Senior Research Seminar with Dr Maurizio Esposito La Rossa, Visiting Fellow (LSE)

Dr Maurizio Esposito La Rossa (LSE)

Complicate jokes: political rivalries, royal diarchies and joking relationships among the Sakalava of Madagascar 

If political rivalries have interests that motivate them, and strategies through which they unfold, they also have a particular form through which they express themselves.

Starting with contemporary political rivalries between representatives of the Malagasy state that evoke historical conflicts between dynastic branches, this talk aims to reconstruct the diarchic tensions underlying the Sakalava kingship of western Madagascar. These dynastic tensions stem from the original diarchy between stranger kings and “masters of land” at the foundation of the Sakalava monarchies. It is through the establishment of joking relationships that these tensions have been managed. Faced with the crisis that the Malagasy Republic has been going through since its independence, the representatives of the Malagasy state seek to legitimise and negotiate their social position by resorting to the imagery and the hierarchy of the monarchy. And it is through the hierarchical ambivalence constitutive of joking relationships that these social negotiations are carried out.