CHAPTER 7 “ THAT ’ S WHAT YOU THINK ” : A RGUING R EPRESENTATIONS OF T RUTH … · 2014-11-10 · Arguing Representations of Truth in Language 195 their potential to pursue

CHAPTER 7

“ THAT ’ S WHAT YOU THINK ” : A RGUING R EPRESENTATIONS OF T RUTH IN L ANGUAGE

I was certain to fi nd a kindred spirit when I met with Vries, the project lead for an international development program dedicated to “building civil society ” in Madagascar. Knowing that this US -basedprogram aimed their fi nancial and human resources at projects in civic education, I suppressed my hypercritical bent toward anything con-cerning international development in the developing world in favor of keeping an open mind. After all, I had just spent several months following urban and rural Imerina, Madagascar ’s mayoral campaigns and listening to discussions about the very popular and highly stylized kabary politika. I had spent day after day talking with the folks who wrote these political speeches, the statesmen who delivered them, and the myriad audiences who listened and commented on them. So to meet with Vries and talk shop about the civic ethos of our shared host countrymen was an exciting prospect.

Edifying experiences on the campaign trail gave me a new way to think about kabary politika as not just traditional ritual but a means of communicative practice in democratic process. This was something I was eager to share with this project leader whose starting point for anything democratic was most likely a Western rhetorical style of sound bites. Adding to my excitement, my usual cynicism was blunted with

Political Oratory and Cartooning: An Ethnography of Democratic Processes in Madagascar,First Edition. Jennifer Jackson.© 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Published 2013 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

194 Arguing Representations of Truth in Language

optimism when I learned that some of the political cartoonists with whom I had been working were involved in some of the projects under Vries’sprogram. The cartoonists ’ work was incredibly meaningful to local audiences, and the fact it was being integrated into an international development plan rather than dismissed suggested at the very least a superfi cial hope for new initiatives in this urban political landscape. Even more so, I felt compelled to support this effort because so many of these cartoonists had suffered from passion misspent in a press that had been under the threat of state scrutiny and control. Any oppor-tunity to encourage their profession seemed a good thing.

I followed the cobblestone streets of downtown Tana toward the tarmac routes circling Lake Aloatra to fi nd Vries ’s offi ce. All the while, I thought of these cartoonists and knowing that their participation was based on an ethic shared across national political boundaries: the prin-ciples of a free press and a common dedication to secure that freedom. In this frame of mind, I met Vries with the simple objective of learn-ing about her program ’s understanding of civil society in Madagascar, and how that informed her program ’s objectives and motivated its current projects. I also wanted to offer my own observations on modes of political participation in urban Madagascar. I imagined we might have common cause and would fi nd this exchange useful to our work.

My ideas shifted dramatically when I mentioned to Vries, with some optimism, the place of the rich oratory of kabary politika in shaping political process. I spoke of the role of this genre, full of indirect phrasings deftly delivered through proverbs, metaphor, riddle, and poetry, as it allowed people to participate in a representative democracy between the state and civil society. I never knew suggesting that poetry and proverbs in political speech served to provoke healthy political debate would prompt an immediate and self -assured indignant response from Vries: “That’s what you think! But that is not how it is. ”

Kabary politika may be traditional ritual but it has no place in politics today. It is not direct and the way that politicians can hide behind all of those proverbs does nothing but perpetuate corruption, which is what the current president and we are working against here in order to forward a democratic government.

I was then subjected to the condescending lessons of an international bureaucrat. As my elder, Vries held my undivided attention as she gave me a litany of cautionary tales about the dangers of falling for exotic traditionalisms that could be used to subjugate people and limit

Arguing Representations of Truth in Language 195

their potential to pursue real development and national progress. She then explained to me how this country was seeing a real change under its new president, Marc Ravalomanana, who refused to engage in kabary politika in the name of speaking with absolute transparency. He was leading by example, she said, by speaking exactly in the way he acts, directly and transparently.

As excited as I was about the cartoonists ’ participation in the efforts of this program, I realized they were part of a larger shift in the build-ing of a certain kind of “civil society ” imaginary, and that society ’sinteraction with the state, or the economic models that stand as proxy for a nation -state. Because theirs was a modern genre whose effect presumably could be translated across sovereignties, they could func-tion in a milieu of Western -style civic education and civil -societybuilding. However, because kabary politika was not useful (or even familiar as a potential tool), it had to go. The relative opacity of kabaryliterary elements, to Vries and others of the D &G ilk, meant that the meaning of the text itself was also obscure (Brenneis and Myers 1984:15). Such ideas privilege denotational meaning in language, as though the very genre of kabary politika was itself corrupt, rather than speakers who perform it. Speakers and auditors argue representations of truth by way of how language best performs “transparency” and “corrup-tion.” This metalinguistic process of talking about what language doesplays a role in shaping what “democracy” means and how it is lin-guistically mediated in urban Imerina. This notion of accountability through denotational speech, in fact, is where we turn next.

