Introduction
Frustrated with the changes wrought by recent democratic elections in his country, one Malagasy political cartoonist summed up the challenges in political oratory (kabary politika) for Malagasy politicians today:
Democracy is not so evident in kabary politika, because the main idea must be hidden and because of the absence of teny mihitsy (straight talk). The message must be transmitted in a somewhat mialoka (curvy) manner via metaphors and proverbs. That is true ‘fomba Malagasy’ (Malagasy custom). But after the introduction of democracy, some people thought that things should not be “hidden” anymore. Today, the politician is faced with the decision, “Will I tell it directly or not?”
For the cartoonist, a new form of government seemed to require a novel way of speaking.
Since the advent of Madagascar’s current president’s campaign and inauguration in 2002, national political speakers’ interactional engagement with new genres of political verbal performance have been increasingly transformed. Old forms of political oratory have changed, both referentially and stylistically, shifting social relations that make up highland Madagascar’s public sphere, a social field mediated by local, national, and global constituents, especially those in the United States. Following these changing political communication styles in the kabary politika of Imerina, the province where Madagascar’s capital city is situated, this article examines the linguistic and metalinguistic encodings of a new form of governance that marks its “newness” through speech styles differentiated against the older styles of past governments. As it follows local kabary politika practices in the context of the globalizing modernization of government, in particular the ways it has informed and been shaped by the country’s recent turn toward democratic neoliberalism since 1990, this article explores how this shift in political practices not only transforms governance structures but also shakes deeper epistemological understandings of language, particularly of what constitutes truth in speech. As it looks at these differences in how truth or transparency versus corruption is read in a speaker’s words, the article also examines how speaking is evaluated as indexical of the internal state of its users, and thus their potential to participate as agents of a particular political modernity.
Truth, as a culturally constituted category of experience, becomes the emergent center of disjuncture between two moral orders informing the locally experienced but globally negotiated democracy in Madagascar. This fissure emerges between two different ideas about what truth is and how language represents it. In particular, the linguistic models and worldviews of urban Malagasy political leaders and their American counterparts differ in how styles of speaking are read as “transparent” or “corrupt.” This tailored binary organizes imported American democratic ideals and governance reform practices in Madagascar today. This clash of beliefs is worked out in kabary and talk about kabary in new oratorical styles.
Attentive to kabary practice at the level of national politics, this study focuses on the trail-blazing efforts by Madagascar’s current president, Marc Ravalomanana, to change the moral and rhetorical landscape. Through recontextualizations of prior styles of kabary and the adoption of new styles, the president has pitted traditional kabary against development and progress, othering it and its speakers as corrupt. Prior presidential styles of kabary have been quite successfully framed as signaling some disposition and tendency toward corruption, while new styles – such as that of President Ravalomanana – presage a future moral order of truth in government, the only path to modern development and progress. Efforts by the president and his political cohort to reframe kabary as “corrupt” while at the same time performing kabary in a style that is actively metalinguistically contextualized as “transparent” have cascaded through the ranks of political elites and into public opinion. The effect has been a considerable control over the linguistic code of how “truth” is represented in formal political speech contexts.Footnote 1
Examining some of the perlocutionary effects of kabary variants at play in the contemporary political landscape, this article engages in a fine-grained analysis of three shifts in the oratory of urban Madagascar – syntactic, register, and contextual shifts – each of which has been deployed to index a rhetorical move toward what is seen as a moral speech of truthfulness. Such claims to truth, or transparency in speech, lie at the center of a fundamental movement of political modernity in which the state assumes the role of moral authority in the drive toward modernity (Kaviraj Reference Kaviraj2005, Mitchell Reference Mitchell1991). This “argument of images” (Fernandez Reference Fernandez1991) between new and old styles of kabary politika mediates between competing linguistic markets to field broader issues of social change and the role of language in the production and negotiation of social relations, especially those burgeoning at fluid boundaries between state and civil society (Beeman Reference Beeman1986, Caton Reference Caton1990, Comaroff & Comaroff Reference Comaroff and Comaroff1999). As these claims are institutionalized through practice, they reorganize the rhetorical modes of a polity and play a role in shaping local democratic structure and practice. In turn, they shift the production of particular publics, public opinion, and the ways and extent to which people may participate in political process. To question then how these particular grammatical categories, registers, and contexts are believed to indexically convey a moral order of truth or corruption brings such shifting modes of political kabary practice into substantive and revealing contact with the role of language in mediating broader issues of political and social change in contemporary Madagascar.
Though the study brings the issue of meaning and language change into a longitudinal discussion about language and political organization within linguistic anthropology, this is certainly not the first time this critical practice of oratory has been discussed as a model for mediating social and political relations. Kabary studies have informed many inquiries into the social and productive role of political oratory and rhetoric in Africa, the Indian Ocean, and as far as the Pacific. Elinor Ochs and Maurice Bloch’s work in Madagascar over 30 years ago brought kabary to the forefront of anthropological studies of the role of oratory and rhetoric in social and political organization (Bloch Reference Bloch1971, Reference Bloch1975; Ochs Reference Ochs1975). In their linguistic ethnographies of highland Madagascar, however, both scholars spoke of a kabary politika that is very different from what we witness today. Their focus was on kabary politika at local village-council levels of government in the highlands of Madagascar, Imerina, just after independence in 1960. Building upon Bloch and Ochs’s work as well as that of other scholars of Austronesian oratory and rhetoric whose work has been greatly informed by these earlier studies (Duranti Reference Duranti, Brenneis and Myers1984, Reference Duranti1994; Brenneis & Myers Reference Brenneis and Myers1984; Rosaldo Reference Rosaldo1980, Reference Rosaldo1984), this article provides a contemporary account of the productive and social role of oratory in political process, this time at the level of national politics – through the words of Madagascar’s president and the National Assembly – and in the context of a political climate of globalization.
