Affective Politics and the Qualities of Things: Materials and Metonymy in the Archaeology of Highland Madagascar

Abstract How might the affective work of politics be accessed through the fragments of material culture that we recover as archaeologists? This paper considers how political identities can be formed and shaped affectively through engagement with the qualities of craft objects and the connected world of experience that they index. Taking up a case study from nineteenth-century highland Madagascar, I explore how political affects are caught up with the making and using of everyday things and how the transposed qualities of objects and the metonymic connections they evoke offer a means to tie changes in material culture to shifts in political affects over time.