I left the meeting with Vries that day thinking back to the numer-ous occasions I heard commentary about kabary politika, from audience members, cartoonists, orators themselves, and the scholars who study them. I thought of an interesting tension in the multiplicity of views concerning language and politics I had observed in illuminating con-versations during campaigns, which centered on this exact issue of kabary politika as a viable form of democratic political practice. On the one hand, I recalled the conversation I had with a few cartoonists about language and democracy. J ôs, who was so active in these civic education projects, had hit on the ideological stance from which Vries was arguing when he explained to me why he felt the style of kabarypolitika had changed since the installation of this new president:

Democracy is not so evident in kabary politika, because the main idea must be hidden and because of the absence of teny mihitsy [straight


talk]. The message must be transmitted in a somewhat mialoka [curvy] manner via metaphors and proverbs. That is true “fomba Malagasy ”[Malagasy custom]. But after the introduction of democracy, some people thought that things should not be “hidden” anymore. Today, the politician is faced with the decision, “Will I tell it directly or not? ”

For J ôs, a new form of government seemed to require a novel way of speaking.

Vries had intimated her concern about kabary politika’s metaphorical features of proverbs and poetry, which, along with the sheer length and formality of this oratorical style, allowed the orator to easily bluff his audience with fl owery rhetoric and hide the “truth”; therefore, the very form itself presumed the intention for corruption. In contrast, the direct Western oratorical style of sound bites is judged within the presumed universal “discourse of truth, ” as direct and straight to the point (Hill 2000).

Against that perception was another sense of kabary politika I had picked up during the mayoral campaign. This viewpoint came from people who I knew had traveled for miles or taken time off work just to hear the kabary politika of certain candidates. When I fi rst started observing the mayoral campaigns in late 2003, I observed people ’svolunteered evaluations of a candidate ’s kabary politika. Sometimes I would ask seemingly banal and non -confrontational questions of why they liked or did not like kabary politika, in general, and what they could learn from a candidate through his kabary politika. Generally, these speeches were the topic of conversation the next morning at coffee and newspaper stalls, and though bus patrons tend to sit quietly, it was easy to overhear discussion of these speeches as people walked the switchback sidewalks or stairs down to work. Where Vries saw indirect messages delivered in proverbs and poetry in this form of political practice as conducive to corruption, most Malagasy I spoke with or just plain overheard perceived kabary politika structure and style as conducive to transparency. This transparency is brought about as an audience “sees how the speaker thinks. ” One can see the internal workings of kabary’s own process of generation, of the speaker ’s think-ing and process of creativity. Unlike Western -style rhetoric where the process of production is entirely disguised, on the journey through the wind of proverbs, riddles, and poetry a kabary audience is able to follow the path of thought and reasoning of the mpikabary, the orator, rather than a manifestation of his fi nished thought process. Persuasion,


at best, is the most transformative effect of kabary as the mpikabaryorator’s speech is not a directive or reported set of decisions, stated without an explanation of how he arrived at such conclusions. My participants assured me that what is important to them is that they are able to see a candidate ’s potential to negotiate matters off -stage, behind the closed doors of a council meeting, in the Assembly or, better yet, in those conversations that take place after such offi cial events in which most major decisions are negotiated and decided. As a mock version of the governing process of which candidates hope to be a part, the event of campaign kabary politika serves as a means for the candidate to show to his audience his ability to represent his constitu-ency, negotiate issues, and make decisions as leader. According to this point of view, kabary politika was thought exemplary of transparency rather than conducive to corruption.

The viewpoints of Vries and the Malagasy audiences with whom I spoke give way to questioning about the very nature of truth itself and how people understand language as conveying that truth. In the semiotic process, meaning in language is based on perceived notions of its referential functions; but it is also based on disciplining com-municative modalities of transparency within a particular moral order of truth. My meeting with this international development consultant pointed to the tension between Malagasy and Western folk ideologies informing large -scale governance reform measures, and how language indexes the qualities and intentions of its users. These perspectives meet in what has become a major issue in Third World governance: the problem of corruption and how governments combat it.