A Political History of Kabary Politika
Any historiography of highlands Madagascar is one that writes of language as a powerful and naturalizing instrument of state power and also as the object of revolutionary nationalist ideology and identity. Implicated in this history is the role of kabary, especially its political form, kabary politika. The form has been common since the first Merina Kingdom of the q8th century and is still the norm for state political oratory today. During French colonial administration (1895–1960), however, kabary was prohibited in public and defanged of its political salience. Following independence, kabary politika found a place in the public sphere again just as its Malagasy speakers did, but not without some struggle. Political unrest in the 1970s led former President Didier Ratsiraka to follow his global socialist allies and censor most public media, prohibiting the performance of kabary apart from his own. Economic bailouts required in the late 1980s to redress Ratsiraka’s failed “all-out investment” initiative, however, ushered in privatization and economic liberalization adjustment policies from Western countries and the International Monetary Fund. These shifts pressured the president to loosen state control of the press and to liberalize the economy in ways that allowed for greater ease in direct transactions across and beyond the island. With greater freedom for a once-quelled press, an end to the state monopoly of radio and television, and the establishment of private broadcasting stations, the 1990s witnessed a large consensus among Malagasy in favor of democratization and continued liberalization of the economy. Even as a former mayor of the capital, Marc Ravalomanana, took office as president in 2002 and shook up and changed the flow of communication between his administration and the polity, traditional varieties of kabary politika remained the state form of address. Despite the struggle among variants in style, kabary continues to serve as the primary context of argument in government matters at the regional and national levels.
Kabary’s roots in channeling the wisdom of Malagasy ancestors and the cunning poetics of its delivery give the form its authority and also its political edge. But this is also, perhaps, what has threatened kabary politika’s place as a political tool throughout recent history. Kabary politika is an extremely rich form of political communication composed of statements indirectly expressed through proverbs, riddles, and poetry, expressed in the passive voice and softened with markers of verbal politeness. Kabary authors, sometimes acting also as speakers or mpikabary, present the traditional order of greetings and honorifics, expressions of respect and apology, and arrangements of proverbs (ohabolana) and poetry (hainteny) in a winding of words and tropes, quite often for hours. The performance is so ornamented in the mpikabary’s cautious and calibrated deployment of literary features that he (or certainly often, she) may avoid speaking directly through referential content about any single point in the kabary itself. The poet, anthropologist, and former political leader Elie Rajaonarison explains what it means to speak in this “curvy”, or mioloka, manner:
The mpikabary convinces people by means of a flourish of poetic expression and proverbs. Ordinary speaking or a simple speech is not enough, because it is not really the message that people listen to but the way that message is passed on. The mpikabary cannot speak anything directly, like ‘this is the way it is!’ for example. People will feel assaulted and often will not understand you. You must break up your words, which is the reason kabary exists. You know, if you are direct, there is no need for kabary!
Just as Yemeni tribesmen summoning the peaks of Yemen (as a call to God) place virtue in the controlled and subtle delivery of oral poetry and a “premium on the ability to allude to truth rather than state it baldly” (Caton Reference Caton1990:36), the Malagasy audience of a kabary associates the symbolic power of the speaker with his knack for indirect persuasion over direct demand.
The composition and delivery of kabary’s literary constituents are all meant less to convey “a point,” as American rhetorical standards claim to be the goal in oratory, and more to gain a rhetorical advantage by conveying to the audience a multiply indexical image, one in particular that both points out the speaker’s thought process and also solicits the ruminations of his own audience beyond the speech. Many speakers and auditors from other oratorical traditions, such as that of the United States, misinterpret this dialogical characteristic in kabary, often judging a speech to be about nothing at all (Harman Reference Harman2002). As a key interlocutor, Mahaleo, explains, an orator presents a substantive and rhetorically satisfying performance such that the audience remains interested and convinced of a larger idea “on their own accord” without explicitly being told to do so through the referential content. The motivation for delivering form over content comes from a joint understanding that a speaker should “say words which make people think and not impose one’s own ideas of truth,” Mahaleo explains. Performing a kabary is a cooperative task in the way Rakazy, my kabary instructor in the field, explains through the proverb, “There cannot be honey without the obligation of the hive; with talk, it is not my obligation, but that of me and you (pl.).” Additionally, the collaborative and dialogical experience of the kabary for its speaker and audience persists beyond the event itself. Commenting again on the durability of kabary beyond the speaker and event, the poet Elie assures any good student of kabary, “After a good kabary, people will discuss it – in the market, at home, in the newspapers – to deepen the picture in question. If a kabary doesn’t deepen through discussion, it’s not right; a good kabary, you know, touches the conscience, touches the mind.” Duranti’s explanation of the Samoan fono echoes Elie’s description of meaning-making in Malagasy kabary: “It follows a hermeneutic process in which ‘any form of understanding is an activity which cannot consist simply in the reconstruction of the sender’s original intentions and his cultural milieu, but must also consist in a constant negotiation between past and present, sender and receiver, history and consciousness” (Duranti Reference Duranti, Brenneis and Myers1984:46).
In recent years, most notably since the installment of many Western economic programs in the country’s national development plan, this indirect style of political rhetoric has been challenged by projects importing democracy and “transparent” governance programs, through what are classified as civil society education projects and democracy and governance (D&G) programs. Programs such as these and other binational initiatives between the Western nations and Madagascar frequently characterize the charismatic flourish of kabary political speakers as an example of corruption, an interpretation firmly rooted in larger discourses regarding the failures of the post-colonial state.
Clashing Language Ideologies and the Failure of the Postcolonial State
When at a meeting with Vries, a project-lead for an international development program in Antananarivo dedicated to building “civil society,” I mentioned the place for the rich oratory of kabary politika in shaping political process; I suggested that because of the spirit of coauthorship kabary contexts are thought to contain, this genre might actually allow people to participate in a representative democracy. Vries interpreted the flow and logic of my ideas abruptly: “That’s what you think.” She went on:
But that is not how it is. Kabary politika may be traditional ritual but it has no place in politics today. It is not direct and the way that politicians can hide behind all of those proverbs does nothing but perpetuate corruption, which is what the current president and we are working against here in order to forward a more democratic government.
