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Tasha Rijke-Epstein (Vanderbilt University)

This paper considers the movements of knowledge about the more- than-human world through the expressive affinities of amulets and talismans across the southwestern Indian Ocean basin. Amulets and relics (ody and sampy) in Madagascar鈥檚 rich material culture, in particular, reveal the ways different earthly substances were long appraised for their capacity to enable the flow of power in the deep and recent past, whether by established monarchs, militia defending their ancestral polity, or ordinary villagers seeking prosperity. Ody and sampy were mediums, in other words, through which ancestrally-proffered sacred power was channeled and activated through the expert knowledge of ombiasy (healers). As small, portable objects, held close to the body, amulets and talismans were empowered objects that traveled with people across spaces and time. Eighteenth and nineteenth century waves of contraction and the rise of global capitalism in the region led to violent displacement of enslaved persons through and across Madagascar, and with them the dispersal of amulets and knowledge of ecological and ancestral worlds to Mauritius, 脦le de Bourbon (R茅union), and beyond. By thinking with an archipelagic framework, and approaching amulets and charms found in museum collections as 鈥渁rchive[s] of intimate encounters,鈥� this paper centers the southwestern Indian Ocean littoral as a dense node of knowledge production, transmission, and contestation.

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