Anthropology

Malagasy social organisation is built on descent and on the relationship between the living and the ancestors. The tomb, rather than the house, is frequently the enduring architectural and social centre of a lineage; in parts of the highlands, tomb construction represents the largest investment a family makes.

Participants study these systems through the standard apparatus of kinship analysis, covering descent, affinity, residence and inheritance, while also confronting the influential Malagasy-derived arguments about how kinship is produced through shared substance and shared action rather than fixed by biology at birth.

Fieldwork focuses on genealogical method, life-history interviewing, and mapping the spatial expression of kinship in settlement and burial patterns. Because ancestral relationships determine land access, this material connects directly to contemporary disputes over land tenure and conservation.

The Vezo of the southwest are frequently cited in the anthropological literature as a case where identity is understood as something performed rather than inherited: one is Vezo by doing what Vezo do, primarily fishing and living from the sea. Working on that coast lets participants examine performative identity directly.

Elsewhere, the highland Merina state of the nineteenth century, the imposition of French colonial administration, the 1947 insurrection and its suppression, and post-independence political cycles all bear on how ethnic categories are mobilised today. Participants are trained to treat 'the eighteen tribes' as a historical artefact requiring explanation rather than a natural fact.

Caste-like distinctions arising from the history of slavery remain socially consequential in parts of the island and are discussed frankly, as one of the topics a superficial cultural programme would avoid.

This is a methods course. Participants learn participant observation and how to write fieldnotes that survive scrutiny, semi-structured and unstructured interviewing, informed consent in practice rather than on paper, participatory mapping, household and time-allocation surveys, and free-listing and pile-sorting techniques for eliciting local categories.

They work with an interpreter, and are taught how to work with one well, which is a distinct skill involving pacing, question construction, and awareness of how the interpreter's own position shapes the encounter. Malagasy language instruction runs alongside so that participants can follow the shape of a conversation.

Reflexivity is treated as a technical requirement, not a philosophical decoration. Participants keep a separate reflexive journal recording their own position, assumptions and effect on the setting, and this material is discussed in supervision sessions.

Research ethics are covered thoroughly: consent that is genuinely informed and revocable, anonymisation, data storage, the politics of representation, and the question of what the community receives from the research. Participants also address the specific ethical position of a short-term visiting researcher, which is different from that of a doctoral fieldworker and should be acknowledged as such.

Environmental anthropology is a major strand, given Madagascar's conservation context. Participants examine local ecological knowledge, taboo systems as resource governance, the social meaning of tavy cultivation beyond its ecological effect, and how conservation policy lands in a village. This is where anthropology becomes directly useful, because conservation programmes fail routinely because they misread the social system they enter.

Our anthropology teaching includes Malagasy academics and university lecturers, and participants work with Malagasy student peers where partnerships allow. Several participants have developed dissertation and doctoral projects from material begun on this programme.