Encounters with ancestors: monumentality in highland Madagascar

Henri Lefebvre argued that monuments offer each member of a society
an image of that membership and in so doing act to effect a consensus
through rendering the relationships between people concrete, practical and
visible (1991: 220). In this paper I’d like to consider the ways in which
standing stone monuments were encountered in the 18th and 19th centuries
in highland Madagascar. What sort of consensus was being enacted through
the encounter, and how were relationships expressed and moulded through
the interaction? A distinctive highland Malagasy way of conceptualizing
monuments and their relation to the ancestral past emerges from the encounter
with highland standing stones. Their location within market place
settings, pathways and on highly visible hilltops speaks to the importance of
the stone as meeting place and location where relationships were articulated
and the absent made present. This presencing may be placed into the broader
context of the trade in enslaved people, and the loss of history and identity in
highland communities.