Perceptions and Representations of the Malagasy Environment Across Cultures (Palgrave Series in Indian Ocean World Studies) [1st ed. 2023] 3031238354, 9783031238352

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PALGRAVE SERIES IN INDIAN OCEAN WORLD STUDIES

Perceptions and Representations of the Malagasy Environment Across Cultures

Edited by Frank Muttenzer Gwyn Campbell Jacques Pollini

Palgrave Series in Indian Ocean World Studies

Series Editor

Gwyn Campbell Indian Ocean World Centre McGill University Montreal, QC, Canada

This is the first scholarly series devoted to the study of the Indian Ocean world from early times to the present day. Encouraging interdisciplinarity, it incorporates and contributes to key debates in a number of areas including history, environmental studies, anthropology, sociology, political science, geography, economics, law, and labor and gender studies. Because it breaks from the restrictions imposed by country/regional studies and Eurocentric periodization, the series provides new frameworks through which to interpret past events, and new insights for present-day policymakers in key areas from labor relations and migration to diplomacy and trade.

Frank Muttenzer Gwyn Campbell  •  Jacques Pollini Editors

Perceptions and Representations of the Malagasy Environment Across Cultures

Editors Frank Muttenzer Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology University of Lucerne Lucerne, Switzerland

Gwyn Campbell Indian Ocean World Centre McGill University Montreal, QC, Canada

Jacques Pollini German Agency for International Cooperation GmbH Kindu, Democratic Republic of the Congo

ISSN 2730-9703     ISSN 2730-9711 (electronic) Palgrave Series in Indian Ocean World Studies ISBN 978-3-031-23835-2    ISBN 978-3-031-23836-9 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-23836-9 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Contents

Perceptions and Representations of the Malagasy Environment  1 Frank Muttenzer and Gwyn Campbell  “Good” Forests and Ambiguous Fields: Cultural Dimensions of Agroforestry Landscapes 31 Sarah Osterhoudt  Sustainabilities, Care and Ecotourism Among the Tsimihety in Rural Northeastern Madagascar 61 Jenni Mölkänen  Offset Life: Lemur Health in Landscapes of Extraction 81 Genese Marie Sodikoff  What’s the Matter with Carbon? Experiences of Volatility in Carbon Offset Production in Madagascar107 Sara Pena-Valderrama The Emptiness of the Nature-Culture Dichotomy: Perceptions of Reef Fisheries and the Will to Improve Well-Being Among the Vezo129 Frank Muttenzer

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Contents

 Perceptions and Representations of Deforestation in Madagascar: From Cognitive Dissonances to Convergences163 Jacques Pollini  The Eastern Forest in the Precolonial Era, c.1795–1895191 Gwyn Campbell Glossary243 Index247

Notes on Contributors

Gwyn Campbell  is founding Director of the Indian Ocean World Centre, McGill University, General Editor of the Palgrave Series in Indian Ocean World Studies, and Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Indian Ocean World Studies. Born in Madagascar, he grew up in Wales and holds degrees in economic history from the universities of Birmingham and Wales. After teacher training, he taught in India (Voluntary Service Overseas), Madagascar, Britain, South Africa, Belgium, and France. During a decade in South Africa, he was academic consultant for the South African Government, taking part in intergovernmental meetings which resulted in the establishment of an Indian Ocean regional association in 1997. Since arriving at McGill in 2004, he has held a Canada Research Chair Tier 1 in Indian Ocean World History for the maximum 14-year duration (2005–2019), and a Humboldt Award (2017–2019). He has been awarded two of the largest Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) research grants for the humanities, for multidisciplinary international research into the economic and environmental history of the Indian Ocean World. Acknowledged as an expert in the history of Africa, Madagascar, the Indian Ocean world, and slavery, his monographs include The Madagascar Youths: British Alliances and Military Expansion in the Indian Ocean Region ( 2022), The Travels of Robert Lyall, 1789–1831 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020), Africa and the Indian Ocean World from early times to 1900 (2019), David Griffiths and the Missionary “History of Madagascar” (2012), and An Economic History of Imperial Madagascar, 1750–1895 (2005). Co-edited works include Disease Dispersion and Impact in the Indian Ocean World (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020), The vii

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NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

Palgrave Handbook of Bondage and Human Rights in Africa and Asia (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020), and Sex, Power, and Slavery (2014). He is currently working on a book entitled An Environmental History of the Monsoon World from Earliest Times to Twenty-First Century commissioned by Cambridge University Press. Jenni Mölkänen  has a PhD in Social and Cultural Anthropology at the University of Helsinki. Her research interests are environmental conservation, biodiversity, land issues, ecotourism and ancestral customs. She has also worked in a multi-disciplinary research project concerning Finnish youth well-being and their life courses towards independence and adulthood based at the Institute of Sustainability Science (HELSUS) in Helsinki. Currently, she focuses on anthropological project about climate crisis and religious change in Madagascar. Frank Muttenzer  PhD (Development Studies, Geneva, 2006) is a social anthropologist and Privatdozent of Cognitive Anthropology at the University of Lucerne. He specialises in anthropological theories of action, language and cognition; human ecology and natural resource economics and policy; and postcolonial religious transformations. He has lived in Madagascar and worked with a variety of rural populations for more than ten years. He has published ethnographies on the socioeconomic strategies of small-scale fishers (Being Ethical Among Vezo People, 2020) as well as on deforestation, resource access regimes, and environmental policymaking (Deforestation et droit coutumier a Madagascar, Editions Karthala, 2010). He was Postdoctoral Fellow in Anthropology at the University of Toronto 2013–2014, and Visiting Scholar at the Indian Ocean World Centre McGill University Montreal 2015–2017. Sarah Osterhoudt  is an environmental anthropologist who studies agriculture and trade. She received her Ph.D. from Yale University and is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Indiana University. Osterhoudt is the author of Vanilla Landscapes: Meaning, Memory and the Cultivation of Place in Madagascar. She is currently working on a project funded by the National Science Foundation on the affective dimensions of violence and justice in Madagascar’s vanilla boom. Sara Pena-Valderrama  received her PhD from Durham University, UK, in 2016. Her thesis explored the multiple social lives of carbon through an ethnography of a forest carbon project in eastern Madagascar, where she spent 18 months between 2011 and 2013. She is now an independent

  NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS 

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researcher with interests in the anthropology of Madagascar, economic and environmental anthropology and political ecology. Jacques Pollini  is an interdisciplinary scholar with 28 years of experience as a researcher and instructor in Development, Environmental and Agrarian Studies, and a practitioner in environmental conservation and rural development interventions. Initially trained in ecology and agronomy, he started his career as a natural scientist, monitoring a network of agroforestry experiments in Burundi, managing a reforestation programme in Vietnam, and training instructors to conduct randomised experiments in an agricultural school in Laos. After obtaining a PhD in Natural Resource Policies and Management at Cornell University (USA), he shifted his main interest to the social sciences, mainly development anthropology, political ecology, and science and technology studies. He conducts research on land use changes, the social and environmental impacts of conservation policies and projects, and the resilience of peasant and pastoralist societies. His geographical focus includes Madagascar, where he conducted his PhD field work and was as a policy adviser; the Congo Basin, where he was a consultant studying avoided deforestation (REDD+) policies and projects; and East Africa, where he conducts research for the Institutional Canopy of Conservation (I-CAN) project at McGill University, studying resource conflicts and the impacts of wildlife conservation in Maasai pastoral societies. Genese  Marie  Sodikoff is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Rutgers University, Newark. Her earlier research examines labour relations in Madagascar’s biodiversity conservation effort, and the entwinement of cultural and biotic extinctions. More recently, she has been studying the anthropology of zoonosis. Her new book project is a multispecies ethnography of the bubonic plague and its effects on Malagasy funerary practices and ancestorhood. She is the author of Forest and Labor in Madagascar: From Colonial Concession to Global Biosphere, and the editor of The Anthropology of Extinction: Essays on Culture and Species Death.

List of Figures

 Good” Forests and Ambiguous Fields: Cultural Dimensions “ of Agroforestry Landscapes Fig. 1 View of agroforestry fields in Imorona, northeastern Madagascar. Photo by author Fig. 2 Map of the Mananara Nord region of northeastern Madagascar. Photo credit: Osterhoudt 2017 Fig. 3 Bundles of Ravenala leaves (Ravenala madagascariensis) for use in ancestral ceremonies, Mananara Nord, Madagascar

33 37 45

Offset Life: Lemur Health in Landscapes of Extraction Fig. 1 A bamboo lemur of the Vakona Lodge reserve (Photograph by Genese Marie Sodikoff, 2016) Fig. 2 Map of the Ambatovy footprint and its biodiversity offsets (Reprinted with permission from Bidaud et al. 2017) Fig. 3 A lemur bridge at Ambatovy. (Photograph by Genese Marie Sodikoff, 2013)

82 90 93

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List of Tables

Perceptions and Representations of the Malagasy Environment Table 1 The world’s ten poorest countries 2021 (based on 2020 Gross National Income per capita in current US$—anon 2022b)

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The Eastern Forest in the Precolonial Era, c.1795–1895 Table 1 Creation of permanent skilled metal and wood fanompoana units, 1790–1883 (Campbell 2005) Table 2 Main construction timber on the Merina market, 1896 (Richardson 1885, Gazety Malagasy 27 mars 1896)

211 218

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Perceptions and Representations of the Malagasy Environment Frank Muttenzer and Gwyn Campbell

1   Introduction With a total land surface of 587,041  km2, and a coastline of 9935  km, Madagascar is the world’s fourth largest island (after Greenland, New Guinea, and Borneo), approximately the size of Texas or 2.4 times the size of the British Isles. It is widely believed to possess the world’s greatest concentration of unique flora and fauna: 98 percent of Madagascar’s land mammals, 92 percent of its reptiles, 68 percent of its plants, and 41 percent of its indigenous bird species are found nowhere else in the world. However, much of Madagascar’s animal and plant life is in danger of extinction. For example, the island’s primate species, second to Brazil in F. Muttenzer (*) Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology, University of Lucerne, Lucerne, Switzerland e-mail: [email protected] G. Campbell Indian Ocean World Centre, McGill University, Montreal, QC, Canada e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 F. Muttenzer et al. (eds.), Perceptions and Representations of the Malagasy Environment Across Cultures, Palgrave Series in Indian Ocean World Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-23836-9_1

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variety, are the world’s most endangered. These include over 100 species of lemur, the animal most associated with Madagascar. Inextricably associated with the lemur is its forest habitat. Yet Madagascar’s forests are fast disappearing, diminishing by an estimated 44 percent between 1953 and 2014, by 37 percent over the period 1973–2014 alone (Vieilledent et al. 2018; Grinand et al. 2013). The conventional view is that the chief contributory factors to environmental degradation in Madagascar are population growth and peasant agricultural practices. The population of Madagascar rose from 4,083,554 in 1950, to 15,766,806 in 2000, to 28,427,328 in 2021, representing a growth rate of about 2 percent in 1950, rising to a peak of 3.1 percent in 1998, before slowly declining to 2.66 percent by 2021. Moreover, although the rural population of Madagascar has declined from 89.36 percent of the total population in 1960, to 72.88 percent by 2000, to 61.47 percent by 2020, it has almost quadrupled in total terms in the 60 years between 1960 and 2020, rising from 4,556,693 to 17,020,562 (UN 2021, see also Goodman and Patterson 1997).

Madagascar: Estimated Population Growth, 1900-2021 (UN 2021) 30000000 25000000 20000000 15000000 10000000 5000000

1900 1908 1916 1924 1932 1940 1948 1956 1964 1973 1981 1989 1997 2005 2013 2021

0

Madagascar: Estimated Population Growth, 1900–2021 (UN 2021)

  PERCEPTIONS AND REPRESENTATIONS OF THE MALAGASY ENVIRONMENT 

Madagascar Rural Population 1960–2022 (World Bank 2022a)

Madagascar: Population Density, 1950–2022 (World Bank 2022b)

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Madagascar: Poverty Rate, 1980–2022 (World Bank 2022c)

Over the last three decades, a number of human geographers and palaeontologists have challenged the conventional view of environmental degradation. For example, Lucy Jarosz (1993) contended that conventional accounts significantly underestimated the contribution to deforestation of colonial-era logging and cash cropping and overestimated that of subsistence farmers. Again, Christian Kull (2000) argued that the island’s original forest cover was probably much smaller and patchier than was commonly assumed. For Kull, the dominance of a certain narrative depends both on its correspondence with observed facts, and on the power of those telling it. This meant that no matter the amount of, for example, political bias in a given narrative, there remains a level of “objective fact”. By contrast, Joergen Klein (2002) considered that to argue that the counternarrative’s new insight is objective truth is inconsistent with the social constructivist approach used to analyse the conventional narrative. He argued that “facts” can only ever constitute partial truths and cannot be separated from the institutions that create them (i.e., the

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“knowledge”). The question, “what counts as a fact?”, would thus be determined by changing paradigms in ecology, from classic equilibrium to non-equilibrium ecology, and by the impact of these reinterpretations on environmental policy and management (Klein 2004). Hence, the scale of human destruction of Madagascar’s pristine ecosystems might have been exaggerated. Nevertheless, Malagasy peasants, like most of their counterparts elsewhere, employ agricultural methods that can be detrimental to “nature”, because they convert natural ecosystems into anthropogenic ones. On the largely deforested highlands, they burn the grasslands at regular intervals, which often leads to uncontrolled fires, loss of surface vegetation, and soil erosion (Kull 2004). More problematic from the conservationist viewpoint is the clearing and burning of forest in order to practise tavy (swidden agriculture), especially when the fallow period is too short for the primary forest to regenerate (which is the rule rather than the exception) or when tavy is followed by the plantation of perennial cash crops. In addition, in 2019, 75 percent of the population were estimated to be living on less than $1.90 per day— one of the highest poverty rates in the world (Borgen Project 2022). This has major implications in forested regions. First, many rural Malagasy are chronically undernourished, and forest communities exploit local resources, including animals, for food. For example, in a 2004 survey of 312 households (13.7 percent of the total) in 14 Betsimisaraka and Tsimihety villages in the Makira forest in Antongil Bay, northeast Madagascar, 95 percent of households had eaten some form of mammalian bushmeat within the previous 12 months. Animals hunted included several species of officially protected lemur, the fossa (Cryptoprocta ferox), tenrec, and bat. Second, peasants cannot afford to purchase timber or, where it is available, electricity (some 85 percent of homes have no access to electricity), so forests are exploited for house and fence construction, and for charcoal and firewood (Golden 2009; Razafimanahaka et  al. 2012; Borgen Project 2022; Osterhoudt 2023).

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Madagascar. Forest Cover 1953 (anon 2022a)

Peasants have also been increasingly involved in the exploitation of non-agricultural forest resources over the last two decades due to rising international demand, notably from Asia, for valuable hardwoods and minerals. For example, a huge, largely illegal trade has arisen in the exploitation of rosewood, chiefly for the Chinese market (Sharife and Maintikely 2022). There is also huge international demand for mineral products from the forested regions of Madagascar. One example is ilmenite from the Fort Dauphin region of southeastern Madagascar, which Rio Tinto exploits in a joint venture concluded with the Malagasy government. QIT Madagascar Minerals (QMM), a Rio Tinto subsidiary, mines the ilmenite for its titanium dioxide content, chiefly used as a whitener in paints and paper (Rio Tinto 2022). However, such is the demand for other minerals, such as

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gold, and gemstones such as sapphires, that it has occasioned clandestine exploitation on a considerable scale by Malagasy miners, as in the Ankeniheny-Zahamena Corridor (CAZ), a 3800  km2 area of rainforest joining the Andasibe-Mantadia and Ranomafana National Parks (National Geographic 2022). Such illicit mining provides an alternative source of income to landless farmers and other poor individuals. Moreover, as Frank Muttenzer’s contribution indicates, Madagascar’s forests are not the island’s only natural asset that is threatened. Its coastal resources are also critically menaced (Harding 2018). The island claims an Exclusive Economic Maritime Zone of over 1 million km2, with a fishing sector supporting some 1.5 million people that is responsible for 6.6 percent of the total exports and almost 7 percent of national gross domestic product. However, several factors are endangering maritime resources (Manach et al. 2013). For example, since 1970, the coral reefs of southwest Madagascar, by far the region’s richest and most diverse maritime habitat with an estimated 6000 reef-associated species, including 752 fish species and 340 coral species, has experienced major degradation, coral being replaced by fleshy algae, and reef fish being severely depleted (Nadon et al. 2007; Harris et al. 2010). Population pressure is one of the causes. The number of small-scale fishers and boats increased by a factor of five in the 1990s and first decade of the twenty-first century. This has resulted in overexploitation of marine resources, especially near urban centres such as Tulear which is experiencing a population growth rate of about 3.5 percent per  annum—significantly above the national average of 2.9 percent per annum. However, a considerable proportion of the region’s coastline remains sparsely populated and distant from river mouths, such as around the coastal village of Andavadoaka in the southwest, where most of the reefs are believed to be less degraded, albeit heavily fished for export (Barnes-Mauthe et al. 2013). Again, ongoing deforestation, itself partly due to population growth and poor agricultural practices, has resulted in terrigenous sedimentation that has damaged coral reefs near the mouths of large rivers such as the Onilahy and Manombo (Gough et al. 2020; Bruggemann et al. 2012; Harris et al. 2010; Nadon et al. 2007; Gabrié et al. 2000). Climate change is also a major factor. Paleoclimatological studies indicate that the warmest periods in the southwest Indian Ocean since 1900 occurred from 1973 to 1995, and that since 1970 higher Sea Surface Temperatures (SSTs) have led to a greater El Niño/Southern Oscillation (ENSO) impact in the region. For example, mean SSTs rose by about 1 °C

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between 1960 and 2008, which probably caused a decline in the extent of coral reefs, while an abnormally warm SST, related to a strong ENSO event, affected the region in 1998 and 2001, causing widespread coral bleaching (UNEP 2012). A different kind of challenge to the conventional view of environmental degradation and the policy narratives it sustains has been posed by chiefly social anthropologists who have documented undesirable impacts on rural populations of environmental policies inspired by either the conventional conservationist view or more recent participatory counter proposals (e.g. agroforestry—see chapter by Osterhoudt). These range from the eviction of smallholders from newly created protected areas or buffer zones (Keller 2008); attempts to control deforestation through community forest management contracts that claim to devolve power and recognise customary law (Muttenzer 2010); failure to recognise the ecological harm and marginal socioeconomic status sustained by local labour in parks, ecotourism (Sodikoff 2012a; Walsh 2012), and “carbon offset” schemes implemented by the mining sector (Seagle 2012); to misappropriation of location-based taboos by conservation organisations (Osterhoudt 2018); and failure to understand the role of ritual and tacit knowledge in resisting marine enclosures (Sodikoff 2012b; Muttenzer and Andriamahefazafy 2021). Piecemeal challenges of hegemonic narratives can only be as powerful as the ethnographic case studies on which they are empirically based. This raises the question of how many more detailed case studies are required to convincingly demonstrate the shortcomings in conservation policy, or the conventional representations of the environmental problem the policy seeks to address. Consequently, an animated, often adversarial, debate has developed about how best to secure a viable future for both the island’s people, and its natural resources. On one side is an alignment of powerful forces, comprising conservationists, international funding agencies, global mining corporations, and development NGOs (CFMN). Conservationist lobbies comprise in the main international and national environmental protection bodies, such as the World Wildlife Fund, Conservation International, Jane Goodall Institute, Blue Ventures Conservation, and the Wildlife Conservation Society, and often associated Madagascar-based NGOs. Initially the agenda of these environmentalist bodies often clashed with the profit-maximisation agenda of international business consortiums operating in Madagascar, such as Rio Tinto, and with the economic development aims of the Malagasy government. However, by the late twentieth

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century, as environmental issues gained growing traction globally, and with them the threat to Madagascar’s unique flora and fauna, and the island became one of the poorest nations on earth, international investors, and the Malagasy government, adopted policies that aligned them increasingly with those of environmental bodies. They have coalesced behind the view that population increase and traditional peasant agriculture have largely underpinned human infringement upon the natural environment and depletion of the island’s natural resources. This perspective has shaped the view that at best only a proportion of Madagascar’s natural resources can be safeguarded, and that the sole means of achieving this is to create a series of large natural reserves from which the island’s inhabitants are excluded—except for a few that service those reserves. Thus, for example, in the 2003 Durban Vision, Malagasy President Marc Ravalomanana committed to tripling the area of protected land in Madagascar by 2009 from 1.7 million to 6 million ha, or about 10 percent of the island’s surface (Golden 2009). Mining concerns have bought into the same vision, including in agreements with the Malagasy government provisions for establishing enclosed areas adjacent to their mining activities where existing flora and fauna are protected, and where, if deemed necessary, other threatened species are introduced (Seagle 2012; Sodikoff 2023). Such standpoints have led to the elaboration of policies that, when enacted, initially impacted adversely on local people, some of whom have been evicted from the reserves, and almost all of whom have been prohibited from their customary access to, and exploitation of, the resources contained in the reserves. The CFMN grouping, acknowledging some of the material disadvantages of their policies, has introduced measures aimed at alleviating their adverse consequences for ordinary people. To this end, it has adopted several strategies. Some of these aim at generating revenue through ecotourism, which offers well-paying jobs to a few local people employed to service the reserves, for example as tourist guides, and through generally promoting Madagascar-based businesses, notably within the hospitality sector. It also includes other benefits for affected people, such as the provision of alternative housing for those evicted from the areas demarcated for reserves or mining activities, other “micro development” projects such as schools, health centres, and roads, and financial compensation for the loss of traditional revenues. Moreover, in line with the ethos of participatory democracy, the Malagasy government and its regional officials, in conjunction with CFMN interests and local community members, have established local councils to meet a regular basis to

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listen and respond to the concerns of people directly impacted by CFMN policies (Raik 2007). Although we do not possess all of the required information to assess the outcomes of these measures, published analyses of CFMN policy reforms, together with some of the case studies presented in this volume, suggest that these measures haven’t produced the anticipated results or contributed to social justice, and that the problems caused or encountered by conservation efforts might not always have such straightforward technical solutions as the ones envisioned by these impact mitigation measures (Ferguson et al. 2016; Pollini et al. 2014). Increasingly, the CFMN grouping has also introduced a policy of carbon credits in developing countries, involving payment in the form of “carbon credits” aimed at curbing CO2 emissions through forest loss or degradation. The carbon credit incentive first appeared on the agenda of international climate change negotiations in 2005 and was formalised in the 2007 UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) in Bali, Indonesia as REDD (“Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation”). The policy engendered vivid debate about extending the activities that could qualify for incentives. Negotiations within the UNFCCC led to the 2013 Warsaw Framework for REDD+ that included advice on factors such as national forest monitoring systems; technical assessment of reference levels; measurement, reporting and verification; drivers of deforestation and forest degradation; and finance and result-­ based payments. The source of this funding for carbon trading could be international institutions such as the World Bank, countries, country blocs such as the European Union or, more commonly, private concerns wishing to offset their own emissions by transferring funds in the form of carbon credits to developing countries (UNFCCC 2016, 2022a, 2022b). There is insufficient space here for a detailed review of how the conventional view of environmental degradation, and the policies based on it, have been challenged by academics from the social sciences. Suffice it to say that the hegemonic narrative outlined above has not changed fundamentally since it was first propounded at the end of the 1980s. Criticisms of that narrative have thus remained largely static. Our ambition in this volume is to move beyond the dichotomy between mutually exclusive naturalist and social scientific perspectives, to a more comprehensive and inclusionary discourse, one that encourages dialogue between two sets of otherwise deadlocked narratives. Local Malagasy communities do not possess a global reach, and thus cannot challenge the CFMN grouping on the international stage. Those

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with a global voice opposed to CFMN policies, chiefly anthropologists, as represented in this volume, argue that both major strands of their strategies are misguided. First, CFMN promotion of gated nature reserves, from which local people are excluded in return for monetary and other “compensation” (which in fact do not suffice to genuinely compensate for the foregone income following conservation), reflects a managerial approach in which “nature” constitutes a set of tangible, measurable assets. Nature existed in Madagascar long before the presence of humans who have progressively exploited, degraded, or destroyed the island’s natural assets. Historically, peasant farmers have been primarily held responsible for such exploitation. Hence, more ecology-minded actors with a global perspective, chiefly CFMN members, are justified in arguing that in order to safeguard the survival of these assets, or even expand them, they need to isolate them in specifically delineated zones from local Malagasy communities. By contrast, most anthropologists contend that the nature versus people dichotomy presented by CFMN interests is erroneous. First, human beings are animals, and thus an intrinsic part of the natural spectrum. This is a significant observation. Despite the marked difference in social ideology between conservationists and Malagasy rural communities that gives rise to mutual misunderstandings, both are equipped with the same perceptual apparatus enabling them to register and respond to environmental changes equally well (see Pollini 2023; Muttenzer 2023). Second, peasant farmers, unlike conservation managers, register and respond to environmental change only when and because it appreciably impacts their livelihood strategies. They view the natural environment as a means to an end, namely to live well, rather than as a set of material assets of intrinsic value that exists independently of them (Keller 2017; Muttenzer 2020). Third, in Madagascar, as in most of the Global South, the worldview of local people is elaborate and holistic. It incorporates the earth, all it contains, and all that lives on it. It also incorporates the living and the dead, and a complex hierarchy of supernatural forces, in a temporally dynamic nexus that links the deep past, the present, and the future. While the conservationist ethos and naturalist worldview more generally could be described as similarly holistic (Pollini 2017), its signature idea of nature as that which remains once history and culture have been subtracted from empirical experience, is clearly modern and has no traditional equivalent. Another cause of pressure on Madagascar’s natural resources is poverty, so that the daily material needs of the Malagasy population needs to be

