty 2000). (In a sense, we are all im-
modern now, but we do not all acknowledge it equally.)
The truth in Sakalava historicity happens in a kind of Heideggerian unconceal-
ment, here simply emerging from and as the presence of the jiriky. This truth is
manifest as the unbroken connection of the past to the present, as evident in its
ability to appear unbidden and reveal itself. Whereas anxieties in many parts of Af-
rica are connected to the sense of a rupture with the past and a removal or distanc-
ing of ancestral protection (e.g. Ashforth 2000), hence with occlusion, in northwest
Madagascar anxiety led to revelation and affirmation of a positive connection with
the past through the vigilance of youth to provide not only physical protection but
also moral order and a kind of joyous playfulness. Such visibility indexes some-
thing that is the antithesis of witchcraft and corruption.
To live history is to be present to it.

Historicist/ethnographic postscript: The best army against modernity

I have taken the presence of the jiriky as an expression of Sakalava historicity and
as simultaneously a historical interpretation and historical act. I also documented
the event in a conventional historicist mode. I can extend this documentation from
2012 with observations during a brief visit in 2015 when I caught the last day of the
Great Service. In 2015, there were more jiriky present than ever, some in possession
of even younger mediums (as young as five, said one person). Their role in crowd
control was more explicit and the spirits had gained the power to speak; at least,
they exchanged greetings with people. However, perplexity about their nature and
presence continued. A member of royalty compared them to wild beasts (biby). An
elderly medium of senior tromba said she had no idea who the jiriky were. It is all
very new; people like us have no idea why they are here or what they are doing.
Another medium, close to Prince Richard, said, No one understands them; we are
all astonished at their presence and dont know what to do about them.
An advisor of Prince Richard explained in a mixture of Malagasy and French,
The jiriky are spirits who live in the forest (aala) and who serve the monarch
(roi) to keep order. They can recognize plants and have remained relatively sauvage.
They dont recognize modern things and flee from them. They form the best army
against modernity. By the striking last phrase, he meant in the first instance that
they dealt with transgressors of taboos at the shrine, but the phrase can be taken
much more broadly.
The advisor also pointed to an incident when a person who appeared to be a
jiriky stabbed a woman (nonfatally) and made off with her handbag. No doubt this
was an imposter. But the real jiriky should have recognized and prevented it. The
vrai have to recognize the faux.
A further concernand another new eventwas the appearance at the Great
Service of many spirits of yet another kind, also bare chested and carrying spears.
They announced they were Betsirebaka (people from southeast Madagascar) and
drank coffee instead of liquor. But their waist wraps were black, a color absolutely
forbidden (fady) at the shrine, and the advisor felt that if they had exercised their
duties properly, the jiriky should have removed them. In effect, the jiriky had failed
in their role to protect the shrine.
Prince Richard met with his advisors to discuss how to maitriser les jiriky,
how to keep them in line. They decided to talk to the mwas (Ndramtiko) and tell
him that things had gone too far and that he needed to exercise discipline over his
troops.
Finally, a few informants associated the presence of the jiriky with an outbreak
of mass possession at a school in the countryside. As reported by an advisor, Prince
Richard considered the outbreak a response to Christians who were trying to over-
turn Sakalava customs. It is appropriate for them to exist side by side, he said,
but not to try to destroy each other. Our ancestors are angry (razanay meloko)
and caused the mass possession. Another informant clarified that the Christians
had bragged about cutting down the forests in which the jiriky found their food;
since their environment has been destroyed, they have begun to enter people. He
suggested that the jiriky were antiestablishment and could resist royalty as well

