Island in the stream Lambek, Michael Joshua
Island in the stream,
2018, 2018, 2018-11-05
eBook
Island in the Stream introduces an original genre of ethnographic history as it follows a community on Mayotte, an East African island in the Mozambique Channel, through eleven periods of fieldwork ...between 1975 and 2015. Over this 40-year span Mayotte shifted from a declining and neglected colonial backwater to a full département of the French state. In a highly unusual postcolonial trajectory, citizens of Mayotte demanded this incorporation within France rather than joining the independent republic of the Comoros. The Malagasy-speaking Muslim villagers Michael Lambek encountered in 1975 practiced subsistence cultivation and lived without roads, schools, electricity, or running water; today they are educated citizens of the EU who travel regularly to metropolitan France and beyond. Offering a series of ethnographic slices of life across time, Island in the Stream highlights community members' ethical engagement in their own history as they looked to the future, acknowledged the past, and engaged and transformed local forms of sociality, exchange, and ritual performance. This is a unique account of the changing horizons and historical consciousness of an African community and an intimate portrait of the inhabitants and their concerns, as well as a glimpse into the changing perspective of the ethnographer.
•We present a new framework combining ground deformation and geomechanical models to infer subsurface magmatic architecture.•A single magma reservoir cannot explain the Mayotte eruptive history for ...any parameter combinations.•Magmatic mushes connected to a magma reservoir are a viable mechanism for explaining long lived basaltic eruptions.
Despite significant advancements in understanding crustal melt transport, determining the shallow magmatic architecture at any given volcanic system remains a significant challenge with geophysical methods alone. In this study, we present a new conceptual model combining previously studied models for geomechanical magma reservoirs and dyke-shaped conduits. Supplementary to previous work, we include a model for porous mush adjacent to a visco-elastic magma reservoir during the eruption. This addition enables physically consistent magma recharge into the elastic magma reservoir by porous flow instead of employing an arbitrary mantle magma recharge parameterization. We compare our conceptual model with an illustrative test case - the submarine 2018 Mayotte eruption in the Comoros Islands (∼6.55 km3 Bulk Rock Volume, ∼3.5 km water depth, ∼35 km estimated deep magma reservoir). We estimate a magma effusion rate history using a new continuous-time inversion of surface deformation data. A single magma reservoir cannot match the observed eruptive history for any reservoir geometry or crustal and magmatic material properties. However, the presence of a porous mush adjacent to the magma reservoir helps to reconcile the model with the observations. The additional magma flux from the mush region sustains the long eruption at a low effusion rate, as is observed off Mayotte, with a decreasing effusion rate after few months of eruptions and a low persistent effusion rate since then. The mush flow dynamics are a direct consequence of reduced pressure in the magma reservoir during the eruption. Thus, our model provides a parsimonious and physically motivated explanation of the Mayotte eruptive history. Since many historical basaltic eruptions worldwide, such as sometime observed at Piton de la Fournaise, Volcan Arenal, and Laki, have a similar effusion rate history shape as Mayotte, magmatic mushes may be a key component for explaining long-lived basaltic eruptions.
This article examines the postcolonial politics of migration control in Mayotte, an overseas French department, and argues that these bear necropolitical consequences. It sheds light on the gendered ...dimension of this necropolitical power by focusing on the life and border-crossing experiences of undocumented Comorian women. Entrenched barriers to the regularization of their administrative status endanger their access to healthcare and degrade the conditions for life long-term. The constant risk of arrest and massive forced removals furthermore engender dangerous border crossings, each instance exposing the passengers to the risk of death. The article also foregrounds that these necropolitics are exacerbated as a result of the postcolonial conundrum in which Mahoran elites find themselves, with the increasing support of Black and Muslim elites for the French far-right political party.
The French ultra-marine territories are almost all concerned by the tsunami risk. Mayotte does not escape this major hazard, and the risks induced by important issues located on its coastline. Since ...2018, due to the seismo-volcanic activity related to the appearance of a new submarine volcano (Mont Fani Maoré), several tsunami simulations have been produced on Mayotte. These models have been used to develop evacuation plans validated by the authorities. Evacuation and warning capacities could be evaluated and discussed, by modeling both the time needed to safe the population and the theoretical audibility of sirens. Mayotte is thus committed to tsunami risk management but the preparation of populations must remain a priority in order to reduce evacuation times despite the difficulties inherent in any new prevention strategy.
Knowledge and practice in Mayotte Lambek, Michael
Knowledge and practice in Mayotte,
c1993, 19930924, 1993, 2000, 1993-04-10, 1993-01-01
eBook
On the East African island of Mayotte, Islam co-exists with two other systems of understanding and interpreting the world around its inhabitants: cosmology and spirit-mediumship. In a witty, ...evocative style accessible to both the specialist and non-specialist reader, Michael Lambek provides a significant contribution to writing on African systems of thought, on local forms of religious and therapeutic practice, on social accountability, and on the place of explicit forms of knowledge in the analysis of non-western societies.
The "objectified" textual knowledge characteristic of Islam and of cosmology is contrasted with the "embodied" knowledge of spirit possession. Lambek emphasizes the power and authority constituted by each discipline, as well as the challenge that each kind of knowledge presents to the others and their resolution in daily practice. "Disciplines" are defined as an organized body of practitioners or adepts, a concept precise and useful when applied to the contexts of Lambek's own research and equally so in the study of comparable environments elsewhere.
Essential reading for those interested in the comparative study of Islamic societies, Lambek's argument directly contributes to the main anthropological arguments of the day concerning the social and cultural basis of systems of knowledge and ethnographic strategies for depicting them.