Through a litany of cautionary tales about the dangers of falling for exotic traditionalisms that could be used to subjugate people and limit their potential to pursue national progress through real development, Vries cast aside my sophomoric notions of kabary’s role. She explained how this country was experiencing real change under its new president, Marc Ravalomanana, who refused to engage in kabary politika in the name of speaking with what she termed “absolute transparency.” He was leading Madagascar toward democracy by example, she said, by speaking exactly in the way he acts, “directly and transparently.” The relative opacity of kabary literary elements, to Vries and others of the D&G community, meant that the meaning of the text itself was also obscure (Brenneis & Myers Reference Brenneis and Myers1984:15).
A fairly brash moral code informs neoliberal ventures into exporting democracy and anti-corruption governance measures from the Unites States. This moral order undergirds the development of certain social institutions characterizing American modernity – the market economy, the public sphere, and even political rhetoric and electoral politics – and it informs how these institutions are exported and rooted in postcolonial nations and other “transitioning democracies.” This moral order informs the economic and political philosophy of neoliberalism to banish all obstacles and barriers to transactions between consumers and their choices in the material world – whether of a product or of a presidential candidate. Such moral-cum-political obligations to structure political process as “transparent” or directly apprehended “truth” extend even to the site of oratory.
Literalism, driven by a sense of logical truth as moral truth, found its foothold in the ideologies of early democracy in the United States through its public’s distrust of mysterious language or that which required more than a literal understanding of the word. Consider, for example, that Thomas Jefferson balked at the theatricality of oratory and instead argued for the “the language of truth …divested of those expressions of servility, to strip away all rhetorical ornament, to remove affectation” (Fliegelman Reference Fliegelman1993:114). Such conflation of semantic logic with moral order prepared the ground for a national moral order that persists in North America today (Marsden Reference Marsden2006:15).
Seeking truth in the form of a “referential cleanliness,” as it seems Vries and others informed by the D&G reform movement inadvertently do, defends that style of “language that gives … access to the unvarnished, non-euphemistic ‘scientific-objective’ as it were, Truth” and protects language from outwitting its users, “rendering us unwilling but helpless sorcerer’s apprentices awash in misguided thought” (Silverstein Reference Silverstein, Brenneis and Macaulay1998a: 292–93). In this world that privileges referential meaning as the tie to “true” reality, rather than dialogic action to social meaning, pretty prose was just too corrupt, a verbal art incompatible with current politics (Rosaldo Reference Rosaldo1984:159).
This ideology informing political communicative interaction is part of a major issue in postcolonial governance reform, the problem of corruption, and how governments combat it (Hasty Reference Hasty2005, Paley Reference Paley2001). Within the discourses of international development in which democracy is its handmaiden, “transparency” and “corruption” have become central terms for characterizing the failure of developing nations to progress. As the anthropologist Jennifer Hasty (Reference Hasty2005:271) argues:
Whereas the global institutions and discourses of development [once] exhorted less privileged nations to work hard and control their populations and consumption habits to become prosperous, now the widespread failure of development is explained through the criminalizing and pathologizing notion of corruption.
The demonization of the underdeveloped world in discourses of corruption has gained an institutional foothold in international development projects and foreign initiatives to create a “global apparatus of anticorruption.” Conversely, “transparency has become nearly synonymous with good governance” (Hasty Reference Hasty2005:271; Sanders & West Reference Sanders and West2003:1). To combat this plague of assumed inherent corruption, the Madagascar government in 2002 enacted large-scale governance reform measures, headquartered in the Justice Ministry’s new Superior Council for the Fight Against Corruption, FAMAK (Filankevitra ambony momba ny ady amin’ny kolikoly). This institutional move was made at the behest of the U.S. government. As a part of its policy to spread “democracy,” the United States. released monetary aid and debt forgiveness upon completion of an anticorruption charter, which U.S. embassy and congressional representatives coauthored with the Malagasy government in 2003. Such collaboration suggested that literal guidance might preclude “the inevitable opportunity for corruption to sneak in” (personal communication with U.S. embassy officials, October 2003). Greater international presence in anti-corruption oversight began shortly thereafter with the creation of a new independent bureau, BIANCO, the Independent Bureau Fighting against Corruption (Birao mahaleotena iadiana amin’ny kolikoly).
This straddling of transnational political and economic spheres has trickled down even to provincial politics. “Transparency” is the new buzzword on the street, in the daily cartoons, on the campaign trail, and in the halls of the national assemblies. Global circulation of this critique in the ongoing endeavor toward modernity and new truth in governance has recoded both the way governments are run and how leaders speak to and about their country. Under this rubric of anti-corruption discourse, kabary politika has become implicated in the failure of Madagascar’s development. As Michelle Rosaldo found with Ilongot oratorical performances, kabary, “once beautiful,” was now “seen as conducive to discord” (1984:132). Any speaker of traditional kabary politika who does not at least speak to this issue that kabary’s style allows its speaker to “hide behind all of those proverbs” is vulnerable to traps from opponents that corner him as a liar (mpandainga), his words as indexical of institutionalized corruption.
However, most Malagasy auditors in the urban highlands of this study make it quite clear that kabary is, in fact, exemplary of transparency and not corruption. This claim comes from the belief that listeners can actually witness the speaker’s internal processes of thought and creativity through the structure of kabary. To witness this path of thought rather than its final outcome is directly to apprehend truth in its organic form. Unlike the American style of rhetoric full of sound bites where the process of production is entirely disguised, the journey through the winding structure of proverbs, riddles, and poetry allows a kabary audience to witness and then follow the path of thought and reasoning of the orator, rather than hear a manifestation of his finished thought process. According to this point of view that builds kabary more as a dialogical event between speakers and listeners, it is the desired format for witnessing how a politician may negotiate and decide matters publicly in the Assembly, as well as behind closed doors, offstage.
