Island in the Stream: An Ethnographic History of Mayotte by Michael Lambek

Abstract

Reviewed by: Island in the Stream: An Ethnographic History of Mayotte by Michael Lambek Kai Kresse Michael Lambek, Island in the Stream: An Ethnographic History of Mayotte. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2018. 376 pp. "If ethnography is about anything it is surely about human being-in-the-world." —Michael Lambek (2018:281) Michael Lambek, one of the most thoughtful and stimulating anthropologists of our time, presents us with a fascinating book, in which he looks back on his 40 years of fieldwork on the island of Mayotte, situated in the western Indian Ocean between Madagascar and the Comoro Islands, to which it belongs. It is a book of books, one might say. In the new and original genre of "ethnographic history" that Lambek coins here, intertwining layers of time and ethnographic experience are presented. They unfold through layers of narrative reflection and commentaries upon earlier experiences and times, of being-in-the-world on Mayotte. These are narrated from the evolving points of view of the anthropologist's respective ethnographic presents and presences, the thens and theres of ethnographic experience. This hermeneutically oriented ethnography takes account of and reflects upon social experience. Over 13 chapters, Lambek presents, revisits, and discusses perspectives on social life in Mayotte, focusing on the dynamic interplay of religion, kinship, and marriage, and of the political dimensions of migration and citizenship. These interlacing narratives [End Page 153] constitute his "ethnographic history." The intriguing particulars of this project and its conceptual features are laid out and recapped in the introductory and concluding parts (I and IV) of the book. As readers familiar with Lambek's work might expect, Gadamer's notion of a "horizon" is central here, as a blurred and dynamically changing progressive sphere of the work of human understanding. The horizon stands as a leitmotif for a hermeneutical and, in Lambek's view, adequately sensitized approach to the understanding of human beings—anywhere in the world—as enveloped, embedded, and entrapped in dynamic and multi-layered processes of meaning-making and becoming. These are in turn, again, shaping them as particular historical and moral beings, in specific ways and according to their respective surroundings, in terms of culture, language, and history. In the interplay of understanding that Lambek sketches out here for Mayotte, "horizons of the past" and "horizons of the future" (279–280) intersect, overlap, and characterize human experience and perception as specific processes of historical coming-into-being that is shifting and in flux. "Moral horizons" mark the relational intersecting dimensions of processes of knowledge in practice, which are linked to specific obligations and normative expectations that people respond to and/or set for themselves. In related philosophical terms, from which Lambek draws often, and as ably as only few anthropologists can, aspects of "being-in-theworld" (Heidegger) and the "human condition" (Arendt) stand out and are emphasized (281). While constituting the leitmotif for this book, the newly coined genre of ethnographic history is introduced also as "central conceit" (5): as a long-term synchronic portrayal, it is a narrative that is historically oriented but narrated with a view to a given present, which is itself to be understood by means of the (historically informed) ethnographic account. In the opening paragraph of the Preface, Lambek characterizes this new anthropological genre as "composed of successive portraits or analyses written at different times in series of ethnographic presents, each with their own changing horizons of future and past" (xxi). This characterization echoes a Gadamer quotation that is used as the epigraph for the book. It points to the dynamic existential horizons of future and past which, in their interplay, constitute the human perception of what is called "the present" (xxi). The more experienced Lambek readers will see a number of versions of earlier publications in these chapters, adjusted and revised to fit the overarching narrative voice of ethnographic history presented here. This [End Page 154] works well, as a multi-layered narrative moving backwards and forwards in time becomes more meaningful as it proceeds. As readers, we are being treated to rich and vivid accounts of significant instances of everyday life, observed in different decades by the ever-returning anthropologist, who then also guides...