At the time of my last period of fieldwork in Madagascar, Brika was seventeen. I had invited him to my house to participate in the study I was conducting about death and the ancestors (cf. Harris, Chapter 2). As with all other participants, I introduced Brika to the task by telling him that I was going to narrate a short story followed by several questions. I reassured him that these questions did not have “right” or “wrong” answers, because people have different opinions about them. I told him that I just wanted to learn about his own way of thinking.

Brika carefully listened to the story and patiently answered all my questions. Once the formal interview was over, he engaged thoughtfully with a number of additional open-ended questions about the meaning of the word angatse, the reasons for offering food to the ancestors, the significance of dreams, and the existence of people who, having died, come back to life. He explained that when a person dies “the body rots and turns into bones,” but the spirit (known as fanahy when the person is alive and as angatse once the person has died) “continues to be there.”

The reflections on sex and gender presented in this chapter were set in motion by the experience of giving birth to my son four years ago in London. Under the influence of the National Birth Association, I was determined to have a “natural birth,” free of any unnecessary medical intervention. Accordingly, one of my requests was that the midwife should refrain from telling me the sex of my baby, for I wanted to be allowed to register it “in my own time,” and to decide for myself whether the fact that the newborn was male or female should be of any relevance at all. At the time, I imagined that my Vezo friends in Madagascar, unlike some of my British and Italian friends at home, would have no difficulty in understanding why I did not want the sex of my baby to be the first thing to be uttered about him or her, only seconds after the birth. I thought they would understand my attempts to escape the strictures of the dominant “gender system of the west” (as in Errington 1990), in which a person, from the very beginning, cannot be anything at all if it is not sexed.

I thought they would understand because the Vezo with whom I had lived and worked for almost two years had impressed me for their lack of interest in the difference between people with male and female genitals – a difference which, in many contexts, appeared to make very little difference (Astuti 1993).

The tombs in which the dead are buried and through which they become members of the ‘single’ raza are built by living people through work (asa) which they perform because the dead desire nice, clean, proper ‘houses’ (trano). If the living fail to carry out the work, the ancestors will make known their discontent. This will begin with a visitation of dreams and minor illnesses, in response to which the hazomanga may try to talk to the ancestors to reassure them that the desired work will be undertaken soon. If the promise is not kept, however, the ancestors may get very angry (meloke mare) and ‘make people die’ (mahafaty).

Although the living work for the dead out of a sense of duty and under duress, the desires of the dead coincide in a subtle way with those of the living. For the dead, the performance of the work is a way to be remembered and be taken care of by their descendants; for the living, working for the dead provides a form of blessing (asantsika ro tsipiranontsika, our work is our blessing), because when the ancestors are happy they stop interfering with the life, dreams and health of their descendants. In other words, working for the dead is another way of separating life from death.

This is a study of two different forms of identity, one which is achieved through activities performed in the present, the other which is given as an essence inherited from the past; one which is of a recognizable Austronesian character, for it is transformative, non-primordialist and non-essentialist, the other which bears instead a clear African imprint, for it is rooted in, and determined by, the unchangeable order of descent. These two identities are both known to the Vezo, a group of people who live on the western coast of Madagascar. One of the aims of this book is to explore how these two different and apparently incompatible ways of being a person are made to co-exist, and how they are articulated with one another.

In the following pages, I shall introduce the reader to these two identities as I encountered them during my fieldwork among the Vezo. I shall describe how I came to formulate the question that will engage us for the whole of this work; at the same time, I shall begin to provide and to explain the local idiom of identity – the contrast between ‘un-kindedness’ and ‘kindedness’.

A few days after arriving in Betania, a coastal village in western Madagascar, I saw two children, aged about six, playing in the hull of a broken canoe half sunk in the sand. As they paddled with two wooden sticks, they chanted to each other ‘ve-zo! ve-zo!’.

We saw in the preceding chapter that when the Vezo say that they are ‘unwise’ they are making a statement about economic strategies that are short term and present bound. When they say that ‘the Vezo do not like ties and bonds’ (tsy tiam-Bezo fifeheza), on the other hand, they are making a statement about their political strategies whereby the power of the past over the present is denied or neutralized. This chapter discusses three different contexts in which the Vezo experience forms of power and authority that stake claims over people's actions and identity through time: the claims of custom and tradition, the claims of affines in marriage, and the claims of the Sakalava kings of the past. In all three instances, the Vezo acknowledge the constraining force of the ‘ties and bonds’ of power and of the past; in all three instances, as we shall see, these ‘ties and bonds’ are manipulated, contextualized or fled.

Customs and taboos

Anthropologists are used to being told by their informants that the reason they perform a ritual in a certain manner or adopt a certain behaviour is that it is customary to do so. Anthropologists seldom find this kind of answer satisfactory, however, for they suspect that an invocation of ‘tradition’ is a way of hiding the ‘true’ meaning behind a ritual or a certain pattern of behaviour; and they feel frustrated that their capacity to understand is so abruptly brought to a halt by an appeal to seemingly arbitrary ‘custom’.

