Media and Nation Building by John Postill

Author:John Postill
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2018-07-03T16:00:00+00:00

6

W RITING M EDIA

From Wet Womb to Dry Tomb

In 1984, the French anthropologist Maurice Bloch attended a conference in Eastern Madagascar on regional history. The attendants were mostly Malagasy academics and students, although there were a few foreign scholars as well. As is the usual practice in Madagascar, the papers were delivered in French, the language of the former colonial power. There was one exception. Arthur Besy, a renowned regional politician and intellectual, delivered a speech in Malagasy that lasted some two hours – well beyond the allocated fifteen minutes. The speech dealt with the origin of a local place name. It was traditional in its formal structure, ‘stuffed full of proverbs and scriptural illustrations, redolent with repetitions, certain passages recurring again and again rather like the chorus in a popular song’. Besy's academic compatriots, accustomed to more Cartesian renditions, were not overly convinced (Bloch 1998: 155). At certain passages in his speech, Besy boasted about his great accomplishments in life as a diplomat and as a man of traditional learning. He found that the work of the young Francophone scholars had its own rationale but lacked the deep historical significance of his own contribution.

According to Bloch, Malagasy culture places great significance on the distinction between everyday language and oratory (kabary), which parallels that between the young and the elderly. Young people are ‘wet’, their bones are not yet hardened, their words and deeds lack wisdom. Knowledgeable elders are different: they have developed a dry, ancestral element over the years. Their oratory prowess is proof that they have the blessing of the ancestors. The process of drying up will be completed after their deaths, when they will have ‘lost all wet individuality and will be entirely dry ancestor’ (1998: 156). Bloch sees this process as a form of lifelong possession or colonisation: individual persons are colonised by the ‘dry coral’ of the ancestors, which is all that will remain in their tombs in the form of dry bones. Besy saw his speech as the passing down of ancestral knowledge to a wet audience. He was blessing the hearers with the dry wisdom of his words.

The purpose of Bloch's story is to undermine Jack Goody's (1968, 1977, 1986) ‘autonomous’ theory of literacy (Street 1993). Goody is usually seen as the chief proponent of the ‘great divide’ model, based on the notion that orality and literacy have radically different social, institutional and cognitive effects. Although Goody has modified his stance slightly in response to his critics (Goody 1986) he is still associated with the idea of literacy as an ‘autonomous’ institution. Authors of this persuasion are said to ‘conceptualise literacy in technical terms, treating it as independent of social context, an autonomous variable whose consequences for society and cognition can be derived from its intrinsic character’ (Street 1993: 5). In essence, Goody argues that literacy is a fundamental institution in the history of mankind. It allowed the ancient Greeks to build a democratic state and the rudiments of a modern science. Pre-literate

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