The tension is realized and mediated in the actual practice of kabarypolitika, as a topical shift in understanding what truth is and how transparency may be achieved is accompanied by a metapragmatic innovation in the structure and style of kabary. As orators talk in the international development parlance, their speech indexes the ways in which their logic has been colonized by neoliberal political and eco-nomic trends. As speakers shift topics to foreground the context of kabary itself, they shift from the highly presupposing forms of kabarythat Razafy taught us all in chapter 3 to a more meta -linguistic context in which they use the speech itself to talk about, well, giving a speech and what that means about who is giving it. In this talk about talk, a speaker co -opts the issue of language to argue how his words and style best represent “truth,” unlike his opponents ’ corrupt old way. These are ideological arguments within kabary and cartooning about


what truth is, and who among speakers best embodies that truth. Grand shifts in the context of kabary have occurred through arguments about how one ’s speech represents truth versus corruption. Such moral debates within the genre itself have thrown into relief the semiotics of political praxis in relation to how language allows or disables a fair and democratic government. In this argument over which kinds of speech are transparent and which are corrupt, the value of particular modalities of communicative practice is predicated on a moral argu-ment for the necessity to “speak the truth ” on the one hand, while on the other hand arguing metapragmatically about what contexts, and therefore which speakers, best encode that “truth.” These contrasting notions of truth in linguistic representations across participant roles and publics have practical implications for reading the landscape of the public sphere in urban Imerina and how democracy is locally under-stood and experienced.

Pragmatic and metapragmatic recontextualizations of speaking occur in at least three interanimated realms of communicative practice in urban Imerina: the level of actual state kabary, discussions about state oratorical address, and cartooning, all of which speak to issues of truth and corruption in political process. Corruption is indexed in political speech, for example, as it is suggested in cartoon depictions of politi-cians’ kabary, as in fi gure 1.1 in chapter 1 and fi gure 6.5 in chapter 6, where the representation of a politician ’s speech is graphed as “blahblah blah ” to index its “meaninglessness.” Talk about truth and corruption within contexts of kabary, resaka (informal speech), and cartooning interpenetrate at the level of syntax, register, and talk about choice of speaking contexts and their grammars. In these stylistic variations, social actors use “the form and functions of features of their own texts as exemplars of preferred practices, thereby attempting to imbue both texts and practices ” – in this case implicitly stipulated in their footing as “democratic practice, ” “development,” “transparency,” and other tropes of modernity – “with authority ” (Bauman and Briggs 2000:142). As authoritative evaluation is tied to legitimizing state action vis-à-vis its practices, change in evaluative purview is tied to ideologies of truth as semantically encoded in styles of speech. For the political elite closely tied to the larger transnational modernity project, speech that represents democracy is transparent, like the parlance of interna-tional development and active agent -centered syntactic voicing associ-ated with the genres of Western oratory. It is also to not speak kabaryunless that kabary speaks to the very subject of the speaker ’s speech


representing truth and transparency. Nearly every politician speaks of corruption as a barrier to successful governance, and one cannot run a campaign or deliver a speech in urban Imerina without referring to transparency and corruption. Often the effect of the speech is merely to position the speaker in respect to what truth is, and how truth is iconically conveyed through language. During Ravalomanana ’s presi-dential campaign and the mayoral campaign I followed in 2004, to deliver a kabary that did not refer to one ’s awareness of this anticipated

Figure. 7.1 The voter looks at the results of the vote. The cartoon ’ s header says, “ Results Day. ” Making fun of the general public ’ s inability to do simple math, and suggesting it might be the cause of electoral corruption, the caption references a passage from the Bible, “ Let only those who have not sinned cast the fi rst stone. ” Source: Reproduced by permission of Gazetiko/Midi - Madagasikara .


evaluation destined one to fail at the polls. Speakers convey this knowledge to their audience in order to exonerate themselves from appearing corrupt by the very use of a form thought to play host to corruption. Orators separate themselves from this association through recontextualizations of the genre, as they perform it, in what Goffman describes as frame breaks. Frame breaks are speech acts that shift the fl ow of speech, and therefore the way it is experienced by speaker and audience (Goffman 1986). For example, a kabary orator begins his kabary with the usual greetings:

Aza fady tompokolahy, Aza fady tompokovavy. Miarahaba anareo aho.Ladies and Gentlemen. I give you my greetings.