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urgently considered. In 2019, an estimated 75 percent of the population were impoverished (i.e., subsisting on under $1.90 a day); and of children under five years of age, 6 percent were acutely malnourished, and 42 percent “stunted” (have low height-for-age). Additionally, Covid-19 has triggered a sharp recession, hitting especially hard those employed in the tourism and manufacturing sectors. Further, the pandemic depleted the availability of fiscal resources for priority investments and social programmes, thus freezing political ambitions to achieve more inclusive growth (Ventura 2021) (Table 1). In this context, compensatory schemes for local peoples adversely impacted by CFMN projects have generally faltered. Peasants have received little or no benefit from subscribing to carbon offset schemes, which were misconceived and ill-understood. Other compensation in the form of amenities or cash have been judged as inadequate. Even those employed in ecotourism are highly critical of a system, based on a European rather than Malagasy concept of well-being, that fails to fulfil expectations. In the Malagasy worldview and ethos of life, services rendered are considered to be part of a long-term system of both immediate and delayed reciprocity, one in which those offering a service receive tangible (e.g. money) and intangible (e.g. friendship) benefits (see e.g., Keller 2017, Jones et  al. 2008, chapter by Mölkänen). Again, councils established by CFMN/government interests intended to take into account the concerns of local Malagasy communities have rarely worked well. Central authorities and international donors have overwhelmingly manipulated these councils, often through the intermediary of conservation and development NGOs, with the result that local communities were excluded, or their interests and concerns ignored. Consequently, major tension has persisted between Malgasy communities, and the different national and international players involved, with local Table 1  The world’s ten poorest countries 2021 (based on 2020 Gross National Income per capita in current US$—anon 2022b) Country

GNI

Country

GNI

Burundi Somalia Mozambique Madagascar Sierra Leone

270 380 460 480 490

Afghanistan Central African Republic Liberia Niger Democratic Republic of the Congo

500 510 530 540 550

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frustrations periodically boiling over into protest and violence (Raik 2007). Often the only way in which the views of local Malagasy have entered the debate on an international level is through Western anthropologists who invariably learn the dialect of the people they study, and meticulously record their daily lives, interactions, worldviews, and concerns about the impact of conservation and mining zones. The debate shows little sign of abating. Those promoting REDD+ continue to view it as a low-cost mechanism for reducing carbon emissions through promoting forest conservation in the Global South. However, in the absence of a regulated market, carbon offset projects have tried to generate carbon credits through selling on the voluntary carbon market to companies, organisations, or individuals in the developed world looking to offset some or all of their greenhouse gas emissions because of concerns about climate change. Critics point to a number of problems with this system. First, entities purchasing carbon credits need to assume their domestic responsibilities in order to cut carbon dioxide emissions. Further, carbon credit projects undercut the already weak land and natural resource rights of affected peasant communities, and threaten local food supplies. Moreover, in 2018 the Malagasy government under President Andry Rajoelina placed a moratorium on the sale of carbon credits with the intention of nationalising the island’s carbon rights and revenues. This has in turn raised concerns about governance, and how funds will be mobilised for REDD+ projects in Madagascar (USAID. 2022; Vyawahare 2021). In order to address the needs of the CFMN grouping, the Malagasy government, and affected communities in Madagascar, REDD+ projects need to meet stringent criteria. These include (i) avoidance of “leakage”, such as whereby the creation of one conservation reserve merely shifts deforestation to another area; (ii) ensuring that reduced deforestation and degradation is a direct outcome of the project, rather than the result of wider changes in the economy; (iii) setting up a viable system to measure reductions in greenhouse gas emissions; and (iv) establishing proper governance to supervise land and forest schemes, and institute effective mechanisms in order to guarantee that payments and benefits are shared both by affected and involved Malagasy communities, and carbon credit purchasers. As noted in this introductory chapter, the views of the CFMN grouping are largely shaped by the research of natural scientists, who consider that their observations reveal factual evidence about the natural, but not the economic, environment upon which, subsequently, policy decisions can be

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taken. They overwhelmingly reject “non-natural scientific” perceptions of the same environment, notably those held by the overwhelming majority of the island’s inhabitants. For local Malagasy communities, Madagascar’s land, flora, and fauna can only be understood in the context of local subsistence and cash economies, indigenous livelihood ethos, and ideas of individual and communal well-being that sustain economic practices (Keller 2008; Muttenzer 2015). Divergent perceptions have led to increasing clashes between peasants and those CFMN entities imposing environmental policies. In this context, social science researchers constitute one of the few lobbies with an international voice that represent Malagasy peasant perspectives. This forms the raison d’être for the current volume, in which contributors present a variety of case studies in historical and contemporary contexts that address the debate. In so doing, they contend that in any assessment of the Malagasy environment, and environmental policies, it is vital to take into account local subsistence and cash economies, and resource access and land use regimes, as they are locally understood within the framework of traditional peasant beliefs and customs. In Chap. 2, Sarah Osterhoudt also highlights the discrepancy between the Malagasy perceptions of environment and economic well-being and those of international conservationist and financial institutions. Her case study is of agroforestry in the Mananara Nord region of northeastern Madagascar where smallholder farmers cultivate food and market crops within a patchwork of small fields they own, most about a half a hectare in size, in managed landscapes they refer to as alam’boly, or “planted forests”. Superficially, these landscapes look like natural forest. However, they comprise a surprising variety of indigenous and foreign plant species, combining subsistence crops, such as hillside rice, breadfruit trees, cassava, and other tubers, with commercial crops, including vanilla and cloves for export, coffee for national domestic consumption, and a variety of fruits for local markets. Tree products are also used for private needs, such as building homes and fences, firewood, and for ceremonial and medicinal purposes. Such agroforestry, Osterhoudt argues, contains a variety of cultivated and natural species within shaded, well-tended parcels that sustains wildlife habitat, improves soil health, and promotes carbon sequestration. It also supports a variety of economic activities that protect peasant farmers against market swings and environmental uncertainty. Agroforestry is thus both a viable alternative to swidden and “slash-and-burn” agriculture, and, through combining diversified smallholder agricultural

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production with maintenance of corridor forest, meets the twin goals of conservation and development. As importantly, Osterhoudt contends, peasant agroforestry promotes sustainable development within a broader ideological, historical, political, and epistemological context that reflects localised Malagasy meanings, memories, practices, and knowledge. In these contexts, the present overlaps with the past, the political with the personal, and the living with the deceased. The integration of these cultural values and perspectives with ecological and economic considerations constitutes what Malagasy peasant farmers consider to be sound agroforestry. However, international conservation and development agencies, in foregrounding the technical, scientific aspects of agrarian practice, often establish rigid development goals and timetables that Malagasy smallholders fail to achieve. The result is mutual incomprehension and distrust, tension, and conflict. The categorization of complex agroforests, by state agencies and their international partners, using rigid and simplistic frameworks, ignores the larger cultural dimensions of local agricultural systems and the ambiguities that characterise them. These ambiguities arise from distinctions made between wild and cultivated plants, the living and the dead, the individual and the collective, and the past and the present. International actors favour either purely natural ecosystems where human activities are banned, with the exception of tourism and research, or highly artificial environments, including other types of agroforestry systems that rely on a narrow range of plants and techniques. The application of these rigid categorisations and the separation of the natural and cultural world they encourage may lead to the eventual decline of Malagasy agroforests over the long term. The only workable alternative, Osterhoudt suggests, is for international agencies to assimilate local cultural with their conservationist and economic perspectives, to promote sound ecological objectives and sustainable development. A similar theme is pursued in Chap. 3 by Jenni Mölkänen in her examination of relations between local Tsimihety and the state and international conservationist agencies in and around Marojejy National Park, in northeast Madagascar. The Tsimihety economy is traditionally based on hill rice and irrigated riziculture combined with the cultivation of cash crops, particularly vanilla, and to a lesser extent coffee. The Tsimihety also cultivate gardens, fish, hunt, and gather plants, leaves, fruits, honey, and firewood. However, the decision by the Malagasy government, in partnership with major international players, notably the

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World Wildlife Fund (WWF) and World Bank (WB), to establish a 55,500 ha large national park at Marojejy, in 1998, caused considerable tension with the local Tsimihety community that has not been resolved. The WWF, WB, and other involved conservationist groupings, believed that ordinary Malagasy were steadily destroying their own unique environment, and that the only way to safeguard aspects of that environment and simultaneously promote sustainable development, was to select areas characterised by rich biodiversity, and transform them into ecotourist zones from which all local Malagasy should be excluded, except for the few trained guides who lead fee-paying Westerners on park tours. However, Mölkänen argues that foreign organisations spread a false narrative about local Malagasy because they fail to understand Tsimihety cultural values. For the Tsimihety deep traditional interconnections exist between the land, the animals, and plants it sustains, and human economic activity, which is in turn intimately linked to kinship relations and rituals. The Tsimihety consider that care or nurturing (mikarakara) is vital to the development of plants, and that they can expect to receive benefits in return for that nurture. This belief in a reciprocal relationship governs their interaction with non-human lifeforms, both domesticated and wild. The same applied to land, which is “nurtured” by being cleared and cultivated, with the expectation that it will sustain human livelihood through the generations. In the process, identities and a sense of belonging are created. Mölkänen focuses on two specific activities to highlight the tensions involved: vanilla growing, and ecotourism. Vanilla constitutes a cash crop of major importance to local people, as it is to Madagascar which produces some 80 percent of the world’s natural vanilla. Vanilla production is highly labour intensive. Peasant producers, who hand-pollinate each flower by pressing together its female and its pollen-coated male parts, nurture vanilla from plantation to harvest in the expectation that it will fetch a good market price. Integral to the process, for the Tsimihety, is the forging of relations of exchange and connectivity between them and the wider world. Mikarakara also applies to ecotourism at Marojejy National Park. There, local Tsimihety care for predominantly foreign tourists in the expectation that they will receive benefits in return, such as gifts or the opportunity to travel. For the Tsimihety, nurturing is a central imperative, one that should be applied to all relations with people or things, from children, family and friends, to land, vanilla, and wild animals. Mölkänen

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contrasts this imperative with modernist theories of sustainability, which view the Global South largely as a void to be filled with technologies of production and governance. Such an approach, she argues, ignores local Malagasy perspectives that stress the centrality of a social fabric connecting things and people, which renders the environment meaningful. In sum, Mölkänen concludes, Malagasy and European histories and epistemologies of nature have created obstacles to understanding what constitutes relationships of sustainability between human and non-­ humans. Her study demonstrates that the ways in which the Tsimihety engage with other human beings, as well as with animals, plants, and spirits, are deeply interconnected, not only in the present, but intergenerationally, from past to present to future. Foreign conservation and development agencies need to understand that these social relations form practical and material landscapes that the Tsimihety inhabit, and that they are essential to their engagement with global sustainability practices. In Chap. 4, Genese Marie Sodikoff examines the discourse and practice of biodiversity offsetting undertaken by the multinational mining operation, Ambatovy, some 11  km northeast of Moramanga, in eastern Madagascar. Over the past decade Ambatovy’s extraction of nickel and cobalt, and its development and conservation activities have comprised the largest-ever foreign investment in the country and one of the biggest in sub-Saharan Africa. With installations beginning in the early 2000s, Ambatovy’s open pit mine razed 1600 ha of rain forest, and its 200 km long slurry pipeline, connecting the mine to the processing plant in the port city of Toamasina, sliced through forest and fragile wetlands. The impact of Ambatovy operations to the environment met with swift and vocal opposition by conservationists. In response, Ambatovy established two protected areas of primary forest, one adjacent to the mine and one more distant. Further, they implemented a robust programme of conserving and monitoring vulnerable wildlife. These “biodiversity offsets” exemplify a global effort to green the mining industry. As a concept and physical space, the biodiversity offset reflects what Fairhead, Leach, and Scoones (2012) call the “economy of repair” of damaged nature, where ecological harm and benefit are turned into calculable units and potential sources of revenue (see also Seagle 2012). The idea here is that protecting a swath of habitat in one place will counterbalance habitat destruction in another. Moreover, Ambatovy’s biodiversity offset nurtures endemic species populations as a means of delivering a “net gain” of biodiversity over the lifetime of the mine. In the offset, planners see a bioabundant future

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and the potential to restore degraded landscapes. The company’s literature suggests that species population numbers and the present-day assemblage of species will survive and swell in numbers. Sodikoff compares Ambatovy’s projections to scientific findings on lemur health near Ambatovy’s offset and other protected areas. Lemurs are a priority species in Ambatovy’s conservation programme, and in addition to their status as “flagship species” for Madagascar, their bodies serve as key indicators of the success or failure of biodiversity offsetting. By examining the impacts of shrinking habitat, interspecies interactions, and mining on lemur health, a different and far less optimistic image of the post-mining landscape emerges. Sodikoff’s key point is not that the biodiversity offsets of mining companies are doomed to fail because the damages outweigh the benefits, or that due to a variety of reasons it is impossible to establish a baseline of biodiversity to begin with. Rather, the key point is that the edge effects of persistent extractivism and human presence alter species’ biologies, impacting their reproductive success and behaviours, whether or not they inhabit strictly protected areas. Offsets and similar reserves are not safe havens or biological “banks” accumulating species over the long term, even though they may appear as such today. Lemur studies suggest that activities that protect habitat in one place cannot cancel out the damages to nearby habitat because that is not how ecosystems operate. Wilderness is not divisible into bounded, buffered units of space immune to their surroundings. Pursuing the theme of offset projects, Sara Pena-Valderrama, in Chap. 5, presents a case study of TAMS (Tetik’asa Mampody Savoka), a World Bank funded project, backed by the Malagasy government, that ran for over a decade in Andasibe, in eastern Madagascar. Hailed as a pilot Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) project for Africa under the auspices of the World Bank’s BioCarbon Fund (BioCF), TAMs had the dual aim of reforesting land degraded by slash-and-burn agriculture and establishing a carbon offsets project to provide local communities with alternative livelihoods and benefits from carbon credit sales. The reforestation scheme planned to reforest 3000  ha of degraded fallows (reconnecting forest fragments) in order to act as “carbon sink” for a period of 30 years. The reforestation programme commenced in 2006 with 60 adult male recruits from Mahatsara, a community formed by people relocated from the area demarcated for the Andasibe-Mantadia National Park (AMNP). The men, one-third of whom authorised TAMS to plant seedlings on land they owned, were employed as reforestation

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workers. However, within five years, the project had faltered, due to a series of complications including unclear land tenure, a lack of a legal framework to establish the property status of carbon, government duplicities, and a complex and expensive CDM verification process. It never resumed, and in 2012 the BioCF cancelled the Emission Reductions Purchasing Agreement (ERPA) signed in 2008 with the government of Madagascar on the grounds of the inability of the latter to make any progress on the deal. Moreover, TAMs never clarified with local people the nature of how they might benefit from the scheme. Farmers who provided land for seedlings were given contracts, but the advantages that would accrue to them were never specified. More significantly, the concept of carbon credit was never satisfactorily explained to them. As a result, local people perceived the concept in different ways. Many men working in the reforestation project considered that carbon was something contained by the trees that foreigners wished to purchase, and for which they would receive money. Others thought that reforestation was promoted by Westerners who wished to promote plant life. Most local women professed little interest in or knowledge of the subject. All, however, believed that the TAMs scheme would result in an influx of money. Thus, for the local community, carbon offset and carbon credit remained intangible concepts. Consequently, when ultimately neither carbon offsets nor the promises of work or money materialised, local people felt disillusioned and cheated, and violent protest sometimes erupted. In sum, the TAMs project again points to the gulf between the perceptions, aims and actions of foreign agencies, and those of local Malagasy. In Chap. 6, Frank Muttenzer analyses a moral conflict that emerges in southwest Madagascar between conservationists trying to protect a coral reef ecosystem and fishery, and local Vezo fishing people who subsist on selling octopus, fish, and sea cucumber for export. The Vezo knew that marine species often became depleted after they started harvesting them to supply global commodity chains, and that resource depletion negatively affects fisher livelihoods. They adapt to environmental changes by targeting fast-growing marine species and by migrating to distant resource frontiers. At the same time, they also participate in conservation initiatives such as the establishment of locally managed marine protected areas and periodic temporal closures of small sections of reef flat that purport to manage local octopus populations. While these actions publicly signal commitment to conservation efforts, they fall short of the Vezo expressing

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a conservationist ethos or of committing to a corresponding worldview. Based on their own perceptual evidence of changes in the fishery, many Vezo doubt scientists’ opinion that reef flat closures are an effective means to either manage coral reefs or conserve octopus populations. In his contribution, Muttenzer tries to explain why the perceptual evidence of ecological processes, which is in principle shared by local fishers and marine conservationists, does not suffice to produce moral agreement or consensus on what one should do about environmental changes. He emphasises that both local participation in conservation efforts and the shared perceptual evidence of ecological processes are subject to divergent interpretations depending on which “worldviews” or “conceptual frameworks” the parties bring to bear on the issues. He argues that while distinguishing between, on the one hand, perceptions of the environment (“ecological facts” or “environmental affordances”), and on the other, ethical stances (“moral appraisals”, “conceptions of wellbeing”), makes sense within a given worldview, it is misleading to equate this distinction with the nature-culture dichotomy which proposes that there is only one nature but many cultural representations of it; and that nature can be known independently of, yet should inform or correct, such cultural representations. Only if one takes the nature-culture dichotomy for granted does it make sense to say that ecological facts, such as the productivity of the octopus fisheries, can be established “objectively” outside of any speaker-relative “cultural representations” of those facts. He contends further that the  concept of ‘cultural representations of nature’ that underlies the representationalist school in the nature-culture discourse, is akin to that of errors in perceptual judgements about ecological facts. Indeed, the nature-culture dichotomy is a false one because as embodied human beings we cannot cognise nature by representing it as if from a God’s eye perspective, without characterising it in ways that fit into some previously existing worldview and patterns of action. Moreover, natural scientific knowledge, just like other kinds of knowledge, is often generated with a view to solving or addressing what is culturally deemed to constitute a problem. Suppose that a fishery scientist is asked to conduct a stock assessment of the octopus population on a coral reef, and that the methods used for the assessment are unimpeachable, the results accurate, and that the study contains no policy recommendations. Suppose further that despite this, the results of that assessment are subsequently used by the organism that commissioned the study to justify restricting fishers’ access to the coral

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reef. Would it nevertheless be the case that unless there was a conservation interest in managing octopus or coral reefs, no fishery scientist would have bothered to “culturally” represent octopus populations nature along these lines? Muttenzer proposes an alternative to what he views as a specious nature-culture discourse. He advocates rather the concept of divergent but partially overlapping frameworks or worldviews, each of which comprises an ethical stance related to a corresponding perception of the environment. This perception of the environment is referred to as “environmental affordance” by the pragmatist (or enactivist) school because what the organism or agent perceives is not simply an environment but rather a specific possibility for action offered by the environment. Conversely, perceiving the environment (the action of perceptually representing it in a specific way known as the “affordance”) is just an aspect of being and acting in the world more generally. For example, if the goal of action specified by group ethos is to overcome scarcity by shifting to less and less selective fishing gear, evidence that a species is less abundant today than it was 20 years ago may not be sufficient to disconfirm fishers’ confidence that species cannot become depleted. And if such confidence is part of their basic assumptions about how they should live, or what the world is like, then the idea of imposing access restrictions to manage the species might not be their primary concern. The accent put on worldviews, and the subjective meaning of actions instead of nature-culture discourse, does not mean that people are forever imprisoned in their respective cultural frameworks. Changes do occur for a host of reasons, both at the level of ecological processes and in the ethical stances of human groups. However, it is highly problematic to try and use nature (in other words, applied ecological science) as a benchmark for choosing one’s environmental values or evaluating one’s ethical and political choices. In Chap. 7, Jacques Pollini focuses on possible domains of convergence between perceptions of the environment by local Malagasy farmers and global conservation experts. He considers that, although Malagasy people and foreign scientists adopt different values, and different cultural systems that influence their overall conceptions of the world, they to some extent share a more mundane, material understanding of that world, regarding, for instance, why a crop grows, a technique works, resources are unavailable, people are healthy, rivers flow, and the rains fall. In this more prosaic domain, perceptions can find a consensus. Indeed, they must find it, since

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correct interpretations of ordinary processes determine whether people, in the end, will eat, and whether some natural resources will remain for future generations to use. Pollini presents two case studies of peasant farmers cultivating forest land to illustrate his argument: in the eastern rain forests, and in the dry forests of southwestern Madagascar. In both cases, farmers and conservationists agree that the forest has value, is worth preserving, and that people need to be fed. However, farmers consider that, because of demographic expansion, deforestation is inevitable because their livelihood depends on enlarging the area of farmland. CFMN projects, on the other hand, promote the adoption of alternative agricultural systems characterised by intensive cultivation of existing plots, in order to avoid further deforestation. Farmers do not reject the idea of adopting alternative cropping systems per se, but will adopt them only if they are more efficient in producing food, which is not the case with the alternatives proposed by conservation projects, or if they have no choice because they perceive that all forest has been cleared or is nearly depleted (which is not the case according to their perception). The differences in the attitudes between farmers and conservationists thus result from differences in their perceptions regarding whether forests are disappearing and whether suitable alternative land uses exist more than from fundamental difference in their culture or worldviews. Certainly, ideology influences perceptions, but the reverse is also true. Malagasy farmers tend to think that the forest has no limit because they do not have access to satellite images to measure forest cover. Their ideology is consistent with this lack of information. The same logic applies to conservationists who propose unsuitable alternatives to swidden farming. Because they have no experience of living in Malagasy villages, conservationists tend to ignore the difficulties that peasants face in adopting the technologies they propose. They perceive neither labour shortages at a household scale nor the impacts on food security of adopting risky new techniques. Differences in attitude towards forests, besides reflecting contrasting values and interests, thus also reflect divergences in what various observers perceive, due to differences in their life experience. Discourses or ideologies collide, but if local and global stakeholders could share more of their respective experiences, through meaningful communication and by making observations jointly, their differences could be smoothed over. Unfortunately, instead of committing to sharing mundane experiences with locals in a common material world, conservation experts and other

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external stakeholders develop their own ritual systems as a way of imposing their view of how land and resources should be managed. That is, instead of engaging empirically with the material world, by visiting farmers on their land, observing what they do, and questioning them about their material struggles and livelihood strategies, they organise workshops where communication is not open, deliberative, and centred on facts. Rather, dialogue is enclosed within the boundaries of analytical frameworks that reflect unequal social positions and political power, between the aid apparatus and its experts (the CFMN agencies) which organise these workshops, on one side, and smallholder farmers who are the supposed “beneficiaries” of these events, on the other side. In these workshops, the inefficient land use alternatives promoted by CFMN projects are presented as if they were a necessity, the inescapable livelihood models of the future. Consequently, material realities, that is, the landscape and the farmers that shape it, including the way they think, have to adapt by adopting these models, rather than the other way round, and the models are never questioned. This process, which is driven by political power and influence rather than empiricism and pragmatism, is more akin to a ritual than to a practical attempt to face a complex reality in the field. It consolidates an ideological apparatus which maintains a cognitive dissonance between local and global actors. This explains the persistent failure and/ or unethical character of conservation policies and projects, with Malagasy farmers banned from implementing their land use practices and from accessing forest land and resources, while they are proposed alternative land uses that do not work or cause production decline (Pollini 2007). Although Pollini criticises conservationist interventions, he affirms the need to conserve the Malagasy environment in a Western sense, to keep some Malagasy landscapes untouched or only marginally transformed by human action. That is, he argues in favour of distinguishing nature and culture conceptually, and in favour of separating nature from culture when cultural systems are incompatible with preserving an amount of nature that is socially and ethically acceptable. But he also contends that conservation has a local cost in the context of Malagasy forest frontiers, because a conserved landscape diminishes the goods and services available to locals who are “deforestation dependent” (who practise swidden farming), unless viable alternative livelihood strategies, such as those already developed by Malagasy farmers in all areas where forests have already been cleared, are supported to compensate for those losses. In other words, conservation is necessary but has a cost, and this cost is currently borne

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mostly by smallholder Malagasy farmers, which is socially and ethically unacceptable. In the final chapter, Gwyn Campbell presents a study of changes in the great eastern forest in the hundred years from 1795 to 1895. Campbell notes that, at the end of the eighteenth century, much of eastern Madagascar was covered by dense forest running some 1288 km north to south. It fell into three broad categories: the lowland rainfall forest below 460 m, that of the steep escarpment between about 460 m and 750–800 m above sea level, and that from about 800 m to 1372 m in altitude. Reports of visiting botanists, as of the first detailed French study of the Antongil Bay region, noted a huge diversity of forest plant life. However, Campbell argues that serious environmental damage to the forest occurred before the advent of French colonial rule, and that such degradation was not primarily the result of foreign capitalist forces. From the time it forged an alliance with the British in the years 1817–1820, the Merina state established military domination over most of the eastern littoral of the island, and declared a monopoly over all commercially valuable produce, including export staples. Foreigners were permitted to exploit local resources only with the authorisation of, and in partnership with, the Merina crown. Moreover, they were allowed to lease but not purchase land. Foreign influence was further undermined by disease, for malaria, endemic in the Malagasy lowlands, generally either killed or physically enfeebled Europeans. Such factors deterred major foreign investment in Madagascar, and most foreign settlers—except for impoverished Creoles from the Mascarene islands of Réunion and Mauritius. The Creoles succeeded in bypassing formal obstacles to land ownership through liaisons with local women in whose names they purchased houses, small parcels of land, and slave labour. However, few were able to gain a workforce sufficient for their needs as Malagasy workers were monopolised by the Merina court through a system of compulsory unpaid labour. Only after the 1883–1885 Franco Merina War did the Merina crown authorise significant foreign investment, and only from about 1890 were foreign agents permitted to deal directly with Malagasy subjects of the Merina state. Thus, until the French takeover in 1895, the Malagasy were primarily responsible for the exploitation of the resources of the eastern forest. Peasant exploitation, in the form of tavy or swidden riziculture, was chiefly sustainable due to low population densities of forest-dwelling communities. However, there was a steady degradation of forest resources, mainly due to Merina state policies. Andrianampoinimerina (r. c.1787–1810)

