Island in the Stream : An Ethnographic History of Mayotte

371 Pages·9.897 MB·English

by  Michael Lambek

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ISLAND IN THE STREAM
An Ethnographic History of Mayotte
Island in the Stream introduces an original genre of ethnographic history
as it follows a community on Mayotte, an East African island in the
Mozambique Channel, through eleven periods of fieldwork between
1975 and 2015. Over this forty-year span Mayotte shifted from a
declining and neglected colonial backwater to a full département of the
French state. In a highly unusual postcolonial trajectory, citizens of
Mayotte demanded this incorporation within France rather than joining
the independent republic of the Comoros. The Malagasy-speaking
Muslim villagers Michael Lambek encountered in 1975 practised
subsistence cultivation and lived without roads, schools, electricity, or
running water; today they are educated citizens of the EU who travel
regularly to metropolitan France and beyond.
Offering a series of ethnographic slices of life across time, Island in
the Stream highlights community members’ ethical engagement in their
own history as they looked to the future, acknowledged the past, and
engaged and transformed local forms of sociality, exchange, and ritual
performance. This is a unique account of the changing horizons and
historical consciousness of an African community and an intimate
portrait of the inhabitants and their concerns, as well as a glimpse into
the changing perspective of the ethnographer.
(Anthropological Horizons)
MICHAEL LAMBEK is a Canada Research Chair and professor in the
Department of Anthropology at the University of Toronto Scarborough.
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ANTHROPOLOGICAL HORIZONS
Editor: Michael Lambek, University of Toronto
This series, begun in 1991, focuses on theoretically informed ethno-
graphic works addressing issues of mind and body, knowledge and
power, equality and inequality, the individual and the collective. Inter-
disciplinary in its perspective, the series makes a unique contribution in
several other academic disciplines: women’s studies, history, philosophy,
psychology, political science, and sociology.
For a list of the books published in this series see page 335.
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Island in the Stream
An Ethnographic History of Mayotte
MICHAEL LAMBEK
With a foreword by MICHAEL JACKSON
UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO PRESS
Toronto Buffalo London
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© University of Toronto Press 2018
Toronto Buffalo London
utorontopress.com
Printed in the U.S.A.
ISBN 978-1-4875-0391-8 (cloth)    ISBN 978-1-4875-2299-5 (paper)
Printed on acid-free, 100% post-consumer recycled paper with vegetable-
based inks.
(Anthropological Horizons)
________________________________________________________________________
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Lambek, Michael Joshua, author
Island in the stream : an ethnographic history of Mayotte / Michael Lambek. 
(Anthropological horizons) 
Includes bibliographical references and index. 
ISBN 978-1-4875-0391-8 (cloth).  ISBN 978-1-4875-2299-5 (paper) 
1. Ethnology – Mayotte – History – 20th century.  2. Mayotte – Social life 
and customs – 20th century.  3. Mayotte – History – 20th century.  I. Title. 
GN661.M3L27 2018  305.8009694'5  C2018-903464-5 
________________________________________________________________________
This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Federation 
for the Humanities and Social Sciences, through the Awards to Scholarly 
Publications Program, using funds provided by the Social Sciences and 
Humanities Research Council of Canada.
University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial assistance to its 
publishing program of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts 
Council, an agency of the Government of Ontario.
Funded by the Financé par le
Government gouvernement
of Canada du Canada
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Contents
List of Figures vii
Foreword by Michael Jackson ix
Note on Orthography xv
Glossary xvii
Preface xxi
Part One: Prelude
1 Introduction: The Presence of History 5
2 Village Life: Kinship, Community, and Islam,
1975 and After 27
3 Founding the Villages, before 1975 53
Part Two: Exchange, Celebration, Ceremony, through 1995
4 Citizenship and Sociality: Practising Equality,
1975–1976 79
5 Exchange, Time, and Person in Mayotte: The Structure
and Destructuring of a Cultural System, 1975–1985 107
6 Localizing Islamic Performances in Mayotte,
1975–1995 124
vi Contents
Part Three: Dancing to the Music of Time, through 2001
7 Choking on the Qur’an and Other Consuming
Parables, 1975–1992 151
8 Nuriaty, the Saint, and the Sultan: Virtuous Subject
and Subjective Virtuoso of the Postmodern
Colony, to 1995 171
9 The Saint, the Sea Monster, and an Invitation
to a Dîner-dansant, to 2001 185
10 On the Move, through 2001 198
Part Four: Contingent Conviviality, through 2015
11 Marriage and Moral Horizons, 2015 221
12 Present Horizons, 2015 243
13 Summation: Mariam’s Mirror 269
Acknowledgments 283
Notes 287
References 309
Credits 325
Index 327
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Figures
1.1 Map of the western Indian Ocean 21
2.1 Lombeni, 1975 28
2.2 Harvesting rice, 1976 42
2.3 Husking rice, 1975 43
2.4 Threshing rice for a member of an age
group, 1985 44
3.1 A simplified genealogy, Lombeni Kely 61
3.2 A simplified genealogy, Lombeni Be 68
4.1 A simplified genealogy of Kala’s shungu 88
4.2 The chef tanana measuring rice 90
4.3 Celebrating Kala 93
5.1 A portion of a larger village, 1975–6 116
6.1 Shijabu prayer at the solar New Year, 1985 131
6.2 A performance of the Mulidy, 1975–6 143
7.1 Celebrating the referendum, 1976 166
10.1 A bilocal family on the terrace of their apartment
in La Réunion, 2000 210
11.1 A wedding dance (ladaimwana), 1975–6 226
11.2 The valise and procession of a groom, 1975–6 227
11.3 A men’s wedding dance, 1975–6 228
12.1 A Mulidy, c. 2005 264
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Foreword
No one has lived in the past and no one will live in the future. The present is
the form of all life, and there is no means by which this can be avoided. Time
is a circle that is endlessly revolving. The descending arc is the past and the
ascending arc is the future.
Jean-Luc Godard, Alphaville
There are several remarkable things about Michael Lambek’s ethno-
graphic corpus: the empirical depth and philosophical subtlety of his
understanding, born of more than forty years’ fieldwork among the
people of Mayotte; the breadth and intellectual range of his anthro-
pological expertise – encompassing hermeneutics, ritual, ethics, histo-
ricity, medicine, spirit possession, mytho-praxis, and religion; and his
insistence on the complexity, multiplicity, and continual alternations
that characterize life-as-lived. His refusal to reduce any way of know-
ing or way of being to a single defining characteristic, a single story, not
only reflects the heterogeneity of the lifeworlds in which he has lived
and worked, where incommensurable worldviews (Islam, astrology,
and spirit possession) are resources to be drawn upon to varying de-
grees and in different situations rather than seen as mutually exclusive;
it reflects a temperamental aversion to either-or thinking, and an intel-
lectual restiveness that makes him sceptical of knowledge claims, fasci-
nated by the ways in which human perspectives change through time,
and convinced that despite the manifest differences between cultures
and individuals, a shared humanity can be brought to light through
our immersion in other lifeworlds and the intimate relationships we
form with individuals in them. In Island in the Stream, Lambek makes