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Island 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 d¿rtement 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 future, acknowledged the past, and engaged and transformed local forms of sociality, exchange, and ritual performance. This is a unique account of the changing horizons and historical consciousness of an African community and an intimate portrait of the inhabitants and their concerns, as well as a glimpse into the changing perspective of the ethnographer.
List 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
About the author
Michael Lambek is a professor and Canada Research Chair emeritus in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Toronto.
Summary
This book follows the trajectory of life in an African island community as composed of ethnographic portraits taken over eleven visits across 40 years. It initiates an original genre of ethnographic history and describes people's ongoing ethical engagement with their past and future.
