House to palace, village to state: Scaling up architecture and ideology

It would seem desirable for any state to gain an ideological foothold in local knowledge and symbols to facilitate the assimilation of its order by average citizens and to argue for its legitimacy. However, given the "lived reality" of local knowledge and its practical and symbolic "efficacy," as guaranteed in part through the skills of ritual specialists not in the service of the state, the introduction and maintenance of state ideology is neither an issue of facile appropriation of local symbols nor a straightforward imposition on local knowledge. The complexity of the architectural and ideological scaling up from traditional house to "palace" and polity are discussed for nineteenth-century Imerina, Madagascar, using ethnohistorical, archaeological, and ethnographic information. We attempt to present this argument through the use of evocative concrete imagery, one stylistic aspect of local knowledge, rather than through an exclusive use of analytical, abstract declarations.