The Disconnection between Power and Rank as a Process: An outline of the development of kingdoms in Central Madagascar

Abstract

TheComplex ranking systems of South Asia and Polynesia offer a special challenge and a special trap to the anthropologist or historian attempting to explain their development. He will inevitably trace the political and economic development of the state and link those to the appearance of new types of power groups and new structures of stratification. The danger lies in identifying and correlating directly the actors' concept of stratification, the distinctions and associations made in the emic system with interest groups identified by analyses of the political or economic structures. This may be done consciously or by implication by translating actors' category terms by words such as ‘nobility’, ‘ruling class’, ‘bourgeoisie’. This is likely to lead to gross ethnocentric assumptions and obscure the specific nature of the ethnographic example. The danger of such an approach has been demonstrated well by Dumont and Pocock for the most complex and the most famous of such hierarchical systems. They point out how the Indian caste system does not fit either in structural form or in ideological content models borrowed from feudal or class systems. Indeed such comparisons obscure the essentially religious aspect of Hindu ideology contained in the scheme (Dumont and Pocock 1958, Dumont 1966). Similar criticisms would also be pertinent to the way the hierarchical systems of Central Madagascar have been analyzed and for very similar reasons.