Slavery and Essentialism in Highland Madagascar

This book explores the prejudice against slave descendants in highland Madagascar and its persistence more than a century after the official abolition of slavery. 'Unclean people' is a widespread expression in the southern highlands of Madagascar, and refers to people of alleged slave descent who are discriminated against on a daily basis and in a variety of ways. Denis Regnier shows that prejudice is rooted in a strong case of psychological essentialism: free descendants think that 'slaves' have a 'dirty' essence that is impossible to cleanse. Regnier's field experiments question the widely accepted idea that the social stigma against slavery is a legacy of pre-colonial society. He argues, to the contrary, that the essentialist construal of 'slaves' is the outcome of the historical process triggered by the colonial abolition of slavery: whereas in pre-abolition times slaves could be cleansed through ritual means, the abolition of slavery meant that slaves were transformed only superficially into free persons, while their inner essence remained unchanged and became progressively constructed as 'forever unchangeable'. Based on detailed fieldwork, this volume will be of interest to scholars of anthropology, African studies, development studies, cultural psychology, and those looking at the legacy of slavery.

Denis Regnier is Assistant Professor and Head of Humanities and Social Sciences at the University of Global Health Equity in Rwanda. He gained his PhD in anthropology from the London School of Economics, UK.

1. An encounter with southern Betsileo 'slaves' 2. Three lenses: ethnography, history and cognition 3. The Berosaiña 4. Contested histories 5. Marriage in Beparasy 6. Unilateral unions and their consequences 7. Mixing ancestries and keeping a memory of origins 8. Essentialism: evidence, development and transmission Conclusion