Sitting with speechwriters for mayoral candidates, I heard instead another conversation about what would come next after this section of the kabary. As Razafy taught us, the fi alan -tsiny follows. However, watching Bernardin and Elie both rub their eyes and foreheads over this and then sit up straight with a clear idea for how to proceed, I learned that the routine is changing. Rather than ask for pardon from guilt for his impending speech, these days the mpikabary politician is more inclined to say, “Now, you think I am about to miala tsiny (ask for pardon), because that is what we leaders do in our speeches. But I am not going to make this apology, because I am not planning to say any corrupt words that would necessitate my request for pardon. ”In breaking the conventional fl ow of the kabary code, the speaker shifts the grounds for his audience to evaluate his kabary. These kinds of frame breaks are used as a political strategy of power to enable those who presumably have the right instrument of truth to participate in political process. Those who do not provide this contextual break are disabled from participating because their lack of action to meta-pragmatically mark, that is say what the form does in one style versus another, presupposes that their character, their internal nature, also cannot represent truth.

Within the discourses of international development and the larger global neoliberal order, transparency and corruption have become central terms for characterizing the failure to progress in developing nations. As Jennifer Hasty notes:

Whereas the global institutions and discourses of development exhorted less privileged nations to work hard and control their populations and consumption habits to become prosperous, now the widespread failure


of development is explained through the criminalizing and pathologiz-ing notion of corruption. (Hasty 2005: 271)

Corruption discourse ’s demonization and pathologization of the unde-veloped world have gained an institutional foothold in international development projects and foreign initiatives to create a “global appa-ratus of anti -corruption” (Hasty 2005: 271).

To combat this plague of “inherent” corruption, the Madagascar government has set up departments such as the Central Agency for the Fight Against Corruption, at the behest of the US government. As a part of its policy to spread “democracy,” the United States released aid upon completion of an anti -corruption charter, which it co-authored with the Malagasy government (conversation with US embassy offi cials, October 2003). This “ride of ideals of sincerity can be read as an instrumental dimension of Western power -building,now extended to other nations whose leaders are anxious to embark on programs of neoliberal restructuring ” (Herzfeld 2005: 193). This straddling of political and economic spheres has trickled down to regional politics, affecting the way candidates market themselves in the mayoral campaign. “Transparency” is the new buzzword on the street, the campaign trail, and in the halls of national assemblies. Global circulation of this critique has shifted the way governments are run, how they speak about that governance, and how they relate to a “public” as constituents rather than subjects.

A fairly brash moral code informs neoliberal ventures exporting democracy and anti -corruption governance measures from the United States. This moral order undergirds the development of certain social institutions characterizing US modernity – the market economy, the public sphere, and even political rhetoric and electoral politics – and it informs how these institutions are exported and rooted in postco-lonial nations and other “transitioning democracies. ” This moral order informs the economic and political philosophy of neoliberalism to banish all interposing obstacles and barriers to transactions between consumers and their choices in the material world – whether of a product or a presidential candidate. Such moral cum political obligations to structure political process as “transparent” or directly apprehended “truth” extend even to the site of oratory.

Literalism, driven by a sense of logical truth as moral truth, found its foothold in the ideologies of early democracy in the United States through its public ’s distrust in mysterious language or that which


required more than a literal understanding of the word. Consider, for example, that Thomas Jefferson balked at the theatricality of oratory and instead argued for the “ ‘the language of truth . . . divested of those expressions of servility, ’ to strip away all rhetorical ornament, to remove affectation ” (Fliegelman 1993: 114). Such confl ation of semantic logic with moral order prepared the ground for a national moral order that persists in North America today (Marsden 2006: 15).

Seeking truth in the form of a “referential cleanliness, ” as it seems Vries and others informed by the D &G reform movement inadvert-ently do, defends that style of “language that gives . . . access to the unvarnished, non -euphemistic ‘scientifi c -objective’ as it were, Truth ”and protects language from outwitting its users, “rendering us unwill-ing but helpless sorcerer ’s apprentices awash in misguided thought ”(Silverstein 1998: 292 –3). In this world that privileges referential meaning as the tie to “true” reality, rather than dialogic action to social meaning, pretty prose was just too corrupt, an incompatible verbal art alien to the current politic (Rosaldo 1984: 159).

The ongoing articulation of the political imaginary of democracy constituted in the daily communicative practices of urban Imerina indexically presupposes an intersubjective relationship between an “informed” and represented “public” by a presumably informing and representing political agent. As publics are presumed to be privy to “information,” the question of kabary as a medium of that “informa-tion” is contested. As a mode of talk, kabary has become an object of scrutiny, a genre implicated in the failure of Madagascar ’s development because of “corruption.” No better example of this impact on how politicians speak to and about their country through metapragmatic shifts can be found than in that of the oratorical style of Madagascar ’srags-to-riches president, Marc Ravalomanana, the man who had become the Western international community ’s poster child of Third World democracy and development.

