Contingency in Madagascar

Storytelling and intimacy conspire in the magic of the street theatre that is the contingent encounter. Here one's participation is already loaded; any engagement involves risks of thought or of feeling. The authors work with an aesthetic of the glimpse; fleeting encounters with wisdom and beauty.

---

As they set off for Madagascar in 2003, photographer Max Pam and writer Stephen Muecke adopted as their guiding principle the idea of contingency—central to which is the conscious embrace of risk and chance. In doing so, they established a new aesthetic in which image and text are inextricably linked to the notion of possibility. This stunning collection of photos and essays is the result of their vision, collectively illustrating the beauty and wisdom on offer in one of the world’s poorest nations. A contribution to the wave of new ethnography exemplified by Michael Taussig and Kathleen Stewart, these encounters with events, images, and experimental writing dramatize thoughts and feelings in the ongoing construction of place.