Rita Astuti
Taking people seriously (the 2015 Robert H.
Layton Lecture)
Article (Published version)
(Refereed)
Original citation:
Astuti, Rita (2017) Taking people seriously (the 2015 Robert H. Layton Lecture). HAU: Journal of
Ethnographic Theory, 7 (1). pp. 105-122. ISSN 2049-1115
DOI: 10.14318/hau7.1.012
Reuse of this item is permitted through licensing under the Creative Commons:
© 2017 The Author
CC BY 4.0
This version available at: http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/83348/
Available in LSE Research Online: July 2017
LSE has developed LSE Research Online so that users may access research output of the
School. Copyright © and Moral Rights for the papers on this site are retained by the individual
authors and/or other copyright owners. You may freely distribute the URL
(http://eprints.lse.ac.uk) of the LSE Research Online website.
2017 | H: Journal of Ethnographic eory 7 (1): 105–122
This work is licensed under the Creative Commons | © Rita Astuti.
ISSN 2049-1115 (Online). DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.14318/hau7.1.012
LECTURE
Taking people seriously
Rita A, London School of Economics
and Political Science
Taking the people we study seriously has resurfaced in recent years as a core aim of the
ethnographic and anthropological endeavor. In this lecture, I present my way of taking
people (i.e., my Vezo friends in a fishing village in Madagascar) seriously. For me, this
involves understanding the multiple sources of their knowledge and the different ways of
knowing that they mobilize in particular contexts and for particular purposes, at different
ages, and fueled by different kinds of experience and cognitive resources. The argument
is developed on the basis of empirical material that draws on an ongoing interdisciplinary
collaboration between anthropologists and cognitive psychologists.
1
Keywords: death, ancestors, knowledge, learning, children, ontological turn, Madagascar
Interdisciplinarity is widely valued—by funders, academic leaders, students, and
reformers—but it is hard work. For it to succeed—that is, for it to generate more
knowledge and understanding than the sum of the knowledge and understanding
generated by each constituent discipline working on its own—it requires a great
deal of patience and a certain amount of tolerance. I have experienced this first
hand: as I started collaborating with developmental and cognitive psychologists
some twenty years ago, I had to patiently learn a new language, get used to different
evidential standards, embrace new methodological tools, while at the same time
politely insisting that my language, evidential standards, and methodologies be un-
derstood and respected. Inevitably, along the way, there were instances of miscom-
munication and moments of frustration. The effort, however, was well worth it:
on the one hand, I have deepened my knowledge and understanding of the Vezo
people of Madagascar who, over the course of nearly thirty years, have allowed me
This article is a revised version of the Robert H. Layton Lecture, delivered at Durham on
October 7, 2015. I would like to thank Maurice Bloch, Sean Epstein and Evan Killick
for comments and discussions.
2017 | H: Journal of Ethnographic eory 7 (1): 105–122
Rita A 106
to be part their lives; on the other, as I shall illustrate in this article, I have found a
way of “taking people seriously.”
Anyone who has been following the onward trajectory of the so-called onto-
logical turn will have noticed that “taking seriously” the concepts, the analogies,
the discourse of the people one studies ethnographically is a recurrent theme in
the writings of those who have taken this turn (e.g., Henare, Holbraad, and Wastell
2007; Holbraad 2012; Pedersen 2011). Their claim is that the only way to do so is
to take people’s alterity at face value, that is, to be open to the possibility that the
various people we encounter in the field inhabit different realities from our own
(see Graeber 2015 for a critical appraisal of the philosophical underpinnings of this
position).
To illustrate: when, famously, a Cuban diviner says that powder is power, he is
not articulating a representation that happens to be different from that of the an-
thropologist, one that represents powder as the kind of thing that can have power;
instead, he is bringing forth a different “world” altogether, one in which powder
is power (Holbraad 2012). To unlock such a world, according to the “ontologists,”
anthropologists have to invent new concepts that will enable them to unproblem-
atically describe powder as power. And to do this, they have to shed their Cartesian
dualistic ontology and realize that things, if taken seriously, are concepts (hence the
injunction that we “think through things” as the non-dualist-other allegedly does;
Henare, Holbraad, and Wastell 2007).
