ABSTRACT
Malagasy folklore is the product of a line of social relationships that span two and a half centuries and three continents. Fashioned by English, French, and Norwegian missionaries, agents of France’s colonial projects, folklorists, ethnologists, and anthropologists, and actors from across the island of Madagascar, Malagasy folklore has in turn shaped the nature of all these groups. In exploring the productivity of Malagasy folklore discourses, it is useful to distinguish the dominant “Western” conception of folklore from what in standard Malagasy is called vakoka-sy-fomban-drazana. This latter notion refers to cultural forms and practices marked as traditional and performed and interpreted through such generic frameworks (again, in standard Malagasy) as fitenindrazana, or “words of the ancestors”—ohabolana (proverbs), angano (folktales and fables), ankamantatra (riddles), kabary (oratory), tantara (historical narratives believed to be either fact or fiction), and hainteny (courting poems, “art of the word”); and fomban-drazana, or “customs of the ancestors”—hiragasy (folksongs), dihy (dances), fanandrona (divination), famadihana, famorana, tao volo, (secondary burial, circumcision, and first haircutting rituals respectively) and so on. While vakoka-syfomban-drazana imbibe a sociality associated with a set of highly valued links between ancestors, their descendants, and land, folklore, as a discourse specific to Western modernity, has, until recently, been an uncritical, romantic reaction to capitalism’s transformation of such ties between people and places. Discourses on Malagasy folklore involve a complex dialogue between both traditions, along with answers to specific demands issued by the church, the colony, and the nation-state.
