4 - Avoiding ties and bonds

Summary

We saw in the preceding chapter that when the Vezo say that they are ‘unwise’ they are making a statement about economic strategies that are short term and present bound. When they say that ‘the Vezo do not like ties and bonds’ (tsy tiam-Bezo fifeheza), on the other hand, they are making a statement about their political strategies whereby the power of the past over the present is denied or neutralized. This chapter discusses three different contexts in which the Vezo experience forms of power and authority that stake claims over people's actions and identity through time: the claims of custom and tradition, the claims of affines in marriage, and the claims of the Sakalava kings of the past. In all three instances, the Vezo acknowledge the constraining force of the ‘ties and bonds’ of power and of the past; in all three instances, as we shall see, these ‘ties and bonds’ are manipulated, contextualized or fled.

Customs and taboos

Anthropologists are used to being told by their informants that the reason they perform a ritual in a certain manner or adopt a certain behaviour is that it is customary to do so. Anthropologists seldom find this kind of answer satisfactory, however, for they suspect that an invocation of ‘tradition’ is a way of hiding the ‘true’ meaning behind a ritual or a certain pattern of behaviour; and they feel frustrated that their capacity to understand is so abruptly brought to a halt by an appeal to seemingly arbitrary ‘custom’.