Merina still occupy the islandвЂ™s central plateau. At the same time another kind, the trade in slaves, increasingly unacceptable at home, had somehow to be stopped.Д¤The Malagasy whom Farquhar and his envoy James Hastie had to deal with were the prominent Merina ethnic group, who lived in the capital city, Antananarivo. So Robert Farquhar, governor of Mauritius, faced вЂњa tricky situationвЂќ, as historian Mervyn Brown puts it (133). These necessities could come from Madagascar. If its French and British colonists were to be fed, the island would need staples: rice, chickens, and cattle for meat. Mauritius was almost entirely planted in sugar. Through the Treaty of 1814, which ended the Napoleonic Wars, Britain had acquired Mauritius (the small island seven hundred miles away) from France. The missionaries were not colonists they wanted to proclaim the gospel and convert the Malagasy to Christianity, whereas the British government wanted economic and strategic advantages. Especially eager to bring an end to the slave trade, LMS missionaries became active agents in creating friendly economic relations between Britain and Madagascar. The LMS had been founded a generation earlier by Congregationalists (non-members of the established Church of England) to spread the Christian gospel to вЂњthe heathenвЂќ, as Africans and Indians were known in those days. 5.1 Context of Situation: Cultures MeetДЈIn 1818 David Jones was a young Welsh missionary, sent with his family from the United Kingdom to Madagascar by the London Missionary Society (LMS). Thereby they either resist the foreign or, more likely, create something new that is their own. People who are economically backward and politically irrelevant are continually invoking native cultural traditions and mixing them with what is imported. So many times, in human history, imported tools have been employed by invaded peoples, who found ways to wield their traditional arts against cultural invasion, or globalisation. It would have to be created, and the new literacy was the tool. Once the British ships came over the ocean from Mauritius, cultural purity could no longer be assumed. But that was also the context in which it was produced, back then. The historical context for interpreting Ibonia now is the encounter between Malagasy and European cultures. Context of culture, for a translation into English from Malagasy, encompasses even more: the conventions of the вЂњoriginalвЂќ audience, the expectations of western readers, and all interpretations and critical commentaries. Both literature and folklore are produced in a social context.ДўContext of culture is much broader, taking in all the topics of literary criticism: вЂњthe reference to, and the representation of, the shared knowledge of speakers, their conventions of conduct, belief systems, language metaphors and speech genres, their historical awareness and ethical and judicial principlesвЂќ (Ben-Amos 215вЂ“216). The production of the texts of Ibonia - its literary history - has been sketched above. Written texts of course have a social context too, as seen in the headnotes in anthologies of literature: вЂњShelley composed this work in Italy between the autumn of 1818 and the close of 1819 and published it the following summerвЂќ (Abrams et al.

It entails a kind of microscopic study of oral performance that is available only to scholars who witness and record live performances. Context of social situation is вЂњthe narrowest, most direct context for speaking folkloreвЂќ (Ben-Amos 216). As Bauman says: вЂњI understand performance as a mode of communication, a way of speaking, the essence of which resides in the assumption of responsibility to an audience for a display of communicative skill вЂ¦вЂќ (Story 3). A social context is needed for any performance.

Context is basically of two kinds, social and cultural. 1Translation gives Ibonia a new audience, which means a new context it вЂњre-contextualisesвЂќ the epic.

Modern folktale examples