To Speak Like “That”: Speaking Truth to Power, Power to “Truth”

Luke Freeman, a British anthropologist commissioned by the president to serve as speechwriter, recalled this story in a recent BBC article:


At the African Union summit in Addis Ababa, as the president and I sat together behind the Malagasy fl ag he asked me to become his direc-tor of communications. United Nations Secretary -General Kofi Annan had just fi nished speaking. “Teach me to speak like that, ” he said.

. . . He had seen in me somebody who could solve his communica-tion diffi culties and help him address the English -speaking world, with whom he is keen to forge political and economic alliances. (BritishBroadcasting Corporation 2004)

Luke Freeman later wrote speeches for the president in both Malagasy and English. The president ’s expressed desire to Freeman at the AU summit – to speak like that – was refl ected in his campaign for presi-dent in 2001. As we recall from the opening of this ethnography, Ravalomanana had enlisted a longtime friend, a former US mayor, and his campaign managers to pull together a campaign more like that of a Western democracy than a Madagascar one. Such transnational collaboration in matters of governance is not unusual. What was remarkable with regard to this campaign was the localized and dialogi-cal nature of the Americans ’ consultation and intervention into the local linguistic repertoire, including kabary politika. Ravalomanana ’sversion of pragmatic intervention into the linguistic self -fi gurings of everyday national politics represents the leading edge of stylistic and contextual innovations changing political discourse to achieve particu-lar political outcomes. Chapter 2 ended with a sketch of Imerina ’slinguistic and political history, leading to this “US-style” campaign, which stood in stark contrast – sometimes intentionally, other times not – to traditional kabary politika. These advisors, Americans and Malagasy, strategized about speech, which would communicate not only their candidate ’s campaign platform but also an embodiment of national modernity, and foreshadow national progress.

The direct speech styles of Ravalomanana went along with self -presentation of an agenda -setting 1 –2–3 businessman style, running the country by a philosophy of acta non verba, an expression Ravalo-manana has used in the past to align his words with what constitutes action. Within the purview of kabary politika, Ravalomanana shifted his speech style in three distinct ways: in syntax, in register, and by metapragmatically reframing traditional oratory as a part of an unen-lightened and corrupt past, with Ravalomanana ’s own variety as a presage of a future of modern development and progress. As previous chapters have sketched, Ravalomanana ’s speech involves more active


voice, and more words borrowed from the register of international development, and often of sermons. It also points to a broader change in the embodiment of the political mpikabary.

Ravalomanana’s US style of hand -shaking, eye contact, and casual dress served, in part, to break down and symbolically reframe the way the normalized formal context of kabary is experienced. Razafy walked us through this in chapter 3 – the way kabary politika is governed by dialogical principles of power and authority, which shape and refl ect a candidate ’s speech and the ways his audience reacts. The traditional mpikabary generally maintains a physical and symbolic distance from the audience, which legitimates it by remaining silent and maintaining that intersubjective distance. By virtue of his political role, Ravalo-manana’s mere utterance in a state kabary politika presupposes this kind of distance between speaker and audience. However, quite often Rav-alomanana breaks frame by talking about the context of this genre of state address in the kabary itself. Ravalomanana deftly recalibrates physi-cal and symbolic distances with his auditors through metanarratives, talk about the context of the form within the form itself. In Ravalo-manana’s 2004 commemoration address of the 1947 insurrection against colonialism, for instance, he broke the otherwise presupposed physical orientation to his audience, saying to veterans of the insurrection: “You down there, come up here because you are to be honored and I will go down there as I am to be thankful of your work. ”

Discourse about the contextual organization of kabary metapragmati-cally recalibrates the presupposed context of speech as metonymic of the relationship between the state and the people. What is more, this layering of talking about kabary in kabary alters the source of power in political speech distinctly away from any other gods before the Christian one when Ravalomanana and others pitch public speaking within the moral code of straight talk. These days, fewer people are surprised when the president speaks in this different style of kabaryor when he speaks only for a few minutes in order to let everyone know he does not wish to speak but to act. What is more, during the campaign, he further upset the contextual conventions for presi-dential kabary by offering his cell -phone number to members of the crowd, shaking hands with people in the audience, and unabashedly leaving mud on his shoes – all the while explaining in his speech that these were the evidence that he was a transparent and action -orientedpresidential candidate, not one who just gives kabary full of empty promises.


