The Merina landscape in early nineteenth century highlands Madagascar.

The ways in which political life and authority are created, maintained, or imagined through landscape are curiously undeveloped in scholarship surrounding the arts of Africa. This paper focuses on the some of the key roles that landscape played in the historical development of the Merina kingdom in the central highlands of Madagascar during the early nineteenth century. The transformation of the highlands landscape by the Merina (the people who inhabit the central highlands) was central to the formation of the Merina kingdom, as were the social meanings embedded in landscape elements, including water, wood, and stone. The creation of rice plains and the increase in scale of tomb architecture are prime examples of these spatial transformations. This is part of a larger workin-progress, The Majesty of Architecture in Madagascar: Transforming the Merina Kingdom, 1800-1880, which examines how political authority of the royal Merina was constituted through the reordering of space and the creation of a royal capital and large palace complex known as the Rova. The palace, which is depicted in an engraving (Fig. 2) from William Ellis's Three Visits to Madagascar (1859), towers above the Merina capital of Antananarivo. In the engraving, below the Rova, a royal procession is leaving the capital for the east coast of the island.

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Seminal scholarship (Lefebvre 1991, Duncan 1990, Cosgrove 1993, and Smith 2003) has expanded our understanding of landscape as encompassing the material, experiential, perceptual, and imaginative dimensions that are at the heart of the creation of space in human societies. Conceptualizing landscape as historical and political and not simply as material or inert allows us to see landscape as a dynamic dimension of human culture. Accordingly, landscape transforms people as much as it is transformed by them. In this vein, Dennis Cosgrove states convincingly that landscape is "both medium and outcome of a broader cultural discourse" (1993:10).

Landscape is at the very heart of Merina political identity. The words "Merina" (for the people) and "Imerina" (for the area surrounding Antananarivo) are really two sides of the same coin. The toponym Imerina was invented by King Andrianampoinimerina (c. 1745-1809), who in the late eighteenth century unified a number of small principalities under a single royal kingdom. The king incorporated the toponym Imerina into his own name, which is a compound word: andriana (sovereign, noble) at the po (heart) of Imerina--the landscape of the central highlands. It is noteworthy that "Imerina" and "Merina" are derived from the Malagasy word meaning "something occupying a conspicuous place or prominency." By 1800, Andrianampoinimerina had conquered Antananarivo, an impressive hilltop royal enclosure. He built a palace on the site, which became the political seat of royal Merina power. The larger palaces depicted in Ellis's engraving were built forty years later by the king's descendants.

Pier M. Larson (2000) cogently argues that the initial uses of "Merina" were grounded in a purposeful association of a singular "permanent" sovereign with a "prominent" place, thereby making the two indistinguishable. This historical construction became an integral part of the collective identity of the Merina peoples, as evidenced by an idealized portrait of the king that was painted around 1905 (the identity of the painter is unknown). The portrait shows him with his feet firmly planted on a stone outcropping, standing in front of his royal palaces, around and through which his kingdom was created.

Andrianampoinimerina created a sense of historical belonging for his people through the vehicle of lengthy orations, which allowed him to articulate before large crowds deep historical ties of the Merina to the region surrounding the royal capital. These historical connections have been passed down to generations of Merina, who continue to draw on the landscape as their main source of memory and history and, by extension, connection to their ancestors, including the king himself. David Graeber succinctly summarizes this complex point, stating that "History, in Imerina, is largely a matter of placing the living in an historical landscape created by the dead" (Graeber 1999:319). The Merina and many other Malagasy have a term tanindrazana (tanin for "land" and razana for "ancestors"); for the Merina, tanindrazana is tantamount to one's own status in society and by definition one's historical and current affiliation to other Merina.

