Research Catalog

Title

Island in the stream : an ethnographic history of Mayotte / Michael Lambek ; with a foreword by Michael Jackson.

Author

Lambek, Michael

Publication

• Toronto ; Buffalo : University of Toronto Press, [2018]
• ©2018

Items in the Library & Off-site

Details

Description

xxxi, 334 pages : map, illustrations; 23 cm.

Summary

"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 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 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."--

Series Statement

Anthropological horizons

Uniform Title

Anthropological horizons.

Alternative Title

Ethnographic history of Mayotte

Subject

• 1900-1999
• Ethnology > Mayotte > History > 20th century
• Muslims, Black > Mayotte > Social life and customs > 20th century
• Ethnology
• Manners and customs
• Mayotte > Social life and customs > 20th century
• Mayotte > History > 20th century
• Mayotte

Genre/Form

History.

Bibliography (note)

• Includes bibliographical references (pages 309-324) and index.

Contents

Part one: prelude -- Introduction: the presence of history -- Village life: kinship, community, and Islam, 1975 and after -- Founding the villages, before 1975 -- Part two: exchange, celebration, ceremony, through 1995 -- Citizenship and sociality: practising equality, 1975-1976 -- Exchange, time, and person in Mayotte: the structure and destructuring of a cultural system, 1975-1985 -- Localizing Islamic performances in Mayotte, 1975-1995 -- Part three: dancing to the music of time, through 2001 -- Choking on the Qur'an and other consuming parables, 1975-1992 -- Nuriaty, the saint, and the sultan: virtuous subject and subjective virtuoso of the postmodern colony, to 1995 -- The saint, the sea monster, and an invitation to a Dîner-dansant, to 2001 -- On the move, through 2001 -- Part four: contingent conviviality, through 2015 -- Marriage and moral horizons, 2015 -- Present horizons, 2015 -- Summation: Mariam's mirror.

Call Number

Sc E 19-408

ISBN

• 9781487503918
• 1487503911
• 9781487522995
• 1487522991

OCLC

1029664766

Author

Lambek, Michael, author.

Title

Island in the stream : an ethnographic history of Mayotte / Michael Lambek ; with a foreword by Michael Jackson.

Publisher

Toronto ; Buffalo : University of Toronto Press, [2018]

Copyright Date

©2018

Type of Content

text

Type of Medium

unmediated

Type of Carrier

volume

Series

Anthropological horizons

Anthropological horizons.

Bibliography

Includes bibliographical references (pages 309-324) and index.

Chronological Term

1900-1999

Research Call Number

Sc E 19-408