Cartoonist Ralanto, who works with Seta, explained this shift in the president ’s speech style, and his more dialogical interaction with his constituents:

When political leaders do kabary, it ’s full of “blah blah ” only. That is why Benja has made this cartoon [see fi gure 6.5, chapter 6]. There should be a great distinction between the time for kabary and time for “work.” That is, when one says, “I am lighting this lighter ” [reaches for his cigarettes and lighter], I should not say it but then do nothing to actually light it. Ravalomanana is mostly angry about this habit in government. He believes that after step A, one should go to step B and not stay at step A. It ’s that mentality of past politicians that Rav-alomanana does not like. For example, the politician will say “Let’sbuild a house together! ” But, not one single house will be built if all of us do not unite our effort to build it and not just stay at the “verbal”stage! Malagasy ’s electoral campaign used to be done like that: “I will build your roads, I will do this, I will do that! From our partnership with X, we will get such amount of fi nancing . . . ” But what had been realized? Nothing. That is what Ravalomanana dislikes, talking without doing anything.

Seta pipes in to Ralanto ’s explanation: “Right, there is no more need for kabary that hides something and does not tell the reality. ”

Figure 5.4 in chapter 5, in which a confused man stands at a fork in the road toward development, points also to this perception of what gets done under the trope of development ( fampandrosoana) and lan-guage’s relation to the intention and action of that process – and therefore of corruption ’s relation to transparency of information con-veyed in a particular form to a particular public.

We read from these cartoonists ’ observations and see in their own arguments and work the idea that Ravalomanana ’s refl exive style of kabary is keyed to prior native ideologies of language ’s functionality as contextualized social action. This suggests that kabary politika incites evaluations of political speakers as liars ( mpandainga) and their words as indexical of an institutionalized corruption. This long -lasting trap for any kabary speaker has caused a shift in its logic, and confl icting epistemologies of speech and truth. Kabary, as an object of scrutiny for animators, authors, and auditors, becomes an icon of Malagasy ideas about talking and agentive intent itself. In this sense, a break in the traditional intersubjective relation between speaker and audience has the force to index Ravalomanana ’s break from broken promises and corruption and a move toward “transparency” and “real action. ”


In transnational networks and the international development com-munity, of which Madagascar ’s everyday life of state governance and civil society is a part, prior presidential styles of kabary continually have been viewed as presupposing some disposition and tendency toward corruption. The old ways “hide,” in their winding style, what you “really mean, ” but to speak “directly” in an agent -centered active voice indexes the ability and intent to progress. Proverbs and formality point to a speaker who tries to avoid responsibility and hide behind another’s words, whereas the corporatized register of business and international development is “straight talk, ” indicating development and modernity. All of this is assimilated into the local stylistic context of Ravalomanana ’s kabary politika and “gets semiotically turned into a positive attribute of [local] identity ” (Silverstein 1998: 404). In short, what was once thought to be a speaking style embodying the essence of strength ( mahery) and power ( hasina), endowed as an “authorizedlanguage,” has shifted over time.

As Silverstein explains, “seen locally in essentializing ideological terms of ‘tradition’ and ‘modernity,’ these polar(ized) opposites become a processual armature of revalorization of the very language form with which positioned identities are heard to speak in various public fora ”(Silverstein 1998: 411). Kabary and references to kabary key to an objectifi ed “tradition,” a category that serves as one of the primary modalities of modernity, in this case tied to power struggles peculiar to language and political action bifurcating tradition as antagonistic to progress (Bate 2009: 185, working from Singer 1972: 287, 384). Alongside the idioms of “community” ( fi havanana)1, language ’s role for shaping and affecting what the public sphere looks like, and how public opinion circulates in it, becomes acutely evident. Beyond this, what forms may be engaged with great political effect – and the roles that may access and fi nesse this mode of speaking – shift.

Controlling the Code to Discipline Access to State Power

As both knowledge and practice, politics is ordered to fi t a moral order of a “truth,” reinforced by links between dominant varieties of speech styles and dominant groups who standardize them. Political


orators inculcate a larger social project of governance by tailoring the code and speech about the code, over and against other codes. Speech contexts and styles are confi ned by a fi xed point on a moral compass such that the “message” is read as always and only the “truth” (Hill 2000). Controlling the standards of what constitutes the truth in context and style shapes modes of participation and participant roles in the public sphere as people speak truth to power and power to truth. As Susan Gal notes, “once the belief in the communicative aesthetic or other superiority of such a standard . . . is established, other varieties are seen as inferior . . . and speakers are ideologically constituted as subordinate groups based on cultural, cognitive, or aesthetic inadequacy of their speech ” ( 1995: 419). Such indexical alignments between speaking truth and being truthful delimit partici-pation to those who exhibit this morality. In short, if an individual – and then, by extension, the social categories he represents such as class, ethnicity, gender, etc. – does not speak this “way,” he and the rest of “them” are not a certain way, and therefore are against progress and development.

