Abstract
This chapter will examine how plague survivors visualise the landscape of the plague in the rural central highlands of Madagascar, where outbreaks recur annually. In August 2015, over the course of several days, a middle-aged couple lost eight family members to bubonic and pneumonic plague, four of whom died in hospital. As per official policy, hospital personnel disinfected, bagged and transported the bodies to a potter’s field. The victims were unceremoniously buried in a pit, from which they may not be transferred for at least seven years to safeguard people against re-infection. For Malagasy, state prohibitions against burying plague victims in the familial tomb and performing the ritual exhumation of remains when the bones are dry induce profound guilt and anxiety. A year after the outbreak, the couple guided the authors to the pit, pointing out the isolated location and neglected condition, and the lack of any offerings for the ancestors. The combination of ethnographic interviews and photographs offers insight into emic perspectives of plague imagery in Madagascar, where the plague pit is especially fraught. Plague pits represent haunts, sites of unresolved emotion and immanent risk to the living. They are also sites from which deceased ancestors steal away at night to admonish relatives in dreams. Photographs of the gravesite two years after the outbreak depict the family’s effort to soothe offended ancestors by improving the gravesite and leaving offerings.
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Notes
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Today, scientists at the Pasteur Institute of Madagascar are preparing to begin an experiment that will test whether and how long plague bacteria can survive underground in rat corpses in order to understand the pathogen’s dormant risk in the environment (Dr Minoarisoa Rajerison, Head of the Plague Unit, Institute Pasteur de Madagascar, personal communication, August 2019).
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Zoë Crossland, Ancestral Encounters in Highland Madagascar, 179.
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Sodikoff, G.M., Rasolonomenjanahary, Z.R.D. (2021). Ethnographic Images of the Plague: Outbreak and the Landscape of Memory in Madagascar. In: Lynteris, C. (eds) Plague Image and Imagination from Medieval to Modern Times. Medicine and Biomedical Sciences in Modern History. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-72304-0_10
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