Michael Lambek 338
as the government or church; they had been present in the region long before any
of these forces.
In sum, the jiriky remain ambiguous, controversial, and outside control. If their
presence indicates a kind of implicit political intervention and ethical interpreta-
tion of historical circumstances, it is met with explicit local interpretations. Both
the interruptive presence of the spirits and the interpretations of that presence are
continuing and open-ended responses in and to the present by means of the past
and hence historical in multiple senses.
Acknowledgments
Different sections of the article have distinct origins. One draws from a presenta-
tion in the panel Beyond the Historic Turn: Toward an Anthropology of History
organized by Stephan Palmi and Charles Stewart for the American Anthropologi-
cal Association annual meeting in Chicago, November 2013. Another began as a
contribution to a conference on Visions and Apparitions from an Interdisciplinary
Perspective organized by Yoram Bilu and Gabriel Herman at the Hebrew Univer-
sity of Jerusalem and the Van Leer Institute, May 89, 2013. A version of the article
was presented at the African Studies seminar at Harvard, November 6, 2014, and
benefited from the critical insights of Jean and John Comaroff as well as Jacob
Olopuna and other participants. I am grateful to all parties for their invitations and
provocations; to five thoughtful referees; to Solofo Randrianja for a critical insight;
and especially to Sarah Gould for sharing the field research and ideas. Gould has
written her own complementary papers on the event and has supplied the magnifi-
cent photographs in this one. Thanks also to the Canada Research Chairs program
and Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada for financial sup-
port, and the people in Madagascar who have instructed and inspired me.
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Sur ltre prsent dans lhistoire: Historicit et esprits brigands

Madagascar
Rsum : Cet article tudie larrive inattendue de nouveaux esprits dans les posses-
sions de jeunes mdiums lors dune crmonie donne annuellement Majunga,
Madagascar. Jy voque la signification de cet vnement pour la politique locale, et
je montre galement que cette crmonie rvle une forme dhistoricit diffrente
de celle de lhistoricisme Euro-Amricain, la fois du point de vue de la structure
de la temporalit historique, et de la nature historique de la vrit, du savoir, de
lexperience, de lattention et de laction. Je suggre aussi que laction des esprits ou
des mdiums est une interpretation des circonstances, et que nous pouvons penser
laction historique plus gnralement en tant quaction interprtative.
Michael Lambek is Professor of Anthropology and holds a Canada Research Chair

at the University of Toronto. He is the author of three monographs on the western
Indian Ocean: Human spirits (Cambridge University Press, 1981), Knowledge and
practice in Mayotte (University of Toronto Press, 1993), and The weight of the past
(Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), and is the editor of several collections, including Irony
and illness (with Paul Antze, Berghahn, 2003), Ordinary ethics (Fordham Univer-
sity Press, 2010), and the Companion to the anthropology of religion (with Janice
Boddy, Wiley-Blackwell, 2013). Recent works include The ethical condition: Essays
on action, person, and value (University of Chicago Press, 2015) and, with Veena
Das, Didier Fassin, and Webb Keane, Four lectures on ethics (Hau Books, 2015).
Michael Lambek
Department of Anthropology
University of Toronto
19 Russell Street
Toronto, M5S 2S2
Canada
lambek@utsc.utoronto.ca

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2016 | Hau: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 6 (1): 317341

On being present to history

Michael Lambek, University of Toronto, Scarborough

If we define spirituality as being the form of practices which

 his work is licensed under the Creative Commons | Michael Lambek.

2016 | Hau: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 6 (1): 317341

3. There is an extensive literature on the relationship of anthropology to history. From

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Presence and responsiveness

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The Great Service of 2012

13. For further discussion, see Lambek (2010c).

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Discovering the identity of the jiriky

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The jiriky in royal politics: The future of the past

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Conclusion: The youthful face and force of the past

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Figure 3: The promise of youth. (Photo copyright Sarah Gould.)

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Historicist/ethnographic postscript: The best army against modernity

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Sur ltre prsent dans lhistoire: Historicit et esprits brigands

Michael Lambek is Professor of Anthropology and holds a Canada Research Chair

2016 | Hau: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 6 (1): 317341

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his work is licensed under the Creative Commons | Michael Lambek.