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initiated unprecedented conversion of plateau land to riziculture, production of iron weapons and tools, and elite buildings, all of which did much to destroy remaining woodland on the plateau and impinge on the western fringe of the eastern forest. Degradation of the eastern forest continued at an ever-increasing pace under subsequent Merina rulers due chiefly to the transformation of Antananarivo into a huge administrative and military centre, the creation of industrial hubs, and the founding of military garrisons and state churches throughout Merina-ruled territory. All these established demand for massive amounts of construction timber and fuel, which was met by intensifying exploitation of the forest for hardwoods and firewood. At the same time, the Merina state launched military campaigns against non-Merina peoples of the island, forcing many to flee for refuge into forested regions. They were joined, notably along the eastern littoral, by many non-Merina who the Merina conquered and subsequently forced into compulsory harsh unpaid labour. The numbers of such refugees fluctuated considerably, but overall added substantially to the population subsisting off forest resources. Additionally, the state forged partnerships with select foreigners for the establishment of cash crop plantations such as coffee, which impinged on the forest, and for concessions to exploit forest resources, notably rubber and timber. Consequently, by the time of the French takeover in 1895, much of the eastern forest was seriously degraded. Its western and eastern fringes had receded significantly, while within the forest, the proliferation of agricultural plots due to enhanced population pressure had by the mid-1870s led to the degradation of much of the region south of the escarpment close to southeastern Betsileo, and by 1890 to the complete deforestation of the Antaisaka region, to the hinterland of Vangaindrano. In sum, Campbell argues, Merina state policy in the pre-colonial era, through its exploitative military and commercial policies, and deliberate attack on the traditional peasant economy, engendered a major and progressive degradation of the eastern forest, one perpetuated by the subsequent French colonial regime. Acknowledgments  Research for this work was supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

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Harding, Simon. 2018. Ch. 6: Madagascar. In World Seas: An Environmental Evaluation, ed. C.  Sheppard, 2nd ed., 121–144. London: Academic Press. https://doi.org/10.1016/B978-0-08-100853-9.00005-1. Harris, A., G. Manahira, A. Sheppard, and C. Gouch. 2010. Demise of Madagascar’s Once Great Barrier Reef: Changes in Coral Reef Conditions Over 40 Years. Atoll Research Bulletin 574: 16. https://repository.si.edu/bitstream/handle/10088/8936/00574.pdf. Accessed 28 December 2021. Jarosz, Lucy. 1993. Defining and Explaining Tropical Deforestation: Shifting Cultivation and Population Growth in Colonial Madagascar (1896–1940). Economic Geography 69 (1993): 366–379. Jones, J.P., M.M. Andriamarovololona, and N. Hockley. 2008. The Importance of Taboos and Social Norms to Conservation in Madagascar. Conservation Biology 22 (4): 976–986. Keller, Eva. 2008. The Banana Plant and the Moon: Conservation and the Malagasy Ethos of Life in Masoala, Madagascar. American Ethnologist 35 (4): 650–664. ———. 2017. Beyond the Lens of Conservation: Malagasy and Swiss Imaginations of One Another. New York and Oxford: Berghahn. Klein, Joergen. 2002. Deforestation in the Madagascar Highlands: Established ‘Truth’ and Scientific Uncertainty. Geojournal 56 (3): 191–199. ———. 2004. Fiddling While Madagascar Burns: Deforestation Discourses and Highland History. Norwegian Journal of Geography 58: 11–22. Kull, Christian. 2000. Deforestation, Erosion and Fire: Degradation Myths in the Environmental History of Madagascar. Environment and History 6 (4): 423–450. ———. 2004. Isle of Fire: The Political Ecology of Landscape Burning in Madagascar. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Manach, F.L., C.  Andrianaivojaona, K.  Oleson, A.  Clausen, and G.-M.  Lange. 2013. Natural Capital Accounting and Management of the Malagasy Fisheries. Washington, DC: World Bank. Muttenzer, Frank. 2010. Deforestation et droit coutumier à Madagascar: les perceptions des acteurs de la gestion communautaire des forets. Geneve: Institut de hautes etudes internationales et du developpement. ———. 2015. The Social Life of Sea Cucumbers in Madagascar: Migrant Fishers’ Household Objects and Display of a Marine Ethos. Etnofoor 27: 101–121. ———. 2020. Being Ethical among Vezo People: Fisheries, Livelihoods and Conservation in Madagascar, Anthropology of Well-Being Series. Lanham, ML: Lexington Books. ———. 2023. The Emptiness of the Nature-Culture Dichotomy: Perceptions of Reef Fisheries and the will to Improve Well-being among the Vezo. In Perceptions and Representations of the Malagasy Environment Across Cultures, ed. Frank Muttenzer, Gwyn Campbell, and Jacques Pollini. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan.

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Muttenzer, Frank, and Mialy Andriamahefazafy. 2021. From Ritual Performers to Ocean Defenders: Fisher Migrations, Identity Narratives and Resource Access in the Barren Isles, West Madagascar. African Identities 19 (3): 375–399. https://doi.org/10.1080/14725843.2021.1937052. Nadon, M.-O., D. Griffiths, E. Doherty, and A. Harris. 2007. The Status of Coral Reefs in the Remote Region of Andavadoaka, Southwest Madagascar. Western Indian Ocean Journal of Maritime Science 6 (2): 207–218. National Geographic. 2022. How Illegal Mining Is Threatening Imperiled Lemurs. https://www.nationalgeographic.com/animals/article/sapphiremining-fuels-lemur-deaths-in-madagascar. Accessed 28 June 2022. Osterhoudt, Sarah. 2018. Community Conservation and the (Mis)Appropriation of Taboo. Development and Change 49 (5): 1248–1267. https://doi. org/10.1111/dech.12413. ———. 2023. “Good” Forests and Ambiguous Fields: Cultural Dimensions of Agroforestry Landscapes. In Perceptions and Representations of the Malagasy Environment Across Cultures, ed. Gwyn Campbell, Frank Muttenzer, and Jacques Pollini. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan. Pollini, Jacques. 2007. Deforestation and Slash-and-Burn Cultivation in the Malagasy Rain Forests: Representations and Realities. PhD Dissertation. Department of Natural Resources, Cornell University, New York, August 2007. ———. 2017. Construction of Nature. In The International Encyclopedia of Geography, ed. Douglas Richardson, Noel Castree, Mike M. Goodchild, Audrey Kobayashi, Weidong Liu, and Richard Marton. Chichester/Hoboken: John Wiley & Sons. https://doi.org/10.1002/9781118786352.wbieg0420. ———. 2023. Perceptions and Representations of Deforestation in Madagascar: From Cognitive Dissonances to Convergences. In Perceptions and Representations of the Malagasy Environment Across Cultures, ed. Frank Muttenzer, Gwyn Campbell, and Jacques Pollini. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan. Pollini, Jacques, Frank Muttenzer, Hockley Neil, and Bruno Ramamonjisoa. 2014. The Transfer of Natural Resource Management Rights to Local Communities. In Conservation and Environmental Management in Madagascar, Earthscan Conservation and Development Series, ed. Y.R. Scales, 172–192. London: Routledge. Raik, Daniela. 2007. Forest Management in Madagascar: An Historical Overview. Madagascar Conservation & Development 2 (1): 5–10. Razafimanahaka, Julie H., Richard B.  Jenkins, Daudet Andriafadison, Félicien Randrianandrianina, Victor Rakototomboavonjy, Aidan Keane, and Julia P.G.  Jones. 2012. Novel Approach for Quantifying Illegal Bushmeat Consumption Reveals High Consumption of Protected Species in Madagascar. Oryx 46 (4): 584–592. Rio Tinto. 2022. QIT Madagascar Minerals. https://www.riotinto.com/en/ operations/madagascar/qit-­madagascar-­minerals. Accessed 28 June 2022.

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Seagle, Caroline. 2012. Inverting the Impacts: Mining, Conservation and Sustainability Claims Near the Rio Tinto/QMM Ilmenite Mine in Southeast Madagascar. Journal of Peasant Studies 39 (2): 447–477. Sharife, Khadija, and Edward Maintikely. 2022. The Fate of Madagascar’s Endangered Rosewoods. https://www.occrp.org/en/investigations/8480the-fate­of-madagascar-s-endangered-­rosewoods. Accessed 28 June 2022. Sodikoff, Genese Marie. 2012a. Forest and Labor in Madagascar: From Colonial Concession to Global Biosphere. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. ———. 2012b. Totem and Taboo Reconsidered: Endangered Species and Moral Practice in Madagascar. In The Anthropology of Extinction: Essays on Culture and Species Death, ed. Genese Marie Sodikoff, 67–86. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. ———. 2023. Offset Life: Lemur Health in Landscapes of Extraction. In Perceptions and Representations of the Malagasy Environment Across Cultures, ed. Frank Muttenzer, Gwyn Campbell, and Jacques Pollini. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan. UNFCCC. 2016. Key Decisions Relevant for Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation in Developing Countries (REDD+). https://unfccc.int/files/land_use_and climate_change/redd/application/ pdf/compilation_redd_decision_booklet_v1.2.pdf. Accessed 01 July 2022. United Nations (UN). 2021. World Population Prospects. https://www. macrotrends.net/countries/MDG/madagascar/population. Accessed 27 December 2021. United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP). 2012. National Marine Ecosystem Diagnostic Analysis (MEDA)- Madagascar. https://wedocs.unep. org/20.500.11822/25891. Accessed 01 July 2022. United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). 2022a. What Is REDD+. https://unfccc.int/topics/land-­use/workstreams/redd/ what-­is-­redd. Accessed 01 July 2022. ———. 2022b. Madagascar. https://redd.unfccc.int/submissions. html?country=mdg. Accessed 01 July 2022. USAID. 2022. Administrator Samantha Power Meets with Andry Rajoelina, President of Madagascar. https://www.usaid.gov/news-­information/press-­ releases/apr-­21-­2022-­administrator-­power-­meets-­andry-­rajoelina-­president-­ madagascar. Accessed 01 July 2022. Ventura, Luka. 2021. Poorest Countries in the World 2021. Global Finance, 12 December. https://www.gfmag.com/global-­data/economic-data/the-poorest-countries-in-the-world. Accessed 27 December 2021. Vieilledent, G., C. Grinand, F.A. Rakotomalala, R. Ranaivosoa, J.-R. Rakotoarijaona, T.F. Allnutt, and F. Achard. 2018. Combining Global Tree Cover Loss Data with Historical National Forest Cover Maps to Look at Six Decades of Deforestation and Forest Fragmentation in Madagascar. Biological Conservation 222: 189–197.

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Vyawahare, Malavika. 2021. Even as the Government Bets Big on Carbon, REDD+ Flounders in Madagascar. Mongabay, 18 Aug. https://news.mongabay.com/2021/08/even-as-the-government-bets-big-on-carbon-reddflounders-in-madagascar/. Accessed 01 July 2022. Walsh, Andrew. 2012. Made in Madagascar: Sapphires, Ecotourism, and the Global Bazaar. North York: University of Toronto Press. World Bank. 2022a. Madagascar Rural Population 1960–2022. https://www. macrotrends.net/countries/MDG/madagascar/rural-population. Madagascar Rural Population 1960–2022. www.macrotrends.net. Accessed 29 June 2022. ———. 2022b. Madagascar Population Density 1950–2022. https://www. macrotrends.net/countries/MDG/madagascar/population-­density. Accessed 29 June 2022. ———. 2022c. Madagascar Poverty Rate 1980–2022. https://www.macrotrends. net/countries/MDG/madagascar/poverty-rate. Accessed 30 June 2022.

“Good” Forests and Ambiguous Fields: Cultural Dimensions of Agroforestry Landscapes Sarah Osterhoudt

1   Agroforests and the Perception of Landscapes Standing with Entienne, a Malagasy farmer, one afternoon atop a steep hill in the Mananara Nord region of northeastern Madagascar, we look out towards the horizon.1 As far as we can see in each direction, the landscape is covered with trees, presenting us with a mottled green vista. Birds call overhead, and on our climb up the path we spot an endemic tenrec––an animal resembling a small hedgehog––with five small offspring scurrying after her.

1

 I have changed the names of all individuals mentioned throughout the chapter.

S. Osterhoudt (*) Indiana University, Bloomington, IN, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 F. Muttenzer et al. (eds.), Perceptions and Representations of the Malagasy Environment Across Cultures, Palgrave Series in Indian Ocean World Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-23836-9_2

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In many ways, the scene before us exemplifies the image of Madagascar’s rich tropical forest corridor that stretches up the eastern coast of the island, an ecosystem especially valued by conservation organisations working to preserve Madagascar’s unique flora and fauna (Brooks et  al. 2006; Ganzhorn et al. 2001). Yet, the tree-lined views we see do not fall within one of Madagascar’s protected areas. Instead, my friend comments that the land stretching before us is entirely owned by smallholder farmers who cultivate food and market crops within these managed forest landscapes. Upon a closer look, markers of this cultivation become visible, including the presence of many clove trees dotting the forest canopy along with the occasional small plots of hillside rice. This landscape represents not a park, but rather a patchwork of small fields—most about half a hectare in size—that are owned and cared for by smallholder farmers. The Malagasy refer to these systems as alam’boly, or planted forests. In this region, these landscapes are quite varied in the species that they contain, but often include a combination of clove trees, coffee bushes, vanilla vines, fruit trees, palm trees, and native and non-native tree and plant species (Osterhoudt 2017). These collections of cultivated crops include subsistence crops, such as hillside rice, breadfruit trees, cassava, and other tubers. Farmers also cultivate market crops in their alam’boly fields, including vanilla and cloves for international export markets, as well as coffee for domestic markets. Households may sell the fruits collected from their fields, including mangos, litchis, avocados, and jackfruit, within local markets. People use many of the tree species found within their agroforests for their everyday household needs, including home construction, fence construction, firewood, and ceremonial and medicinal purposes (Osterhoudt 2017). As a collection of managed forest fields, the alam’boly fields of the Mananara region represent thriving, locally managed agroforestry systems (Fig. 1). Agroforestry fields are generally defined as spaces that contain a combination of trees and agricultural crops (Michon and De Foresta 1995). Proponents of agroforestry systems point to the potential for these landscapes to bring together diversified agricultural production and economic opportunities for smallholders, while keeping a degree of forest cover and soil health intact (Altieri 1999; Jose 2012). Studies of agroforestry landscapes in the tropics, for example, have linked agroforests with protecting corridor wildlife habitat, improving soil health, and promoting carbon sequestration (Davis et al. 2011; Hobbs et al. 2009). Agroforestry land management approaches gained increased prominence as a development goal during the 1970s and 1980s, when

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Fig. 1  View of agroforestry fields in Imorona, northeastern Madagascar. Photo by author

international agencies such as the World Agroforestry Center (ICRAF) saw agroforestry systems as preferable land use alternatives to swidden and “slash-and-burn” agriculture (Pollini 2009).2 Similarly, many 2  As Pollini notes, swidden rice production is itself a type of agroforestry system, long practised by farmers throughout the world (Pollini 2009).

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conservation and sustainable development organisations have come to regard agroforestry initiatives as a “silver-bullet” solution for bringing together the “twin goals of conservation and development” (Chowdhury 1999: 100; see also Mercer 2004, Rocheleau 1989). More recently, agroforestry programmes have been linked to the sustainable development frameworks of conservation agriculture (Hobbs 2007), carbon smart agriculture (Lipper et al. 2014), and payment for ecosystem services (Pollini 2009). Yet, although many mainstream environmental and development groups are adopting agroforestry projects, these programmes encounter significant challenges, as “prescribed agroforestry initiatives rarely live up to their potential” (Chowdhury 1999: 125). Even with the investment of funding and other significant resources, agroforestry development programmes often struggle to achieve their long-term objectives, as farmers do not permanently adopt the agrarian techniques promoted by agroforestry organisations (Chowdhury 1999; Mercer 2004; Pollini 2009; Rocheleau 1989). Some of this struggle is due to the tendency of agroforestry programmes to foreground the technical, scientific aspects of agrarian practice, instead of the larger social and political dimensions of local agricultural systems (Blaikie 2016; Dove 1999). To successfully work with smallholders, however, agroforestry programmes need to consider not only the technical aspects of agrarian practice, but also the localised cultural dimensions of agrarian perceptions––generally speaking, how individuals regard their landscapes within broader ideological, historical, political, and epistemological contexts (Bloch 1998; Keller 2015; Kull 2002; Osterhoudt 2016; Sodikoff 2012). Within such frameworks, agroforestry systems emerge as spaces that contain not only a diversity of materials, but also a range of localised meanings, memories, practices, and knowledge. 1.1   Research Methodologies and Chapter Organisation In the following chapter, I consider some disconnects between how Malagasy smallholder farmers perceive agroforestry landscapes and how development and conservation programmes tend to view these same landscapes. To examine these differing perceptions, I present an in-depth, ethnographic case study of the agroforests of the Mananara Nord region of Madagascar.3 I draw from anthropological research conducted with 3  I refer to the vanilla and clove landscapes of the Mananara region as agroforests, as they are cultivated systems that include trees.

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Malagasy smallholders during various periods over the past 12 years. My ethnographic methods include participant observation, semi-structured interviews, oral history interviews, archival work, and economic botany surveys of vanilla agroforests. I argue that the agroforests of Mananara Nord represent not only a diversified collection of plant species and economic resources, but also fundamentally shape––and are shaped by––broader cultural systems of meaning, knowledge, memory, and identity (Osterhoudt 2017). It is within these linked ecological, economic, and cultural contexts that Malagasy farmers develop a sense of what makes a “good” agroforest. From an ecological perspective, farmers note that a good agroforest contains a variety of cultivated and natural species within shaded, well-tended parcels. From an economic perspective, a good agroforest supports a variety of economic activities, which helps to hedge individuals against market swings and environmental uncertainty. Finally, from a cultural perspective, a good agroforest integrates entities often perceived as separate: the present with the past, the political with the personal, and the living with the deceased. The multifaceted dimensions of northeastern Madagascar’s agroforests resonate with other anthropological work conducted in Madagascar, which similarly notes the generative connections between practice, meaning, memory, power, and knowledge (e.g. Astuti 1995; Bloch 1998, 2008; Cole 2001; Lambek 2003). Especially relevant to Mananara’s agroforests is the theoretical framework elaborated by anthropologist Maurice Bloch, in which he brings together the cultural spheres of the transcendent (with its focus on the essentialised roles and duties of social groups) and the transactional (with its focus on the quotidian behaviour of individuals) (2008). The agroforests of the Mananara region serve to integrate these two complementary facets of Malagasy life. In the process, they present individuals with flexible, resilient agrarian landscapes that can bend to changing times, without breaking. Indeed, many families of the Mananara Nord region have tended the same agroforestry landscapes for multiple generations. The chapter next considers how conservation and development groups tend to perceive agroforestry landscapes. Such groups are embedded within their own ideological, political, and epistemological systems (Ferguson 1990; Li 2007; Scott 1998; West 2006). Historically, conservation initiatives have favoured the models of parks and protected areas, which prioritise the ideals of “natural” landscapes that stand apart from

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visible human influence (Cronon 1996; Nash 2014; Neumann 2002). This stance, in turn, has provoked considerable conflict with local residents living near park borders, both in Madagascar and across the globe (Hanson 2007; Keller 2015; Sodikoff 2012; West et al. 2006). In one sense, the increase in environmental initiatives focused on agroforestry systems appears a productive way to move beyond the types of conflicts precipitated by protected areas, as by their very definition agroforests are fundamentally shaped by human activity. In practice, however, many agroforestry projects in the Global South replicate the reductionist tendencies of more mainstream conservation programmes. For example, they often adopt a narrow, technical vision of what counts as a “good” agroforestry field, one that may focus on one tree species, or a narrow range of agrarian techniques (Michon and De Foresta 1995; Pollini 2009). Environmental groups also frequently prioritise generalisable models for agrarian practice, instead of recognising the considerable variation of needs, aspirations, and resources within rural communities (Agrawal and Gibson 1999; Alcorn 1989; Blaikie 2016; Li 2014). To conclude, I suggest some approaches for agroforestry initiatives, including adopting frameworks that better align with Malagasy perceptions of agroforestry landscapes. This view encourages a strength-based approach to projects that emphasises the holistic potential of agroforests to provide services beyond income generation and biodiversity conservation. It shifts the orientation of environmental projects from problems-­ based to ones that are strengths-based; instead of development groups determining what is missing from agroforests, they ask residents what is already working well (Dove 1992; Li 2007; Richard and Ratsirarson 2013). Shifting the focus from community problems towards community strengths encourages programmes to work within existing cultural, social, and environmental perceptions of landscapes, instead of against them (Feeley-Harnik 1995; Gezon and Freed 1999; Scales 2014).

2  Overview: The Region of Mananara Nord, Madagascar The Mananara region is situated along the Bay of Antongil in the Indian Ocean on Madagascar’s northeastern coast (Fig. 2). The town of Mananara Nord is the commercial and administrative center of the region. The town has a population of approximately 80,000 residents, and this number rises

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Fig. 2  Map of the Mananara Nord region of northeastern Madagascar. Photo credit: Osterhoudt 2017

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during the clove and vanilla harvests when people from other regions of Madagascar travel to Mananara looking for seasonal work. The primary ethnic group of the region is the Betsimisaraka, the second largest ethnic group in Madagascar. Most residents speak the Northern Betsimisaraka dialect of Malagasy. The town of Mananara Nord has several hotels, restaurants, a health centre, a daily market, and the region’s only public high school. Infrastructure in the region is generally in poor repair. The precarious National Route 5 is the main point of connection between Mananara and surrounding areas, stretching north to the Masoala region, and south to the major port city of Toamasina. Mananara Nord also has a small port, as well as a paved airstrip that can accommodate light aircraft. There is cell phone and internet service in Mananara. The greater Mananara District region consists of 13 surrounding rural townships. This region includes the UNESCO Mananara Nord Biosphere Reserve, managed by Madagascar National Parks, which encompasses an area of 140,000 hectares and includes both forest and marine ecosystems.4 In general, the rural townships of Mananara Nord do not have electricity or running water, though most have cell phone service. The majority of the residents who live in the Mananara Nord region engage in a mixture of subsistence and cash crop agriculture. The coast, which is protected by a large reef system, is also a site for subsistence fishing and shellfish collection. For rice cultivation, people who live in coastal areas establish small paddy rice fields in the marshy lowland areas. Moving inland, the terrain becomes hilly, with predominantly clay soils, and reaching altitudes of approximately 1000 metres. On these hillsides, farmers practise swidden rice cultivation and also establish agroforestry fields. Smallholder farmers generally adopt two main strategies to establish their agroforests. The first includes creating agroforests on land that was the site of swidden rice cultivation. For this strategy, farmers first clear a small patch of land through burning in order to plant hillside swidden rice. As farmers plant and harvest their hillside rice, they plant clove and coffee seedlings among the rice plants, and encourage native tree seedlings to grow (Osterhoudt 2017). Farmers will cultivate rice on this land for two 4  http://www.unesco.org/mabdb/br/brdir/directory/biores.asp?mode=all&code= MAG+01

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or three years, and then convert the field into a managed fallow, where farmers continue to plant new seedlings and nurture existing trees. Once the resulting tree cover is mature enough to provide consistent shade, farmers will begin to integrate vanilla vines into the landscape. The second technique for establishing agroforests is to plant clove tree seedlings and vanilla vines, as well as other desired species, within a patch of existing forest. In this case, larger trees may be removed to allow for enough light and space for clove trees and vanilla vines to thrive (Rabetaliana 1989; Rajeriarison n.d.). Once farmers have mature agroforestry landscapes with productive clove trees and vanilla vines, they will rarely, if ever, re-swidden their fields for rice cultivation (Osterhoudt 2017). Mature vanilla agroforests contain a significant diversity of native and non-native tree species. For example, a pilot tree inventory study I conducted in 2010 with seven smallholder vanilla farmers found that their agroforestry fields collectively contained a total of 97 tree species, across 40 botanical families (Osterhoudt 2017).5 About one-third of these tree species were native to Madagascar. Adding in herbaceous species collected from surveyed agroforests raised the total to 170 species across 66 families. The tree species richness of these vanilla and clove managed forests compares favourably with other littoral forest inventories conducted within and nearby the Mananara Biosphere reserve. For example, the Malagasy Park service conducted eight surveys within the littoral forests of the periphery zones of the Biosphere Reserve and recorded a flora diversity of between 23 and 116 species per site (Fritz-Vietta et  al. 2008). Although comparable in species diversity, vanilla agroforests usually lack valuable hardwood tree species such as rosewood and ebony that are found in protected areas (Fritz-Vietta et al. 2008). In addition to species richness, vanilla agroforestry systems have been found to support lemur diversity (Hending et  al. 2018) and to foster more nutritious local diets (Styger et al. 1999). 5  For inventories, we surveyed five parcels for each farmer, measuring 10 × 10 metres each. Within each parcel, we recorded the local names and the diametre at breast height (DBH) of all tree species with a DBH equal to or greater than five centimetres. We also recorded the number and local names of all pole trees––trees greater than two metres in height but less than five centimetres in DBH. Representative samples of all local tree species included in the inventories were collected, dried, and identified with the assistance of botanists at the herbarium of the University of Antananarivo (Osterhoudt 2017).

