Review by Choice Review
The brief answer to the title's rhetorical question is "no." This is not surprising, as the colonial experience for the Betsimisaraka People of Madagascar at the hands of the French was brutal. Over 100,000 died, primarily as the result of a violently repressed uprising shortly after WW II. Cole's book, based on her fieldwork and dissertation, provides a detailed, clever, and often fascinating response to this query. She grills the usual Madagascar topical suspects--death rituals, the ancestors, and sacrifice--until they eventually confess to their complicity in abetting a process of silence about the recent past. This amnesia came to an end during a recent peaceful election campaign, which Cole (Univ. of Chicago) claims at times symbolically evoked memories of the disastrous past. At this point the local voice is muted, and the author's academic arguments and comparative material are unconvincing. Yet her overall concern is a good one, and her grasp of the abstract issues and local ethnography are sound enough to recommend this book to graduate students and professionals. W. Arens SUNY at Stony Brook
Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.
Review by Choice Review
