Jennifer L. JACKSON, Yale University—

DISSERTATION PROJECT PROPOSAL, 2003-2004

Title. Getting an Edge in Wordwise: The Productive and Social Role of Oratorical

Performance in Malagasy Democratic Process

I. Research Problem and Background

The proposed ethnographic research examines how the use and interplay of two forms of public speaking in Madagascar reflect and shape shifting dynamics of political engagement and emerging modes of public participation in national democratic process. The proposed site for this research is Imerina, the capital city region of Madagascar. This non-partisan research will center on one highly stylized traditional form of political speech, kabary, and its less formalized alternative, resaka, which encompasses speech forms such as poetry, music, and speeches. Ongoing interplay between these traditional genres is now invigorating new forms of communicative interaction between ordinary people and political elites in the public sphere. In both respects—as vehicles of rhetoric and information, and as means for enacting public identities—kabary and resaka are mediating institutional change as particular performers, representing particular interests, deploy them. With this in mind, the research will focus on how these two kinds of talk serve as new forms of political representations to express ideas and to index emerging social formations. Through this ethnographic research, I intend to pursue and clarify three important issues to which the interplay of these two speech genres speak: 1) relations between political agency, social identity, and culturally-situated modes of political representation at play in democratic process; 2) the role of language in the production and negotiation of social relations, especially those burgeoning at fluid boundaries between state and civil society; and, 3) the ways in which language ideologies—socially situated, common sense notions about language and language users—shape the structures and practical effects of modern Malagasy political speech.

More than twenty-five years ago, an anthropologist with much experience in Madagascar, Maurice Bloch, argued that a political system only can be understood with consideration to the political oratory circulating within and around it (1975:12). The events surrounding Madagascar’s national elections in December 2001 now bear him out. At the time of Bloch’s ethnographic research, kabary no longer was used exclusively by the state as it had been during the pre-colonial Merina Dynasty. It had been suppressed by the French colonial government, yet kabary found its voice in small-scale institutions where Bloch, followed by Elinor Ochs, examined it as a form of ceremonial oratory engaged to negotiate local disputes and marriage dowries (Bloch 1975; Ochs 1979). Scholars understood forms of resaka as verbal arts not necessarily engaged politically in the public sphere.

Today, however, kabary and resaka circulate in larger institutional frameworks than both Bloch and Ochs observed in their studies. Within political contexts, kabary and resaka are different modalities of the productions of power. Both forms are active in politics as vehicles for participation in democratic process, and the public continues to value and even expect the metaphor-packed kabary as the model of speaking for their political representatives (Harman 2002). Though looser in structure and varying in style—as poetry, music, or prose, for example—resaka forms, too, are weighted significantly in political contexts according to how their words interact with other kabary texts. The political crisis that ensued after the presidential national elections in December 2001, when both incumbent and challenger claimed victory, exemplifies this.

In July 2002, only after slow negotiations reached an international level, Ravalomanana, the challenger, was declared President. This was not before the crisis fractured existing political identities, reignited pre-colonial ethnic clashes between coastal and highland communities, and threatened the legitimacy of the nation-state. As Bloch foresaw, the events of this crisis were recurringly and crucially bound up with public oratory using traditional forms, but in new contexts and new institutions. During the post-election crisis, both kabary and resaka speech forms were engaged interactively by both candidates in a tit-for-tat, call and response between speech genres. The two modalities of speech became two modalities for being, strategies deployed by candidates to align in identity and tradition with the citizens of the polity. The two forms mediated political process, shaped social and political relations, and in turn, were shaped by a locally situated political culture bifurcated by highland and coastal ethnic tensions.

This research problem may have been prompted by the political situation last December, but it endures in Malagasy democratic process beyond political conflict. Given that “democracy” has been in practice for merely a decade in Madagascar, focusing on two salient forms of political speech will provide significant understanding of broader issues tied to language and the conditions under which language is shaped in the public sphere and how its deployment is negotiated. In clarifying the ways in which public talk mediates politics, this research will examine how these forms of talk are weighted differently in social and political value—ideologically and aesthetically. In context of their value, it will expand the understanding of how each form of speech has profound implications for shaping social and political relations as well as distinctions between political, ethnic, and class groups, while, in turn, is shaped itself by a local and national political culture infused with global influences.

II. Importance and Contribution of Research Problem to Anthropology

The scholarship shaping this research circulates within the wide body of theoretical and empirical work in linguistic and socio-cultural anthropology concerning the following areas: A) relations between political agency, social identity, and communicative modes of political representation at play in democratic process; B) the production of civil society and political oratory in post-colonial Africa; and, C) the social and political significance of language ideologies and aesthetics to the structures and practical effects of political speech.