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2.1   Mananara Nord and International Trade Systems The Antongil Bay area of Mananara has long been a site of global trade. The Dutch East India Trading Company established trading posts in the region during the early 1600s, and Antongil Bay served as a pirate hub throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (Ellis 2007; Pearson 1997). Traders from India and China have had an historical presence in the region, participating in commodity trade with Malagasy smallholders for goods including cloves, quartz, coffee, and vanilla (Campbell 2005, 2012; Sodikoff 2004). During the period of French colonialism, the region around Antongil Bay supplied the French administration with key natural resources, including sugar cane, timber, and wild rubber, and became one of the colonial centres of clove production (Campbell 2005, 2012). Currently, the region’s major export crops are cloves and vanilla beans. Mananara farmers have cultivated these crops for approximately 100  years, with cloves arriving to the region a bit earlier than vanilla (Osterhoudt 2017). Cloves are generally destined for South and Southeast Asian markets, while the largest importers of Madagascar vanilla beans are Europe and the United States (Brown 2009).6 Throughout its history, the Mananara region has therefore provided a variety of commodities for a range of international markets; these products have included timber, honey, wild rubber, black pepper, sugar cane, coffee, cacao, cloves, and vanilla. This commodity trade has unfolded within the context of uncertainty across political, economic, and environmental realms. The region has a prolonged history of struggle against powerful and intrusive political forces including piracy, the slave trade, the Merina regimes of highland Madagascar, French colonialism, and multinational extractive industries (Bloch 1998; Campbell 1981; Cole 2001; Jarosz 1993; Walsh 2005). Compounding this political uncertainty is the economic uncertainty of highly volatile commodity markets. For example, export prices for vanilla beans have experienced dramatic market swings since the deregulation of the vanilla market in the 1990s (Brown 2009; Wexler 2017). Further, this area of Madagascar regularly experiences severe cyclones, disrupting the production of agricultural commodities 6   Clove import statistics: https://www.indexmundi.com/trade/imports/?commodity= 090700

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such as vanilla and cloves, which are often severely damaged by storms (Donque 1972). Despite such challenges, smallholder farmers in the Mananara region have largely remained committed to their agroforestry fields over time. Early oral history accounts of the region note that the first families to settle in the region practised shifting cultivation, managing their fallow fields for useful food and tree species (Osterhoudt 2017). Over time, these managed fallows have transformed into more permanent agroforestry cultivation systems, especially over the past century or so, when clove farming emerged as a viable economic opportunity across the region. Hillside rice cultivation still plays an important role in organising economic, social, and ceremonial relationships in the region (Sodikoff 2004; see also Pollini 2023). Yet, as discussed below, many smallholder farmers give similar importance to their agroforestry fields. Thus, although the regions’ managed forests are not identical in species composition to old-growth tropical forests, this region has largely avoided the large-scale clearing of tree cover noted across other areas of Madagascar (Green and Sussman 1990). As a group, smallholders in this region have also avoided many of the other common traps that befall individuals integrated into volatile international commodity markets, such as losing their land title rights or abandoning subsistence crop cultivation in times of commodity booms (Li 2014). Instead, rural families in Mananara Nord have largely maintained control over their land ownership rights, have eschewed a wage economy in preference for continuing a more autonomous, piece-based economy, and have continued to cultivate rice and other subsistence food crops alongside their commodity crops (Campbell 1981; Laney and Turner 2015; Sodikoff 2004). The question then arises: why are farmers in this region so successful at adapting their agroforests to meet changing and challenging conditions? This resiliency, I argue below, is in large part a cultural story, as the agroforests of Mananara become embedded within broader systems of meaning, memory, knowledge, and care. In terms of the analytical framework of Bloch, agroforests bring together mundane and ritualised cultural spheres, spanning the realms of the transactional and transcendent (2008; see also Pollini 2023).

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3  Cultivating Culture: Cultural Dimensions of Agroforestry Landscapes Development and conservation organisations that promote agroforestry projects emphasise how agroforests bring both economic and ecological advantages to local communities, for example, by preserving biodiversity while providing smallholders with economic opportunities and food security (Chowdhury 1999). When measured by these criteria, the clove and vanilla agroforests of the Mananara Nord region exemplify thriving agroforests that offer farmers diversified food and income crops while preserving species richness and tree cover across hillside landscapes. Yet, Mananara’s vanilla and clove agroforests also contain a richness of cultural and historical meaning. As elaborated below, agroforestry fields are places where people cultivate memory, forge ancestral relationships, and produce unique forms of knowledge and practice. In such ways, agroforests shape and are shaped by broader historical, political, epistemological, and cultural dynamics. 3.1   Memory and History In Madagascar, the past is woven into everyday experiences, as individuals articulate individual and collective memories both to remember the past and to comment on the present (Bloch 1977, 2008; Lambek 2003). Given the cultural saliency of the past in Madagascar, cultural anthropologists have long examined the role of history and memory within Malagasy worldviews (Bloch 1977, 1998; Lambek 2003; Cole 2001; Cole and Middleton 2001). In her research among the Southern Betsimisaraka, for example, anthropologist Jennifer Cole connects the practice of cattle sacrifice to the art of memory making, and examines how memories are “simultaneously articulated, transformed, and sustained” (2001: 170). She notes that through the ritual of cattle sacrifice, along with more mundane matters of everyday conversations, people articulate their relationships with the past. Cole proposes a “spatial framework of remembering”, which she terms a “memoryscape”. Memoryscapes represent “an array of schemas through which people remember and the socio-historical forces that draw these schemas into action and sometimes enable them to be formulated in narrative” (2001: 290). The framework of “memoryscape” can be brought to the agroforestry landscapes of Mananara. As with the practice of cattle sacrifice, the practice

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of cultivation similarly offers individuals an active interface with history and memory, as farmers deliberately weave the memories of the past into the material fabrics of their local agroforestry landscapes (Osterhoudt 2017). Often, these memories are highly personal. Individuals may commemorate an important life event, such as marriage or the birth of a child, by planting a tree within their agroforests. Once while attending a particularly lively Easter party on the beach, I noticed a group of friends sneak away from the gathering and return together an hour later, laughing. When I asked what they were doing, they told me that the party was so good they decided to plant a coconut tree in one of their vanilla gardens as a souvenir. While walking with farmers through their fields, they will often point to such trees, which serve as an impetus for storytelling. Such trees mark the passage of time, as explained to me one afternoon by Katarine as we walked together through her agroforestry fields: Here is an orange tree I planted when my first child was born—just a seedling, when she was a baby. And now look [taking an orange from a branch]—look how old it is now… how old we are now!

In addition to marking individual memories, agroforestry fields also reflect larger social and political trajectories of history, including times of struggle and hardship (Osterhoudt 2016). One farmer showed me a wild plant growing near a stream next to his field, noting that these were the plants people were forced to eat after a severe cyclone hit the community in the 1960s. In another village, people showed me where vines of wild rubber grew and recalled times when they were forced to collect these vines without pay under French colonialism. In such ways, navigating agroforestry landscapes becomes a way to remember and articulate shared histories. As Cole notes, the cultural work of remembering is a highly political undertaking. As such, she encourages an examination of who remembers what and why, as well as which interpretations of the past tend to prevail. In the case of cattle sacrifice among the Southern Betsimisaraka, Cole argues that Malagasy individuals deliberately break down certain aspects of the colonial versions of history, reconstituting them to better align with Malagasy worldviews. In a parallel way, the work of cultivating memory in agroforests connects with dynamics of power across both local and extra-­ local scales. For example, families may tell stories about their lineage’s connection to a parcel of land as a way of staking ownership claims to

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property. As discussed below, the iterative connections between land, memory, history, and power become especially relevant within the context of ancestral relationships. 3.2   Ancestral Relationships and Agroforests As anthropologist Michael Lambek notes, in Madagascar “of all the divisions of society, that between the living and the dead is primary” (2003: 122). For many in Madagascar, ancestors exercise considerable influence over the lives of the living. People may consider ancestral views in making both the small and large decisions that shape their lives, including which foods to eat, which fields to plant, and whether or not to embark on new agrarian enterprises. Much like the living, ancestors are unpredictable agents, with the capacity for both anger and compassion (Lambek and Solway 2001). Interactions with ancestors thus provoke the paired emotions of aspiration and fear (Cole and Middleton 2001). Ancestral relationships also bring power and prestige, as the individuals with the knowledge and skill to mediate between the realms of the living and the deceased exercise considerable influence within communities (Cole 2001; Lambek 2003; Sodikoff 2012). The agroforestry landscapes of Mananara represent one site where people consider and negotiate broader ancestral relationships.7 First, many lineages have their familial burial grounds located within the rocky outcroppings scattered throughout agroforestry fields. These burial grounds are the sites of ancestral ceremonies, such as “turning of the bones” rituals and ceremonial rites to give thanks to the ancestors for good fortune (Fig.  3). Locating ceremonies in agroforestry landscapes infuses these spaces with the power and presence of ancestors, as they interface between worldly and otherworldly realms. Further, it is often the income gained from agroforestry products such as cloves and vanilla that families use to host these lavish and quite expensive events. A boom in clove or vanilla prices will bring a subsequent boom in ancestral celebrations, further linking agriculture and ancestors. In one village outside of Mananara, a farmer noted this connection:

7  Swidden rice farming connects to ancestral relationships, as the practices of planting, harvesting, and consuming hillside swidden rice is often accompanied by ancestral offerings and ceremonies (Sodikoff 2012).

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Fig. 3  Bundles of Ravenala leaves (Ravenala madagascariensis) for use in ancestral ceremonies, Mananara Nord, Madagascar Now vanilla prices are so high, and now every weekend there is a sabaraha [ancestral ceremony]—or two or even more. The ancestors will be satisfied (maha'afaka fô), they are getting attention now.

In addition to the more spectacular realms of ceremony, agroforestry landscapes offer more mundane reinforcements of ancestral relationships.

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For example, many agroforestry sites are marked with fady––rules for correct behaviours, analogous to taboo (Osterhoudt 2018). Agricultural fady are restrictive in nature, prohibiting farmers from cultivating certain varieties of crops, or farming on certain days, or cultivating crops in particular areas. Such fady are passed down by the ancestors and may apply across an entire community, or may be particular to an individual family or even one specific plot of land (Lambek 1992; Osterhoudt 2018). Navigating spaces of fady in agroforestry fields illustrates how agrarian spaces become places where the ancestral past shapes the everyday experiences of the present (Lambek 1992; Walsh 2002). Finally, as with the production of memory and history more generally, interactions with the ancestors connect to structures of power and authority. Individuals with the knowledge and skill to mediate interactions with the ancestors enjoy considerable prestige, and may be called upon to mediate land disputes or other conflicts. This power structure tends to favour the more established lineages within villages, as these families often have comparably powerful tangalamena––the influential guardians of family burial sites who are often deferred to in instances of conflict over land access and ownership. In such ways, relationships of ancestral power “provide cognitive frameworks for negotiating control over the use and management of the environment” (Gezon 1999: 58). 3.3   Knowledge and Identity In the Mananara region, people often describe themselves as vanilla, clove, and coffee farmers. Individuals are proud of this identity, in part because being someone who cultivates vanilla and cloves usually denotes someone who owns their own land, who possesses the knowledge to successfully cultivate these crops, and who has access to the income and resources that such agrarian activities bring. To be a clove and vanilla farmer is therefore a mark of social distinction. Further, in Mananara Nord, one’s identity connects not only to being a vanilla and clove farmer, but to being a good vanilla and clove farmer. Within agrarian communities, people closely monitor and discuss amongst themselves the agrarian skills of their neighbours. While walking along the paths leading through agroforestry fields, people will note whose vanilla looks healthy, whose clove trees are developing buds, and who is practising which techniques to cultivate rice. People will evaluate the overall condition of one’s fields, which should be clear enough to allow one to work easily among vanilla vines, but dense

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enough to provide adequate shade. The most respected farmers are known for having a variety of tree species in their fields, especially fruit trees including litchis, mangos, jackfruits, and citrus varieties. As tree-based systems, vanilla and clove agroforests take a long time to mature and the skills and knowledge required to tend to them require time to master. Thus, being a skilled farmer with healthy agroforests is a gradual process that develops as one accumulates knowledge. During this process, the state of one’s agroforests often becomes connected to the state of one’s own moral being: young farmers who work hard and invest in their fields are looked on favourably as good Betsimisaraka individuals, while elder farmers with thriving agroforestry fields serve as moral examples of wise behaviour. In contrast, people who neglect their fields, or fail to cultivate vanilla or cloves on their land, are criticised for wasting resources and failing their family.8 This gradual process of identity-making through agroforestry practice–– whether through  planting rice or vanilla cultivation––requires distinct forms of knowledge. For agroforests, people primarily accumulate knowledge through hands-on practice, as opposed to formal schooling. This knowledge is primarily non-linguistic in nature; although an older farmer may describe to a younger farmer the techniques of pollinating vanilla flowers or harvesting rice, it is only by doing these tasks repeatedly that knowledge is truly mastered. This type of knowledge is often disseminated through hands-on apprenticeships, in which “language appears to play a surprisingly small role” in knowledge transfer (Bloch 1998: 7). This knowledge emphasises everyday forms of “know-how” developed through trial and error––what James Scott refers to as “metis” knowledge (Scott 1998; see also Pollini 2009). Bloch situates this epistemological form within a “mental model” of cognition that is “partly linguistic” but “also integrates visual imagery, other sensory cognition, the cognitive aspects of learned practices, evaluations, memories of sensations, and memories of typical examples” (1998: 25). The agroforestry landscapes of Mananara Nord overflow with up-close, sensory, and metis knowledge. Working in agroforests, farmers gather 8  The connections between identity and practice is similar to the Vezo fisher communities of Madagascar, where “being Vezo” is “primarily a way of acting, learned through practice, and is not only dependent on where one was born or where one’s ancestors were from” (Astuti 1995: 466). Bloch’s work with the Zafimaniry similarly ties identity with knowledge and practice, as he notes how the Zafimaniry could “become” Betsileo by learning to cultivate wet rice (Bloch 1995).

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knowledge through a variety of mediums including everyday practice, trial and error experimentation, sensory memory, and concrete examples. People learn to recognise the texture of green vanilla beans that are ready to be harvested, to spot pests that burrow into the bark of clove trees, and to expertly navigate the slippery clay paths that wind through the hillsides. Being a successful farmer involves navigating overlapping, sophisticated forms of knowledge. As discussed below, farmers creatively adjust and re-­ articulate their agricultural knowledge within shifting environmental, economic, and social contexts.

4  Flexible Landscapes: Change and Continuity Malagasy smallholders perceive agroforests through a multifaceted lens. For the Northern Betsimisaraka of the Mananara Nord region, agroforestry landscapes represent more than a collection of diverse plant species, or an opportunity for economic advancement––they are also places that foster the cultivation of identity, knowledge, belief, and practice. For example, one vanilla farmer explained to me one afternoon why he enjoys cultivating vanilla in his agroforests. The income that vanilla brings to his household is certainly one important reason. Yet, he also mentioned other considerations: the fact that vanilla fields are peaceful places to work, the opportunity vanilla offers to learn a real skill, and the way that looking at his fields reminds him of when he was young, and just beginning his own family. In a parallel way, a clove tree standing in an agroforestry field may hold many meanings for the tree’s owner: an income source for the family, a way to commemorate a life event, and a legacy to pass on to children and grandchildren. The multiple dimensions of agroforestry landscapes influence how farmers manage their forests and fields. When deciding which trees to clear, for example, farmers may pause before removing a tree they planted to denote an important event. Elder farmers recall their experience with boom and bust market cycles, and council younger farmers to continue to care for vanilla vines and clove trees in times of market downturns (Osterhoudt 2017). People are mindful of previous periods of food insecurity, and maintain a commitment to cultivating food crops, even if they could earn a relatively higher income by converting all land into cash crop production (Laney and Turner 2015). Overall, the multilayered perceptions of agroforests support a considered approach to agrarian change, whereby farmers balance decisions within multifaceted calculations of

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value and risk. While economic considerations are undoubtedly important to these decisions, they are not the only factor that people take into account when managing their resources. The cultural meanings and memories people ascribe to agroforestry landscapes are dynamic and interactive. Farmers look towards their fields to articulate and re-articulate shifting social, political, and personal views (Gezon and Freed 1999; Golden and Comaroff 2015; Tengö and von Heland 2011). The anecdote of the group of friends planting a coconut tree to remember a festive Easter picnic is one example of such dynamism: the celebration was Easter, a festival imported from Christianity, and the group planted a coconut tree, a non-native species. In another example, a family from a village outside of Mananara hosted a large ancestral ceremony in their vanilla fields to thank the ancestors after their son secured a job as a surgeon in a top hospital in the capital city. Farmers may plant trees with an eye towards honouring the past, but also to participate in carbon sequestration programmes advocated by NGOs. In such ways, agroforests are vibrant landscapes that incorporate new crops, meanings, and values over time, while maintaining land in tree-based systems. With their combination of flexibility and endurance, the agroforests of Mananara Nord reflect Maurice Bloch’s discussion of the transactional and transcendent facets of Malagasy cultural systems (1977, 2008). Bloch develops this framework to consider one of the enduring questions of the social sciences: how can one account for both social structures and for the changes within these “super-structures” over time? Bloch summarises this theoretical problem by noting that in many classical accounts of social structure and change, “either the infrastructure was not truly independent, since it could only be apprehended in the terms of the superstructure, or [it] was irrelevant because it was formulated in a way that actors could not apprehend” (1977: 287). As a way past this tension, Bloch regards cultural structure and agency as consisting of two distinct but complementary realms that together form “certain moments in a long conversation” (1977: 287). Bloch identifies these two realms as the transactional (comprised of individuals and their everyday actions) and the transcendent (comprised of the essentialised roles and responsibilities of the group). The transcendent represents a social “process of continual manipulation, assertions and defeats” (2008: 2057). The boundary between these two realms is permeable, though the two spheres do not often appear side by side. Together, they offer individuals a combination of everyday flexibility within an overarching infrastructure, which may be creatively re-imaged and re-formulated.

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The agroforestry landscapes of the Mananara region contain both transactional and transcendent elements, and as such provide an example of Bloch’s social infrastructure. Like the long conversations of social transcendence, agroforestry fields represent a continuous period of gradual intervention, as generations of the same family add their own adjustments to the same agroforestry parcel. Further, as with the knowledge of transactional realms, the knowledge relevant for agroforests is largely practical in nature, as people learn the agrarian tasks of growing food and caring for land. Agroforestry spaces periodically collapse the boundary between the transactional and the transcendent, as in the case of ancestral ceremonies. At such events, individuals are situated within their agroforests, surrounded by markers of day-to-day agrarian work, even as they participate in cultural rituals. In these moments, the transcendental past is brought to bear on the transactional present (Bloch 1998, 2008). Agroforests can be understood as coupled material and social infrastructure that remains overall consistent in form, though constantly shifting in particular details. While the specific crops cultivated within Mananara’s agroforests have changed over time, whether cacao, black pepper, or vanilla, what remains constant is that smallholder farmers turn towards managed forests to produce some crop to meet some market. Likewise, while the particular individual or collective meanings connected with agroforests may shift––to include Christian frameworks or environmental sensibilities, for example––the role of agroforests in mediating social understandings remains constant. Agroforest landscapes both draw from tradition and shape the possibilities for the future, as people turn towards their fields to imagine and articulate the meaningful relationships that shape their lives.

5   Agroforests: Some Perspectives from Conservation and Development The agroforestry landscapes of Mananara Nord are situated within broader relationships of history, identity, power, and knowledge. These dimensions shape how individuals perceive what constitutes a “good” agroforest: a landscape that simultaneously fosters economic gain, environmental health, historical significance, and cultural meaning. In a parallel way, conservation and development institutions are also embedded in particular political, cultural, and epistemological frameworks (Blaikie 2016; Corson 2016; Ferguson 1990; Li 2007). Although there is

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great diversity between the missions and histories of various conservation and development groups, they often share certain characteristics. First, many conservation organisations draw from perceptions of nature and wilderness that prioritise spaces removed from visible human influence (Cronon 1996; Neumann 2002; Terborgh 2004; West et al. 2006; Wilson 2016). Environmental organisations have long advocated for the expansion of parks and protected areas, which aim to minimise human interactions with “natural” spaces. These approaches frequently lead to conflicts with the people living near (or within) spaces designated as conservation areas (Corson 2016; Goldman 2003; Hanson 2007, 2012; Keller 2008, 2015; Kull 2002; Sodikoff 2012; West et al. 2006). In many ways, the increasing interest that environmental programmes have in promoting agroforestry programmes seems a productive way out of this long-standing conflict, as agroforests are by definition landscapes shaped by human work. Yet, despite encouraging areas of overlap, many agroforestry programmes struggle to achieve their objectives when partnering with farmers in the Global South (Mercer 2004; Pollini 2009; Rocheleau 1989). These struggles can partly be attributed to the differences in how agroforestry landscapes are perceived by environmental and development groups, compared to how they are generally perceived by smallholder farmers. What makes a “good” agroforest in the eyes of a conservation or development organisation often does not align with how smallholders describe a “good” agroforest. Agroforestry extension programmes tend to focus on the economic and biophysical aspects of agroforests: the number of seedlings planted, for example, or the amount of income generated from a given species (Osterhoudt 2012, 2017). These characteristics are amenable to scientific research, quantification, and monitoring, allowing groups to track and report their results (Hanson 2007; Muehlmann 2012). Additionally, agroforestry interventions tend to support a modernist aesthetic marked by neat rows, straight lines, and orderly landscapes (Scott 1998). Pollini, writing of the frameworks often adopted by agroforestry programmes, describes how such aesthetic characteristics are exemplified by the promotion of alley cropping and hedgerows as favoured agrarian practices of development groups, which promote geometric and tidy landscapes (2009).9 The conservation and development perceptions of “good” 9  Alley cropping is the technique of planting alternating rows of trees and companion crops at equally spaced intervals. Hedgerows are rows of wild shrubs and trees that border a field.

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agroforests as spaces that are ordered, monitored, and efficient overlook the messier, more intangible aspects of agroforests that Malagasy smallholders also prioritise. An example of how these different perceptions come into tension is illustrated by one agricultural extension programme working in the Mananara Nord region, that I will call Hazo. As part of an agroforestry initiative, extension agents from Hazo worked with smallholder vanilla farmers to improve their production techniques (Osterhoudt 2012). One of their major efforts was to encourage farmers to use coffee bushes as vanilla tutor trees (trees that support vanilla vines as they grow). Extension agents pointed to the fact that this practice would increase income generated from agroforestry parcels, as both coffee and vanilla are market crops. The group promoted a Malagasy slogan, written on t-shirts and pamphlets, that translated as “vanilla growing over coffee: money growing over money”. In the Mananara Nord region, many vanilla farmers already use coffee bushes for some of their tutor trees. They also, however, use a wide array of other tree species. Tree inventories I conducted with seven vanilla farmers in their agroforests contained a total of 75 different species used as tutor trees. Thirty-three of these species, or 44 per cent, were native or endemic to Madagascar. In addition to the impressive degree of biodiversity this represents, farmers noted many other uses for their tutor trees beyond supporting vanilla vines. These uses include home construction, fence construction, canoe construction, medicine for people and livestock, ceremonial purposes, providing food and fruits, providing fibres for weaving and ropes, natural dyes, firewood, charcoal, raising honeybees, and for ornamental purposes. Farmers also noted the ecological roles that tutor trees played, including providing shade, fixing nitrogen in soils, and providing food and habitat for various bird and lemur species. Thus, as development groups focus on promoting landscapes that use only coffee bushes as tutor trees, they undermined the existing biological and cultural diversity of local agroforests. In reducing the value of tutor trees to an economic measure, other important forms of value and meaning became obscured and erased.