Because the right to engage in kabary has always been a critical factor determining who shall infl uence decisions, this semiotic refram-ing of kabary has shifted the means of access to state power and the way its affairs, from economic to social, are negotiated. As speech styles change, their functions as mediators of social relations change. This “power to regulate and control is not simply a capacity stored within the state, from where it extends out to society. The apparent boundary of the state does not mark the limit of the processes of regulation. It itself is a product of those processes ” (Mitchell 2000:90). Regulating and disciplining the democratic state and civil society are achieved by regulating and disciplining linguistic representations, which are emblematic of truth across social fi elds. This process of regulation and control became evident to me while following the mayoral campaign as many candidates spoke to the issue of corruption and then framed their own speech as representative of something “notlike those ways of the past corrupt leaders. ” Implicitly responding to recent political crises and crony -ism, speakers played on voters ’concerns to assure their audiences that they were not like “that” by not speaking like “that.” In this, they aimed to secure the code of power by cornering the market on the aesthetic qualities of truth in that code.


Once You Have the Appearance of a Wild Cat, You Are One: Assuring the Aesthetic Qualities of Truth in Speech

The president ’s platform for development has reverberated across party lines and trickled down to an audience often faced with juxtaposed styles within the speech of a single representative. During the mayoral election, political parties ran candidates who espoused a platform of development through transparency, and who often chose to model this change in their speech. Nearly all spoke to the issue of speech as representative of “truth,” implying a truth that they carried inside themselves and transparently displayed by their speech. The political party Asa Vita Ifampitsarana (AVI) is glossed as “judged by the work done, ” so named to emphasize work over talk. In the Bemasoan-dro campaign rally, an AVI party representative exclaimed to his audience:

For us in AVI, we do not need much talk in kabary [ tsy lava resaka amin’ny kabary], but we evaluate only the work done. This candidate has been our choice because he said to us, “What I have said I will do if elected is what I will do. It is not propaganda fi lled with empty promises like the kabary of others. ”

This mayoral candidate added a set of greetings beyond the traditional ones to include honorifi cs to his party leader and government offi cials. To index his moral character, he suggested that “everyone here may know of me because I am particularly well known in the church ” and followed this with a special greeting to “dear pastors, church offi cers, deacons, young Christians. I know that you all know what is to be known about me without me saying too much. ” This lends salience to the frame work the speaker next invoked: the ranjan’kabary, the body of his message, a commentary on his own relationship to the act of speech -giving:

I am not of the talkative type as many of my opponents. As our motto says, let us be judged by the work we have done. We have so much corruption to work out in the politics of this village and we need soli-darity and transparency in our work to fi x this and develop the area rapidly. So, if you choose me, you will be able to see my work and not always only hear my voice talking without action.


This move oriented his words -to-come to the moral order of a truth in words and actions. Through this contextualization of his words before they occur, the speaker appeals to an audience ’s sense of truth in which aesthetic canons and social order coincide.

The president of the party association later took this same evaluative position by contrasting what he was about to say with words about the words of his opponents. He spoke about politicians who do nothing but make promises with their words, promises couched in proverbs that hide intentions, actions he names as “out-of-date manners and what the former ones used to do. ” The evaluative kiss of death came when he offered up his own proverb to disparage the old way: “Here is one they won ’t use: Izay vandana dia kary! [literally, striped cats are wild cats], ” “Once you have the appearance of a wild cat, you are one. ” The appearance of being that wild cat is what the presi-dent and other speakers invoke in their effort to be seen as part of this movement toward a new political modernity.

In addition to this break, to speak of how he would not speak and trap others ’ words in corruption, the party ’s president used additional frame breaks to link that candidate ’s speech with the president ’s, and to implicate the audience in the content of the speech itself, namely me. The president of the AVI looked at me, the only foreigner in the crowd, and pinned on my presence the truth of all his and others ’talk about development and progress through work and not just talk: “This vazaha is not here by chance. Don ’t think this vazaha is here by accident. I can say that by her presence, and not by my own words, that if you manage to get our candidate elected, there will be a place from abroad which will work with this district here. ” Breaks in kabaryto speak about development ( fampandrosoana) and transparency ( nymarina) reinforce the relevance of these issues, and indexically signal a new genre of kabary that is iconic of that development and progress, a new way of doing in a new way of speaking.

