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Reflections on the "Ethno-" in Malagasy Ethnohistory

Madagascar is an island, and its scholarship has always run the risk of remaining insular.The logo of the Canadian Association of African Studies is an outline of the African continent; Madagascar is literally ‘‘off the map.’’ At North American conventions of Africanist scholars, panels on Madagascar generally are attended by few but the small (though rapidly growing!) cohort of people working on Madagascar. Madagascar is even less well represented in Southeast Asian studies. Malgachisants need to make stronger efforts to build bridges, to make comparisons with continental African and insular Southeast Asian cases (but see, e.g., Metcalf and Huntington ; Bloch and Parry ; Lambek and Strathern ) and to learn from the application of common paradigms. We need to do so not to repeat the diffusionist speculations of past scholarship but to simultaneously sharpen our analytic lens and broaden our view, and to be exposed to the critiques of outsiders. For this reason Jeffrey C. Kaufmann is to be congratulated for developing this special issue of Ethnohistory, and especially for enabling the participation ofMalagasy scholars.The contributors are to be congratulated as well for producing, without exception, an excellent set of articles from which this insider, at least, has learned a good deal. What nearly all of these essays ask, in one form or other, is who are or what is the ‘‘ethno-’’ in ethnohistory? What are the social units that make history and about and for whom history is produced? To this we may add the central question that comes up in anywork in African history or anthropology, namely the attention given to Europeans and the weight given the effects of the colonial period. To what degree have the social units found in