Interminable Disputes in Northwest Madagascar

Abstract

The literature in the anthropology of religion has queried not only how to define religion but also whether religion can be defined at all and whether, as an object, it is a product of the modern state.¹ Insofar as there is some truth to the latter (Asad, 1993; 2003), religion is, in part, constituted by means of law, but simultaneously as something that is constituted to stand at arm’s length from the law. Hence, it is no straight-forward matter to describe the relationship between religion and law—as though the law could readily interfere in religious disputes or religion in legal ones (cf. Kirsch and Turner, 2009). When I began to write, I had in mind to contrast this relationship between religion and law in the modern state (“secularism”) with the relationship pertaining in a society in which law and religion were not disembedded from a social whole, in this case a sacred monarchy. The problem in the monarchy was not the separation between religion and law, however convoluted, but the lack of distinction between them. If we begin not with the modern state and, hence, not with the way law circumscribes religion, but with the sacred monarchy and, hence, with the constitution of and contestation over the sacred, then the picture looks rather different. In both models, religion and law are inextricably entangled; one starts with features intrinsic to law, whereas the other starts with features that (it claims) are intrinsic to religion.