Forget Colonialism?: Sacrifice and the Art of Memory in Madagascar: 1 (Ethnographic Studies in Subjectivity) - Softcover

Cole, Jennifer

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0520228464 ISBN 13: 9780520228467

Publisher: University of California Press, 2001

Synopsis

While doing fieldwork in a village in east Madagascar that had suffered both heavy settler colonialism and a bloody anticolonial rebellion, Jennifer Cole found herself confronted by a puzzle. People in the area had lived through almost a century of intrusive French colonial rule, but they appeared to have forgotten the colonial period in their daily lives. Then, during democratic elections in 1992-93, the terrifying memories came flooding back. Cole asks, How do once-colonized peoples remember the colonial period? Drawing on a fine-grained ethnography of the social practices of remembering and forgetting in one community, she develops a practice-based approach to social memory.

About this title

About the Author

Jennifer Cole is a cultural anthropologist and member of the Committee on Human Development at the University of Chicago.

From the Back Cover

"The best book-length study of colonial memory available... Cole provides a way out of the dichotomy in which memory is viewed as either individual or 'collective.'"--Rosalind Shaw, coeditor of Syncretism/Anti-Syncretism: The Politics of Religious Synthesis

"A remarkably lucid and self-assured analysis of social memory. . . The book is a pleasure to read."--Michael Lambek, author of Knowledge and Practice in Mayotte

Edition details

• Publisher: University of California Press
• Publication date: 2001
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0520228464
• ISBN 13: 9780520228467
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 380