To tell it directly or not: Coding transparency and corruption in Malagasy political oratory

Abstract

ABSTRACTThis article discusses stylistic and contextual variations in the political oratory (kabary politika) of urban Madagascar. New imported oratorical styles and older styles ofkabaryrepresent competing linguistic markets where political leaders field broader issues of political modernity, fighting government corruption through reforms toward transparency.Kabaryhas become the object of criticism in models for transparent government practice. This has affected the way leaders speak to and about the country, reifying a moral structure arguing what constitutes truth and how speakers understand language as conveying that truth. In this respect, this article describes linguistic and metalinguistic encodings of transparency versus corruption in the political communication styles of highland Malagasy political orators. It looks at how the rhetorical modes of an urban polity are reorganized in ways that reshape vernacular epistemologies of truth in language and shift the production of particular publics and their access to participation in political process. (Madagascar,kabary, oratory, democracy, linguistic variation, language ideology, truth and ethics, public opinion, public culture)*