[Sci-tech-public] World History Seminar TODAY, Friday November 14, 2014

[Margo Collett]

Literacy and Power in Madagascar: Reading, Writing, and Arithmetic in the Nineteenth Century


Pier M. Larson
                                                                                  Professor of History, Johns Hopkins University



MIT, E51-275

Friday, November 14 

from 2:30 to 4:30 PM


Protestant Evangelical missionaries and an innovative, ambitious ruler brought primary education and literacy to Madagascar in the early nineteenth century.  While missionaries sought to spread the Word of God by sending students to recite the scriptures in domestic spaces, the royal court superimposed a bureaucracy upon its powerful army.  The reading, writing, and calculating skills that cleric and king separately cultivated often came into conflict.  Over time, the ways that adults absorbed reading skills posed challenges to both evangelism and military bureaucracy.  This lecture sets these fascinating struggles over the uses of literacy in Madagascar in the perspectives of both World and Indian Ocean History.

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