More Shopping OptionsIn The Weight of the Past, Michael Lambek explores the complex ways that history shapes, constrains, and enables daily life. Focusing on ritual performances of spirit mediumship in a multifaceted religious landscape, Lambek's analysis reveals the multiple ways that Sakalava "bear" history. In Mahajanga, Madagascar, to bear history is at once a weighty obligation, a creative re-birthing, a scrupulous cultivation, and an exuberant performance of the past.This book describes the division of labor, creative production, and ethical practice entailed in imagining, embodying, and serving the past. It is at once a vivid ethnography of Sakalava life and a significant intervention in anthropological debates on culture and history, structure and practice, advocating a theoretical approach informed by Aristotelian categories of understanding.
Michael Lambek is Professor of Anthropology at the University of Toronto. He is the author of Human Spirits: A Cultural Account of Trance in Mayotte.
Part I: A Poiesis of History * Bearing Sakalava History: A Glossary of Some Key Terms * Into the Maze: Surface and Centre, Place, Person, and Potency * The Sakalava Poiesis of History: Realizing the Past through Spirit Possession * Part II: Structural Remains: Contemporary Divisions of Historical Labor * Mechanical Division: Structure and History in the Northwest * The Legacy of Lord Diviner, Ndramisara: Organic Division, Kindedness, and Sakalava Subjects * Personal Particularism, Mediumship, and Distributive Memory * Part III: Serving the Ancestors * Popular Performances: Paying Homage and Gaining Respect * The Great Service (Fanompoa Be) * Part IV: Practicing History * Kassim's Burden: The Practice of an Exemplary Spirit Medium * Answering to History: Conflict, Conscience, and Change * The Play of the Past: Historicity in Daily Life * Conclusion: Imagined Continuities