For the living Vezo, the ‘single’ raza is only a shadow that lingers over them. For the dead, membership of the raza has become their permanent and only form of identity. The transition from life to death, from filongoa to the raza, transforms the living person profoundly; as a result of this transformation, ‘the dead and the living are not together, they are not the same’ (ny maty ny velo tsy miaraky, tsy mitovy). This otherness of the dead was conveyed most starkly in the statement that ‘the dead aren't people, they're “animals”, they aren't related to the living’ (lolo reo tsy olo fa biby, tsy longon' olom-belo). The dead are bad tempered, wild and aggressive (masiake), and must be prevented, for this reason, from interfering in the life of their descendants; the living must therefore create a barrier (hefitsy) to keep themselves separate (miavaky) from the dead.

The new, alien and dangerous identity of the dead is created by the living through acts of separation and division. During funerals and mortuary rituals, the living expel death from life, creating and recreating the barrier that keeps the dead separate from them. As the dead are separated from life and from their living descendants, they are also divided among themselves by being placed in different tombs.

The first intelligible conversation I had in Betania was about swimming. I wanted to find out whether I could swim in the ocean, and I was told that I could; when people saw me swimming, they told me that I was Vezo (fa Vezo iha). Later on, when I began to imitate my hosts in the way they ate fish – stuffing my mouth with a piece of fish, flesh, skin and bones all together, swallowing the flesh and skin and spitting out the bones – I was told that I was really Vezo (fa Vezo tokoa iha). The first time I was taken out fishing, I found a large crowd of people waiting for my return on the beach; they asked whether I had been sick, if I had been hungry or thirsty, whether the sun had burnt my skin. I told them that I had been fine, that I had liked it, and that I had actually caught a fish.

In this book I have explored the identity of the Vezo, a group which defines itself as ‘people who struggle with the sea and live on the coast’ (olo mitolo rano, olo mipetsaky andriaky). In order to study Vezo-ness, I have not looked at who the Vezo are, but rather I have immersed myself and the reader in the ways of doing that render people Vezo. I have described men, women and children becoming Vezo by sailing skilfully, by selling fish for a profit, or by carrying the canoe paddle in a certain way on their shoulder; I have described people losing their Vezo-ness (and thus becoming Masikoro) by making a blunder while they change the position of the canoe masts, by choking on a crab's heart, or by feeling sick on a sailing expedition.

I have shown how Vezo-ness is experienced contextually as an activity, rather than inherently as a state of being: people ‘are’ Vezo when they perform Vezo-ness. Vezo-ness is an identity that binds people to the present, the only temporal dimension in which a person can ‘be’ Vezo by acting Vezo. The past, by contrast, does not determine what a person ‘is’ at any point in time. The past does not turn into ‘history’ – a chain of events that explain how the present has come to be what it is – for it is constantly shed as people move from one context to another, from one moment to the next.

The Vezo are soft people. Their customs are easy and their taboos are few. They dislike ties and bonds, which they avoid through complex strategies of manipulation. When the binding power of kings becomes too strong to be manipulated or contextualized, they choose to flee in order not to be told who they are. The Vezo are people who keep themselves alive by searching for food in the sea. But they are unwise, and so they fail to learn from past experience and to plan a head for the future; this makes them unusually prone to surprise. They are people who live on the coast, who know how to swim, how to make canoes, how to sail, fish, eat and sell fish, and how to walk on soft sand without losing their breath. They are people who bear on their body ‘the signs that one is Vezo’.

The Vezo are people who ‘are’ what they do. Their identity (Vezo-ness) is an activity, not a state of being; it must be performed for a person to ‘be’ Vezo. When people learn Vezo-ness, they learn to ‘be’ Vezo; when they perform it skilfully, they ‘are’ very Vezo; if they perform it only intermittently, they ‘are’ Vezo at one moment and Masikoro at the next; if they stop performing it, they stop ‘being’ Vezo. Whether people ‘are’ Vezo or not depends on their actions in the present, for it is only in the present that they can act Vezo.

Kinship in the present

Dadilahy (grandfather) is a very old man (fantitra be). He does not know when he was born, but he thinks maybe in 1905. Dadilahy is very tired (rerake mare); he spends his days sitting in front of his house, which his grandchildren (zafy) built for him a few years ago. He occupies himself with making knives out of small scraps of iron that his grandchildren find for him. He hammers the iron on a flat stone; now and then he stops to recover his strength, and at times he falls asleep over his work. His grandchildren tease him that he spends more time sleeping than hammering, so it takes him many days before he finishes a blade and can start carving the handle. Although dadilahy is barely able to walk from his house to the kitchen, which is just 10 m away, he says he would go fishing if he could find a companion; at this, his daughter reminds him how weak his legs are and how bent his back is. A few hours later, in the evening, a small audience gathers around dadilahy to listen to him telling one of his many adventures at sea as a young man. He gives marvellously accurate details on the wind, the current, the waves and the position of the sail. His audience strains to hear his feeble voice, for his stories are always very engaging. His grandchildren say that he is a good story-teller (mahay mitantara ie).