A. Agency and political representation in democratic process.

Recent studies on democracy in Madagascar argue that the progress of a decade of democracy in Africa has been measured according to a Western metric. Richard Marcus’ work in Madagascar makes this claim and counters it with attention “on the ground”, to the way that people in Madagascar, themselves, conceptualize democracy (Ndegwe 2002:114). Marcus surveys popular definitions of democracy and provides a preliminary basis from which to orient broader questions that this research is designed to examine. In facing the question of what constitutes democracy, this project looks to how democracy is viewed through the lens of performance speech. It works from scholarship examining how the political imaginary, “democracy”, is brought from its historical and global abstraction to concrete everyday experiences through the work of public agentive voices—both the inclusion of public voices in political process and people’s own perceptions about what they think speaking accomplishes (Bakhtin 1981; 2000; Bate 2000; Marcus 2002; Goffman 1973). The election last year is an instructive example.

During the troubled election, both presidential candidates employed kabary to make claims that ostensibly transcended politics as they sought to convince the populace of their legitimacy. Alongside these performances, crowded rooms resonated with the lyric staccato of public debate in the more creative forms of resaka—in music, poetry, and prose. Though kabary always is formal and performed by specialists—or, in this case, political elites—speakers of less formal forms of resaka presuppose a performance space in which ordinary citizens, like their leadership, seek political edge through words deployed with equally-nuanced delivery and impact.The democratic work of these voices is inextricably tied to the speaker’s identity as a representative voice for a particular audience or group. As speakers engage their audience, they presuppose a particular imaginary of social organization that may be characterized as a ‘public’, some addressable multitude ‘out there’ and they model their speech on such presupposition. This interactive process made in concrete speech points clearly to various modes of agency within a participatory framework comparable to Erving Goffman’s notions of the interactional dialogue within the spoken monologue: where both speaker and audience co-author the speech event (1973). Mikhail Bakhtin elucidates this further by situating this act of co-articulation in orientation to the "heteroglossic" nexus of social, historical, and environmental forces (1981:292). Moving from these broader theoretical issues, this research seeks to examine empirically how kabary and resaka speakers alike use words in such a way as not only to point to a particular kind of socially-situated strategic communicative form, but also to create their identity as public, agentive speakers in dialogue that shapes political representation in democratic process.

B. Political oratory in the production of civil society.

Building from these theoretical and empirical notions concerning agency, identity, and democracy, this research intends to gain broader understanding of how the speech event is bound in social relations beyond the speaker and the event. It takes as its guide and intends to build upon research examining configurations of community and the nation-state emerging from the existing forms of participatory politics “on the street” (Comaroff and Comaroff 2000:2; Anderson 1991; Habermas 1999; Mitchell 1991).

As kabary and resaka continue to be crucial as politically salient public speech forms, their place in the public sphere acts as a point of convergence between performance contexts in which particular performers engage in the service of particular interests on the one hand, and forces for large-scale institutional change on the other. Within the context of the election crisis in Madagascar, public voices gained an edge that reconfigured the relationship between the state and civil society. Elite speakers couched opinions and arguments in the authoritative code of kabary, while both elite and non-elite engaged forms of resaka that parodied those same kabary events, often upsetting the boundaries of authority. In particular, kabary was deployed by candidates as strategy for aligning with the citizens of the polity, and as shared-heirs to Merina heritage. In instances as this, the speaker appeals to the listener through the authority of the speech, which is vested in claims of a shared social and political identity symbolized in the speech form itself.

Building on this notion, this research asks how kabary and resaka may be read as technologies reflecting particular alliances between the state and institutions represented by speakers in civil society. Further, this research seeks to examine how in such modes of participatory interaction in kabary and resaka speech events, “the geographically localized, nationally bounded conception of society and culture…is opened up for negotiation and reconfiguration” and reconstituted on the authority and identity claims structurally embedded in these speech genres (Comaroff 2000:15). Specifically, it questions as new representative voices emerge within the contexts of either genre, how are these conceptions of the relationship and boundaries between the state and civil society indexed by these genres and the talk about them circulating in other talk and in popular media and press? How does this interaction of texts in the public shape the ways in which the relationship is realized and negotiated?

