Contingency in Madagascar

Stephen Muecke

Description

As they set off for Madagascar in 2003, photographer Max Pam and writer Stephen Muecke adopted as their guiding principle the idea of contingency—central to which is the conscious embrace of risk and chance. In doing so, they established a new aesthetic in which image and text are inextricably linked to the notion of possibility. This stunning collection of photos and essays is the result of their vision, collectively illustrating the beauty and wisdom on offer in one of the world’s poorest nations. A contribution to the wave of new ethnography exemplified by Michael Taussig and Kathleen Stewart, these encounters with events, images, and experimental writing dramatize thoughts and feelings in the ongoing construction of place.

Sujets

• Photographie
• Photographie
• General
• Photography
• General officer

Informations

• Publié par: Intellect Books
• Date de parution: 18 avril 2013
• Nombre de lectures: 1
• EAN13: 9781841506852
• Langue: English

Extrait

CONTINGENCY IN MADAGASCAR
First published in the UK in 2012 by Intellect, The Mill, Parnall Road, Fishponds, Bristol, BS16 3JG, UK
First published in the USA in 2012 by Intellect, The University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th Street, Chicago, IL 60637, USA
Copyright 2012 Intellect Ltd
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Cover image: Stephen Muecke, text and
Max Pam, photographs and photographic compositions.
Cover designer: Holly Rose
Production Manager: Jelena Stanovnik
Copy-editor: Macmillian
Typesetting: Holly Rose
Series Editor: Alfredo Cramerotti
Editorial collaboration: Jane Louise Fletcher
ISBN 978-1-84150-474-2
Critical Photography Series ISSN 2041-8345
Printed & bound by Latimer Trend, Devon.
CONTINGENCY IN MADAGASCAR
PHOTOGRAPHY ENCOUNTERS WRITING
By Stephen Muecke and Max Pam

