It would seem desirable for any state to gum 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 Us practical and symbolic "efficacy," as guaranteed in part through the skills of ritual specialise not in the service of the skiie. the introduction and maintenance of state ideology is neither an issue of facile appropriation o/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 lor 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. [Madagascar, symbolic organization of space, state origins, ideology, local knowledge]