In this contest between what language is and does, this pitfall for any performer of “old style” kabary has set at odds ideas about the place of Malagasy oral tradition in the path to modernity. This, in turn, has prompted a shift in the genre’s logical structure – syntactically, in regard to register, and through contextual reframing enacted through arguments about how one’s speech represents truth versus corruption. As kabary politika speakers shift in their styles to meet these challenges, the form finds new ground as a vernacular means for indexing one’s proximity to the tour de force of modernity at present in the country: transparent democracy. No better example of this can be found than in the movement caught up in the oratorical style of the Malagasy national president, Marc Ravalomanana.
Exporting (Moral) Democracy: the Ravalomanana Campaign of 2002
In 2001, the mayor of Madagascar’s capital city Antananarivo, Marc Ravalomanana, decided to run for the country’s presidency. He enlisted the help of a longtime friend and colleague, the former mayor of Baltimore, Maryland, Kurt Schmoke, to pull together a campaign that would surely take him to victory. Ravalomanana wanted an “American-style” campaign. These two mayors became political allies and friends when Ravalomanana visited the United States for a World Bank conference some years before. At that time, Mayor Ravalomanana requested a meeting with U.S. city mayors to learn best practices for running a large city. His consultation with mayors like Richard Daley of Chicago, Rudolph Giuliani of New York, and Anthony Williams of Washington, D.C. gave order to Ravalomanana’s “crime and grime” approach to revitalizing Madagascar’s capital city. Ravalomanana’s personal history in many ways follows the popular political narrative of the “American dream.” He rose from rags to riches, selling yogurt from the back of his bicycle and ultimately building his business into a national conglomerate, Tiko. Fortified by his strong religious faith and his leadership role in the major Protestant denomination, FJKM (Fiongonana Jesosy Kristy i’Madagasikara), Ravalomanana believed his own biography of material and spiritual progress could be the biography of the entire nation.
With the news that Antananarivo’s mayor was running for president, possibly to unseat Didier Ratsiraka, who had been in power for over 25 years, his American advisor Schmoke enlisted the aid of his former Democratic National Committee campaign manager to pull together a campaign for Ravalomanana. From platform to strategy and vision, even to the speeches and gimmicks of hats, buttons, bumper stickers, and posters, the campaign materials were designed with all the glitz and glamour of a slick American campaign.
Leading up to the election, U.S. political strategists and campaign advisors brought in by Schmoke, their Malagasy counterparts, and the candidate huddled in hotel rooms in the capital for nights on end, writing speeches and talking about the art of the campaign speech. This new set of contents and the American worldview informing this candidacy and the government meant also that speeches needed new forms of expression (Duranti Reference Duranti1994:105). The candidate and advisers strategized how Ravalomanana could not only communicate his campaign platform but also seat that message in an electable personality – one of a modern African president. In contrast to the established formality of the kabary style and context, the American campaign strategists argued that Ravalomanana should speak to the rural public in modest casual attire rather than the traditional suit and tie; he should offer a smile rather than a stern look, and shake hands and make eye contact with the public rather than maintain the assumed respectable distance between leaders and the public. They encouraged him to go by the more personable “MARC Ravalomanana” as opposed to “RAVALOMANANA Marc” (family name, given name).Footnote 2 Alongside these efforts to present the candidate as more directly perceivable to the polity, a “real person,” they urged him to speak with a single, direct message rather than detailed kabary. To the Americans, kabary contributed to the candidate’s inaccessibility; it did not reflect a modern presidential image. In this, their own point of view corroborates Vries’s point that kabary “is not direct and the way that politicians can hide behind all of those proverbs does nothing but perpetuate corruption.” Operationalized, the new style of speaking incorporated sound bites and involved speaking in short, active statements without the proverbs and poetry of “ideas” characteristic of kabary. It meant speaking about how the candidate himself planned to act as opposed to cloaking his action in a flourish of words.
Empirically, Ravalomanana’s own kabary speech style exemplifies these shifts in speech in three distinct ways that are socially indexically salient: (i) syntactically, that is, shifting from the common, unmarked style of voicing in Malagasy, which is the passive, to the active agent-centered voice associated with the unmarked case in English and other Western European languages; (ii) with respect to register, primarily code shifts from the common weave of proverbs to what may be defined as the sound bites of the “international development” register; and (iii) contextual shifts such as elision of the ritual indexes of respect, as well as recalibrating this otherwise highly formalized context of the speech event through talk about the context of the form within the form itself. Each shift of the Ravalomanana variety is detailed in the following sections.
Enregisterment through Syntactic Fashions of Speaking
Syntactic variations in the “American” style in which Ravalomanana has been apprenticing, which deviate from prior genres of kabary politika contexts, are of three distinct types. First, the president’s speech style reflects frequent use of the agent-centered first person nominative, Izaho. This nominative is used to construct subject-verb-object or SVO case constructions (SVO is the marked case in Malagasy). Second, he uses a high incidence of such active-voice agent-oriented constructions of SVO along with agent-oriented predicative phrases, and active imperatives. Last, Ravalomanana has a lack of grammatically referential indices of verbal politeness, phatics that soften the illocutionary force of kabary politika. This shift in speaking marks not just a mere style variation on the part of the president but the “enregisterment” of a type of syntactic repertoire that has become differentiable against other political speakers and socially recognized as the performance of a certain type of speaker and context (Agha Reference Agha2005, Goffman Reference Goffman1959).
As stylistic innovation is often understood through real-time variation comparisons, this article considers speech excerpts from two speakers, President Ravalomanana and the then president of the National Assembly, Jean Lahiniriko. These excerpts are culled from a single performance by the two speakers at the State of the Union address in 2004.Footnote 3 It is significant to note that Jean Lahiniriko’s kabary followed President Ravalomanana’s, and many journalists and political analysts on television and radio allege it served as a form of social translation for the president’s speech. Ravalomanana’s marked register was demystified to an audience accustomed to prior styles when this register of a prior genre was put alongside his new variation. In this case, the Assembly president’s “traditional” kabary was delivered as an entertaining and didactic translation for Ravalomanana’s and made to soften the blow of the national president’s harsh and seemingly confrontational speech about development. The excerpts chosen align according to this relationship of translation from one style into the other.
