Tasha Rijke-Epstein (Deparment of History, Vanderbilt University) will present "Elixir of Power: Bees, Honey, and Political Transformations in Early Modern Madagascar," followed by a discussion.
How have bees and honey been used in amplifying, performing and transforming relations of power? This talk explores this question through bee and honey-related historical practices in the Indian Ocean island of Madagascar during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. As early as the sixteenth century, Malagasy political rulers employed cosmological practices that brought together the living, the dead, and the natural world. Within these was an understanding of the world as a space inhabited by invisible and invisible forces, ancestral presences, and key plants, animals and substances that possessed properties—bees and honey foremost among them. Royal rulers and ritual specialists from diverse polities across the island undertook practices—for instance, demands for tributes of honey; public consumption of honey-infused meals; and the use of honey-laced royal amulets—that centered bees and honey as key intermediaries between the living, the dead, and the invisible world of power. In this talk, I will share preliminary research, based on triangulated Malagasy oral histories, parables, and proverbs, travelers accounts and material culture artifacts, that tracks the active presence of bees; the rich, contested imaginative terrain of political rulers and commoners; and the ways in which insects and insect materials were central to spiritual and political transformations in the region. Although sometimes only glimpsed through their makings, bees were potent social catalysts in constituting the possibilities for dwelling and thriving in the southwestern Indian Ocean.