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6   Pathways Forward: Cultivating Strength-Based Perceptions of Agroforestry Landscapes Agroforests have great potential to foster landscapes that are ecologically diverse, economically viable, and culturally meaningful. Yet, there are often divides between how Malagasy smallholders and how conservation and development programmes perceive a “good” agroforest. As a result, many agroforestry programmes fail to achieve their objectives over the long term. One way forward to reconcile such divides is to centre local perceptions of agroforestry landscapes in environmental programmes. This shift, in turn, will support a more strength-based approach to working with agroforests. One common consequence of environmental groups’ laudable mission of assisting groups is that they adopt narratives of crisis to frame their work: the glacier that is rapidly melting, the species on the brink of extinction, or the forest that is being destroyed by fire. While these challenges are indeed important to address, this culture of urgency supports a problem-based perception of human-environment relationships. In response, organisations look to identify what is not working in a particular place or ecosystem. They focus on what is missing––whether they perceive this missing component to be a new miracle species, a crucial form of technical knowledge, or an underutilised economic market. This stance, in turn, leads to interventionist approaches, where outside groups try to “fix” particular aspects of local landscapes, often with disappointing results. Yet, by focusing on what is missing in communities, groups may fail to appreciate what is already there. They may overlook existing social, environmental, and cultural practices that support sustainable resource management, diversified systems of knowledge production, and civic forms of engagement (Chowdhury 1999; Goldman 2003; Pollini 2009). Shifting the focus from community problems towards community strengths is one strategy to counteract such biases. A strength-based focus often requires long-term, qualitative, ethnographic research (Feeley-­ Harnik 1995; Gezon and Freed 1999; Scales 2014). Before designing agroforestry projects, organisations could ask members of the community questions such as: What are farmers skilled at growing? What do they enjoy cultivating, cooking, and eating? What are the local arrangements for labour and land tenure? What environmental risks do farmers commonly face and how do they manage them? How is information learned

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and shared? What do residents aspire to, both with regard to their land, and also with regard to their broader life goals? In gathering this information, it is necessary to highlight the proactive agency of farmers, while also acknowledging that individuals must work within a range of political, economic, and environmental constraints. Within such strength-based paradigms, people are not a problem to be solved, but rather potential collaborators who bring a wealth of finely tuned environmental and cultural knowledge to agroforestry programmes (Dove 1999; Goldman 2003; Pollini 2009). Agroforestry fields are not only a collection of biophysical processes or quantifiable market relationships, but are dynamic spaces of cultural meaning and collaboration. Overall, by centring local perceptions of what makes a good agroforestry landscape––and why––sustainable development programmes can take a strength-based approach to landscapes, and to the communities that tend to them.

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Jose, Shibu. 2012. Agroforestry for Conserving and Enhancing Biodiversity. Agroforestry Systems 85: 1–8. Keller, Eva. 2008. The Banana Plant and the Moon: Conservation and the Malagasy Ethos of Life in Masoala, Madagascar. American Ethnologist 35 (4): 650–664. ———. 2015. Beyond the Lens of Conservation: Malagasy and Swiss Imaginations of One Another. Vol. 20. Berghahn Books. Kull, Christian A. 2002. Madagascar Aflame: Landscape Burning as a Peasant Protest, Resistance, or a Resource Management Tool? Political Geography 21 (7): 927. Lambek, Michael. 1992. Taboo as Cultural Practice among Malagasy Speakers. Man 1992: 245–266. Lambek, Micheal. 2003. The Weight of the Past: Living with History in Mahajanga, Madagascar. New York: Palgrave Macmillan Press. Lambek, Michael, and Jacqueline S.  Solway. 2001. Just Anger: Scenarios of Indignation in Botswana and Madagascar. Ethnos 66 (1): 49–72. Laney, Rheyna, and B.L.  Turner. 2015. The Persistence of Self-provisioning among Smallholder Farmers in Northeast Madagascar. Human Ecology 43 (6): 811–826. Li, Tania Murray. 2007. The Will to Improve: Governmentality, Development, and the Practice of Politics. Durham: Duke University Press. ———. 2014. Land’s End: Capitalist Relations on an Indigenous Frontier. Durham: Duke University Press. Lipper, Leslie, Philip Thornton, Bruce M. Campbell, Tobias Baedeker, Ademola Braimoh, Martin Bwalya, Patrick Caron, et al. 2014. Climate-smart Agriculture for Food Security. Nature Climate Change 4 (12): 1068. Mercer, D. Evan. 2004. Adoption of Agroforestry Innovations in the Tropics: A Review. Agroforestry Systems 61 (1–3): 311–328. Michon, Geneviève, and H. De Foresta. 1995. The Indonesian Agro-forest Model. In Conserving Biodiversity Outside Protected Areas: The Role of Traditional Ecosystems, ed. Patricia Halladay and D.A. Gilmour, 90–106. Gland: IUCN-the World Conservation Union. Muehlmann, Shaylih. 2012. Rhizomes and Other Uncountables: The Malaise of Enumeration in Mexico’s Colorado River Delta. American Ethnologist 39 (2): 339–353. Nash, Roderick. 2014. Wilderness and the American Mind. New Haven: Yale University Press. Neumann, Roderick P. 2002. Imposing Wilderness: Struggles Over Livelihood and Nature Preservation in Africa. Vol. 4. Berkeley: University of California Press. Osterhoudt, Sarah. 2012. Sense and Sensibilities: Negotiating Meanings within Agriculture in Northeastern Madagascar. Ethnology 49 (4): 283–301.

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———. 2016. Written with Seed: The Political Ecology of Memory in Madagascar. Journal of Political Ecology 23: 263–278. ———. 2017. Vanilla Landscapes: Meaning, Memory and the Cultivation of Place in Madagascar. New York: New York Botanical Garden Press. ———. 2018. Community Conservation and the (mis)appropriation of Taboo. Development and Change 49 (5): 1248–1267. Pearson, Mike Parker. 1997. Close Encounters of the Worst Kind: Malagasy Resistance and Colonial Disasters in Southern Madagascar. World Archaeology 28 (3): 393–417. Pollini, Jacques. 2009. Agroforestry and the Search for Alternatives to Slash-andburn Cultivation: From Technological Optimism to a Political Economy of Deforestation. Agriculture, Ecosystems & Environment 133 (1–2): 48–60. ———. 2023. Perceptions and Representations of Deforestation in Madagascar: From Cognitive Dissonances to Convergences. In Perceptions and Representations of the Malagasy Environment Across Cultures, ed. Gwyn Campbell, Frank Muttenzer, and Jacques Pollini. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan. Rabetaliana, H. 1989. La Réserve de la Biospehère de Mananara Nord: Riz et forets ou riz ou forets (Etude des systems de production et des premieères actions du projet Rèserve de la Biosphère). ESAT: Ecole Supérieure d’Agronomie Tropicale, ENGREF Ecole Nationale du Génie Rural et des Eaux et Forets. UNESCO, le 26 Octobre 1989. Rajeriarison, C. n.d. Typologie des Savoka et etude dynamique en une d’un suivi ecologique. dans la Reserve de la Biosphere de Mananara Nord. Archival file at Association Nationale Pour la Gestion des aires Protegees (ANGAP), Mananara-­ Nord, Madagascar. Richard, Alison F., and Joelisoa Ratsirarson. 2013. Partnership in Practice: Making Conservation Work at Bezà Mahafaly, Southwest Madagascar. Madagascar Conservation & Development 8 (1): 12–20. Rocheleau, Diane E. 1989. Agroforestry as Popular Science: A Land User Perspective for Research and Design in Rural Landscapes. Paper Presented to the Annual Meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), San Francisco, CA. Scales, Ian R. 2014. The Future of Conservation and Development in Madagascar: Time for a New Paradigm? Madagascar Conservation & Development 9 (1): 5–12. Scott, James C. 1998. Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed. New Haven: Yale University Press. Sodikoff, Genese M. 2004. Land and Languor: Ethical Imaginations of Work and Forest in Northeast Madagascar. History & Anthropology 15 (4): 367–398. ———. 2012. Forest and Labor in Madagascar: From Colonial Concession to Global Biosphere. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

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Styger, E., J.E.M.  Rakotoarimanana, R.  Rabevohitra, and E.C.M.  Fernandes. 1999. Indigenous Fruit Trees of Madagascar: Potential Components of Agroforestry Systems to Improve Human Nutrition and Restore Biological Diversity. Agroforestry Systems 46 (3): 289–310. Tengö, Maria, and Jacob von Heland. 2011. Adaptive Capacity of Local Indigenous Institutions: The Case of the Taboo Forests of Southern Madagascar. In Adapting Institutions: Governance, Complexity and Social-Ecological Resilience, ed. Emily Boyd and Carl Folke. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Terborgh, John. 2004. Requiem for Nature. Island Press. Walsh, Andrew. 2002. Responsibility, Taboos and ‘the Freedom to Do Otherwise’ in Ankarana, Northern Madagascar. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 8 (3): 451–468. ———. 2005. The Obvious Aspects of Ecological Underprivilege in Ankarana, Northern Madagascar. American Anthropologist 107 (4): 654–665. West, Paige. 2006. Conservation is Our Government Now: The Politics of Ecology in Papua New Guinea. Durham: Duke University Press. West, Paige, James Igoe, and Dan Brockington. 2006. Parks and Peoples: The Social Impact of Protected Areas. Annual Review of Anthropology 35: 251–277. Wexler, Alexandra. 2017. Your Passion for Fancy Vanilla Ice Cream Is Creating World-Wide Havoc. The Wall Street Journal, December 14. https://www.wsj. com/articles/your-passion-for-fancy-vanilla-ice-cream-is-creating-world-widehavoc-1513264731 Wilson, Edward O. 2016. Half-earth: Our Planet’s Fight for Life. New York: WW Norton & Company.

Sustainabilities, Care and Ecotourism Among the Tsimihety in Rural Northeastern Madagascar Jenni Mölkänen

1   Introduction In 1998, the Malagasy government established the 55,500 ha (214 miles2) Marojejy1 National Park in northeast Madagascar, in partnership with transnational bodies such as the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) and World Bank (WB). These Western organizations have promoted the narrative that Malagasy people have been chiefly responsible for the degradation and destruction of the island’s forests (Jarosz 1993; Keller 2015). It was thus essential to ban local people from exploiting the natural resources in the park, which would secure some of Madagascar’s exceptional but highly 1

 Maro= many; jejy= spirit, rain or rock.

J. Mölkänen (*) University of Helsinki, Helsinki, Finland e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 F. Muttenzer et al. (eds.), Perceptions and Representations of the Malagasy Environment Across Cultures, Palgrave Series in Indian Ocean World Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-23836-9_3

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endangered biodiversity through initiatives that combine environmental conservation with profit-making enterprises such as ecotourism. However, this chapter reveals that people who ethnically identify as Tsimihety, living in the vicinity of the Marojejy National Park, far from being ignorant of their environment, care for and nurture the flora and fauna around them. My research into Tsimihety practices of exchange and caring for (mikarakara) humans, plants and animalsas well as spirits, is based on 13 months of ethnographic fieldwork I conducted from January to April2 2011 and again between September 2012 and August 2013. During these periods I lived in a village near the Marojejy National Park visitor’s centre and entrance, with Willy and Angelina (these, like other names mentioned here, are pseudonyms), a married couple in their thirties, and their two daughters. They cultivated rice and vanilla, and Willy worked also as an ecotourism guide. My research material comprises 40 semi-structured interviews3 on a wide range of issues, including village and family histories, conservation practices, observations of villagers’ daily life, cultivation methods, seasonal agricultural cycles, rituals, social relations, and ecotourism. Further, I participated in the activities of four local villages. These included agricultural work, from the planting to the harvesting of rice and vanilla, and rituals ranging from funerals, circumcision, Christmas, New Year and Independence Day celebrations to weddings. I was thus able to observe villagers’ social and work relations and activities, their conversations, and movements. In collaboration with Mieja Razafindrakoto, an MA student based at the ESSA-Forêts institute who was studying the socio-economic influences of ecotourism, I conducted a further 40 structured interviews with tourists visiting the park. Finally, I also visited archives in Antananarivo4 to research population movements and the historical use of natural resources. I conclude that the concept of “sustainability” has to take into account socially meaningful Malagasy relations and practices characterized by exchange and nurture. 2  This was a preparatory fieldwork. During this time, I collaborated with the ESSA-Forêt institute at the University of Antananarivo, studied the Malagasy language, and visited the SAVA (Sambava-Antalaha-Vohemar-Andapa) region in order to prepare for a second period of more extensive fieldwork. 3  I conducted the interviews in the very beginning of my stay (September–October) in order to get a general sense of the people and the place and to get to know the people in the villages. 4  National Archives and IRD (Institute de Recherche pour le Développement).

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2  The Tsimihety The Tsimihety are an ethnic group living in the central northern areas of Madagascar. Their economy is based on hill rice and irrigated riziculture combined with the cultivation of cash crops, notably vanilla, and to a lesser extent coffee. They also practise gardening, fishing, hunting, and gathering plants, leaves, fruits, honey and firewood. According to historical records and traditions, the Tsimihety migrated to their current location in the Lokoho River valley at the turn of the twentieth century (Laney 1999; Molet 1959). They did so in order to escape the expanding military power of the Merina kingdom which in the nineteenth century subjugated one-­ third of the island (Larson 2000), and the French who colonized the island in 1896. According to Wilson (1992: 162–4), a Tsimihety ethnic consciousness developed due to mounting feelings of deprivation and frustration caused primarily by Merina and French taxation and forced labour policies, and secondarily by the demands of the Sakalava monarchy of Western Madagascar for ritual work and loyalty (see Lambek 2002: 78–84). Memories of the colonial era linger. For example, one day while I was walking to see a special tree located at a bend in a road close to Marojejy National Park, a Tsimihety park guide informed me that long ago the Tsimihety people split from the neighbouring Betsimisaraka population on the east coast, because they refused to submit to the French demand that they collect rubber (Danthu et  al. 2016), and the Sakalava court’s demand that they let their hair grow, as cutting it was contrary to royal Sakalava mourning practices (Wilson 1992: 17–24). The story highlights the independent spirit of the Tsimihety. Nevertheless, the Tsimihety also developed collaborative relationships with these groups at different times and under different circumstances. For example, they responded to demand for seasonal labour on European and Créole-run plantations first under Merina authority and subsequently under the French (Laney 2002: 705). However, once the Tsimihety learned the cultivation methods and technologies, they started to independently cultivate cash crops, such as vanilla, on their land. In this chapter, I examine the ways how Tsimihety practices of caring for (mikarakara) vanilla plants and foreign tourists reflect sustainable development practices within the cultural systems of rural people. For them, establishing a nexus of good relations with fellow humans, ancestors, spirits, and fauna and flora, forms the basis of a healthy and prosperous life

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(Mölkänen 2021; for similarities with the Betsimisaraka, see Keller 2008). I single out nurturing practices at two sites: the painstaking, year-long care of vanilla plants and taking care of tourists visiting the national park that highlight the Tsimihety expectations for exchange in their social lives as well as in relation to environmental conservation efforts.

3   Global and Local Sustainabilities The sustainable development paradigm in Madagascar, as elsewhere, followed the 1987 United Nations (UN) Brundtland Commission. Its report defined sustainable development as “development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs”. This has been highlighted as a human-centred definition (Brundtland Commission 2015; Reed 2002). Five years later, the 1992 UN Conference on Environment and Development in Rio de Janeiro, known as the Earth Summit, promoted a “growth-centred” approach to development that set aside previous concerns about equity (Kirsch 2010). Since then, researchers have highlighted the importance of inter-sectoral and inter-regional networks in the search for solutions for environmentally friendly means of producing food, water and energy (Díaz et al. 2019). Marojejy National Park was created during these paradigm and policy shifts of the early 1990s (Kull 2014: 146). As environmental conservation efforts intensified, new governmental agents were needed to implement a proliferation of new projects in the island. In 1998, the WWF, in liaison with Madagascar’s Water and Forest Department, authorized a special state agency called the Association National de Gestion des Aires Protégées (ANGAP), renamed Madagascar National Parks (MNP) in 2007, to replace state forest services in the management of national parks. At the 2003 International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) World Bank Congress in Durban, Marc Ravalomanana, President of Madagascar (2002–9), announced the “Durban Vision”, an initiative to more than triple the area of land in Madagascar under protection.5 In 2013, following the guidelines of the United Nations and the IUCN, as stated in the

5  From 3–10 percent of Madagascar’s area, approximately 17,000 km2 to over 60,000 km2. The Durban Vision was later entitled the “Système d’Aires Protégées de Madagascar” (SAPM) (System of Protected Areas in Madagascar) (Corson 2011).

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2010 Convention on Biological Diversity, Madagascar met the 10 percent requirement of areas under protection (Corson 2014: 193). These donor-state conservation and development projects in Madagascar and elsewhere in the Global South relied heavily on Euro-­ American rationality (Lowe 2006) and top-down management (e.g. Sillitoe 1998). For example, the dominant Euro-American view is that natural spaces are “empty” and can be modified with the application of economizing measures and technologies of governance (Mitchell 2011; Li 2007). The focus on non-human species and natural resources works to extract people from the environment (Scott 1998; also Tsing 2005). This has the effect of creating hierarchies of knowledge and people (Lowe 2006; Sodikoff 2005; Stasch 2014: 203) in which significant human-­ environment relations are ignored (Tsing 2015). In Madagascar’s rural districts, people conceptualize land as constitutive of human kinship since it sustains families down the generations. Subsistence labour, including clearing forests and constructing houses, comprises some of the means by which people establish ancestral land (tanindrazana). Claiming land entails two things: people “mark” their land (Bloch 1995) and they “root” themselves in new land (Keller 2008). By “marking”, the Malagasy create landscapes and sceneries that they aesthetically value and in which they belong. “Rooting” refers to practices, such as clearing forest, cultivating land, having children, and establishing tombs, that create places imagined as tanindrazana. Tanindrazana expands when new places become settled and inhabited by people of the same clan (Keller 2015: 154). In the past, clearing land allowed former slaves to establish relations through the land to recreate ancestries that, as slaves, they had lost (Brown 2004). The Tsimihety consider the creation of ancestral land to be both morally virtuous and essential for their well-being and prosperity (Mölkänen 2021). It is essential to acknowledge these concepts in order to understand the Tsimihety and their life goals. Europeans witnessing the subsistence activities of rural Malagasy, particularly forest clearance to plant rice and other food crops, portrayed these activities as shortsighted and irrational. By the turn of the twentieth century, a narrative about Madagascar’s landscape had emerged that positioned Europeans as necessary environmental stewards.

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4  Creating Marojejy National Park Conservation organizations and agencies operating in Madagascar implicitly supported the Perrier-Humbert hypothesis which states that before humans permanently settled the island, about 4000 years ago, forests covered most of the island, providing undisturbed habitats for its numerous endemic animals and plant species (Kull 2000: 429; Keller 2015: 2; Pollini 2010: 717; Sodikoff 2012: 12). People gradually transformed the forests into grasslands, a process of deforestation for agriculture that continues today. More recently, scholars have challenged this narrative, arguing that Malagasy ecosystems are far more complex than has been conventionally portrayed, and are constantly undergoing change (Kull 2004: 63–72). Moreover, the first concrete evidence of permanent human settlement is in the mid-ninth century CE (Campbell 2016: 16). It is in this context that the impact on forests of population growth and poverty on a regional level needs to be considered (Kull 2000: 432–3; Jarosz 1993; Campbell 2013; Olson 1984: 180). The Perrier-Humbert hypothesis gave incentive to the French colonial state to conserve the extant forests. Indeed, European botanists had helped to establish the first nature reserves in Madagascar in 1927 (Virah-­ Sawmy and Gardner 2014). From 1937 to 1951, the French botanist Jean-Henri Humbert (1887–1967) studied the Marojejy mountain region, describing it as a marvel of nature because of its exceptional biological diversity. His work resulted in Marojejy being declared a reserve in 1952  (Humbert 1927, 1955). Entry into the reserve was nominally restricted to accredited researchers, but in reality people living in its vicinity also freely entered the park (Laney 1999: 47). The effort to make the Marojejy Park economically sustainable involved converting it to a national park in 1998,6 open to paying tourists and other visitors as well as to researchers. At the same time, the WWF initiated a programme to sensitize the local Tsimihety to the influence of climate change and its impact on forests. As an alternative to swidden farming, the programme encouraged them to concentrate on growing vanilla, a plant that they had long cultivated, and irrigated rice,7 and to engage in tourism (Garreau and Manantsara 2003: 1457). 6  Transnational and national conservation efforts have intensified throughout Madagascar during 1990s (see a well-covering description by Kull 2014). 7  The System of Rice Intensification (Le Système de Riziculture Intensive in French) was developed in the early 1980s by Fr. Henri de Laulanié, S.J. who collaborated with the Cornell International Institute for Food, Agriculture and Development (CIIFAD) (SRI-RICE 2015).

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The environmental conservation agencies and their financial backers claimed that the new programmes would both protect nature and reduce poverty. The German Investment Bank, KFW,8 one of the main funders of 8

 Kreditanstalt für Wiederaufbau, “Reconstruction Credit Institute”.

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the Marojejy National Park, stated that “only an intact natural environment will attract tourists, who bring money and job opportunities” (KWF 2011). In this model, humans would be able to harness intact nature for economic growth and development. Yet the park mainly catered to the needs of European and American tourists, suppressing subsistence-based activities and therefore excluding the majority of local Malagasy population from realizing any benefits. Especially in the beginning of the conservation efforts, the local Tsimihety could not understand why they could not use park land for cultivation, while tourists and researchers were permitted to spend days in the forest (Mölkänen 2019: 100–4). The fear of foreign and non-local conservation authorities that Malagasy subsistence practices degrade the ecosystems of parks implies that the Malagasy are strangers to the kinds of nature-affirming practices and perspectives demanded by conservationism. In the following sections, I describe three sites of nurture, vanilla, relations with relatives and ecotourism activities, as a means of counterbalancing this portrayal of Malagasy practices in the history of conservation. The first part examines vanilla cultivation, a process that demands a delicate touch and careful labour.

5  A Short History of Vanilla in Madagascar Vanilla is a lucrative cash crop that development agencies have promoted amongst poor rural Malagasy. Although vanilla is not endemic to Madagascar, the country today produces from 50–80 percent of the world’s vanilla. Due to its favourable environment, the SAVA (Sambava-­ Antalaha-­Andapa-Vohemar) region is responsible for over 80 percent of the island’s vanilla production and is home to 87.5 percent (70.000) of its planters (Packer 2008). The chief variety grown is Vanilla planifolia, a climbing orchid (Lubinsky et al. 2008). Vanilla was probably first introduced from Réunion to the Malagasy east coast in 1825 by Jean Joseph Arnoux (d. 1829) and in 1840 by Napoléon de Lastelle (1802–1856) (Campbell 2005: 99–100, 337), but only after the French conquest, when Creole settlers from Réunion established plantations in the island, did the crop flourish (Laney 1999). The French colonial regime (1896–1960), which sought to exercise strict control over the island’s agricultural and trade policies, encouraged vanilla cultivation in the Antalaha region, and insisted that all exports be sent to France to be marketed or re-exported to other countries. Since vanilla was

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a highly valuable crop, French colonial officials controlled its production through a license system. They initially issued licenses only to French nationals and a few prominent Malagasy under the pretext that small farmers did not have the necessary skills and, if permitted to cultivate vanilla, would produce a poor quality spice that would damage the export market. They burned the fields of those who illicitly tried to cultivate vanilla, and conscripted labour from the south of the island to work on large vanilla plantations on the humid eastern coast established by Reunionnaise or Creole entrepreneurs. (Osterhoudt 2016: 269.) These plantation workers comprised mainly young people, in some cases entire households. In their “search for money” (mitady vola) many of these workers were by the 1920s, despite official French efforts to stop them, clearing and cultivating unsupervised forested areas to cultivate valuable cash crops such as vanilla (Laney 1999: 1; Cole 2001: 43–5; Brown 2004; Keller 2008). Likewise, Malagasy farmers from the east coast also started to grow vanilla transforming the valleys of the Lokoho River into an important corner of the “vanilla triangle”.9 Indeed, during the first decades of the twentieth century, the northeast had become the most prominent vanilla-producing regions in the world (Althabe and Balandier 1969). Vanilla became a status symbol for the Malagasy of the region, and those who did not cultivate were dishonoured (Molet 1959: 13). Through vanilla cultivation the Tsimihety “marked” their land, engaged in lucrative exchange and were able to create new social relations. From the Tsimihety perspective, “nurturing” was intrinsic to all these processes. Vanilla requires intensive care in order to produce fruit, all phases of associated work, from planting to preparation and selling, being undertaken manually by local cultivators. Papa ny Georges, a major vanilla producer in the region with an annual output of 500 kg is explained that: The vanilla stem should be planted during the rainy season (January-March) because then it takes root (mamaka) and grows (mitombo) well. It takes three years for a new stem to sprout and then fruit. Vanilla fruit develops from January to May. In nurturing (mikarakara) the vanilla plant, it is good to clear the field of smaller vegetation during the rainy season, and to take care of the stems by, for example, cutting the apex and burying it in the soil next to the roots.

9

 Vanilla triangle consists of Sambava, Andapa and Antalaha.

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“Why does it have to be cut?” I asked, as I watched Papa ny Georges tend to his vines. He took a moment to inspect a plant carefully, before gently cutting a vine that had grown too high, and placing others on branches that directed the stem back towards the ground. “If a stem is not cut”, he answered, “it will grow but not produce fruit”. Nurturing vanilla requires constant all-year-round labour. Papa ny Georges commented: From June to the end of August is the season for harvesting and drying vanilla. During the harvest, each pod is picked manually. A cupped handle (taho) is used to collect the pod; otherwise the sap (rano) inside will escape. Retaining the sap is important for the producer because it increases the weight of the pod. When harvesting, one has to constantly estimate how long to keep the pods on the plant because, once harvested, they start to lose their weight. Keeping vanilla moist benefits cultivators because it makes vanilla heavier and increases the price.

