Description
Book SynopsisIsland in the Stream introduces an original genre of ethnographic history as it follows a community on Mayotte, an East African island in the Mozambique Channel, through eleven periods of fieldwork between 1975 and 2015. Over this 40-year span Mayotte shifted from a declining and neglected colonial backwater to a full département of the French state. In a highly unusual postcolonial trajectory, citizens of Mayotte demanded this incorporation within France rather than joining the independent republic of the Comoros. The Malagasy-speaking Muslim villagers Michael Lambek encountered in 1975 practiced subsistence cultivation and lived without roads, schools, electricity, or running water; today they are educated citizens of the EU who travel regularly to metropolitan France and beyond.
Offering a series of ethnographic slices of life across time, Island in the Stream highlights community members'' ethical engagement in their own history as they looked to the fu
Trade Review
"It is clear that Lambek’s way of relating to ‘his’ islanders – giving full scope to emotions and mutual efforts toward understanding – and his special talent in relating such small-scale events to wide philosophical horizons have produced another beautiful book, opening up new perspectives on time and how people – both anthropologists but also ‘their’ people – can deal with time." -- Peter Geschiere, University of Amsterdam * Anthropologica *
Table of Contents
List of Figures Foreword by Michael Jackson Note on Orthography Glossary Preface Part One: Prelude 1 Introduction: The Presence of History 2 Village Life: Kinship, Community, and Islam, 1975 and After 3 Founding the Villages, before 1975 Part Two: Exchange, Celebration, Ceremony, through 1995 4 Citizenship and Sociality: Practising Equality, 1975–1976 5 Exchange, Time, and Person in Mayotte: The Structure and Destructuring of a Cultural System, 1975–1985 6 Localizing Islamic Performances in Mayotte, 1975–1995 Part Three: Dancing to the Music of Time, through 2001 7 Choking on the Qur’an and Other Consuming Parables, 1975–1992 8 Nuriaty, the Saint, and the Sultan: Virtuous Subject and Subjective Virtuoso of the Postmodern Colony, to 1995 9 The Saint, the Sea Monster, and an Invitation to a Dîner-dansant, to 2001 10 On the Move, through 2001 Part Four: Contingent Conviviality, through 2015 11 Marriage and Moral Horizons, 2015 12 Present Horizons, 2015 13 Summation: Mariam’s Mirror Acknowledgments Notes References Credits Index
