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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
La laïcité à Mayotte. Un cas d’école Bréant, Hugo
Cahiers de la recherche sur l'éducation et les savoirs,
07/2022, Letnik:
21, Številka:
21
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Odprti dostop
The territory of Mayotte was early excluded from the application of the law of separation of Church and State in 1905. A century later, the law prohibiting the wearing of religious signs in public ...schools thus became the cornerstone of a secular policy in the 101st French department. This article aims to understand the implementation of this model of a public and secular school in a department where the majority of students are Muslim and attend the Koranic school in parallel. The legislative debates highlighted the specificities of the context of Mayotte and established a clear demarcation between a problematic religious veil and a tolerated cultural veil. An analysis of pedagogical and disciplinary practices, carried out by directors in their school and by teachers in their classrooms, demonstrates the fluidity of this border. The management of secularism in action is marked by constant accommodation.