Once harvested, the vanilla pods are taken indoors and enclosed in a cloth (lamba) chiefly to protect the skin of the pods and ensure that they retain their moisture, as well as to hide them from potential thieves. Vanilla is so valuable that from May to June, just prior to harvesting, cultivators sleep in their fields to guard their crop. Before being marketed, the pods are “killed” (plunged into hot water in order to stop further growth), “sweated” (placed in large boxes stuffed with wool where, thanks to the heat, an enzymatic process takes place in which the bean “sweats”), sorted and cleaned. The entire process, from planting to marketing, involves great care, forging an intimate bond between the Tsimihety cultivators and the plant that highlights their labour, connection to land and social relations. Vanilla cultivators expect a return on their investment. Village negotiators representing ordinary Tsimihety cultivators with no capital resources (tsy manambola) who worked hard (miasa fatratra) to produce vanilla, used this argument when negotiating the market price of vanilla.10 Their “nurture” was rewarded by higher market prices. Between 2013 and 10  From 1993 onwards, the vanilla market in Madagascar has been gradually liberated by easing the licensing system and reducing taxes on vanilla exports. Today, the state’s role has been making sanitary and quality inspections and setting the date and place of vanilla marketing every year. Observations have reported of increased violence (Cadot et al. 2008: 400–3; Osterhoudt 2020: 250).

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2017 the price per kilogram of dried vanilla rose from $20 to over $600, before falling to $515 in 2018 (Pilling 2018). A successful vanilla harvest also brought the cultivator prestige and fame. As a young and newly successful vanilla farmer stated: “I have now decided to plant a lot of vanilla. When I produce good vanilla harvests, all the buyers come to me.” He was very aware that vanilla  buyers would compete for his quality harvests to produce which, however, he had to “nurture” his vanilla crop.

6  Exchange Relations in Ecotourism Since 1998, people living in villages near the Marojejy National Park entrance have been recruited in ecotourism, as guides, cooks and porters. In 2013, there were 13 guides, 9 cooks, over 100 porters and 2 park rangers. Their main task is to ensure that visiting tourists, who come mainly from Western European countries, such as Germany, Spain, the UK, and France, have as good a park experience as possible (see Mölkänen 2019: 102). “We have to take good care of them [tourists]”, a Tsimihety ecotourism guide pointed out to me. One morning, in late July 2013, a couple in their fifties from Réunion, and their guide Vincent, headed to the park from a neighbouring village. En route, Vincent explained to them what local people in the surrounding vanilla and rice fields were doing, and pointed out local fauna, such as a chameleon, hiding under the leaf of a bush, and a frog on the side of the pathway. When one of the visitors stopped because of difficulty in climbing steep rocky stairs, Vincent stayed with him while he recovered his breath and calmed down. Within the park, the visiting group were met by two porters returning after having carried their bags to their overnight camping site. All this clearly demonstrates that the park personnel seek to take good care of visiting tourists. The Tsimihety perceive such efforts as part of an exchange relationship. As one Tsimihety guide put it: “We [Malagasy] lend our land for environmental conservation”. The Tsimihety anticipate that because the Tsimihety  invest in environmental conservation projects in the form of land, work, and nurture that assist the global effort to ensure fresh air and water for all they should receive in return material benefits, such as schools and education, health clinics and an improved communications infrastructure (see also Mölkänen 2019: 103). Exchange relations require acknowledgement by village leaders. In theory, the Madagascar National Parks (MNP) would supposedly invite

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such leaders to a celebration at which they received gifts, such as a bottle of cooking oil. This would have established the principle of exchange relations between the parks and surrounding villages. Again, in theory, 50 percent of park revenues were supposed to be channelled to local communities. However, in practice the channelling needed local initiative. Villages or other local communities were expected to make a formal application stating how such revenue would be used, after which COSAP (Comité d’Orientation et de Soutien des Aires Protégées), comprised of people from local communities, were to review applications and decide where the money was to be spent. The region around the park, containing 52 villages, was divided into six sectors,11 each of which would annually have been awarded one micro-project, such as the construction of a school. In practice, however, few villagers knew anyone on the committee or anything about its funding activities (Mölkänen 2019: 103). In Madagascar, the logic of exchange runs through people’s life cycles and is inter-generational. Constant inter-personal giving and receiving, as well as respect of ancestral taboos, caring for ancestral tombs and bones, and the presentation of gifts to the ancestors, are essential in maintaining good relations with the ancestors, who in return bestow their blessings upon the living (Keller 2015, 2008; Mölkänen 2021). Reciprocal practices of giving and receiving create social relations (Lévi-Strauss 1969 [1949]). These activities  mark  also people’s spatial and temporal being as people connect with and orient towards their relatives who have dispersed to different places during their lives, and dead ancestors buried in different clan tombs (Lambek and Walsh 1997: 320). They also define moralities, for example, by distinguishing long-term social reproduction of the family and short-term market relations (Parry and Bloch 1989: 28–30; Mölkänen 2021: 90–5). Ethnographic studies of a mining town in northwestern Madagascar show that by contrast, when a young man leaves a rural economy and becomes a miner  using the benefits from mining for his own individual ends, he divorces himself from rural village morality and values (Walsh 2003: 291, De Boeck 1999: 179). Tsimihety principles of mutual reciprocity, integral to kin relations, also apply to foreigners. For example, it was expected that a foreign visitor with whom a good relationship had been established in the park would, upon returning home, spread the word, influencing other foreigners to visit the

 Four sectors in 2021.

11

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park and hire Tsimihety guides (see West 2006 for a comparative ethnographic study in Papua New Guinea). However, the Tsimihety understand very well that only in rare cases do exchanges with tourists and researchers stabilize into long-term relationships, unlike their relationship with the state. “Projects come and go but the Malagasy state stays” another Tsimihety ecotourism guide pointed out to me. Local guides found environmental conservation efforts and the short-term visits of tourists puzzling: “Why would someone spend a lot of money on airplane tickets and other travel and accommodation just to be able to stare at animals that the Tsimihety were used to hunting and eating?” (see Mölkänen 2019: 102–4). Eva Keller (2008: 651) argues that unlike the Malagasy ethos “based on the ideal of the fruitful continuation and growth of human life, the conservationist ethos is founded on the ideal of a perfect, but static, equilibrium among the different species present on the planet”. The focus on nurture nuances this debate. For the Malagasy, maintaining their ethos requires certain kinds of human beings, preferably relatives, being bound to one another through nurturing and exchange practices. In this context, the Tsimihety pose ethical and existential questions about ecotourists who could be demanding and behave unexpectedly. For example, when I visited Manantenina in 2016, Rocco, Willy’s young relative, immediately wanted to share certain news with me about “something terrible” that had happened: There was a young man who was naughty (maditry) in that [ecotourism] group. He did not respect the park rules, did not stay on the pathway as expected, walked around by himself, and did not listen to the guide’s orders. When the group arrived at the camp, he was not with them. After a while, a cook went to look for him and found his body crushed on the rocks below a waterfall… A tangalamena (an elder), a gendarme, the MNP, a doctor, and the mayor, were called to the park. The elder apologized (mijoro = apologize, ask for blessing) to the spirits of the forest. After his apology, it rained, and the blood was washed away from the rocks because spirits do not like blood on the rocks. The purifying rain meant that the forest was sacred again. Despite the apology, the guides, cooks and porters were afraid that something bad would happen, that something like this might occur again.

It was clear that the Tsimihety were disturbed at what had happened. This was an instance that reveals how Tsimihety people apprehend

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existential and ethical dilemmas that arise from their interactions with different beings: in this case, a foreign tourist who did not respect the rules and invisible spirits that frequently inhabit landscape features. What was clear to the Tsimihety guides, but not to the tourist was the importance of proper behaviour with different beings in this place. This view was confirmed by evidence of the effects of improper behaviour, which causes misfortune. Further, the Tsimihety asked why ecotourists did not stay or create lasting social relations, and why local Malagasy could not fly or enjoy the same technological benefits as vazaha (strangers or refers also to whiteskinned foreigners). Indeed, their experience in ecotourism made the Tsimihety more intensively aware of the cultural and socio-economic differences between themselves and ecotourists (Mölkänen 2021: 199–205).

7  Conclusion By focusing on nurturing, I have emphasized that profit-driven discourses about sustainability, aimed at promoting the well-being of the local people, cannot create the conditions of sustainability if it stems from the premise that the Malagasy are careless swidden cultivators. Thus far, environmental conservation efforts have failed to deliver returns in the form of material benefits or social relations for the Tsimihety would otherwise be willing to engage with conservation practices. Mere fresh air, water and rain “given” by the park does not adequately address the desire of the Tsimihety for electricity, clean water salaries and longer term social relations. In addition, any conservation activity or event should respect Tsimihety locations, animals, plants and spirits. Finally, the issue of Tsimihety puzzlement at the wealth of ecotourists needs to be considered beyond mere economic inequality and take account of the variety of social relations recognized by the Tsimihety that contribute to the achievement of a “good” and “prosperous life”. Conservation project planners must strive to understand the cultural and social logics that underlie how rural Malagasy relate to different beings, human, plant, animal, and spirit, as well as to the land from which they make a living. For the Tsimihety of northeastern Madagascar, the concept of “nurturing” underscores the creation and maintenance of social relations. This is the case, for example, with vanilla, originally a colonial crop, that the Tsimihety adopted. The plant requires intensive nurturing in order to

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grow and produce fruit. Similarly, the Tsimihety “nurture” their children, who thus become proper caring and moral humans, and strangers, including tourists, in order to establish good durable social relations. Ancestral traditions lead the Tsimihety to expect reciprocity for such care. In the case of vanilla, this was reflected in the high market prices attained by the vanilla fruit in 2016–18. Again, children nurtured by their parents are expected to take care of their parents when they become old. However, environmental conservation efforts have thus far failed to deliver returns in the form of material benefits or social relations. The experience of environmental conservation efforts in Masoala National Park demonstrates that European histories and epistemologies of nature have created obstacles to understanding what constitutes relationships of sustainability between different beings (Keller 2015). As reflected in this chapter, the ways in which the Tsimihety engage with human beings, animals, plants and spirits constitute also their enduring relations. The variety of these social relations recognized by the Tsimihety form practical and material landscapes that people actually live with and are essential when people engage with global sustainable practices. Acknowledgements  I wish to thank the editors of this volume and anonymous reviewers for comments on preliminary drafts of this chapter. For their support, I thank the Kone Foundation, as well as the Academy of Finland’s “Human ecology, land conversion and the global resource economy” project (#253680), and the “ALL-YOUTH” project (#312689). I am grateful to Mieja Razafindrakoto for her research collaboration.

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Online Resources Brundtland Commission. Report of the World Commission on Environment and Development. United Nations. http://www.un.org/documents/ga/res/42/ ares42-187.htm. Accessed January 2015. KWF.  Madagascar. http://www.kfwentwicklungsbank.de/ebank/EN_Home/ Countries_and_Programmes/Sub­S aharan_Africa/Madagascar/index.jsp. Accessed May 2011. Pilling, David. The Real Price of Madagascar’s Vanilla Boom. Financial Times. https://www.ft.com/content/02042190-65bc-11e8-90c2­9563a0613e56. Accessed December 2018. SRI.  System of Rice Intensification. http://sri.ciifad.cornell.edu/aboutsri/ origin/index.html. Accessed November 2015.

Offset Life: Lemur Health in Landscapes of Extraction Genese Marie Sodikoff

One of my favourite places to stop for a night or afternoon in Madagascar is the Vakona Lodge, located on the outskirts of Andasibe town in Madagascar’s central highlands. Nestled in a quiet rain forest, this upscale tourist hotel was built by a relative-by-marriage of the Izouards, a French colonial family that ran large graphite mines in the region in the early twentieth century. The descendants sold off many of their land concessions over time, and a portion of these were incorporated into the Mantadia National Park in the 1990s. Mag Izouard is the owner and manager of the Vakona Lodge. A passionate advocate of lemur conservation, she established a small reserve on the property. Located on a verdant islet woven with footpaths, the reserve can be accessed by floating on a canoe for a few feet to the dock opposite, where it is common to see a couple of curious lemurs waiting to check out the new arrivals. The reserve is inhabited by four lemur species:

G. M. Sodikoff (*) Rutgers University, Newark, NJ, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 F. Muttenzer et al. (eds.), Perceptions and Representations of the Malagasy Environment Across Cultures, Palgrave Series in Indian Ocean World Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-23836-9_4

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the bamboo lemur, the black and white ruffed lemur, the brown lemur, and the diademed sifaka (see Fig. 1). The bamboo lemurs and black and white ruffed lemurs have become so habituated to humans that they leap from trees with hungry grunts onto people’s shoulders to snatch bananas from their hands. It is nearly impossible to avoid contact with the animals, though doing so poses certain health risks to them. Lemurs are vulnerable to a variety of human diseases. Scientists recently discovered, for example, that a range of wild mammal species, including lemurs, have ACE2 receptors similar to humans, making them susceptible to COVID-19 (Damas et al. 2020). In March 2020, an Italian tourist visiting an unnamed private reserve in Andasibe transmitted COVID-19 to several people, and the reserve was one where “direct contact” between people and lemurs occurred frequently (Salazar 2020). Another downside to human-lemur contact is all the charming photographs of these encounters that get uploaded to social media sites.

Fig. 1  A bamboo lemur of the Vakona Lodge reserve (Photograph by Genese Marie Sodikoff, 2016)

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The imagery indirectly feeds the illicit trade in exotic wildlife by fostering people’s desire for pet primates. I have been guilty of doing these things, telling myself that without the lodge owner’s interventions, including veterinary care, these lemurs would not have survived for so long. Their natural habitat has been reduced over centuries by logging, fire, swidden agriculture, and mining, and they are hunted for food as other protein sources dwindle with increasing deforestation (Borgerson et al. 2017). While nature reserves have historically been perceived as sanctuaries for lemurs and other endangered species, which they undoubtedly are, a new type of nature reserve emerged in 2004, one that projected something bigger and more ambitious. In Madagascar and other rain forest countries, where the mining industry vies with conservation groups to control ore-­ rich forest remnants, the Business and Biodiversity Offsetting Programme (BBOP) was introduced to placate conservationists and satisfy the desires of industry (Common Resources 2012). Although biodiversity offsets are outwardly no different than conventional protected areas, they function as financial instruments that enable mining companies to write off ecologically destructive activities and therefore serve to neutralise the damage (Sullivan 2013a). In addition, they are presented as repositories of wildlife species kept for future ecological restoration efforts, thereby making good on the ideal aim of delivering a “net gain” of biodiversity. Two large mining ventures operate in Madagascar: Ambatovy and Rio Tinto/QMM. Ambatovy is a joint venture owned by Sherritt International Corporation (Canada), Sumitomo Corporation (Japan), and Korea Resources Corporation (Korea) that trades shares on the Toronto stock exchange. It extracts cobalt and nickel in the eastern forest of the central highlands. Rio Tinto/QMM dredges ilmenite off the coast of Fort Dauphin in the southeast. It is a joint venture of Rio Tinto, a United Kingdom and Australian mining conglomerate, and the Malagasy state through a Quebec subsidiary, QIT, and QMM. Malagasy people call the mine simply QMM (Seagle 2012: 448–450). Both ventures have created biodiversity offsets on the island. With a combination of narrative and calculative frameworks, technologies, and grounded practices, implementers of biodiversity offsets in Madagascar imply that these spaces are relatively immune from the ecological effects of mining and deforestation, as well as human proximity to wildlife species. The Business and Biodiversity Offset Programme (BBOP) has promised to enrich Madagascar with both jobs and a “net gain” of biodiversity. Yet, as Apostolopoulou and Adams (2017: 24) argue, in framing biodiversity

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as “fully replaceable,” offsetting discourse “confuses the state of ecological restoration science and practise with its aspiration.” This confusion between aspirational futures and the perceptible transformations of endemic species caught within the forces of degrading-while-conserving nature is the theme of this chapter. It considers how this current paradigm of conservation, the biodiversity offset, constructs space and time against the grain of biological change we see occurring at the moment. The chapter focuses on lemurs to compare a prospective bioabundant habitat, as depicted in biodiversity offsetting discourse, to the trajectories of species’ lives that we can extrapolate from studies of lemur health. The case study is the pilot biodiversity offset owned by Ambatovy (“at iron rock” in Malagasy), located near the Vakona Lodge. Ambatovy’s offset experiment has prioritised the protection of lemurs, among the world’s most endangered primates. Lemuriformes are both symbolically and biologically important to Madagascar, and like other non-human primates, they remain intertwined in development pursuits and their emergent ecologies (Fuentes 2012). The gradual disappearance of lemurs in Madagascar foreshadows “extinction cascades” because lemurs play key roles in maintaining diverse forest ecosystems (Schwitzer et al. 2014: 842). Scientific findings suggest that lemurs may be “sentinel species” insofar as they indicate trajectories for other wildlife species in forest fragments (Cooper et al. 2012). It should come as no surprise that the endangered status of lemurs raises doubt about a corporate strategy that justifies razing habitat with projections of enhanced biodiversity (see Waeber 2012; Sullivan and Hannis 2015). However, I am interested in taking biodiversity offsetting discourse at face value and analysing its counterfactual spacetime of expansion and restoration. If biodiversity offsets are not and cannot be set off from business as usual, what kind of lemur lives can we realistically expect to find in post-mining landscapes? In what follows, I briefly discuss the rationale, design, and strategy of the BBOP and the scholarly critique of the “economy of repair” of damaged nature in which biodiversity offsets operate (Fairhead et al. 2012). I then turn to the creation and maintenance of the main biodiversity offset of the Ambatovy mine, focusing on the ways employees implemented the mandates of the BBOP’s mitigation hierarchy with regard to lemur species. Finally, I describe studies of lemur health at Ambatovy and other sites in Madagascar to compare and project present-day indicators to the speculative future of offset lives in mining industry discourse (Ambatovy.com).

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1   The Offsetting Model The “Business and Biodiversity Offsetting Programme” emerged out of strategic planning meetings of the global mining industry. It describes a partnership of financial institutions, private companies, governments, and civil society organisations that support international agreements to protect endangered habitats and stem carbon emissions (Bumpus and Liverman 2008; Ferguson 2010; Bull et al. 2013a, 2013b). Biodiversity offsets are often established adjacent to a mine site. They strive to contain biological assemblages similar to the perturbed habitat so that the uniqueness of the ecological niche may be preserved and amplified. They comprise a market of carbon and biodiversity credits that has turned conservation into what Sian Sullivan (2013b) calls a “spectacular investment frontier.” As she explains, non-human nature has been recast “in terms of banking and financial concepts, enabling conserved ‘nature’ to be entrained with new circuits of monetised exchange and financial instruments” (Sullivan 2013b: 200). Fairhead et  al. (2012) describe the discursive shift in the twenty-first century as one that replaces “conservation” and “sustainability” with a perception of nature as divisible into extractable and conservable spaces that counterbalance each other and maintain the conditions for eventual restoration: The economy of repair has been smuggled in within the rubric of ‘sustainability’, but its logic is clear: that unsustainable use ‘here’ can be repaired by sustainable practices ‘there’, with one nature subordinated to the other. Once this logic of repair is grasped, so a new interplay can be discerned which is doubly valuing nature: for its use and for its repair. (Fairhead et al. 2012: 242)

To repair the ruins of mined landscapes, the BBOP strives to compensate habitats with “net gains” of biodiversity, otherwise called “additionality” (see Bumpus and Liverman 2008; McKenny and Kiesecker 2010; Benabou 2014; Hrabanski 2015; Lawler et al. 2015). To achieve this, the BBOP entreats the mining industry to adhere to a “mitigation hierarchy” throughout the process of mining, guided by a scale of preferred impacts, from best to worst, on the environment: to avoid, minimise, restore, and offset the destruction of habitat.

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The “net positive impacts” or “net gains” might take the form of higher population numbers of dwindling species, a greater degree of biological diversity within habitats that had been depleted, or even an improvement in the quality of multispecies lives, including human communities. Biodiversity offsets are privately funded and controlled, and the state limits itself to regulating the mining investments of mining ventures, not their conservation activities. Although these economic advantages set biodiversity offsets apart from cash-strapped national parks, the promise of what they can accomplish and the language they deploy have infused conservation discourse more generally in the Global South (Hubert Ta 2018). Reframing nature in terms of finance requires metrics that can demonstrate the species profitability of biodiversity offsets (Bull et  al. 2013a). Biodiversity offset plans therefore “quantify harm” suffered by wildlife species through the “use of standardized calculative frameworks,” which enable actors to identify exactly how much compensation for biodiversity loss is required (Sullivan and Hannis 2015: 1). However, determining the baseline of biodiversity confronts a number of challenges. I describe six key challenges below to give a sense of this complexity (see Apostolopoulou and Adams 2017 for a more comprehensive discussion). 1. Counting units of biodiversity is unreliable and fraught with subjective choices and vested interests in what gets counted and when (Benabou 2014: 115–116). 2. The very concept of “biodiversity” is ambiguous. As Ursula Heise (2010: 53) explains, biodiversity “pertains at the level of the ecosystem, of the species, and of subspecies variation, so that bare numbers of different species in a particular ecosystem can only give an incomplete picture of its biodiversity.” 3. “Moving targets,” such as migratory species and ecological changes, further complicate the determination of baselines and biodiversity calculations over time (Bull et al. 2013b). 4. Climate change has also set into motion a range of unpredictable impacts on “spatial patterns of parasitism and disease,” which in turn affect the reproductive fitness of species (Barrett et  al. 2013: 410). 5. Potential species hybridisation occurs when subspecies no longer inhabit distinct zones due to a reduction in their ranges, thus complicating species counts. Alternatively, with shrinking habitat ranges, scientists may confront a proliferation of “new” species, as has

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recently occurred with lemurs, which may actually reflect intraspecific genetic variation that had not been observable earlier (see Markholf et al. 2013). 6. The appearance of invasive species also raises questions about the “legitimate” and “illegitimate” species to include in biodiversity offset inventories. Globally, invasive plant and animal species displace endemic species from primary habitats and alter the quality of what remains (Simberloff and Rejmanek 2011; Norton and Warburton 2014). They also tend to be more abundant in eroded landscapes with habitat loss (Norton and Warburton 2014). Yet invasive species are not necessarily harmful to endemic biodiversity. Some endemic species may adapt to the ecological changes caused by invasive species, as in the case of the southern bamboo lemur of the Mandena littoral forest, which adapted to the invasion of the plant Melaleuca quinqueneriva (Eppley et al. 2015). Offset planners try to control some of this uncertainty with spatial and temporal “multipliers” that can allay uncertainty over how to define and measure biodiversity over time. Multipliers are additional units of offset space (the metrical language gives the illusion of objectivity), essentially a buffer that takes into account uncertainty “in both the biodiversity losses and the success of the offset itself” (Bull et al. 2013a: 5; Moilanen et al. 2009). The multipliers are designed to provide a fairer exchange of future gains against current losses (Bull et al. 2013b: 4–5; Dunford et al. 2004). All these calculations of loss and gain do not directly address the health of endemic species populations over the life course of a mine, which has implications for species’ survival beyond the temporal boundaries of a biodiversity offsetting project. The longevity of current biodiversity depends on health and reproductive capacity of species in protected areas ostensibly shielded from the fallout of extractive industry. Such fallout includes the leaching of tailings into water sources, the circulation of pathogens among species increasingly crowded as habitats decrease in size, and the influence of human culture (i.e. activities and habits beyond economic activities) on non-human animals at the interfaces of wilderness and settlements. In some places, transformations in lemur biology arising from shrinking wild habitats and close encounters with humans offer a glimpse into the future of offset biodiversity. Ambatovy’s biodiversity offset illustrates some of the difficulties of establishing conditions that would avert the loss of lemur diversity and

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nurture the resurgence of these critically endangered species. I turn now to my observations of the accomplishments and challenges confronted by implementers of the BBOP as I observed them in July 2013, seven years after the venture “broke ground” at the mine site and established the biodiversity offset. At this time, the British head of Ambatovy’s Environment Team, an environmental lawyer and ecologist, agreed to authorise my access to the mine site and kindly show me around. I was already familiar with the larger region from much earlier fieldwork there (1994–1995, 1997, and 1999), before Ambatovy was established, and I have since travelled to the Moramanga District a number of times (2016, 2017, and 2018) for my current research on zoonotic diseases.