As the first element of syntactic comparison, consider Ravalomanana’s frequent voicing in the marked active voice agent-centered subject-verb-object (SVO) construction against his National Assembly director’s style of the unmarked voice:
(1) Ravalomanana: Izahono faly mahita daholo….
[marked 1st person active voice SVO]
It is I who is happy to see you all….
Izahono miasa. Izaho no mankany lalana any ‘fampandrosoana’.
[marked 1st person active voice SVO]
It is I who works. It is I who takes the road toward development.
Lahiniriko: Tompkolahy sy Tompkovavy. Miala tsiny ary aho raha handray ny fitenenana fa mijery anareo feno haja sy mianjaika ka mahatsiaro tena fa
salsala toa kotrolahy, tsy andriana.
[unmarked 1st active voice VOS]
Ladies and gentlemen, I am sorry to take the floor. Seeing you respectful and smart, I feel like I am meddling like a kotrolahy, a man of low station, not as an andriana, a man of the highest social station.
Both the active verb-object-subject (VOS), in which elision of the agent-subject at the end of the sentence is quite common in Malagasy, and passive voice is unmarked in Malagasy formal and informal discourse. That is, both are commonly used and considered the norm for most spoken interactions, whereas the agent-centered active SVO, common and unmarked in English, is the marked case in Malagasy. Examples of these unmarked cases are apparent in Lahiniriko’s speech excerpt. In Ravalomanana’s speeches, however, there is almost no occurrence of these unmarked constructions unless the verb can only be voiced in this way. Instead, Ravalomanana speaks most often in the marked agent-centered first person nominative, which requires SVO construction. The difference between the two active constructions, VOS and SVO, may be glossed in English as “I work” versus “It is I who works”.
In a speech community where VOS and passive constructions are unmarked, agent-centered active voice syntactic constructions of SVO are grammatically correct in Malagasy; however, they can be read as too direct. This interactional meaning of directness is more closely associated with speech outside the context of the highly formalized genre of kabary politika, namely in contexts involving the speech of children or Westerners: “Directness is associated with the ways of children,” the ways of Western speakers, “and with things contrary to tradition” (Ochs Reference Ochs, Brenneis and Macaulay1996:104).
First person predicative statements in an SVO construction imply an obligatory focus on the agent referent (i.e., agent-centered active first person). Again, though grammatically correct and necessary in some contexts, excessive use of agent-centered active voice in propositional and imperative statements in kabary is marked, and its effect on the aesthetic of the kabary experience does not go unnoticed. For example, political cartoons in urban Imerina iconically essentialize the president through caricatures that embody excessive use of agent-centered active voicing. These embodiments have the effect of representing a recognizable stereotype: an irascibly egotistical, headstrong, and unabashed self-promoter.
Aside from showing high incidence of passive constructions, Lahiniriko’s excerpts show markers of politeness, verbal softeners that contrast with the aesthetic of bluntness that active declaratives convey:
(2) Lahiniriko: Izahay ato amin’ny Antenimieram-pirenena moa dia manan’ila toa zaram- pamaky, ka sady vahoaka no fanjakana.
[verbal softener]
We from the Assembly have two sides like a cleaver. We are at the same time the authority and the people.
While Lahiniriko frequently uses this register of deference and politeness, Ravalomanana does not at all. Lahiniriko uses the term moa, a phatic carrying no semantic meaning, but one that carries an indexical meaning marking the speaker’s attempt to soften the illocutionary force of his own words. In local models of polite speech, markers of politeness can also index to the speaker’s audience his own awareness of how his words may be perceived and then reported by others. In this case, Lahiniriko uses this style because “a directive which is too explicit may affront the person directed” (Ochs Reference Ochs, Brenneis and Macaulay1996:104). The ease with which users are aware of this syntactic and lexical machinery of politeness may be higher when phatics such as moa, through their quite literal participation in the syntax, increase the ideological evaluations of the speaker and his words (Silverstein Reference Silverstein and Duranti2001:399).
Though the limits of awareness of our own speech do restrict most conscious descriptions of syntactic patterns as intentional rhetorical tactics, in this case the effect of syntactic styles or any variation on the norm is projected onto ideology-driven metalinguistic evaluations of the president’s speaking aesthetic (Silverstein Reference Silverstein and Duranti2001:399). When his syntactic style is different from the norm, as in the following example, auditors may not be able to point out that syntactic shift, but they certainly feel the shift, especially when the statements are imperatives:
Ravalomanana: Raha misy ny tokony hatao, dia ataovy fa aza miandry an’izatsy na izaroa.
[active imperative]
If there is something that should be done, don’t wait, just do it and don’t wait for other.
Koa aza misalasala ry Tompon’draikatra ny manaiky ny vahoaka madinika.
[active imperative]
Those responsible for government, do not hesitate to approach the common people.
Ravalomanana: Aza matahotra fa mino fotsiny ihany!Tsy ny vola akory no tsy misy fa ny handaniana azy no manahirana.
[Active imperative, also reported speech from the Gospel of Mark 5:7]
Have no fear, just believe in me! It is not money that we haven’t but the matter is how to spend it.
Read against his propensity to use the agent-centered active voice (SVO), any occasional and unremarkable use of the active imperative by the president is now thrown into relief and instituted as iconic of his speech. Consider his daily declaration of one imperative in particular: Aza matahotra fa mino fotsiny ihany ‘Have no fear, just believe in me’. This is reported speech of the word of God recorded in the Gospel of Mark, frequently reanimated as an active imperative refrain by Marc the president. The scriptural passage also serves as the motto for this born-again Christian’s business conglomerate, Tiko, and is emblazoned on all sides of his company vehicles. Again, syntax becomes a matter of register. The common use of this imperative refrain by the president, along with his other scriptural references and a style indexical of the Protestant sermonic tradition, has stimulated many a marketplace and dinner conversation about the egotism and assumed messianic self-identification of the country’s leader.
