Abstract
This chapter engages contemporary archaeological conversations about meaning and materiality. Against the tendency to counterpose practice and representation, it calls for an expanded definition of semiosis, which encompasses material and affective properties, humans and nonhumans, dispositions and ideas. Through the lens of Peircean semeiotic, This chapter examines negotiations over the signs of belief in the polity of Imerina, highland Madagascar. The analysis focuses on early nineteenth century missionary encounters in the region and explores how the expansion of missionary schools across the landscape was translated differently by different actors, and fostered new configurations of agency. Where missionaries saw material evidence of conversion, locals understood mission schools and activities to be selectively drawn into the sanctified places of highland politics. Such spatial incorporation simultaneously affirmed the political topography of highland elites and absorbed the missionaries into the cosmological structures they hoped to eradicate. By carefully aligning missions with the sacred coordinates of the landscape, the highland king of Imerina creatively reworked the channels through which blessing flowed from the ancestors to the world of the living. The work of the schools and the king reveal very different understandings of agency and show how agentive actions were configured through tangible and intangible sign relations.
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Notes
- 1.
London Missionary Society (LMS) Madagascar Incoming Correspondence (MIL) Box 2 / Folder 1/A: 12 March 1825[?] Held at the Council for World Mission Archive, SOAS, University of London.
- 2.
Here it should be borne in mind that the Peircean term “object” bears little relation to the understanding of objects as opposed to subjects, as within a Cartesian frame.
- 3.
“For the proper significate outcome of a sign, I propose the name, the interpretant of the sign. The example of the imperative command shows that it need not be of a mental mode of being” (Peirce 1935, paragraph 473 [1907]).
- 4.
Peirce developed a number of different terms for his triad of interpretants (see Fitzgerald 1966; Liszka 1990; Short 1981; and for archaeological explorations of his terms, Crossland 2013, and Preucel and Bauer 2001). Here I deal only with the more well-known “emotional,” “energetic,” and “logical” interpretants, without going into any great detail on these or Peirce’s other classifications. I use “affective interpretant” in preference to “emotional interpretant” to acknowledge that emotion is culturally specific, conventionalized, and generalizable. I use “habitual interpretant” in preference to “logical interpretant” as a way of situating the term within a broader anthropological perspective, notably Bourdieu’s writings on habitus, as well as to avoid the problematically narrow and rationalist inflection that the term “logical” carries.
- 5.
- 6.
LMS MIL 1/2/A: 11 Oct 1820.
- 7.
Eventually, a party of young nobles would be sent to the UK, some to be educated under the auspices of the LMS, and others to learn a range of crafts, such as the manufacture and dying of calico, and the making of guns and gunpowder (LMS MIL 1/2/C: Jones to Directors 3 May 1821).
- 8.
A history of Madagascar, based heavily on missionary correspondence was published by Ellis in 1838. This provides a great deal of information on the early mission, some of which cannot be found in the documentary sources that have survived. Griffiths also published a short history in 1843. More recently, a number of historians have written accounts of the mission, including Gow (1979); Campbell (1985); Raison-Jourde (1991) and Huyghues-Belrose (2001).
- 9.
Report published in 1828. Held in the National Library of Wales, J. Luther Thomas Collection: MS 1943078.
- 10.
For example, LMS MIL 1/2/C: Jones to Directors 3 May 1821.
- 11.
For example, LMS Madagascar Journals (MJ) 1/8: Entry for 2 January 1824.
- 12.
- 13.
- 14.
Currency in Madagascar at the time was composed primarily of silver dollars, cut into fragments, some as small as half a grain of rice (LMS MIL 1/2/B: Hastie to Griffiths 18 February 1821).
- 15.
The specific act of sprinkling the main posts of Jones’ house is recorded in Hayes’ book about David Jones, written for children in 1923. Ellis’ account also mentions the ceremony, although without reference to the house posts. I have not yet found documentation of the ceremony in the LMS archive.
- 16.
LMS MJ 1/8: Entry for 10 March 1824. Jones and Griffiths, Antananarivo.
- 17.
LMS MJ 1/8: Entry for 5 May 1824. Jones and Griffiths, Antananarivo.
- 18.
LMS MJ 1/ 8: Entry for 19 May 1824. Jones and Griffiths, Antananarivo.
- 19.
LMS MJ 1/8: Entry for 20 May 1824. Jones and Griffiths, Antananarivo.
- 20.
LMS MJ 1/8: Entry for 10 March 1824. Jones and Griffiths, Antananarivo.
- 21.
LMS MJ 18: Entry for 3 May 1824. Jones and Griffiths, Antananarivo.
- 22.
LMS MJ 18: Entry for 29 April 1824. Jones and Griffiths, Antananarivo.
- 23.
Indeed, as Berg points out, the financial support of the schools by Radama, including the payment of salaries to missionaries could be interpreted as a hasina offering (1986, p. 189).
- 24.
For example, LMS MIL Box2/ Folder 1: 22 Oct 1836. Baker, Port Louis. Cited in Raison-Jourde 1991, p. 125. Griffiths wrote during the time of the next monarch, Queen Ranavalona I that “the six provinces in the interior of the island are oppressed to the extreme; both soldiers and civilians being compelled to work at a moment’s notice, without food or any remuneration whatever…” (Griffiths 1841, p. 38).
- 25.
LMS MIL 2/1/C: Griffiths 23 Sept 1824.
- 26.
LMS MJ 1/ 7: Entry for 25 Sept 1823. Tour of the kingdom.
- 27.
LMS MJ 1/ 7: Entry for 25 Sept 1823. Tour of the kingdom.
- 28.
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Crossland, Z. (2015). The Signs of Mission: Rethinking Archaeologies of Representation. In: Richard, F. (eds) Materializing Colonial Encounters. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4939-2633-6_5
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