2   The Biodiversity Offset of Ambatovy Ambatovy’s footprint covers a nickel and cobalt-rich pluton, a body of intrusive igneous rock, lying approximately 120 kilometres east of the capital, Antananarivo, in the central highlands. Beyond the main site of the open pit and its adjacent complex of offices, apartments, medical clinic, and cafeteria, Ambatovy constructed a sunken slurry pipeline that stretches 217 kilometres from the main site to the processing plant and refinery in the port city of Toamasina. A portion of the pipeline just east of the mine site stretches through the Torotorofotsy marsh flowing into 9900 hectares of wetland that is protected under the international Ramsar Convention of 1971 (Rakotondratsimba et al. 2013). The entire complex (open pit, slurry pipeline, operational buildings, and main biodiversity offset) lies within a mid-altitude rain forest with a high level of biodiversity (Junge et al. 2017). After digging the open pit and slurry pipeline, after constructing the office buildings, apartments for staff, a medical clinic, and a cafeteria, and after installing the machinery at both the open pit and the coastal processing plant, the venture began extracting ore in 2011. According to the company website, Ambatovy is the “largest-ever foreign investment” in Madagascar, and one of the largest lateritic nickel mines in the world (ambatovy.com). The operation got off to a rocky start in its first years of production when declines in the global price of nickel for stainless steel caused losses of over $1.7 billion and pushed the operation to the brink of bankruptcy more than once (Globe and Mail 2016). But it has survived. The predominant population of the rural hamlets ethnically identifies as a mix of Betsimisaraka and Bezanozano, and lives mainly by shifting

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swidden agriculture. The professional class in the large town of Moramanga is predominantly of Merina ethnicity, and Merina individuals comprise the majority of staff at Ambatovy. The social and ethnic composition of the region reflects a centuries-old hierarchy that has added heat to simmering tensions between mine staff and local residents at Ambatovy and other mine sites. Both Ambatovy and the Rio Tinto/QMM operation in the southeast have implemented a variety of development projects to foster good will between the mining operations and resident populations (Seagle 2012; Bidaud et al. 2015). Yet, these activities have been largely overshadowed by residents’ anger towards the mines for appropriating land, contaminating the environment, giving jobs to foreigners and non-locals, and diverting water sources (Seagle 2012; Bidaud et al. 2015; Bidaud et al. 2017; Orengo 2019). At times, such feelings of resentment by local residents, who are largely not employed by the mines, have erupted into angry protest or sabotage, disrupting mining operations (Telegraph 2013; Tohdy and Tahiri 2012). I lack the space here to delve into these social tensions. Suffice to say, they risk undermining conservation goals over the long term. After the creation of Ambatovy’s first biodiversity offset, the Environment Team identified a second offset site, Ankerana (see Fig. 2). The main site, which I focus on in this chapter, is visible from the open pit and consists of 3600 hectares of rain forest at the southernmost end of the Ankeniheny-Zahamena Forest Corridor, lying about 100 kilometres east of the capital, Antananarivo. The second one, Ankerana, is much smaller and equidistant between the open pit area and the processing plant and tailings management facility in Toamasina (Dickinson and Berner 2010). Ankerana was originally considered similar to the azonal habitat of the mine’s footprint (Berner et al. 2009). It was later discovered that the substrate of Ankerana was different than Ankeniheny-Zahamena, and therefore, so was the biodiversity. Staffers acknowledged the trickiness of trading “like for like” or “in kind” habitats, particularly in the ecological mosaic of a rain forest, where assemblages of species are highly variable as one moves over the surface, as we find in Madagascar. The high degree of micro-endemism results from variable “geology, geomorphology, substrate, topography, and meso-climate” (Dickinson and Berner 2010: 4). Among the Environment Team’s first tasks was to identify and create an inventory of the key biodiversity components that would be disturbed by development activities. These included approximately 16 lemur species, 62 bird species, 123 reptile species, 5 fish species, 24 insect species, 376

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Fig. 2  Map of the Ambatovy footprint and its biodiversity offsets (Reprinted with permission from Bidaud et al. 2017)

plant species, and an additional 330 plants that were “species of concern,” identified as rare in Madagascar (Berner et  al. 2009: 9; Dickinson and Berner 2010: 7). Fortunately, field agents did not find a single species that was endemic to the mine’s footprint alone, meaning all species present in the footprint also existed in the offset forests (Berner et al. 2009: 22). The discovery allowed mining to proceed without violating the mitigation hierarchy. When I spoke to staff about long-term aims for the offset, one employee explained that a long-term goal was to see flora and fauna within the offset gradually drift into contiguous forest, including the national park, Mantadia, thereby remediating decades of ore extraction. The head of the Environment Team told me that he imagined that, after the ore was exhausted and the mine closed, the site could become a tourist magnet and the open pit turned into a fish-filled lake, perhaps with bungalows lining the water’s edge.

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To critics of their environmental practices during the construction phase, Environmental Team members countered that their mitigation and restoration works proved that the mine was not the “ecological catastrophe” many had assumed it would be (see, for example, Mouvement des Citoyens Malagasy de Paris 2014). The head of the team showed me their accomplishments to date. I saw the native tree saplings planted only a couple of years earlier and growing quickly along the banks of the dirt road running parallel to the slurry pipeline. I saw where workers had sprayed grass seeds along a bank to prevent soil erosion. I learned that the North Dam, built to trap sediment and avoid spillage into the river, had become a refuge for an endemic species of duck, though only temporarily, since the dam will be demolished when the whole operation ceases. An assortment of native orchids was awaiting transplantation from a reserve into the degraded forest corridor the following year, in 2014. These actions did indeed add biodiversity into the mine’s footprint and environs. Ambatovy has earned accolades in the global mining sector. It was the winner of the 2014 Nedbank Capital Sustainable Business Award in the Resources and Non-renewable Energy category thanks to its “landmark” Biodiversity Management Programme in Africa and creation of value for community and environment. A self-described “green and caring bank,” the Nedbank group awards businesses operating in southern Africa that embrace environmentally sustainable practices and “create value” for the community and environment. Nedbank is one entity that bankrolls the economy of repair by evaluating and congratulating companies that adhere to an industry-led model of adding value, conventionally understood to mean the profit generated from services (Nedbank Capital n.d.). With regard to Ambatovy’s Lemur Management Plan, staff identified a total of 13 lemur species in the forest: 1) six nocturnal species (eastern woolly lemur Avahi laniger; hairy-eared dwarf lemur, Allocebus trichotis; greater dwarf lemur, Cheirogaleus major; aye-aye, Daubentonia madagascariensis; weasel sportive lemur, Lepilemur mustelinus; and Goodman’s mouse lemur, Microcebus lehilahytsara); 2) four diurnal species (grey bamboo lemur, Hapalemur griseus; indri, Indri indri; diademed sifaka, Propithecus diadema; and black and white ruffed lemur, Varacia variegata); and 3) three cathemeral species (those active at any time), (brown lemur, Eulemur fulvus; red-bellied lemur, Eulemur rubriventer and the greater bamboo lemur, Prolemur simus) (Ambatovy Lemurs Booklet n.d.; Mass et al. 2011). Of these, the six species at greatest risk of extinction

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include the greater bamboo lemur, the indri, the diademed sifaka, the red-­ bellied lemur, the aye-aye, and the hairy-eared dwarf lemur (Rakotondratsimba et al. 2013). Protecting and monitoring these species populations do not simply require surveillance of the region to scout out poachers and unauthorised forest clearance. It has also necessitated a literal hands-on approach. On occasions when lemurs wandered into the cleared spaces of the mining area, workers captured them and hand-carried them back into the forest. They also collared lemurs with microchips to radio-track their movements as a means of determining whether lemurs were migrating into new areas or remaining isolated in specific ranges. The construction of the slurry pipeline and road alongside divided the forest and threatened to obstruct the movement of lemurs and other animal species wary of crossing open spaces. This kind of forest fragmentation threatens endemic species with “demographic collapse,” their genetic integrity compromised by spatial confinement due to inbreeding (Craul et al. 2009). In other words, the constraint of lemurs’ movement caused by the pipeline’s slash through the forest jeopardises their reproductive potential by impacting their genetic diversity and health (Mass et  al. 2011: 12). Fragmentation can refer to several things, including “habitat loss, increase in number of habitat patches, decreasing size of habitat patches, and increasing isolation of habitat patches” (Holmes et  al. 2013: 615). Researchers have found that larger habitat patches possess greater allelic richness, and the greater the genetic diversity of a species population, the stronger a population’s “potential for adaptability and persistence” (Greenbaum et al. 2014). Small, fragmented, and inbred species populations face eventual extinction due to their increased vulnerability to disease (Smith et al. 2009: 2). One of the Environment Team’s most significant accomplishments was the construction of seven tall wooden bridges that span the pipeline divide (see Fig. 3). Anticipating that lemurs, which are “clingers and leapers and species that move quadrupedally” and prefer locomotion through trees, would avoid descending to the ground to cross the road if they had a choice, the Environment Team believed the lemurs would prefer moving over bridges as tall as treetops (Mass et al. 2011: 13). To know for certain if they were effective, staffers set up observation posts and watched the bridges for ten hours per day, four to six days per week, for a total of 764 observation days and 7640 hours in 2009 and 2010 (see Fig. 2).

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Fig. 3  A lemur bridge at Ambatovy. (Photograph by Genese Marie Sodikoff, 2013)

Their efforts paid off. Over time, they spotted six “highly arboreal,” diurnal lemur species tentatively start to climb and cross the bridges, and some individuals even travelled on the ground. Initially, these six species descended to the ground as often as they used the bridges, but over the course of the year, the ground locomotion waned (Mass et al. 2011: 17). Since no one observed the bridges at night, it could not be determined whether nocturnal species were also crossing the pipeline divide. The fates of the other seven species remained unclear. The capture and return of lemurs into the forest and the construction of the lemur bridges bring to light how hard it is in practice to avert biodiversity loss. In addition to protecting and safeguarding lemurs’ genetic robustness, the Ambatovy team has also invested in scientific studies of lemur health, since a decline of health bodes ill for the programme’s long-­ term goals. The next section examines studies focused on Ambatovy lemurs, as well as studies of lemurs within other protected areas. Their

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findings offer a sense of how forest fragmentation and the intensification of human-lemur contact alter lemur bodies over time.

3   Monitoring Lemur Health Between 2012 and 2014, a team of veterinary scientists associated with Duke University and commissioned by Ambatovy for its Scientific Consultive Committee collected health data from lemur species in the biodiversity offset. They needed to establish a health baseline for the Lemur Management Plan. The team collected serological and parasitological data, as well as temperature, dentition, heart rate, and body systems information, from lemurs in the conservation zone (Junge et al. 2017). Although the scientists worked under the auspices of Ambatovy, their findings do not sugarcoat the potential impact of mining on lemurs. The team tracked four species for long-term monitoring based on their degree of extinction threat according to the International Union for the Conservation of Nature’s designation categories. These included “Avahi laniger (VU, vulnerable), Lepilemur mustelinus (NT, near threatened), Indri indri (CR, critically endangered), and Propithecus diadema (CR, critically endangered)” (Junge et al. 2017: 795). This data was collected between 2012 and 2014 for Ambatovy’s Lemur Management Program. In the team’s published article, the authors note that A. laniger and L. mustelinus had higher levels of nickel and zinc and lower levels of iron than the other two, but that may merely reflect the preexisting composition of the soil, “hence, the reason for situating a nickel mine at the site where this study was undertaken” (Junge et al. 2017: 801). Another reason for the high levels of nickel and zinc may be due to consumption of plant species that concentrate these minerals, and the consumption of soils with high levels of trace minerals (certain lemur species practise geophagy). But the authors also consider the impact of mining: it cannot be ruled out that mine operations directly contribute to increased exposure to nickel and zinc through the generation of large amounts of dust, which settles on the leaves of plants at the forest edge. If lemurs of Ambatovy consume foliage or plant parts containing even minimal amounts of dust, prolonged consumption of nickel, zinc or other trace minerals present in the soil could account for the higher serum values of select trace elements… (Junge et al. 2017: 801)

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Changes in the composition of lemur blood over time may shed light on whether mining is contributing to their absorption of high levels of minerals. An earlier study in this region, again with Randall Junge as the lead author, about the effects of anthropogenic activity on lemur health was conducted by veterinarians and field biologists. This one focused on just the Indri indri, the largest of the extant lemur species (Junge et al. 2011). For this study, the team compared two population groups, one in an undisturbed forest reserve, called Betampona, and the other in the Analamazoatra forest complex, which contains an indri reserve that is heavily trafficked by tourists and lies adjacent to the Vakona Lodge. However, indris remain high up in the trees, avoiding direct contact with tourists. This does not preclude the possibility of microbial traffic between humans and lemurs. The team found that the two lemur groups showed differences in blood cell counts. Indri of the undisturbed forest in Betampona “demonstrated higher values for molybdenum and selenium.” Serum trace minerals also differed. Indri of the disturbed forest in the Analamazoatra reserve near the Ambatovy mine “exhibited higher values for nickel, cobalt, manganese, and zinc, with differences being at least two-fold greater for all values except zinc.” It is not yet known whether the absorption of excessive amounts of minerals and metals will affect the reproductive cycles of lemurs, but this remains a concern. The researchers did not find any evidence of the endoparasites Giardia or Cryptosporidium in the lemurs. In contrast, these parasites had been detected in degraded areas of the Ranomafana National Park, located approximately 330  miles south of Ambatovy’s offset. The presence of endoparasites in the Ranomafana lemurs was presumably due to their frequent exposure to humans and livestock (Rakotondratsimba et al. 2013; Junge et al. 2017). The authors note that the indri lemurs, as well as the other species of the study site, confront the same risk of parasitic pathogens as mining proceeds and enables “further encroachment of domestic species and people into the forests” (Junge et al. 2017: 800). Concerning the earlier indri study, they found that individuals in the disturbed forest had higher ectoparasite diversity and co-infections. However, enteric bacteria, such as Salmonella, Shigella, Campylobacter, and Yersinia, associated with diarrheal disease in people and deemed pathogenic in lemurs, were not detected (Junge et al. 2011: 7).

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As people encroach on primary forest, the incidence of zoonotic and vector-borne diseases increases (Cormier and Jolly 2017; Walsh and Haseeb 2015; Wolfe et al. 2005). It might seem counterintuitive that biodiversity loss poses greater risks of zoonosis, since one might reason that fewer animals means fewer hosts and vectors that transmit diseases to humans; however, studies suggest that the loss of species can increase disease risk. Cormier and Jolly (2017) summarise the findings of Keesing et al. (2010): Loss of biodiversity can affect prevalence rates of parasites. Decreased diversity and lowered population densities of reservoir hosts means that there are fewer animals available to infect, increasing the levels of parasite load across the population. Here, humans coming into contact with any given animal are more likely to encounter an infected animal (and are also more likely to encounter an animal with a high parasite load). In addition, loss of natural reservoir may facilitate host switching. (Cormier and Jolly 2017: 13)

Research furthermore shows that biodiversity loss, such as the loss of “less competent hosts” of a pathogen, may result in parasites infecting more competent hosts—that is, hosts that are more successful in transmitting disease to humans (Cormier and Jolly 2017: 13). Keesing et  al. (2010) also discuss how changes in the biodiversity of species bodies, their microbiomes, can also increase disease risk, but this depends on the balance and species of microbial populations. In some cases, a rich microbial community appears to regulate the abundance of endemic microbial species that can become pathogenic when overly abundant. In other cases, high microbial species diversity can prevent colonization by invasive pathogenic species. (Keesing et al. 2010: 650)

Mining industry insiders are aware of the human health risks of extracting ore from tropical forests. As David Heymann, head of the Centre on Global Health Security at Chatham House in London, said at a mining conference in Perth, Australia (ABC News 2014), “infections jump from animals to humans regularly, and there is always a need to consider emerging infectious diseases in business.” Extractive activities may stir up viruses from the deep forest interior, and these viruses multiply the more they come into contact with animals and people. Moreover, anthropogenic climate change reconfigures habitat overlaps, shifting

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microbes to mammal ranges and exposing flora and fauna to new pathogens (Bublitz et al. 2015: 5; Barrett et al. 2013). Higher population density on less available land also puts a strain on food resources and forces people to eat more bushmeat, which is a potential source of infectious disease for humans (Jenkins et al. 2011). Domestic animals, vulnerable to bacterial and viral infections, can transmit them to wildlife populations. The circulation of pathogens among humans and wild and domestic species is part and parcel of the vitality of these mosaics of strip-mined land, settled land, and rain forest fragments.

4  Lemur Health at Other Sites We can infer from lemur health studies of other sites how Ambatovy lemur populations may transform over time with increasing forest fragmentation, the construction of new settlements, and tourism. Lemur studies conducted elsewhere on the island suggest rapid biological and behavioural changes as the animals adapt to anthropogenic landscapes and the contingencies of rising “interspecies intimacy” with humans and their livestock and pets (Hinchliffe 2014: 3; Shukin 2009; Rasambainarivo et al. 2013, 2017). At the Ranomafana National Park, studies of lemur health are ongoing through the “One Health” project led by Emory University since 2011. Researchers there routinely collect mosquitos and ticks, as well as faecal samples of livestock, lemurs, and people to check for pathogens. So far, they have found that viral, bacterial, and parasitic pathogens are moving among all three, reflecting how disease pathways link species together to make “health” a multispecies condition (Clark 2014). One study showed that lemurs in an undisturbed portion of the Ranomafana National Park carried none of the enterobacteria, the most common being E. coli, that did 33 per cent of sampled lemurs from the more tourist-trafficked areas (Bublitz et al. 2015). Researchers also found a similar pattern for gastrointestinal helminths and protozoa infections: lemurs in the undisturbed area of the park fared better than those in the disturbed area (ibid. p. 5). Scientists agree that wildlife species only persist in disturbed habitats at a cost, exhibiting changes in “physiology, ecology and behavior,” which dim their prospects of long-term survival (Irwin et al. 2010). Lemur species whose food sources are vanishing with the destruction of habitat may succumb to extinction more rapidly than those that adapt behaviourally to human culture around the edges of human settlements.

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Lemurs’ behavioural adaptations to rapidly transforming ecosystems have impacted their biology (Balestri et al. 2014). Like other primate species, lemurs display avid curiosity in the goings-on of humans and often alter diets and behaviours in response to habitat disturbance (Bublitz et  al. 2015). For example, in the Beza Mahafaly Special Reserve, an arid, spiny gallery forest in southwest Madagascar, a study of ring-tailed lemurs demonstrates the effects of human-occupied territory on lemur behaviour and physiology. The study compares lemur populations at three sites: an undisturbed reserve, a research camp, and a human-settled area. Findings revealed that lemurs of the “degraded” (human-occupied) area fought more with each other over human food resources, were more dehydrated in this drier region, and had more dental abscesses, presumably caused by eating processed foods, than the undisturbed forest group. Researchers noticed marked differences in the behaviour of lemurs that frequented the research camp inside the reserve versus those in the forest interior. The “camp” lemurs, as well as lemurs that visited the “degraded” village area, tended to self-groom, scent-mark, and fight more frequently, moved on the ground more frequently than they locomoted through the trees, and practised novel behaviours, such as stealing human food scraps from huts and “gazing at themselves in car windshields” (Sauther et al. 2006: 10). The intensification of lemur-human mingling as forests fragment and shrink in Madagascar means that the socialities of human and non-human primates are also adapting and evolving. Although the behavioural changes do not necessarily imperil human or lemur wellbeing, and in fact, the interactions between people and lemurs are frequently playful, the increased interaction between these primate populations results in pathogen sharing. Forest degradation and ecotourism come with a cost of heavier parasite loads for lemurs and potential disease for humans and lemurs (Barrett et al. 2013). Again, these cases are drawn from disparate regions in Madagascar, from forests riven by the activities of subsistence farmers, builders, loggers, and miners.

5   Conclusion A tour of lemur health in protected areas around Madagascar offers a glimpse of the ecological future for lemurs and other wildlife species, a future that diverges starkly from the blithe predictions of biodiversity offsetting literature. Prospects of ecological restoration at the end of mining

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operations look increasingly bleak (Les Amis de la Terre 2012). Between 2001 and 2018, 16.3 per cent (approximately 793,000 hectares) of Madagascar’s extant forest was razed (Mongabay n.d.). Risk to lemur health by habitat fragmentation is, of course, not the fault of one mining venture. Madagascar’s primary forest has eroded steadily since the late nineteenth century, when the French colonial state began to build new inroads into the eastern forest to extract and export natural resources. The colonial discourse of ecological depredation and wastefulness laid blame on Malagasy subsistence farmers, who cut down and burn forest to plant rice. The state praised “rational” forest use that combined conservation with selective felling, while it promoted profitable forest-depleting ventures, such as cash crop plantations, logging, road and rail works, and mining (Sodikoff 2012). Iterations of the policy of degrading-while-conserving forest in Madagascar have conceptualised the landscape as divisible into bounded, biologically robust units and open-access, biologically compromised ones. This manner of parsing space finds its counterpart in biosecurity strategies aimed at the prevention of zoonotic outbreaks and pandemics. As Hinchliffe et al. argue, institutional approaches to biosecurity have relied on arbitrarily drawn boundaries between “healthy and unhealthy bodies,” reflecting spatial assumptions that underpin the geometry of disease outbreaks, where pathogens are thought to cross over into healthy lives as if a pure space can somehow exist in contrast to an impure, diseased space. (Hinchliffe et al. 2013: 531)

While biodiversity offsetting discourse does not foreground the management of species health, it shares these spatial assumptions with respect to ecological degradation. I would argue that offsetting discourse also constructs the landscape as temporally uneven. Biodiversity offsets are represented as spaces relatively immune to the ecological ravages taking place outside their boundaries, abstracted from historical time through feats of human engineering. At the same time, the discourse suggests that biodiversity offsets can potentially accelerate “natural” time by priming these protected ecologies for rapid expansion, conceived as an outflow of additional species numbers or kinds, in the post-mining future.

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The careful monitoring of species movements and health, the surveillance of protected areas, and the use of precise metrics are offered as a pathway towards abundant biodiversity, yet the idea of biodiversity offsetting misdirects our gaze from the big picture. Even if Ambatovy’s biodiversity offset and other protected areas were to remain intact over the years ahead, the steady erosion of surrounding habitat jeopardises the health of endemic species and disrupts their ability to maintain robust gene pools. Extractive activity and human presence appear to be generating a net gain of “unloved others”—viruses, helminths, and bacteria—that are harmful to lemurs and people (Lebarbenchon et al. 2007; Van Dooren and Rose 2011). What we have learned from investigations into the presence of metal particulates, parasites, pathogens, and manufactured food in lemur bodies demands a revisioning of ecological time and space. Nature reserves of all sorts may slow down time as measured by regional declines in species population numbers, but they are inset into extractivism, their non-human inhabitants unlikely to prevail.

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What’s the Matter with Carbon? Experiences of Volatility in Carbon Offset Production in Madagascar Sara Pena-Valderrama

1   Introduction TAMS (Tetik’asa Mampody Savoka) was a carbon offset project that ran for over ten years in the municipality of Andasibe, in eastern Madagascar. Aimed at reforesting 3000 hectares of degraded fallows due to slash-and-­ burn agriculture, or tavy, TAMS was also promoted as a pilot carbon offset project which would provide communities with alternative livelihoods and with the benefits obtained from the sale of carbon credits. Far from the ‘canonical narrative’ (Keller 2015) in Madagascar that portrays an untouched, primary forest threatened by the destructive force of tavy farmers driven by poverty and tradition, the area of Andasibe has a long history as national and international productive landscape: as key logging site for the colony beginning in the 1900s, as graphite enclave

S. Pena-Valderrama (*) Durham University, Durham, UK © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 F. Muttenzer et al. (eds.), Perceptions and Representations of the Malagasy Environment Across Cultures, Palgrave Series in Indian Ocean World Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-23836-9_5

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throughout the century and, more recently, as a conservation complex thanks to the establishment of the Andasibe Mantadia National Park in 1989. TAMS once again recast these landscapes as productive of a new type of natural resource: carbon offsets. How do people experience these novel productive landscapes? And what difference do carbon offsets as natural resource ‘make’ to people with long histories of intervention and resource extraction, as Leach and Scoones have asked (Leach and Scoones 2015: 2)? These are the questions that I aim to answer in this chapter as I explore the experiences of people involved in the production of offsets in TAMS. In order to do so, I will focus on the experiences of villagers in Mahatsara, a small settlement which was created in 2001 as local communities were relocated from inside the Andasibe-Mantadia National Park (AMNP). Here, 60 men were employed as reforestation agents and about 20 of them gave part of their land for TAMS’ seedlings to be planted. They hoped to obtain a stable source of work and money from the sale of this hitherto unknown natural resource. This, however, never happened. A few years after reforestation began the project came to a standstill due to a series of complications and it was eventually abandoned: neither carbon offsets nor the promises of work and money ever materialised. In its wake, TAMS left abandoned seedlings, rusty signs and feelings of having been cheated; in Mahatsara, the project became known as a scam. Accessing people’s experiences of carbon offset production is not a straightforward task since carbon offsets were never seen, manipulated nor exchanged. As I show below, even the nature of offsets or carbon credits became a disputed element in Mahatsara. In order to approach experiences of this absent resource I turn to its ‘resource materialities’ (Richardson and Weszkalnys): the diverse entanglements between people and things that were established in order to bring offsets into being. This framework allows me to move away from a narrow focus on the object itself—which never materialised—and rather capture it through the relations between people and things that were assembled in Mahatsara, which reveal the specific experiences that emerged as a result. This leads me to focus on three key aspects of carbon offset production in Mahatsara: labour regimes, infrastructures, and forms of exchange and value production. By comparing these elements to those of other resources present in the area, I will argue that carbon offsets specifically emerge as temporary, socially detached and intangible.

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This chapter is structured as follows: I first provide a brief introduction to TAMS. This is followed by an overview of the way carbon offsets or credits were understood in Mahatsara where I also introduce the framework of ‘resource materialities’ (Richardson and Weszkalnys 2014) as a fruitful way of accessing experiences of an absent resource in these landscapes. I then explore carbon offsets through the labour regimes and infrastructures established in Mahatsara, comparing them to those involved in graphite production. I finish by elaborating on what were perceived as obscure forms of exchange and value production in TAMS, arguing that questions of intangibility and invisibility played an important role in the way people conceptualised TAMS as a scam. Taken together, these elements—temporariness, detachment and intangibility—suggest that carbon offset production in Mahatsara led to experiences of volatility in the widest sense.

