Michael Lambek

Taboo as Cultural Practice Among Malagasy Speakers

ethnographic matenral collected among Malagasy speakers in Mayotte, this article attempts to approach the subject of taboo from a practice perspective. It views the observance of taboo as a kind of performative act with moral consequences, and argues for the significance of taboo in the constitution of personhood and society and hence of the relationships between them. It argues firther that embodiment forms a primary means of legitimating various claims and disclaimers and that the observance of taboos forms a means of naturalizing cultural rules. The most important developments as regards social theory concern not so much a turn towards language as an altered view of the intersection between saying (or signifying) and

Value and virtue

This article offers suggestions for situating value in the liberal economic sense with respect to values understood in a broader, ethical sense. It is a conceptual exercise in bringing together ideas about value, which pertain largely to objects, with ethical ideas of virtue, which concern acts and character. I argue that economic value and ethical value are incommensurable insofar as the former deals with ostensibly relative, commensurable values and the latter with ostensibly absolute and incommensurable ones. The articulation of incommensurable values is better expressed as acts or practices of judgment rather than of choice. I suggest that sacrifice may be a site where meta-value is established.

Ritual Communication and Linguistic Ideology: A Reading and Partial Reformulation of Rappaport's Theory of Ritual

This article examines Roy Rappaports theory of ritual from the point of view of recent work on linguistic ideology. Rappaports theory, I argue, can best be understood as an attempt to marry the performative approach to ritual to one that regards ritual as a form of communication. Rappaport effects this synthesis through an argument about the indexical qualities of performatively produced signs and goes on to argue that because ritual produces indexical signs, it is a uniquely trustworthy channel of communication. Because language is an untrustworthy channel of communication, prone to carrying misrepresentations and lies, people turn to ritual to make up for languages shortcomings. Here, Rappaports argument requires reformulation. His assumptions about language reflect a particular linguistic ideology. Where that ideology is in force, ritual will likely play the role he suggests, but where it is not, ritual will be evaluated differently. I illustrate this with examples from Melanesia and the history of Christianity in the West. The force of this reformulation is an insistence on the need for any theory of ritual as communication to situate its claims in relation to broader issues of linguistic ideology and cultural constructions of communication.

The weight of the past : living with history in Mahajanga, Madagascar

PART I: A POIESIS OF HISTORY Bearing Sakalava History: A Glossary of Some Key Terms Into the Maze: Surface and Centre, Place, Person, and Potency The Sakalava Poiesis of History: Realizing the Past through Spirit Possession PART II: STRUCTURAL REMAINS: CONTEMPORARY DIVISIONS OF HISTORICAL LABOR Mechanical Division: Structure and History in the Northwest The Legacy of Lord Diviner, Ndramisara: Organic Division, Kindedness, and Sakalava Subjects Personal Particularism, Mediumship, and Distributive Memory PART III: SERVING THE ANCESTORS Popular Performances: Paying Homage and Gaining Respect The Great Service (Fanompoa Be) PART IV: PRACTICING HISTORY Kassims Burden: The Practice of an Exemplary Spirit Medium Answering to History: Conflict, Conscience, and Change The Play of the Past: Historicity in Daily Life Conclusion: Imagined Continuities

The ethical condition : essays on action, person, and value

Written over a thirty-year span, Michael Lambeks essays in this collection point with definitive force toward a single central truth: ethics is intrinsic to social life. As he shows through rich ethnographic accounts and multiple theoretical traditions, our human condition is at heart an ethical one-we may not always be good or just, but we are always subject to their criteria. Detailing Lambeks trajectory as one anthropologist thinking deeply throughout a career on the nature of ethical life, the essays accumulate into a vibrant demonstration of the relevance of ethics as a practice and its crucial importance to ethnography, social theory, and philosophy. Organized chronologically, the essays begin among Malagasy speakers on the island of Mayotte and in northwest Madagascar. Building from ethnographic accounts there, they synthesize Aristotelian notions of practical judgment and virtuous action with Wittgensteinian notions of the ordinariness of ethical life and the importance of language, everyday speech, and ritual in order to understand how ethics are lived. They illustrate the multiple ways in which ethics informs personhood, character, and practice; explore the centrality of judgment, action, and irony to ethical life; and consider the relation of virtue to value. The result is a fully fleshed-out picture of ethics as a deeply rooted aspect of the human experience.

Catching the local

This paper attempts to conceptualize the local neither in exclusive relation to the global nor as a specifically spatial phenomenon but in terms of ethical life, as a conjunction of activities and their consequences. In this sense the local is singular rather than merely a specific site on a homogeneous grid and as much temporal as spatial. The argument is developed with respect to changing meanings of the local in my own ethnographic practice as well as the changes in my main field site in Mayotte, Western Indian Ocean. The depiction of activities draws from and develops the conceptual scheme of Hannah Arendt.

The value of (performative) acts

In this paper I pursue arguments concerning the relation between economic and ethical value. I consider the relationship of activities to objects and (following Aristotle and Arendt) distinguish between the activities of action (doing) and production (making). Marx founded his theory of value on labor and the way it is congealed and occluded in commodities and most anthropology, whether Marxist or non-Marxist, has followed suit in the attention to objects (or objectifications). What are the consequences of adding the value of acts (especially performative acts) to the value of labor and what are the “objects” into which acts congeal? What would be a ritual theory of value?

Virgin Marriage and the Autonomy of Women in Mayotte

Many of the relatively early papers in the emerging anthropological literature on women were concerned with comparing the status of women and men in a given society. In such studies, the selection of criteria for evaluating relative status becomes a central problem. Papers documenting the dominance of men are open to the criticism that relative status has been measured by variables or described using values relevant to men but not to women. Additionally, these studies can be faulted for tending to focus on what women lack, while neglecting essential issues revolving around who women are: the social constructions of womanhood; the forms through which being female is experienced, integrated, and recreated; the models and motivations for womens actions in particular cultural contexts. Recent publications introduce more dynamic pictures of women as they are and as they fit into social wholes that are no longer defined androcentrically.1 This article considers one aspect of womens identity in Mayotte, an island in the Comoro Archipelago of the western Indian Ocean. My goal is to understand the place of virgin marriage in the social construction of Mayotte womanhood. Specifically, I want to unravel what to us might appear a paradox: in Mayotte, displaying the blood of a womans

The continuous and discontinuous person: two dimensions of ethical life

Whereas early liberal thinkers developed the concept of the ethically accountable continuous forensic modern European person in contrast to what they saw as the discontinuous and hence unaccountable mimetic person, I argue that forensic and mimetic are better understood both as ideologies of personhood and as dimensions of all persons rather than as fully distinctive kinds of persons. I present an account of persons as accountable for their acts but show that this is not limited to the maximally continuous and autonomous person of liberal ideology. I review other forms of personhood encountered cross-culturally and suggest that the mimetic dimension offsets some of the problems inherent in an exclusively forensic model.

Rheumatic irony: questions of agency and self-deception as refracted through the art of living with spirits

The story of a young man from the Western Indian Ocean island of Mayotte who was prevented from a career in the French army by an illness sent by a spirit who possesses his mother inspires reflection on the nature of agency. I suggest that spirit possession and the ill nesses it produces are intrinsically ironic. The prevalence of irony implies not that we should disregard agency but that perhaps we should not take it too literally.