In this lecture, I shall advocate a different approach. Like those who have opted
for the ontological turn, I also start from ethnographic puzzles. However, my puz-
zles are of a very different nature from those that exercise the “ontologists.” This is
because mine are generated by paying resolute attention to the multiplicity of ways
in which people create and deploy their knowledge in different contexts, at differ-
ent ages, fueled by different kinds of experience. For example, were I to interact
with Cuban diviners, the puzzle that I would choose to engage with would not so
much be that they take powder to be power but that—as we are told in passing
(Holbraad 2012: 157)—they are also certainly not confused about the difference
between the two. How shall we account for this? What does this tell us about the
radical alterity of the non-Cartesian reality inhabited by the diviners?
But this, of course, is not my puzzle. My puzzle, which I shall explore in this
lecture, is generated by the complex and apparently contradictory nature of Vezo
ancestors, the word I shall use as a short hand to refer to what my Vezo friends de-
scribe as “the people of the past who are now dead.”
The ancestors
When Jira acquired a small TV set—a gift from the owners of a South African yacht
he had worked on as an assistant sailor—he placed it in the middle of the table in his
father’s house, under the cover of a lace tablecloth. There it stayed for a week or so, in
acknowledgment of the fact that juniors should never surpass their seniors, whether
in height (in which case a gift is given by the junior to the senior as a kind of apolo-
gy), the size of one’s house (in which case the senior is invited to be the first occupant,
at least for a few days), or the acquisition of the latest novelty (which is temporarily
2017 | H: Journal of Ethnographic eory 7 (1): 105–122
107 T
handed over to the senior, as with Jira’s TV). On the day chosen in consultation with
his father, who happened to be the hazomanga, the mediator between the living and
their dead forebears, Jira approached the house with a small bottle of rum and a small
sum of money. His father accepted the rum and money and, sitting in the house fac-
ing east, called upon the ancestors—the most senior of all—to announce that Jira had
returned from his trip (which they had previously been informed about) and that he
had brought back this new thing. The ancestors were asked to take notice so as not
to be surprised about this new acquisition; they were asked to rejoice in the fact that
Jira had been successful in gaining such wealth, and to give their blessing. After the
conversation was over and the rum consumed—a few drops by the ancestors, the rest
by those family members who happened to be present—Jira picked up the TV and
transported it the short distance between his father’s house and his own house next
door. The arduous and largely unsuccessful process of making it work thus began,
although at no point did I hear Jira surmise that the difficulties he encountered were
due to the jealousy or the malice of the ancestors or to that of his father—the ones
and the other being equally worthy of respect and a potential cause of trouble when
slighted. It was more to do with the poor reception of the homemade antenna and
the hopeless quality of the car battery he had been sold as nearly new.
By contrast, when Lola woke up with a swollen and extremely painful ear, ev-
eryone in the family was quick to conclude that the illness was caused by Lola’s
disgruntled grandmother, who had died ten years earlier. A few months before,
Lola had traveled north with her husband to explore new fishing grounds. Despite
various setbacks due to bad weather and lack of food and clean water, the trip
had been financially successful. But during her stay up north, Lola had a dream in
which her grandmother had asked her to cook a meal for her because she was hun-
gry. In the dream, Lola cooked rice and asked her grandmother what she wanted as
a side dish. Fish, was the answer. As the grandmother ate the food, she commented
on the fact that she was forced to ask her grandchildren for food because her own
son (Gramera, Lola’s mother’s brother) did not give her any; it was as if she had
never given birth, as if she had no children, seeing that her children let her sleep
outdoors, and left her without a proper house. This, as everyone who heard about
the dream clearly understood, was a reference to the fact that after so many years
since her death, the family had yet to complete her “work,” namely the construc-
tion of a cement fence and cross to substitute the temporary wooden ones used
at the time of her burial. As Lola’s swelling gave no sign of subsiding, the family
gathered for an offering of cooked rice (people were relieved that in the dream the
grandmother had asked for fish rather than meat, for this meant that a rice offering,
rather than the provision of a zebu, would suffice). Interestingly, when Gramera, in
his role as hazomanga, spoke to the ancestors, including his mother, he ignored the
accusation that he had failed to take care of his mother’s house. Instead, he asked
the ancestors to excuse Lola who, being young and unwise, had failed to properly
announce her journey northward. I was surprised that Lola should be the one to
get the blame, but no one else seemed to be since no one else paid much attention
to Gramera’s words, spoken in the hushed sort of way that hazomanga use to invoke
the ancestors. My guess is that Gramera was too scared to admit his family’s serious
failing in the presence of the ancestors and that he hoped to divert their attention
to a far less serious breach of etiquette.