The cognitive and semiotic processes linking Whorf’s (Reference Whorf1956) “fashions of speaking” with patterned thought follows this scheme: Folk ideas of person and social action are based on both ideological reasoning and gut feelings about what sounds “right” and what sounds “wrong,” a semiotic process motivated even at the level of syntax. In this evaluation, what might well be reproduced below the speaker’s threshold of ideological awareness is challenged from above the threshold of awareness, consciously in the evaluative purview of his audience (Hill & Mannheim Reference Hill and Mannheim1992). As the following sections clarify, such indexical constituents of syntactic fashions of speaking that tie speaking to character compound the ways in which other features of speech – aspects of register and context – play a part in rationales for what constitutes the moral truth of persons and their words.
Apples and Oranges: Variants in Kabary Registers
Figurative idioms of proverbs, metaphors, and poetry, which are indexically presupposing of the kabary register (i.e., if you hear them in the context of a particular public, you know you are hearing a kabary), are replaced with simplified lexical items often termed “sound bites” common in American generic forms of political oratory and international development. Alluding to the subject of government corruption, the General Assembly president, Jean Lahiniriko, likened the country’s management to stolen oranges from a market: “It has been a long time since the country’s management has not been taken as if it were like oranges at the market grabbed by a thief who avoids thrown stones of a shopkeeper, to no avail.” This was a proverbial allusion to what Lahiniriko sees as corrupt governments’ impediment to development: “This mentality was among the reasons for our non-development. We will bring home what is good from abroad. … These are among my aims with the 3-P or Public-Private-Partnership.” Ravalomanana spoke the 3-P as three-p, and Public-Private-Partnership in English, perhaps a signal that development not only comes through direct speech styles but also only comes in English.
Building from this example, consider Marc Ravalomanana’s April 18, 2005 acceptance speech for a poverty-reduction grant awarded by the U.S. government’s Millennium Challenge Corporation (MCC) at the State Department in Washington, D.C. Madagascar was the first grant recipient of this program, designed to fund leaders identified as having strong promise for instituting economic and government reform in their home countries. Ravalomanana’s acceptance speech did not mirror the kabary style of his own National Assembly president, Jean Lahiriniko; rather, he delivered this speech much as he would in his own country, in the register that may be associated with the international development community – what Sanders & West 2005 have termed “global-speak.” In fact, his style of speech was strikingly similar to that of the MCC director, Paul Applegarth, and the U.S. Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice, who both spoke that day. Note the common use of poetic triads, acronyms, and key lexical items (marked in bold), ubiquitous in American political rhetoric, in the following excerpt from Ravalomanana’s speech:
(4) This [award] is recognition of our effort in good governance, economic reform and social welfare. Indeed, good governance is my highest priority. Good governance is the key to everything else. Fighting corruption, enforcing state accountability, creating transparency, improving service delivery and the efficiency of justice system, these are the basis of trust and security. ... Economic reform is equally important. We have a very clear roadmap on how to implement this vision. ... Security and financing for farmers and SMEsFootnote 4, new opportunities to create added value. The MCA compact will assist us in realizing our vision. The approach of the MCC is also in line with our philosophy of country ownership … the first to deliver results … a new model for economic development in Africa … The road ahead is not easy, but we will rise to the challenge.
Director Applegarth’s closing remarks, by comparison, serve well to index the president’s “global speak.” Indeed, Ravalomanana’s register was so assimilated to the rhetorical style of the Americans that when he accidentally left his speech transcript on the podium, Applegarth suggested that instead of providing his own closing remarks, he would just reread the president’s speech: “‘Maybe I’ll reread yours. I think it’s better than mine.’ (Laughter.)”
Following the register of American political rhetoric, Ravalomanana’s speech sent a rather clear message to the donor country, the United States: He is speaking their language, quite literally. This “corporatized register … fashioned along the lines of modern advertising copy” wields considerable power in holding the attention of an international development and governance audience (Silverstein Reference Silverstein2003:116). The more Ravalomanana talks in this manner and talks about not talking in a way that facilitates corruption, another loan is forgiven, another grant is awarded, and international governance monitors turn away from scrutinizing potentially corrupt reform measures.
To better gauge how these economic and administrative transnational alliances are negotiated locally through continual realignments within the communicative act of kabary oratory itself, consider the pragmatics of these real-time contextual shifts. These shifts involve changing the frame of the oratorical event, either through upsetting what is presupposed as an essential marker to the event, or through talk about oratory within the oratorical performance itself.
Talk about Talk: Reframing Kabary Contextual Variants
Principles of power and authority shaping kabary politika’s very formal context are iconically reflected in the embodiment of the candidate and how his audience reacts to that material, real-time contextualizing act. For example, the actual way a candidate presents his own body during a speech reflects how he and his audience understand power and authority. In highlands Madagascar, the traditional mpikabary generally maintains a physical and symbolic distance from the audience. As a politician, the mpikabary is certainly not known to smile much, especially in photos. He does not make eye contact, or dress in less than his Sunday best even if his own audiences might. His audience legitimates this formal distance by remaining silent and maintaining a certain intersubjective distance without taking additional interactional cues from the speaker to do so.
This style of interaction with the audience differs remarkably from that of American politicians, who, in their stump speeches and town hall meetings, are usually less formal and certainly less distant. Ravalomanana, the otherwise impeccably dressed leader who finally agreed to smile for his campaign poster and wear flannel shirts and jeans in rural areas and a suit in urban centers, built a campaign around this American informal style, manifest in clothing style. This more populist approach was discursively deployed in the campaign to create an image that consequentially embodied “the very essence, the principle, the ‘right stuff’ to hold together that one message” (Silverstein Reference Silverstein2003:24), the message of the modern man, the man who was not afraid to be direct, even in direct contact with his own people. During his oratorical performances Ravalomanana deftly recalibrates this physical and symbolic contextual distance between speaker and auditor through metanarratives, or talk about the context of the form within the form itself. This shift from talking in kabary to talking about some aspect of kabary constitutes a frame break, notably in the ways speakers and audiences experience those qualities and characteristics distinctive of kabary politika performance. In short, as Ravalomanana breaks this contextual frame, he in turn reshapes the experience of the political event for his audiences and their relationship with him as their leader (Goffman Reference Goffman1986).