intellect Bristol, UK / Chicago, USA
For Pru Black
who brought us together
A NOTE FROM THE EDITOR TO THE READER
From the Middle
Alfredo Cramerotti, Editor, Critical Photography series
Learning by doing, they say. Yes, but I learn a great deal also by thinking over and forming in my head the very idea of doing. I constantly negotiate what I have preconceived and what I actually do and consequently learn from both processes and the discrepancy between them. This is precisely what Contingency in Madagascar attempts to reveal to the reader. It is not a matter of exotic imagery or travel photography, but something else altogether.
By implying that I am always implicated in what I do, no matter how hard I try to detach myself, neutralise my gaze, make myself invisible, this book places its authors, readers and myself, as editor, in the middle of a life drift: that is, the images capture the past and the future, in the present - less a case of trying to understand things from the beginning or anticipating a possible future from which to work things out retrospectively, more about placing ourselves in the middle of the stories and going with the flow, in one direction and then another, like life. Despite my best efforts to plan my existence, I know I will never succeed; any attempt to plot life will always be foiled by fate.
In fact, the best way to explore an idea is to run alongside, rather than to take a snapshot, which often freezes and stultifies instead of offering an ongoing experience. As a medium, photography, at its best, is capable of reflecting on itself; not many activities and practices can do it. Sometimes I do not have enough information to gauge a situation or a potential narrative, so my cultural background makes up the missing connections. In this way, I can share with the readers the responsibility and the weight of that space/time situation to hold and evaluate, for a while. And little matters if I find the image equivocal; it is life itself and the reality in which it is lived that are just as equivocal. Learning by doing, they say. And sharing all the incongruities along the way.
Alfredo Cramerotti | Mostyn|Wales | eCPR European Centre for Photography Research, University of Wales, Newport
ACKNOW LEDGEMENTS
This project was supported by the Australian Research Council as a part of a larger research project on Culture and Commerce in the Indian Ocean; thanks also to the Transforming Cultures Centre at the University of Technology, Sydney, which nurtured the Indian Ocean Project from its first days and where Devleena Ghosh, M. N. Pearson and Sharon Davidson provided a fertile environment. Thanks also to Edith Cowan University. It was only possible to embark on something like new ethnography thanks to the inspiring examples of Mick Taussig, Kathleen Stewart, Ghassan Hage and Michael D Jackson, great storytellers all. Augustine Zafy in Nosy B Madagascar was one of the many friends we made there. Thanks to Cathy Cole for canny writerly advice on the manuscript, Bob Hewitt for giving the project an airing at the remarkable FotoFreo 2006 and, of course, our editor Alfredo Cramerotti and the team at Intellect.
INTRO DUCTION
Michael Taussig
If the decisive blows are stuck with the left hand, as Walter Benjamin declared, then this book from the southern oceans, Contingency in Madagascar , is very much a left-handed book, a gift, one might say, to all right-minded thinkers. Ostensibly a book about anthropology as travel, and travel as anthropology, it is also about the ways we decide to shuttle back and forth between the strange and the familiar in trying to sort out new experiences as we keep pushing on in our travels, which, it turns out, are as much philosophical as geographical, as much about our craft as writers and picture-makers, as it is about the role of chance in the craftiness of craft.
It is a deft, indeed shocking, move to settle on the unstable ground of chance and, politely enough, set aside the magisterial claims to authority that accrues with prolonged immersion in a foreign culture that an anthropologist would like to claim. For what we have here is the result of a mere three weeks in Madagascar, inflamed by the different sort of immersion that accrues to a writer obsessed with writing for some 30 years and to a photographer obsessed with photography for the same amount of time. What does all that obsession with craft have to say about what the craft is ostensibly about, in this case Madagascar, or should I say Madagascar ?
Over the decades both the author and the photographer have travelled far and wide in Indian Ocean, studied outside of their native Australia and Muecke has published extensively on indigenous Australia as well, beginning with that greatly unique book Reading the Country , co-authored with a watercolourist, Krim Benterrak, and the indigenous man, Paddy Roe. These books have been every bit about how you go about writing about the colony and postcolony, and it is this mix that makes their focus on chance extraordinarily interesting.
Wherever we turn here, analysis gives way to poiesis, also known as fictocriticism . The best way of settling a philosophical problem of representation is through art, whether that be the art of storytelling or photography - so long as you have your eye on the role of the contingent in human, historical and, of course, in your own affairs. This crucial theme is not belaboured but gently makes itself present like light rain falling on the parched fields of determinism, whether in criticism or social science.
Contingency in Madagascar settles into a way curious zone where magic and empiricism not only coexist but also flourish. Hence language, spirits, sorcerers and the dead are no less present than Nietzsche, Deleuze, Roland Barthes and Michel Serres, together with anthropological writers such as Greg Dening, Kathleen Stewart and Michael Jackson. This unseemly, left-handed mix, is made possible because of the way that contingency straddles what we westerners tend to call mystical and what we call chance - as in one of William Burroughs last books called Ghost of Chance , a book like this one ostensibly about Madagascar. Burroughs, of course, found magic congenial to his craft as a writer working with montage, no less than to his disdain for Church, State and Family, those grand institutions upon which Hegel rested the grand edifice of his philosophy carefully built so as to repel the slightest whiff of the contingent.
Then there is beauty. For just as romanticism is licensed once one is attuned to the contingent, so the concept of beauty acquires a specific meaning, one that has everything to do with craft. Beauty for us , write Muecke and Pam at the very end of this book, is in the complexity of the contingent situation; it is neither out there in Mada[gascar], nor shored up inside us. It is available here and now .
Which is why there is a lot of attention to form and photography in the crafting of this book. The text exists (can one rightfully say proceeds ?) as a montage of encounters, events, meditations, side by side with Max Pam s photographs and explanation of why he takes photographs the way he does - by asking permission and allowing people to pose themselves, contingently.
Michael Taussig
Madagascar is one of the poorest countries in the world, with a ranking of 171 out of 180 on the 2009 International Monetary Fund list. It has a per capita gross domestic product of US$412 compared to the United States US$46,000. It is the fourth largest island in the world, situated in the Indian Ocean, sometimes identified as part of Africa, sometimes as an Indian Ocean nation and sometimes remembered for its colonisation by the French from 1890 to 1960. The first settlement possibly dates back to the fifth century ce, with Austronesian peoples travelling by canoe from South-East Asia; their language and culture have links right through to the Pacific. Africans, Arabs and eventually Christians joined this initial population, creating a unique ethnic identity. This is further reinforced by the strange and wonderful floral and fauna, always under threat because of a lack of resources to protect and sustain them. At the time we visited, Madagascar was in an optimistic period. It had a new president, Marc Ravalomanana, who was attracting overseas capital and attempting some reforms to combat the entrenched corruption and nepotism among the ruling noble families . But his own weaknesses allowed him to fall foul of a coup d etat in 2009, and an illegal government was installed, attracting condemnation from the United Nations and withdrawal of most of the investments. Today, Madagascar continues to struggle as a precarious State and with an even more precarious, poverty-stricken citizenry.
Beauty and Wisdom
[H]ere then is a philosophy for the third and fourth w