Alexandra Boggs, Columbia University
“Spirit Mediums of the Menabe Region, Madagascar”
Bio: Ali Boggs is a fourth year student at Barnard College who focuses most of her energy on stories and activism. After spending four months in Madagascar where she spoke with spirit mediums and watched possession ceremonies, many of her ideas about life, history and human development have significantly changed, and they continue to change. While not learning about anticolonialism or Latin American politics, Ali makes friends with refugees and helps them adjust to their new lives as NYC residents through her volunteer work at the International Rescue Commitee. She also volunteers at the International Center of New York as a conversation partner, and is part of an organization that supports a Mayan women's weaving cooperative in San Juan Laguna, Guatemala. Most exciting, however, is her newest project--- founding an indigenous rights activism group on the Barnard/Columbia campus that will send a student delegation to Chiapas, Mexico in the Spring.
Abstract: In my paper I would like to explore cultural development among the Sakalava of the Menabe region of Madagascar. My studies in Madagascar have led me to define development not as a universal phenomenon, but as a local process, which should be understood only in relation to the particular setting where it occurs. Therefore, by looking at a place in terms of its history, its present, and how it is coping with current changes, development can most accurately be assessed. I believe that “indices” of development, such as income or education, are not adequate to assess situations of development among people whose values are inherently different than our own. I found that the Malagasy in Morondava and surrounding villages, where I spent a month doing my independent project with SIT’s Culture and Society program, were extraordinarily adept at dealing with rapid change from external influence and internal conflict. However, the way in which they represented and processed these changes was primarily through rituals of possession by ancestral spirits, known as tromba.