2017 | H: Journal of Ethnographic eory 7 (1): 105–122
Rita A 108
A few years earlier, I had my own problems dealing with Gramera’s mother. At
that time, she was still alive but very old and frail. Despite this, temperamentally she
continued to be extremely forceful. I had never felt that she liked me all that much,
but our relationship got openly strained when I returned for a visit a few months
before she died. She had become very demanding, as she apparently thought that
she was entitled to ask for, and obtain, all my possessions. Her eldest daughter and
Gramera had intervened to deflect her requests, but the most dramatic incident
happened after she got me to hand over a new blanket I had bought for myself at
the start of my visit. When Gramera found out about it, he summoned her and me
to his house, and forced her to return the blanket. He was furious, and scolded her
for always begging—couldn’t she see that I needed a blanket? Why was she always
making him feel so ashamed? She didn’t speak a word. She just sat there, fiddling
with the corner of her sarong. But she did send the blanket back.
At the time of my departure, I went to say goodbye and gave her the blanket,
nicely washed and, by local standards, still in excellent conditions. I have a pho-
to that captures this moment: she is sitting on a mat, leaning against the wall of
her house, the folded blanket on her lap. She is looking sideways, lost in thought,
brooding. When I look at this picture, I cannot help reading into it the events that
unfolded four years later, when I returned to the village with my son.
Sean was four-and-a-half years old and, as predicted, he took village life in his
stride and seemed very happy. But after about a month, he got severely ill. Late at
night, after securing the medicines to treat him against typhoid and malaria, I was
back in the house, trying to keep myself calm and him hydrated. Quietly, Gramera
entered the house and sat on the floor in the near darkness, facing east and holding
a little cup in his hand. He started speaking, in his usual muffled way, calling upon
the creator Ndranahary, the four cardinal points and then the names of the ances-
tors. But after this initial invocation, Gramera’s tone suddenly changed for he was
now talking to one person in particular: he was talking to his mother (addressing
her as such). And he was angry: he raised his voice, accusing her of making Sean
ill. He asked her what she thought she was doing. Had she not been told (a month
earlier) that her granddaughter had come back from “the other side of the ocean”
and that she had brought her son? Had she not been asked to protect them both?
And look instead what she was doing! By now he was nearly shouting at her, as he
told her that she made him feel ashamed. I was squatting in the middle, between
a furious Gramera and a delirious Sean, not quite knowing what to make of it all.
Things got worse when Gramera concluded his invective by sprinkling around the
room the cold water he had been holding in the cup; a few drops fell on Sean’s
burning back, and this made him scream in terror. To Gramera, Sean’s reaction to
the blessing water confirmed his assessment of the situation: it was his mother’s
vengeful nature that was responsible for Sean’s illness. What was striking about
this conversation is that there was remarkably little difference in the way Gramera
spoke to his mother about Sean’s illness—when she was dead—and about the blan-
ket—when she was still alive.
I could fill many more pages, telling stories of how the Vezo people I know in-
teract with the ancestors, ranging from almost routine blessings when the launch
of a new canoe or a journey are announced, to more dramatic and costly offerings
of rum, rice, or meat to seal a marriage or to claim the right to bury one’s children’s