This expressed rationalization about new kabary variations is caught in an ideological tension that many in urban Imerina share. In effect, stylistic shifts in kabary politika index ideological stances that co -articulate with “deeply felt yet contested discourses ” between Western and Malagasy ideologies and aesthetics of oratory and the semiotics of how “image” is conveyed and experienced (Gal 1993). As I men-tioned before, most Malagasy non -elites in urban Imerina will argue that to be able to deliver a political kabary with winding skill ( sakalaka),through indirect speech ( teny mioloka), shows the citizenry that the


orator can think through and make decisions behind closed doors, because the orator reveals his train of thought through speech, allow-ing the audience to think for themselves rather than exercising the authority presupposed in the kabary by just reporting a decision. In what Durham and Fernandez (1991) call an “argument of images, ”new and old styles of kabary politika mediate between competing linguistic markets. In this case, locally recognized kabary variants become emblems (iconically essentialized indexes) and tropes of their users’ agentive positions in shifting fi elds of identities (Silverstein 1998:411). The reception of these identities is maintained and threatened according to the success of what Goffman refers to as “impressionmanagement”: speakers aim to achieve the appearance of living up to moral standards over content in a manipulation of morality, and are “concerned not with the issue of realizing the moral standards they as people are supposed to live up to, but with the amoral issue of engi-neering a convincing impression in their own speech that these standards are being realized ” by them over another (Goffman 1959: 251).

Cartoonists play in this penetration of codes by foregrounding ten-sions between this “image” or impression of truth and the realities of corruption. As we have seen in earlier examples, recontextualizing the impressions politicians attempt to create, cartoonists reveal their failures, blurring the line between the person and the political role. Misframing the code the politician uses suggests what that code con-ceals, or what cartoonists believe to be the “real” message. Cartoonists re-key the lines taken by that politician, to put on the page what they claim is actually their motivational core. Cartoonists also suggest that political speakers couch their intentions in the register of international development, as a code with a vested base – bystanders who are local and international constituents – all the while concealing rather than revealing their message to an immediate audience.

The “Local” of Language and Governance

What Ravalomanana and his campaign managers may have recognized as the “US style, ” once brought to the Imerina stage, transformed into a syncretic, generically hybrid, transnational style (Errington 1998; Hill and Hill 1986). Stylistically enabled and sustained by the presupposed authority of the kabary genre and the power it bestows on its speakers,


these changes began to be picked up but also iconicized as Ravalomanana-like by his second term. Active judgments by auditors like cartoonists and the talk about this kind of talk within other speak-ers’ kabary began to focus on the distinction between talking about development and realizing it democratically. This was especially when Ravalomanana’s company logo was imprinted on the national cur-rency and almost every contract for construction or road building was awarded to the president ’s private company. This put the very modernaesthetic enabling Ravalomanana ’s image and plan in tension with what felt more transparent, kabary tsotra, simple kabary, and informed the major political changes that eventually ended Ravalomanana ’stenure as president. Early on, however, Ravalomanana got great mileage out of this style of transparency. The utterances of Ravalo-manana and others during the campaign were read, evaluated, and “rendered understandably relevant to what the [auditor] can come to perceive is going on ” relative to the authority and power this discursive contextual style assumes and creates (Goffman 1981: 50 –1). “Sincerityof a certain sort gets entextualized in a master narrative about the evolution of democracy ” (Herzfeld 2005: 191). With this kind of endurance, the ideological and aesthetic framework of truth and falsity argued through language about language not only legitimizes the state but also mediates connections with a global, pluralingual imperative to develop.

As politicians change the way they speak to fi t with ways of government, and audiences accept the change as a move toward moder-nity, they dismantle the salience of traditional kabary forms and poten-tially defang it of its political salience as it was during the colonial era. This critical practice of Malagasy culture is now at stake in a politic where speaking in its formalized style can implicate its speaker as corrupt. Whether it is from the president or pundits who parody his words, the emergence and reproduction of this larger moral argument within the semiosocial world that is urban Imerina give shape to a political imaginary in which a focus on actual corruption plaguing government processes is defl ected and placed on the very hermeneutic, collaborative practices that aid in democratic transparency. Morality and immorality are framed as discursive measures to enable or disable participation by certain kinds of speakers. However, because this style of oratory and the inherent rumination of ideas embedded in its form persist across social institutions, certainly the limits of the state and public opinion are uneven in their affect across multiple levels of


society. Within these structural relations, these practices become normalized and institutionalized as agentive practices associated with state regimentation or examples of a public ’s consent or agitation of that regimentation. Despite the eventual coup d ’état that would force Ravalomanana from offi ce, these shifts in kabary infl uenced the forma-tion over time of particular political and cultural institutions that continue to shape governance and relations between the state and civil society.

Note

1 These idioms are discussed thoroughly in chapter 5.

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