Limited rationality ? The curious attitude of a Madagascan king faced with an international agro-industrial project

• Laurent BERGER
  Ethnologist
  Laboratory, Social Anthropology - Musée du quai Branly, Paris
  

Summary

Take a traditional king in a Coca-Cola T-shirt, who likes innovative rituals and luxurious hotels with bars; some Franco-Indian-Pakistani cousins at the head of rival international companies; a country which has recently cut its colonial ties, and is now changing into a kind of tropical Marxist regime before turning to a more liberal regime ; some Christian and Muslim general reformist government ministers; some supercilious and sometimes vindictive ancestors ; add the World Bank, a zebu, prawns and a few crocodiles ; add to the mixture a French expert who has merely come to set up a company ; and then allow an ethnologist to observe the result of this concoction. This might give an idea of what it is like to conduct negotiations in a multicultural environment, which is somewhere between the world of economic globalisation, terrestrial powers, taboos and make-believe. This is a commonplace political story, but if you look closely, you will see that it is too different from our situation in the West.

Summary translated from French by Rachel MARLIN.

• The entire article was written by Pascal LEFEBVRE.

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