Such frame breaks were evident in Ravalomanana’s 2004 commemoration address of the Malagasy insurrection against colonialism on March 29, 1947. Ravalomanana broke the frame otherwise presupposed in this physical orientation between speaker and audience in his kabary when stating to veterans of the insurrection, “You down there, come up here because you are to be honored and I will go down there as I am to be thankful for your work.” During the campaign in 2001, he further upset the contextual conventions of the code of presidential kabary by offering his cell phone number to members of the crowd, shaking hands with people across the audience, and unabashedly keeping the mud on his shoes – all the while explaining in his speech that these were the things that really spoke the truth about him as a transparent, action-oriented presidential candidate, not one who just gives kabary full of empty promises. Quite often, he literally overstated this to emphasize his awareness of his own recalibrated stance, usually with the assurance, “I am not going to give a kabary, because I am about action, about business. One-two-three.”
By speaking about the contextual organization of kabary governing the here-and-now performance, the president recalibrates the otherwise presupposed context of speech metonymic of the relationship between the state and the people. Shifting the speaker’s positional identity from distant to proximal and breaking the formalized experience between speaker and audience productively indexes Ravalomanana’s intentions to move away from broken promises and corruption and toward “transparency” and “real action.”
Layering talk about talk shifts the otherwise formal context between kabary speakers and listeners, which, in turn, alters the source of power in political speech. By breaking the conventional flow of the kabary code, the speaker disrupts the presumed ideal of restraint and shifts the grounds on which his audience evaluates his kabary. This reframing serves as a political strategy of power that equips the speaker with the authority of certain linguistic resources, which set the barometer of truth and standards for participating in political process. The metalinguistic arguments inside Ravalomanana’s own speeches about what constitutes appropriate speech have become, themselves, devices of that authority. By inhabiting the speaking role of the kabary orator, which he then disrupts, he is continually recast as an irrefutable symbol of progress and development, now and whenever he speaks again.
Controlling Access and Political Participation Through Linguistic Codes of Truth
In addition to shaping ideas about how speech itself works, the organizing mechanism of syntactic fashions of speaking, register variants, and contextual shifts all indexically presuppose and contribute to an ever-growing roster in public debate of ideas and opinions about contrasting speech styles and the moral quality of their speakers. Within Imerina’s public institutions where the discourse of neoliberal democracy and governance circulates, oratorical speech styles that were once considered indexical of a communal process toward meaning-making (as the kabary instructor Rakazy stated earlier, “with talk, it is not my obligation, but that of me and you”) are now considered representative of a speaker’s internal moral nature, character, and mental capacity – what speakers in urban Imerina refer to as ‘character’ (fanahy) and ‘mental capacity’ (toe-tsaina). Communication as an “exchange of individual intentions through a particular code” goes against the urban highlands’ “interactively oriented” approach to language, which focuses an evaluation of linguistic meaning not on the speaker’s intentions as much as on “the responsibility speakers must assume for the state of affairs created by their words” (Duranti Reference Duranti, Brenneis and Myers1984:24). As the state of such affairs is framed as transparent or corrupt, the speaker becomes implicated in practices deemed moral or immoral. In this semiotic process, auditors naturalize grammatical patterns, registers, and contexts of speaking so that when one speaks in a certain way, he is immediately assumed to be a certain way. Such evaluations of social identity and modes of representation have the material consequence of affecting speakers’ access and agentive ability to participate in politics as public figures, as their own agency is predicated on how their moral state and mental capacity are judged. In the case of shifting toward a more modern kabary politika, ideologies about language and language users align styles and personae with modern potential or traditional stigma. Such judgments then extend to iconicize group identities associated with those styles of speaking. “Once the belief in the communicative aesthetic or other superiority of such a standard … is established,” Susan Gal notes, “other varieties are seen as inferior … and speakers are ideologically constituted as subordinate groups based on cultural, cognitive, or aesthetic inadequacy of their speech” (1998:419).
In the comparison between “traditional” versus “modern” oratorical styles, styles of the Ravalomanana variety vie with prior variants as semantic testimony to one’s agentive capacity to lead a nation toward development. Within arguments informed by such modernity discourse, Ravalomanana’s voicing in agent-centered active constructions indexes his agentive potential and becomes metonymic of direct speech, that acta non verba mantra of modernity, and the no-holds-barred approach of neoliberal development. His style also points to a directness that is ideologically oriented toward transparency and action. And this new version of state communication contrasts with traditional kabary’s common reputation for indirectness associated with its stylistic features, some of which are syntactic. Such perceptions of agentive capacity may be mapped denotationally to the presence of active and agent-centered semantic operators, but their social meaning comes as such fashions of speaking are recontextualized as grammatical tropes of social agency and transparency. The president’s register of international development-speak boosts this view, as does his reframing of the context including the political elite speaker and his audience. As Ravalomanana might put it, “I am a man of action. I want to see results instead of reports. I am not one to stand here and make big speeches.”Footnote 5 Following this Western imported rationale in which metapragmatic description assimilates to reference or rides along referential structure (Silverstein Reference Silverstein and Duranti2001:401), when words are “up front,” so too is the person.
Shifts in syntactic fashions of speaking, variation in the kabary register, and frame breaks that recontextualize the relationship between speaker and auditor all shape the gut aesthetic that pulls together claims aligning ways of speaking with being truthful or transparent, versus a propensity to be corrupt. Foucault tells us that “resemblance imposes adjacencies that in turn guarantee further resemblances” (1994:18). As the Malagasy proverb corroborates, Izay vandana dia kary! ‘Once you have the appearance of a wild cat, you are one’. The entry and agentive participation in this social field of political action by anyone who does not command a new style is limited when only one way of speaking is believed to carry out the only legitimate realization of the will of the people. Access to these domains of discourse becomes an unattainable site of privilege and power as speech styles from outside the field are “othered,” indexed as something undesirable about the speaker’s character. The impression management of rooting out these “others,” or even the appearance of being that wild cat, is what the president and other speakers who are picking up on his style invoke as they speak out against prior styles of kabary to secure the code of modern power and corner the market in the aesthetic qualities of truth and modernity believed to be held in that code.
