Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611

  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Slavery and Essentialism in Highland Madagascar: Ethnography, History, Cognition

Slavery and Essentialism in Highland Madagascar: Ethnography, History, Cognition

Regnier, Denis

Paperback

Series: Lse Monographs on Social Anthropology

African HistoryAnthropologyGeneral Racism & Ethnic Studies

ISBN10: 0367640449
ISBN13: 9780367640446
Publisher: Routledge
Published: Aug 1 2022
Pages: 194
Weight: 0.55
Height: 0.44 Width: 5.50 Depth: 8.50
Language: English

This book explores the prejudice against slave descendants in highland Madagascar and its persistence more than a century after the official abolition of slavery.

'Unclean people' is a widespread expression in the southern highlands of Madagascar, and refers to people of alleged slave descent who are discriminated against on a daily basis and in a variety of ways. Denis Regnier shows that prejudice is rooted in a strong case of psychological essentialism: free descendants think that 'slaves' have a 'dirty' essence that is impossible to cleanse. Regnier's field experiments question the widely accepted idea that the social stigma against slavery is a legacy of pre-colonial society. He argues, to the contrary, that the essentialist construal of 'slaves' is the outcome of the historical process triggered by the colonial abolition of slavery: whereas in pre-abolition times slaves could be cleansed through ritual means, the abolition of slavery meant that slaves were transformed only superficially into free persons, while their inner essence remained unchanged and became progressively constructed as 'forever unchangeable'.

1 different editions

Also available

Also in

Anthropology

View All