Editor’s introduction

Abstract

Raymond Scupin reviews an ethnography of Madagascar by Denis Regnier based on fieldwork conducted there in the aughts. His focus is on the relations between two groups: those descended from slaves and those descended from freemen. The former are essentialized and coded as “unclean,” while the latter are “clean.” Scupin draws on a broad body of literature that critiques essentialist discourse, equating it with racism, which is, of course, its most obvious manifestation in multi-ethnic societies. Indeed, in a very different place such as Romania, where I have conducted fieldwork, the distinction between Roma (previously known as Gypsy) and Romanian was similarly essentialized, along similar lines of clean and unclean. Interestingly, for the Roma themselves, this is also the logic, with they being the pure bloodline with outsiders as potentially polluting. Of course even in extreme cases such as Romania, there is in fact pragmatic interaction among groups, even including marriage. This is most definitely the case in Madagascar, where, despite essentializing discourse, it was acknowledged that descendants of slaves and freemen did in fact marry. This could occur for many reasons, including the fact that some of the “unclean” families were, by local standards, relatively prosperous. Moreover, many slave descendants who were freed by the king, prior to French colonization, were thought to have been purified in that act, while those freed by the Napoleonic decree, were thought not to have been. In other words, the categories were not exactly congruent, making the structural opposition itself less meaningful. This is a thought-provoking essay. One of the issues to consider is the oscillation between perspectives that social actors engage in. It is perfectly possible for one to hold essentializing views of a group while making “exceptions” for individuals with whom one has pragmatic interactions. My research with white men in rural Wyoming, most of whom were Trump supporters, illustrates this dynamic. They may well hold such views of outgroups, especially Black, Hispanic, and Indigenous people, but were willing to have friendly conversations with such people. However, as a group, especially when gathered for a political demonstration (especially the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020), they were seen as threatening and alien.