Such evaluations linking ways of speaking with ways of being relocate the social salience of kabary within a larger movement of political modernity where the state assumes the role of moral authority in the drive toward modernity (Kaviraj Reference Kaviraj2005, Mitchell Reference Mitchell1991). Building from this struggle between global and local models of democracy, oratorical style differences then become indices not only of Malagasy and American folk language ideologies, but also of two broad strands of thinking about the nature of modern power that are struggling for imaginative dominance of a moral order undergirding this political imaginary (Kaviraj Reference Kaviraj2005:265). Through speech and arguments about the speech, political communicative action is ordered to fit a moral order of a “truth,” reinforced by links between dominant varieties of speech styles and dominant groups who standardize them, “imbuing both texts and practices … with authority” (Bauman & Briggs Reference Bauman, Briggs and Kroskrity2000:142). In this process, kabary plays a critical role not only in how democracy looks on the ground, but also in how morality and immorality are framed as discursive measures to enable or disable participation by certain kinds of speakers in the political process.
Conclusion
This article sets out to describe recent stylistic and contextual changes in kabary politika performances in highlands Madagascar as a means for measuring structural transformations in vernacular political process and as an index for understanding how folk theories and epistemologies of language emerge, take shape, and change. Through comparisons between older and new styles of kabary politika, the article details not only how this performance genre is shifting as new forms of government are established in urban Madagascar, but also how the very ways people relate meaningfully to this practice are changing. Focusing on local politics in the context of globalizing democracy and modernity, this study shows how features of old and new kabary styles coarticulate with imported democracy and governance models purporting to fight corruption in postcolonial countries. Following the ways in which democracy as a political imaginary is mediated by arguments about how truth or transparency is represented in language (Duranti Reference Duranti, Brenneis and Myers1984, Kaviraj Reference Kaviraj2005, Taylor Reference Taylor2002), the article points out how these styles of oratorical performance are brought from mere modes of style to serve in the struggle between transnational neoliberal democracies and Malagasy vernacular models. In this, it explores and clarifies particular issues relevant to ongoing studies that seek to understand the “relationship between political organization and language as a form of social action” (Brenneis & Myers Reference Brenneis and Myers1984:1; Rosaldo Reference Rosaldo1980, Reference Rosaldo1984; Habermas Reference Habermas1989), particularly as one that penetrates the system of political process to the level of structuring belief and moral practice (Kaviraj Reference Kaviraj2005, Taylor Reference Taylor2002, Silverstein Reference Silverstein1998b). Building from Rosaldo’s notion that “verbal art has a social force” alongside the reality in which traditional political art forms such as kabary politika are in a process of decline associated with processes of modernization, this article examines how this process of social change in public speaking affects the extent to which people may participate in political process (Rosaldo Reference Rosaldo1984:133, 140).
General anthropological studies addressing globalization and democracy, as well as those focused on social change through political and economic neoliberalism, tend to focus on macro-institutional shifts without specifically considering language as one of those institutions. And though these studies discuss particular movements within governance reform, such as “the fight against corruption,” they look to the movement’s role in adjusting structures – perhaps economic accountability or electoral politics – without an eye to how such movements are realized through everyday linguistic practices and shaped by the ideologies informing those practices. What is more, they tend never to consider the changes in local epistemologies of language that are taking place alongside these more empirically based structural adjustments. Yet such changes to larger institutional structures are almost always mediated linguistically, and local and “global” modes of communicative interaction also are almost never the same or carry the same social contextual meanings. Borrowing from the argument Charles Hirschkind made for studying the affects and sensibilities honed through popular media practices, kabary politika performances “are as infrastructural to politics and public reason as are markets, associations, formal institutions, and information networks”; and the aesthetic sense of any one group of people is not a “stable foundation upon which a singular and unassailable truth can be erected … but rather a space of indeterminacy, heterogeneity, and possibility” (Hirschkind Reference Hirschkind2006:9, 20). In an effort to provide an alternate view on the processes of globalizing politics and modernity, this critical inquiry into the descriptive particularities of grammatical categories, oratorical registers, and performance contexts illuminates these empirical practices shaping and reflecting political infrastructural transformations, while also pointing to very deep shifts in local epistemologies of what language is and does.
As this article brings kabary back into discussions within anthropology, it does so at a time when this performance genre’s service as an instrument of information and representation is threatened in the political sphere. As politicians change the way they speak to fit with ways of government, and audiences accept the change as a move toward modernity, they dismantle the salience of traditional kabary forms and potentially defang it of its political salience, as happened during the colonial era. This critical practice of Malagasy culture is now at stake in a politics where speaking in its formalized style can implicate its speaker as corrupt. Whether it is from the president or pundits who parody his words, the emergence and reproduction of this larger moral argument within the semiosocial matrix that is urban Madagascar gives shape to a political imaginary in which a focus on actual corruption plaguing government processes is deflected and placed on the very hermeneutic, collaborative practices that aid in democratic transparency. Morality and immorality are framed as discursive measures to enable or disable participation by certain kinds of speakers. Within this economy of negotiating, valuing, and discounting political modes of practice predominantly set by a political and social elite, those who cannot achieve this standard are kept at arm’s length from participating in and affecting political processes. As participant roles are renegotiated in this way, the production of a political public and public opinion become predicated on this filtering, ultimately transforming how the democratic process is locally negotiated, understood, and experienced. However, because this style of oratory and the inherent rumination of ideas embedded in its form persists across social institutions, certainly the limits of the state and public opinion are uneven in their effect across multiple levels of society. It is necessary then to examine how kabary performances and arguments about kabary persist, and how this is being negotiated through kabary and in other genres of everyday communicative interaction, formal and informal. To continue to follow the ways in which language variation is operationalized according to a local ethos, and vernacularized by actors in a local public sphere, will clarify the role of language in political processes in Madagascar, where the practice of democracy is based not only on locality, but also on the historical accretion of agents whose roles are bound in larger transnational, codependent, and even plurilingual processes.