C. Language Ideology and Aesthetic Practice.

In considering talk as a vehicle of democratic agency that mediates social and political identities and relations, new questions emerge about the ideas people have regarding the nature of public communication itself. Perceptions of language and the aesthetic value of verbal performance affect how these two forms of speech unfold, are intensified through style and structure, and how they are experienced. This research works from and builds upon recent work that focuses on the importance of language ideologies mediating the structures, styles, and practical effects of political speech in the public sphere (Errington 2000; Kroskrity, Schieffelin, Woolard 2000; Silverstein 1979, 1985, 1993). Such approaches situate ideology in tension between neutral and negative values—between a conceptual phenomenon having to do with subjective representations, beliefs, and ideas, and one of construed practices in the service of interests or power (Kroskrity, Schieffelin, Woolard 2000:6-7). Within the tension, this understanding of ideology as active and effective may be examined according to the interactional and dialogic production of a speech event by co-agents, the speaker and patron. This relationship suggests that speaking itself always implies a pre-emptive judgment by the speaker of listeners’ reactions, and therefore, constant negotiation and calibration of what one says (Silverstein 1993; Volosinov 1973). This evaluative orientation to language connects to the role of aesthetic devices suggested by Paul Friedrich (1979; 1989) and furthered by V.N. Volosinov’s assertion that language itself devises means for infiltrating what others say with retort and commentary in deft and subtle ways (1973:122). This is quintessentially demonstrated in the choreography ofboth kabary and resaka forms, which tie literal meaning with larger social and political concerns through densely packed metaphor and innuendo.

This orientation raises questions of how perceptions of language itself and the aesthetic of verbal performance affect how these two forms of speech unfold and are experienced. Specifically, as this research intends to explore, how do common sense notions about word choice, speaker posture, and audience response inform the structures and practical effects of Malagasy political speech? What are the criteria for basing aesthetic judgment? What is the ideological and phenomenological nature of resaka forms that parody kabary where the kabary structure is maintained but the experience of the speech event is very different? How are people’s perceptions of themselves as speakers informative and reflective of how authorship is sometimes claimed while other times its responsibilities are avoided, and at the same time the authority couched in the speech is maintained? Fortifying this authority, how does the construction of one’s words in oratorical performance as well as the use of metaphorical, euphemistic, and other poetic elements intensify the genre of speech while positioning the speaker to significantly affect political outcomes? These views on language ideology and aesthetic provide an especially useful model for this research to engage and clarify how people’s own understandings and judgments of what they think language does is connected to how they structure and experience political verbal performance.

III. Research Methodology and Justification of Approach

To answer the questions posed by this research problem, this study’s methodological approach for collecting and analyzing evidence is emic and interpretive, in that participants’ explanations and conceptualizations of their own and others’ experiences are key in describing social and linguistic phenomena. This approach and its methodology require an extended period of field-based research in which the researcher is involved not only in daily observation but intense interaction with people of the society studied in the domains of practice relevant to the research problem. Accordingly, I have planned a research schedule based over a twelve-month term from fall 2003-2004. In order to engage critically in ethnographic investigation of the use and interplay of these speech forms and in order to examine the ideologies and aesthetics of language circulating within and around these events, I will engage in participant-observation, open-ended interviews, collection of oral and text materials, and archival research. To capture these interactions over time, I will transcribe daily audio transcriptions and notes taken from the speech events, interviews, and archives. To guide my research over this extended period, I will work closely with scholars in sponsoring institutions (outlined in section 4) throughout the progress of my research, as well as with informants with whom I have worked in Madagascar in the past (1994-1995; 2000). Also, I will communicate and collaborate throughout the progress of the research with my doctoral committee and advisors, Joseph Errington and David Graeber. Although I am proficient in both research languages, this research deals with highly poetic forms of speech, which oblige me to work closely with native speakers on translation and interpretation. I work currently to build my knowledge and ability of Malagasy and French and will continue during the spring semester and summer months of 2003.

Participant-Observation.

I will engage in a thorough ethnography of the domains of use where kabary and resaka speech genres are taught, practiced, discussed, and where they interact publicly and politically. I will study the active role of speakers and listeners in and beyond the actual speech events. To do this, I intend to observe and work with informants to transcribe the many public kabary and resaka performances scheduled in and around the capital city throughout the year. Aside from collecting evidence as an audience member of the actual performances, I will observe and record presidential speech-writing teams as they prepare kabary for President Ravalomanana. This will be conducted under the direction of national political advisor, anthropologist, and poet, Elie Rajaonarison, who has and will continue to serve as my mentor and guide throughout this research. Work with the presidential writing team will comprise half of the research time. An equal amount of time will be spent circulating within the domains where resaka is performed, which includes spaces where both elite and non-elite speakers perform. Because resaka refers to many varieties—speaking, music, poetry, and even conversation by a kabary speaker after the kabary performance, for example—my goal is to obtain a sample that reflects that diversity in political arenas. I also will review written versions of performances when available and will refer to archived speeches that resurface in new speech forms. Further, I plan to collect and analyze discussions about speech events in popular newspapers, on television and radio, and in everyday conversations with my informants. This approach will encapsulate the shape of the performance as well as the reporting of it. Lastly, I will observe instruction in kabary institutions, and I aim to speak with participants about their own ideas about kabary performance, especially in opposition to resaka. I also will ascertain the general relationship between teaching institutions and the political domains of kabary. By examining various domains of speaking, I propose to clarify the interaction between resaka and kabary in political process—how one guides the other, and how they parody one another for ironic effects or to usurp power from the other.