One of the chief ways in which space was reordered by Andrianampoinimerina was through massive earthworks, including systems of dikes and canals to create the rice fields on the plains on the west side of the capital. Figure 1, which is a typical example of the highlands landscape near Antananarivo, shows rice fields surrounding nearby villages. In the distance are hills, many of which were the seats the former principalities that were unified by Andrianampoinimerina under the Merina Kingdom. The creation of these rice fields, which today remain among the largest and most productive in Madagascar, required an enormous concentration of slaves and "forced laborers" who worked under a mandatory system of royal servitude known as fanompoana. Gerald M. Berg and Maurice Bloch argue that the intensive labor required for and the control of these massive projects were downplayed by elite Merina and "clothed in the rhetoric of rituals" focused on the sacred power of land and ancestors, and ultimately the sovereign, as the true source of fertility and wealth (Berg 1981:307).

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These projects represented more than engineering feats, because landscape elements such as water are embedded with larger social meanings. One of the material ways in which Malagasy elders symbolically transmit a historical sense of unification of land and people is through the action of sprinkling water (tsodrano) onto their descendants (Bloch 1994:138). During the ritual, water becomes both a vehicle for the transmission of ancestral blessings and an element taken from a specific locale with ancestral ties (Thomas 1997). The importance of water is highlighted in William Ellis's extraordinary photograph (1862-65) of a quarter near the Rova. The photograph shows a group of Merina gathered around a large stone. Though it is not clear from the image, the stone is a marker for a sacred spring, which supplied water for rituals such as tsodrano. The spring is what drew people to this place.

The practice of using water to symbolically transmit Merina ties to each other, their land, and their ancestors continues to the present day. When I was conducting fieldwork in 1997-98 and 1999, on several occasions I witnessed families taking water from a specific spring and carrying it in bottles up to a hilltop tomb site. In many cases, water and earth were carried over considerable distance from an ancestral home to the tomb. The reenactment of these rituals conveys the importance of attaching an identity to elements of the landscape (in this case water and earth) based on their place of origin. For many Malagasy, water exemplifies the "rootedness" of individuals in a particular landscape shared by others (Thomas 1997). Rivers, streams, ponds, and springs are also physical markers and boundaries that help define the character of a place with which individuals and families can identify. Throughout Madagascar, trees (and their visible roots) often are used to mark sacred sources of water. A tree on the edge of a pond, located near the west-coast city of Mahajunga, has recently been wrapped with cloth during a ritual honoring the ancestors (Fig. 3). There is a striking parallel between the practice of wrapping trees and the wrapping of the corpses of ancestors during a highlands ritual known as famadihana for which the island is famous (on famadihana, see Bloch 1994).

In the highlands, possessing certain types of hardwood was the greatest mark of status. Small forests existed below royal enclosures and around villages, but they were protected from foresting by taboos (fady) because certain groups of Merina considered them sacred. These forests were also visible markers of social rank, since these hills stood out in the deforested landscape. Rare hardwoods, which were carried for over one hundred miles from the eastern forests to the central highlands, were the exclusive building material used by royal and elite Merina until the late 1860s. Most generally, wood and vegetal materials were associated with the living and were the only materials used to build houses and palaces until the late nineteenth century. Many kinds of trees were taboo for construction; ficus, for example, was off limits because its roots suffocate other trees and therefore was believed to be destructive to life (Feeley-Harnik 1980:564). However, certain species of ficus were planted to mark sacred places and tombs and were closely associated with Merina royalty. Today, it is common to find ficus planted near former royal enclosures and tombs.

For the Merina and other Malagasy, stone is far from being an inert material. Stones remind individuals of their connection to others, past events, and ancestors by means of their powerful physical and metaphorical associations. Maurice Bloch writes that stone monuments are erected throughout Madagascar as a way of "inscribing the living person in the unchanging land since stone is, and is perceived to be, even more permanent than the hardest wood" (Bloch 1995). Stones serve as a means of "communication" between ancestors and the living. Individuals stand in front of a stone tomb and ask their ancestors for blessings or help during a family crisis or prior to an event such as a wedding. The notion that people communicate with stones is portrayed in a 1905 painting by the Malagasy artist James Rainimaharosoa (1860-1926; Tale of Two Islands 1998:28). His moving painting portrays a woman in mourning standing next to an ancestral tomb with the tanindrazana in the background. In her grief, the woman is asking for help from her ancestors. There is a sense of self-awareness that one day she will become like the stones that makes up her ancestors' tomb.

