The Ethnological Mission in Madagascar and the Indian Ocean (MEMOI) is part of the Department of Political and Social Sciences at the University of Pavia. Its main objectives are: 1) to deepen ethnographic and historical knowledge of an Afro-Asian area characterised by long-standing connections, hybridisations and exchanges; 2) to establish and consolidate a network of institutional relations between research bodies, universities, local communities and associations and third sector organisations operating in the areas under investigation; 3) to promote research opportunities for young researchers interested in conducting field and archival research in African and Asian countries bordering the Indian Ocean; 4) the organisation of activities for the dissemination and communication of scientific results.

Based on field and archival research, MEMOI aims to analyse the ways in which people, ideas and objects have circulated and connected societies bordering the Indian Ocean for centuries, through a synchronic and diachronic perspective capable of capturing how these dynamics have influenced local processes of political centralisation, social hierarchisation and renegotiation of local forms of cultural and social belonging. The main research themes concern the mobility and migration of individuals and groups in unequal positions of power, the exchange and dissemination of knowledge and cultural practices, slavery and its legacies, forms of labour exploitation, policies of memory construction and ethnicisation, and local dynamics of social subordination. MEMOI analyses how these processes have impacted on different axes of social differentiation, based on gender, class and status, and on local political, religious, ethnic and national affiliations. Currently, MEMOI’s main areas of interest include Madagascar, Eritrea, the Swahili coast, Mayotte and Malaysia. Additional contexts of investigation will be included based on the research interests of researchers who wish to participate in the Mission’s activities in the future. With this in mind, MEMOI aims to establish itself as an open and flexible space for discussion, able to generate a fertile interdisciplinary and comparative dialogue. Capturing the continuity and discontinuity between past and present in different realities of the Indian Ocean and promoting new research on the area that combines ethnographic and historical research methods will be at the heart of the project.