Med utgangspunkt i den samiske aktivisten Ingolf Kvandahls familiefotografier, diskuterer denne artikkelen hvordan Kvandahl-familien bruker fotografiet til å etablere sin historie. Den viser hvordan fotografiene i albumet manifesterer historiske prosesser som dels griper inn i hverandre, dels løper parallelt og dels kan stå i motsetning til hverandre: fornorskning, modernisering, samepolitisk aktivisme. I albumet presses spenningene i disse prosessene opp til overflaten i en estetikk ladet med kontraster og kontradiksjoner.

This article explores how photographs of Sámi peoples were used in the context of Norwegian physical anthropology in the interwar period, but also how they are re-appropriated in the Lule Sámi community in Tysfjord today. It also demonstrates how photography as used in in the Norwegian racial research publications, although designed to highlight physical characteristics, also include references to cultural characteristics and context. Such inclusion of cultural markers and contextual information may be understood as a strategy to overcome the failure of the scientific community to isolate race as a biological fact. The photographs worked to secure "evidence" where evidence could not be found. This strategy is based on the abundancy, or excess of meaning, of the photographic image as such. The article argues that it is precisely this photographic excess that is the key to understanding why and how photography contributed to establish credibility to a scientific discipline in continuous struggle and with frequent breakdowns. The abundancy, or photographic excess, is also a key to understand how photographs that once were used as instruments of racial research, over time have undergone a series of transmutations of functions and meanings. Thus, racial photographs may acquire new meanings when circulating in time and space.

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The point of departure for this paper is the particular role of Christian movements in Madagascar’s most recent political crisis. During the coup d’état in March 2009, ritual specialists from the Christian revival movementFifohazanawere called on to carry out an exorcism to cleanse the presidential palace of evil forces. This incident not only shows the significance of Christian revival movements within the Malagasy political landscape and society in general, but also indicates how Malagasy politics is imagined in spiritual terms. With its recurrent efforts to restore the nation-state, Malagasy national politics is impossible to understand without taking into account how thoroughly the Malagasy political imagination is infused with the cosmology and ontologies of power. This paper explores the ambivalent relationships between the various Christian movements and national politics in the light of history as well as through the recent transmutations of power, showing howFifohazanahave provided a site for the (re)production of the contemporary political imagination.