Ancestral Encounters in Highland Madagascar: Material Signs and Traces of the Dead [Hardcover]

This book examines encounters between the living and the dead in nineteenth-century highland Madagascar, considering the challenges that ghostly actors pose for writing history.Nineteenth-century highland Madagascar was a place inhabited by the dead as much as the living. Ghosts, ancestors, and the possessed were important historical actors alongside local kings and queens, soldiers, traders, and missionaries. This book considers the challenges that such actors pose for writing history. How do we take proper account of the dead, and what might this reveal about the practice of writing and creating history? To tackle these questions, this book draws on archaeology, landscape study, oral history, and textual sources to trace the many different encounters between the living and the dead in highland Madagascar.Nineteenth-century highland Madagascar was a place inhabited by the dead as much as the living. Ghosts, ancestors, and the possessed were important historical actors alongside local kings and queens, soldiers, traders, and missionaries. This book considers the challenges that such actors pose for writing history. How do we take proper account of the dead, and what might this reveal about the practice of writing and creating history? To tackle these questions, this book draws on archaeology, landscape study, oral history, and textual sources to trace the many different encounters between the living and the dead in highland Madagascar.Nineteenth-century highland Madagascar was a place inhabited by the dead as much as the living. Ghosts, ancestors, and the possessed were important historical actors alongside local kings and queens, soldiers, traders, and missionaries. This book considers the challenges that such actors pose for historical accounts of the past and for thinking about questions of presence and representation. How were the dead made present, and how were they recognized or not? In attending to these multifarious encounters of the nineteenth century, how l£‰