In many parts of Madagascar, including the central highlands, there are widely held beliefs that as individuals age they harden and when they die they are "hard, resistant, and eternal" (Pearson and Ramilisonina 1998:313; see also Middleton 1999:8). Unlike the rare hardwoods used to construct Merina palaces and houses, stone has never been alive. As the most visible material in tomb architecture, stone provides tombs with the quality of eternity, which, in turn, is associated with ancestors. Through the use of stone as the primary material for tomb construction the Merina continue the process of creating ancestors and, as in the painting of the woman in mourning, creating identities for themselves (Feeley-Harnik 1991). What water, stone, and wood have in common is that they all embody hasina--a critical Malagasy concept of "sacred efficacy" whereby "blessing" provided to one's ancestors are extended to the living. Whether natural or manmade, these materials are potentially beneficial for the living as sources of power.

At the beginning of the nineteenth century, changes in tomb construction were perhaps as transformative as the creation of vast rice plains. Contrary to most scholarly opinion, historical evidence suggests that highland tomb-building practices were changing prior to the European presence in the highlands, which increased dramatically by the 1820s. My fieldwork in Madagascar confirms that almost all tombs constructed in the highlands before the late eighteenth century were made from packed earth lined with small stones, although forms and siting differed considerably among them. Some tombs were simply mounds located on top of high rocks (Fig. 4), some were rectangular tiers at ground level, and others were hardly noticeable piles of stone.

Tomb-building and burial practices changed as a result of the policies of King Andrianampoinimerina. The content of these policies is handed down to us through his famous public addresses, which were recorded after the king's death, beginning in the 1820s, and later compiled by a French Jesuit priest, Francois Callet, in a collection of oral histories known as the Tantara ny Andrian (History of Kings, 1871-83). In these orations, the king urged his Merina subjects to "build huge tombs" out of large slabs of granite (Larson 2000:186). The slabs, weighing several tons, had to be dragged by dozens of men from the quarry to the tomb site. Pier Larson argues that the collective labor required to move stone slabs and set them upright during construction was the reason this type of tomb was encouraged by royal decree (Larson 2000:188; see also Pearson and Ramilisonina 1998:313). As the king was attempting to build allegiances among highlanders, the construction of large permanent tombs became popular among certain groups of Merina. Tomb building legitimized their desires for cohesive communities that tied the king and the Merina to a particular place (Larson 2000:189). The highlands slave trade controlled by the king was one of the main causes of this longing, since slaving resulted in social fragmentation and insecurity among his subjects. Large stone tombs were also constructed at the Rova, an innovation that served to increase the "power" of the site.

By the 1820s, as increasing numbers of Europeans settled in the highlands, Western "landscape models" were superimposed onto Merina ones. In the same way Merina specified particular places with landscape elements, Europeans marked "their social historical places in a common landscape" (Feeley-Harnik 2001:42). This process involved a direct introduction of non-native plants and trees onto Malagasy soil, since the climate of the highlands was conducive to growing European plants and vegetables.

A photograph (1862-65) by William Ellis (Fig. 5) shows royal subjects sitting attentively, listening to a formal public address known as kabary, a highly structured speech for transmitting the political will of sovereigns. The space where they are sitting is among the most sacred in the capital, due to the presence of a spring and sacred stone. It accommodated the entire population of Antananarivo's upper quarters, which otherwise had very little open space. The ability to draw multitudes of people to one place, coupled with the architectural density and concentration of material elements, demonstrates the power of these materials, and by extension the sovereign. The integration of these political and material elements that make up this space exemplifies that landscape is both the "medium and outcome" of cultural processes.

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[This article was accepted for publication in October 2005.]

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