The rare stenopodid shrimp, Stenopus devaneyi Goy, 1984, is reported for the first time in the Western Indian Ocean (WIO), at 60 m depth at Mayotte Island. No specimens were collected but the species ...is recognized confidently on photographs based on its characteristic colour pattern: two large red spots on the sides of the second abdominal somite. Selected colour photos are presented. Former Indo-West-Pacific records are listed with an updated map for the geographic distribution of this shrimp. A few ecological observations are made.
À Mayotte, département français inscrit dans l’espace géographique et culturel comorien, la population est musulmane à plus de 95 %. Pluriculturelle et plurilingue, l’île voit cohabiter plusieurs ...langues (locales, officielle et liturgique) qui recoupent trois univers sociaux complémentaires : les interactions d’ordre privé, l’école laïque et l’école coranique. L’histoire sociopolitique de Mayotte en fait aujourd’hui une société sous influence européenne avec une globalisation à deux vitesses qui n’affecte pas de la même manière les familles, selon leur trajectoire migratoire et leur héritage socioculturel. Ces bouleversements se cristallisent notamment autour de la place et du rôle de l’enseignement coranique dans une société qui voit l’école laïque et républicaine concurrencer les rythmes traditionnellement dévolus aux shioni, les écoles coraniques traditionnelles. À partir d’enquêtes ethnographiques sur la fréquentation des shioni, nous montrerons comment la confrontation entre ces principes du « vivre ensemble », issus de l’islam, et l’impératif de laïcité tend à déstabiliser l’ordre social séculaire.
The “Fani Maoré” eruption off the coasts of Mayotte has been intensively monitored by applying methods similar to those used for subaerial eruptions. Repeated high-resolution bathymetric surveys and ...dredging, coupled with petrological analyses of time-constrained samples, allowed tracking the evolution of magma over the whole submarine eruptive sequence. Indeed, after one year of direct ascent (Phase 1), basanitic magma switched to a different pathway that sampled a tephri-phonolitic subcrustal reservoir (Phase 2). Later, the magma pathway shifted again in the crust resulting in a new eruption site located 6 km northwest of the main edifice (Phase 3). The petrological signature of lava flows reveals both an evolution by fractional crystallization and syn-eruptive mixing with a tephri-phonolitic magma.We demonstrate that high-flux eruption of large volumes of basanitic magma from a deep-seated reservoir can interact with shallower reservoirs and remobilize eruptible magma. This has significant hazards implications with respect to the capacity of such large eruptions to reactivate shallow-seated inactive reservoirs from a transcrustal magmatic system that could be located potentially at a distance from the high-flux eruptive site.
L’éruption au large de Mayotte a été intensément surveillée en appliquant des méthodes similaires aux éruptions sub-aériennes. Une étude pétrologique et géochimique des échantillons dragués couplée à de nombreux relevés bathymétriques, nous a permis de suivre l’évolution du magma au cours de l’éruption. Le trajet du magma change après un an de remontée directe (Phase 1), un réservoir magmatique sous-crustal et plus différencié est alors échantillonné (Phase 2). Un mois plus tard, le trajet change à nouveau et engendre une migration du site éruptif à 6 km au nord-ouest de l’édifice principal (Phase 3). La signature pétrologique des coulées de lave révèle à la fois une évolution par cristallisation fractionnée et un mélange syn-eruptif avec un magma téphri-phonolitique. Nous démontrons qu’une éruption à haut débit impliquant de grands volumes de magma basanitique et provenant d’un réservoir profond peut interagir avec des réservoirs plus superficiels et remobiliser le magma éruptible. Ceci a des implications significatives en termes de risques quant à la capacité de ces grandes éruptions à réactiver des réservoirs inactifs peu profonds provenant d’un système magmatique transcrustal et potentiellement situé à distance du site éruptif.
The book uncovers the versatility and literary skills of oral narrators in a small African island. Relying on the researches of three French ethnographers who interviewed storytellers in the ...1970s-80s, Lee Haring shows a once-colonised people using verbal art to preserve ancient values in the postcolonial world, when the island of Mayotte was transforming itself from a neglected colony to an overseas department of France. The author’s innovation is to read ethnographic researches as play scripts—to see printed folktales as accounts of live performances. One storyteller after another comments symbolically on what it is like to be a formerly colonised population. Storytelling women, in particular, combine diverse plots and characters to create traditional-sounding stories, which could not have been predicted from the African, Malagasy, Indian, and European traditions coexisting in Mayotte. Haring’s account shows them to be particularly skilled at irony and ambiguity, conveying both submissive and rebellious attitudes in their tales. He makes Mayotte storytelling accessible to a new, English-speaking audience and demonstrates that traditional storytellers in those years were preserving, but also critiquing, their inherited social order in a changing world. Their creative intentions, cultural influences and widely different narrative styles constitute Mayotte’s system of the arts of the word. Literary specialists, folklore enthusiasts, and people who like reading stories will find much to appreciate in this engaging and sophisticated book.
When Mayotte was purchased by France in 1841, major works were undertaken on the island to provide central administration and dwellings for civil servants and colonists. Studying the buildings known ...as "the Old Courthouse" (built in 1955) not only gives an insight into the organisation of justice in Mayotte since the second half of the 19th century, but also makes it possible to follow the establishment of French administration on the island, from Dzaoudzi (Petite Terre) to Mamoudzou (Grande Terre). Although this architectural whole is no longer used for its original legal function, the Old Courthouse of Mamoudzou still remains monumental at the seafront. It stands as a testament to the introduction of architectural prototypes for the administrative buildings in the mid-20th century. Halfway between preservation and the desire for modernity, the question of restoring and re-appropriating a site recently listed as a historic monument (monument historique) calls for some reflection in Mayotte.