2   An Overview of TAMS TAMS—Tetik’asa mampody savoka—has often been translated as the ‘project to bring back the forest’ (Dolch et  al. 2009) although a more accurate translation may be ‘the project to restore the fallows’. As a forest carbon project it ran for over ten years in the municipality of Andasibe, although the origins of TAMS as a conservation project date back to the mid-1990s. Andasibe is a biodiversity ‘hot-spot’ in eastern Madagascar home to the Andasibe-Mantadia National Park (AMNP) since 1989. The area is famous for the Babakoto, or Indri lemur, and it is also the object of great conservationist efforts that see in slash-and-burn agriculture, or tavy, its main threat. Since pre-colonial times, this type of itinerant, subsistence agriculture has been in the spotlight of the various ruling elites and subject to different degrees of regulation. Nowadays farmers risk fines or imprisonment if caught expanding into the forest but they are tacitly allowed to practise tavy in secondary vegetation and in confined spaces. This, however, means shorter fallow periods that do not allow the soil to regain its fertility and, therefore, a constant decrease in the amount of rice harvested, and consequent poverty. Institutional efforts to turn people to practise irrigated agriculture have not been successful, in part because of the mountainous landscape of the area. TAMS was originally conceived by Louise Holloway, a British environmental researcher, but it expanded over the years in scope and

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actors, transforming from a locally based reforestation and development project into what was hailed as a pilot Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) project for Africa under the auspices of the World Bank’s BioCarbon Fund (BioCF). Its main objectives were to reforest 3000 hectares of degraded fallows (reconnecting forest fragments) to act as ‘carbon sink’ for a period of 30  years, and to provide people with alternatives to tavy, both through improved agricultural techniques and through the benefits obtained from the sale of carbon credits. Although the exact kind of benefits—whether money or ‘development’—was never agreed upon, there was a clear insistence from the BioCF that most benefits should be passed on to participating communities. Reforestation began in 2006 and two years later the BioCF and Government of Madagascar signed the Emission Reductions Purchasing Agreement (ERPA)—the contract stipulating the transaction. Conservation International (CI) coordinated and funded the project’s initial stages but it later retreated to a ‘technical partner’ position, although its role as primary developer of the project did not wane. At the national level, TAMS was directed by the semi-public organisation ANAE (Association Nationale d’Actions Environnementales), which supervised on-the-ground activities, that were carried out, in turn, by seven local organisations, or Facilitating Agents (FAs). Local farmers took part in TAMS as reforestation workers and some of them also provided part of their land for reforestation, signing a temporary contract with ANAE and the Regional Forestry Service, CIREF, in which they committed to leaving the reforested area intact for 30 years. The benefits farmers were to obtain for this exchange were not specified in the contract, but were rather postponed for a final contract that would be eventually provided. This never happened. By 2011, when I arrived in Andasibe, the project had ground to a halt due to a series of complications: unclear land tenure; a lack of a legal framework to establish the property status of carbon; government duplicities; a complex and expensive CDM verification process and more. It never resumed. In 2012 the BioCF cancelled the ERPA claiming the project was at an impasse mainly due to the government’s unwillingness to establish a benefit-sharing agreement. In the small village of Mahatsara, home to about 500 people, over 60 men took part in reforestation work and 23 of them gave land to the project. It was in this village that I carried out most of my fieldwork for a period of seven months in 2011 and another six in 2013. During this time, something changed: whereas in 2011, people hopefully awaited the arrival

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of carbon money and the continuation of reforestation work, by 2013 hope had transformed into feelings of having been cheated, and TAMS became widely known as a scam.

3  Understanding Carbon Offsets in Mahatsara Whereas experiences of TAMS as a source of reforestation work were easily accessible, making sense of what ‘carbon’ actually was did not prove that straightforward. Although informative workshops had been carried out in the village according to local organisations, ‘carbon’ meant different things for different people. Thus, some of those with closer ties to the project could provide an account of carbon’s role on the environment, and its links to foreign industrial emissions, even if the role of trees in absorbing or releasing carbon was not too clear. Sylvain1, who had worked for TAMS as head of a tree nursery, explained carbon in 2011 the following way: It [the project] dealt with carbon (carbone) because the price of carbon is very high; outside Madagascar the environment is already damaged due to too much industry and the likes. And those abroad are the ones who provide funding for the carbon and they say that in five years’ time those trees we have planted will have released carbon, although at the moment it looks as if just a little carbon has been obtained because the tree seedlings don’t seem to be growing.

For many of those (men) who had worked in reforestation, or had given land to TAMS, on the other hand, carbon was simply something that was in trees and which ‘those abroad’ were interested in ‘buying’. Its actual properties or origins tended to appear somewhat irrelevant, and carbon was most often conceptualised as the object of the sale for which people would receive payment, generally understood as ‘the price of carbon’. Some people, on the other hand, left carbon unexplained, and rather referred to TAMS’ aim of turning savoka, or fallow land, into forest, as a result of ‘foreigners liking green’. When probed into the actual forms or meaning of carbon, for example, a man who had given half of his land to 1  All informants in this chapter have been anonymised except for the Tangalamena, the village chief. In order to safeguard his position his remarks are only included when explicitly belonging to him and it is essential to note that he never referred to the project himself as a ‘scam’.

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the project claimed he did not know, for it was something that had not yet been experienced, or ‘lived’. Those who had not given land or worked for TAMS, in turn, the majority of women among them, tended to shrug when asked and claimed not to know what the project nor carbon was about. There was an interesting understanding of what carbon credits, crédit carbone, were, however. As we know, credits are the end-product of a forest carbon project and are therefore supposed to flow from the forests of Andasibe to carbon buyers outside Madagascar. In Mahatsara, however, the idea of crédit carbone was equated to that of ‘the price of carbon’, often used interchangeably, and referred to the money farmers hoped to receive in exchange for carbon. In their analysis of the Western Area Peninsula forest carbon project (WAPFoR) in Sierra Leone, Leach and Winnebah (2015) present ideas about carbon, carbon-related money and concomitant elements such as climate change, as ‘difficult-to-fathom’ concepts for those communities involved—even if ‘logical in terms of local experience’. The same may be said of understandings of what carbon was in the context of TAMS in Mahatsara, as shown above. Fathoming what the ‘carbon’ of carbon offsets is in fact no easy task even among those actors involved in its coming about as abstract and exchangeable commodity: it is essential to bear in mind that, while often referred to as ‘carbon sinks’, what forest carbon projects aim to produce is not so much a CO2 absorption—the carbon that is ‘stored’ in trees—but rather its ‘reduction’ or ‘offset’, measured in tonnes of CO2 equivalents (tCO2e). Since an offset can only come about by comparing what is—the amount of carbon present in a carbon sink—to what would have been without the project (what is called the baseline), the verifiability or very existence of offsets has been put into question  (see Lohmann’s 2005, 2010 work on what he terms ‘counterfactuals’ for this perspective). How do we then fathom the elusive carbon offset as natural resource? And how do we access experiences of it, when talking about ‘carbon’ only gets us so far in local landscapes? Accounts of carbon in Mahatsara, as I have briefly shown above, while diverse, do not refer to it as a well-defined commodity and neither as simply something that lies in trees, but rather elaborate on a series of relations established between local people and landscapes and ‘those abroad’. This, I suggest, points to an interesting take in the study of natural resources that treats them less as bounded and well-defined substances and more as the result of the entanglements between people and things that aim to bring them about. In this sense, I

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follow Richardson and Weszkalnys (2014) in their approach to the study of natural resources as ‘relational’ and ‘dispersed’ phenomena, that is, as the outcome of ‘relations, practices and networks’ that bring ‘persons, things and materials’ (Richardson 2014) together. They offer the framework of what they term ‘resource materialities’ as a flexible way of moving beyond the ‘specific chemical and physical properties’ of materials as resources, to rather situate them within ‘assemblages’ composed of humans, non-humans, infrastructures, knowledges, technologies, practices, etc.…that make up resources as ‘distributed things’ (Richardson and Weszkalnys 2014: 8). This approach does not in any way question the importance of substances and materials, but it does argue that natural resources exceed them. This is useful, I believe, in two ways. On the one hand, situating the essence of resources neither ‘exclusively in their biophysical properties nor in webs of socio-cultural meaning’ (Richardson and Weszkalnys 2014), that is, as neither purely cultural nor merely material phenomena, seems more akin to local understandings of carbon offsets in Mahatsara, as argued above, and therefore offers to make sense of them in locally meaningful ways. On the other, it also allows me to access experiences of carbon in the absence of the resource in question without dismissing some of its presences. My aim in the next sections is therefore to explore experiences of carbon offsets by focusing on its ‘resource materialities’: not simply by paying attention to the different meanings that ‘carbon’ had for people in Mahatsara, but rather by emphasising the diverse experiences that resulted from the entanglements between people and things that were established (or not established, as we will see), in order to bring this natural resource into being.

4  Natural Resources and Local Entanglements In this section l turn to an analysis of three key aspects of carbon offset production in Mahatsara: its labour regimes, its infrastructure and its forms of exchange and value production. The first two elements, labour regimes and infrastructure, are analysed by comparison to the long-­ standing and now extinguished graphite industry, revealing questions of temporariness—the fact that carbon offsets did not offer a stable source of work—and detachment—the fact that carbon failed to produce solid entanglements in the landscape. The forms of exchange and value production, in turn, are compared to other cases of failed exchange transactions involving graphite, gold and mercury. Here, I will argue that offsets’

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intangibility and invisibility played an important part in local conceptualisations of TAMS as a scam. 4.1   Labour Regimes: Temporariness in Carbon Offset Production The contemporary job situation in Mahatsara is characterised by a sense of temporariness, consistently compared with the more stable industry of graphite extraction in the past. TAMS as a forest carbon project did not just propose the return of the primary forest or the fallows, but was also— and fundamentally—posed as an initiative that would bring back the permanence of past work experiences. This as we will see, never happened. In April 2013, an important meeting took place in Mahatsara, judging by the exceptional number of men who attended. For about a week, a notice had advertised the gathering, stating that nine men would be recruited as patrol guards for the new Corridor Forestier Analamay-­ Mantadia, CFAM (Analamay-Mantadia Forest Corridor), developed by the nearby mine of Ambatovy in partnership with the Regional Forestry Service, CIREF, and Conservation International. Word had already spread around the village days before the meeting, and excited conversation abounded regarding this new work opportunity and the recruitment process, which would involve a test among selected candidates. On the day, about 50 or so men sat on the ground, intently listening to the event organisers on how the project and recruitment process would work: nine males, from 18 to 45  years, who could read and write in Malagasy and knew the area well would be selected to patrol the new ‘surveillance zones’ under contracts of three to five months for a total period of one year. As the meeting came to an end, the buzz of the previous days died out and was replaced by a bitter-sweet resignation: as it turned out, only four men from the area would actually be taken on, since the nine positions offered were to be shared between the municipalities of Andasibe and Morarano. The first comment made during question time was evocative of this general feeling, as an elderly man from a nearby village stood up and argued that as much as the environment needed protecting, so did people need to make a living. He then requested, in various rhetorical ways, what he qualified as asa maharitra, or long-term work (work that lasts). This comment can be clearly located within a more general discourse in the area which points to the significance of past long-term wage work, unequivocally identified with the now extinct industry of graphite.

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The industry developed in the area shortly after colonisation, in the early 1900s, and went through a series of fluctuations where businesses would close down and reopen years later until the early 2000s, when national production began to decline due to competition from Chinese producers and increasing costs. Two main enterprises developed in the area of Mahatsara, Izouard and Louys. Graphite mining has not only left resilient imprints on the landscape but also on people’s memories and present lives. No man in Mahatsara over 30 years of age will fail to mention their long-time engagement (often for over 20 years) with these two local graphite enterprises. The significance of this source of work seems to draw a large part of its meaning from its contrast with contemporary job opportunities, considered temporary, or ‘on and off’, and unreliable. During one of my walks between villages I came across Da, a middle-aged local man with whom I shared part of the route on our way to Andasibe. He was excited to hear that I was interested in TAMS, and told me he had been one of the team supervisors during the planting work. After asking whether I knew when the carbon credits were coming (they had been waiting for years, he said, and it was rumoured that it was the government who had messed up), he explained that the problem in the area was that work was temporary, that it did not last: as the mines had closed down and TAMS had stopped, everyone had gone back to tavy. The conceptualisation of past work for Izouard or Louys in temporal terms among men in Mahatsara is particularly revealing of its significance as long-lasting and permanent. While it most likely offered a continuous yet intermittent source of work opportunities, it is most often articulated as an uninterrupted period of time significant for its duration. Germain, a local of Mahatsara in his late thirties who complements a small parcel of tavy with local alcohol brewing and gold digging (and who also worked for and gave land to TAMS), explained his work for the mines in the following terms: I worked for Izouard for 22 years, but then unemployment came so it [the job] stopped. I didn’t want to stop working but the graphite business didn’t work well anymore and that’s why it stopped, up till now both Izouard and Louys are still closed.

The importance of wage work in the graphite industry must be understood as a semi-regular source of income which would have secured livelihoods at times, ‘luxury’ items at others, and the possibility to re-invest

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in agriculture at times in which relaxed enforcement allowed it, as it offered the possibility to hire workers in order to expand the area under tavy cultivation (something that today is, however, not affordable). Interestingly, it does not seem to have attracted an unsustainable number of labour migrants—at least not for workers themselves—as it is claimed that during this time everyone (every able male, that is) was employed by either Izouard or Louys. This idea of long-term work finds a clear contrast with the current labour markets available to those young males who are just coming of age and beginning to search for work in Mahatsara. Here, most of the available positions in hotels, the nearby mine of Ambatovy or the National park (with tasks such as road repairs before the tourist season begins) are temporary and seasonal. We can thus begin to see that the situation and experience of men’s wage work in Mahatsara have radically changed over the last decades. Where the previous generations enjoyed a large and steady source of job opportunities, today’s generation is characterised by precarious work: temporary and insufficient. In general, it means that families in Mahatsara can only rely on the small tavy parcels they hold and other small-scale economic strategies, such as gold digging, for as long as they last (usually a few months). Wage work, on the other hand, has become a complementary yet unpredictable activity. At the intersection of these two forms of work experience we find TAMS: the project was presented to people in Mahatsara as an opportunity for well-paid, long-term work, and thus as a remedy to the precarious contemporary situation. In its initial stage (2006–7), TAMS employed 60 men through the organisation SAF-FJKM (the Protestant Church’s branch for development in Madagascar) to reforest 140 hectares of land inside the National Park. Workers were arranged into groups of ten and were each supervised by an appointed local team manager or ‘chef d’équipe’ and a ‘technicien’ from SAF. As a CI operative liked to boast, TAMS offered some of the highest wages in the area and was thus highly regarded by workers, who indeed often acknowledged how well work for TAMS was paid. At a later stage, around 2009, when more land was needed, 23 men gave part of their land to the project to reforest 40 hectares. They gave between 1/2 and 3 hectares each, depending on how much they had or were willing to give, on the promise that they would receive carbon money within the following five years and, most of them claim, work. The promise of work is a disputed element in TAMS. Most farmers, for example, claim that the only way of accessing this second stage of work

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was by giving land, although this is contradicted by official TAMS sources. Others claim that they were told work would last for the whole 30 years of the project’s lifespan, and that its wealth—as a source of money and work—would be passed on to their children. In turn, a report on TAMS by Holloway dated June 2007 hinges on this aspect, as it is claimed that ‘Conditions upon which people are prepared to negotiate transfer of carbon rights almost unanimously include: … secure employment to restore and protect the natural forest for the 30 year duration of the project’. On the contrary, the document ‘REDD, A casebook of on-the-ground experiences’ produced by TNC, WCS and CI in 2010 and which features TAMS as case study for ‘Involving and Benefitting Local Communities and Indigenous Peoples’ states that the majority of jobs created are expected to be temporary, occurring in the first 9 to 12 years of the project, though some employment related to ongoing maintenance and monitoring will be supported throughout the life of the project, along with employment related to sustainable livelihoods. (2010: 45)

Although the Regional Director of SAF-FJKM claimed that work had lasted for a total of three years—21 months of reforestation and 12 months of maintenance—this did certainly not translate into a permanent source of work for men in Mahatsara, who generally claim to have worked for TAMS for intermittent short periods over the course of those three years, sometimes totalling only five months of work on the whole. During the second stage of reforestation, and in the absence of an official agreement with the Government of Madagascar on the exact terms of land and benefit provision, a ‘temporary contract’ was signed in 2009 between farmers, ANAE as project manager and the Regional Forestry Service, CIREF, at the request of the BioCarbon Fund. This document stated that land was being ‘offered’ to the project for a 30-year period during which farmers committed to leaving the reforested area intact. In return, it was claimed, a final contract would be signed stating the actual benefits that they would receive. This, however, never happened, nor was there any clear understanding within TAMS organisational structure on how the hereditability of jobs or land would work out during this long period of time. The validity of the contracts once TAMS had ended also became a disputed element within TAMS’ different organisations at later stages. When interviewed on this matter in 2013, CI, for example, claimed

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that these contracts were still in place, whereas ANAE acknowledged that without the delivery of TAMS’ promises and with the apparent liquidation of the project, it did not make sense to ask farmers to stick to them. In any case, as the second stage of reforestation came to an end, promises of permanent work evaporated as TAMS began to break down and funding was intermittently cut. The importance of promises of long-term work in TAMS, at least in Mahatsara, cannot be overstated. In an area where the only stable source of wealth in the present—the expansion of arable land for tavy—risked unaffordable fines or prison, and where no realisable alternatives, such as wage work, had been available since the mines closed, for men to have given half their land for a conservation/development project must have taken some very convincing arguments. We can thus begin to see the significance of the call for asa maharitra, or ‘work that lasts’, in the CFAM meeting: it responds to past experiences of permanent, productive work and contemporary feelings of precariousness (both temporal and limited in numbers) in the area. 4.2   Infrastructure and Detachment The idea of permanence associated with Izouard is not only relevant in terms of long-term work, but also in the ways that the industry became entangled with local lives and landscapes in socially meaningful ways, as a result of the infrastructure that the extraction and transformation of graphite in Mahatsara required. This contrasts with the detached character of carbon offset production, as I show below. The extraction of graphite involved the opening of mine-pits in the forest; the establishment of ‘toby’ or camps in those locales where whole villages were set up; the construction of a road which did not only facilitate the transportation of ore but which also became a central element in social lives as it connected people to each other and to Andasibe (the road, in fact, is still today known as ‘Izouard’s road’); it involved the establishment of a mining plant in the nearby village of Falierana which required a constant workforce that settled in its vicinity and the construction of Izouard’s own home by the plant, presumably to supervise operations. All of Izouard’s activities, in turn, did not just settle on a vacuum, but rather on a landscape that had already been dwelt in (Ingold 2000)—lived, worked and died in. Many tombs today are still located inside Izouard’s land, the main difference with those inside the national park being that the former

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do not seem to need any type of authorisation to be visited in funerary rites. Maybe unknowingly, Izouard’s presence extended to ancestral matters, as when he took charge of the fines that people were subject to if caught doing tavy illegally (this, of course, need not be seen as an altruistic act, but as one geared towards sustaining a much-needed workforce). His comings and goings along the road that connected the mining plant to the forest camps, and his involvement in extraction operations, led to his entanglement in social relations with his workers, such as lunch or dinner, as the Tangalamena (village chief) recounted, changing from the appellation ‘Izouard’ to that of ‘Jean Claude’. In sum, then, graphite mining did not just extract ore from underground, but also forged a series of socialities in those landscapes that brought graphite into being. Also, by cultivating a life and a line of descent locally, and thus setting roots in the landscape, Izouard came to be seen as sharing particular attributes with local populations—this being one of the key ways of understanding attachment to land and origins among people in Madagascar (Bloch 1971; Feeley-Harnik 1991). The story with TAMS is very different. What is left of it in the landscape are a few rusty signs and some indistinguishable trees. This, of course, does not mean that they are insignificant: they are the unwelcome remnants of something that is seen as unproductive—and yet remain in place because of people’s fear of clearing the land. But it does attest to the lack of local attachment that the production of carbon credits entailed in this case. As I have explained above, people were employed by SAF-FJKM, an organisation that has an office about 15 kilometres from Mahatsara, which is, however, rarely used, its closest headquarters being in the regional capital of Moramanga. I never experienced SAF-FJKM’s presence in Mahatsara and only ANAE, with a small local office in Andasibe and its general headquarters in Antananarivo, visited the village, twice during my stay. CI and the rest of the national actors are located in Antananarivo. Foreign funders, in turn, known in Mahatsara as the ‘mpamatsy vola’, and as TAMS’ key actors, remain hugely diffuse and invisible (I will come back to this below). I sometimes heard rumours of ‘them’ coming to Mahatsara but they never appeared. In fact, in the absence of a solid organisational structure with local presence, rumour was often the sole channel through which knowledge about TAMS travelled, knowledge that in most cases was proved wrong. We have therefore seen how the extraction/production of graphite and carbon offsets was based on very different types of entanglements between

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people and things in Mahatsara, translating into highly diverse experiences. If the graphite industry entailed a stable and permanent workforce and a solid attachment to local landscapes and lives through extractive practices and infrastructures, carbon offsets in TAMS remained socially detached through erratic work patterns, a diffuse and mercurial range of actors and a lack of accessibility. This contrast is in fact similar to what Ferguson (2006) has termed ‘socially thick’ and ‘thin’ projects in his analysis of past copper extraction in Zambia and current oil production in Angola. In the case of these two resources, he argues, the former was based on the ‘national development state model’, and entailed the construction of vast ‘company towns’ for some 100,000 workers that incorporated social development projects like schooling, hospitals and even ‘recreational amenities’ like movie theatres (2006). By contrast, contemporary ‘offshore’ oil production in Angola, Ferguson claims, is much more ‘clean’ in the sense that neither production nor oil wealth partakes in the wider social context, making it ‘socially thin’ (see also Appel 2012). By attending to the labour regimes and infrastructures that TAMS set in place in Mahatsara, we can already get an insight into the type of volatility that carbon offsets as natural resource brought to Mahatsara: temporary and erratic and carried out by diffuse and unlocatable actors without solid local attachments. TAMS began as a project that explicitly appealed to a future of permanence, somehow a return to past working lives. During its short life, however, it transformed into its very opposite, as the unfulfilled promise of work coupled with that of undelivered carbon money. As TAMS came to a premature end it became known as a scam, fitaka. In the following section I will argue that the notion of scam points to a fundamental property of offsets as natural resource: their invisibility. This, coupled with unclear forms of exchange and value production led to doubting the existence of carbon itself. I will explore such feelings of deceit and their relation to carbon’s (im)materiality as natural resource, by comparing them to three other cases of failed exchange transactions relating to natural resources: graphite, gold and mercury. 4.3   Exchange and Value Production: Seeing a Scam Instead of Carbon They told us to give land and they said: this land you will plant with tree seedlings and you will work for 30 years so that you don’t have to come and go around looking for work, although after planting them we haven’t been

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employed even once during this year, and we are baffled … have they deceived the population or is there really that carbon?; that carbon we still haven’t seen up to now though.

This is how Dadan’i Lala summed up his experience of taking part in TAMS. During my first stay in Mahatsara in 2011, people awaited the carbon credits/money in the hope that they would eventually arrive. Word was that there had been problems with either the government, or, most generally, the funders, mpamatsy vola, but when I asked whether the project had ended or was at a halt, I usually got the same hopeful answer that it had been stopped temporarily but the money for the carbon would eventually arrive: ‘the carbon credits will come’, ‘it [TAMS] has stopped but it will continue’. At the beginning of 2012, however, some people were already beginning to question whether everything had actually been a scam. Faly, a local smith who had worked in the initial planting stages but had not given any land away (maybe that is why he need not hold on to hope) and his wife Hanta put it this way: What they were giving us in exchange was this: if you give land, you will work with us, we will get you work so you won’t have to struggle (Hanta: scam), that’s what they said … That’s how they tricked us, but all that stuff, all that money, is missing.

In 2013, however, this feeling had become the general rule in the village, and the most common word associated with TAMS when I enquired was consistently that of scam or deceit, ‘fitaka’ ‘mamitaka nataon-jareo’. After years of patiently waiting, and with no signs of TAMS coming from anywhere, people felt that the whole project had been a scam and they had been cheated into giving their land. The problem, of course, was that while knowing that TAMS had ended and would not provide any benefits, people were scared, matahotra, to clear the land, because of the contracts they had signed when the project began. When asked what they would do, no one had a consistent answer, and at best they acknowledged in laughter that they would eventually have to clear the land, and, shaking their heads, would call out the word scam, fitaka. It could be argued that feelings of having been cheated resulted from a failed exchange transaction due to one side’s default. Although the wording of the contract signed with ANAE and CIREF stated that the land subject to TAMS was being offered, manolotra, farmers’ own narratives

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constantly highlighted a notion of exchange. Indeed, although the most common word employed by farmers when referring to this transaction was that of giving, manome, land, it unequivocally involved an element in return, whether work or carbon credits/money, or both. As we saw above, carbon was most often articulated either as the ‘price of carbon’ or as the ‘carbon credits’ that farmers were owed by the project. The notion of ‘scam’ or deceit does not simply emerge from an economic rationality, however, but points to a particular ‘morality of exchange’ (Parry and Bloch 1989, see also Appel 2012), where it is perceived that the failure to fulfil one’s obligations was intentional and done in bad faith—that is, that one of the parties never intended to settle the debt (Graeber 2011). I suggest, however, that the idea of fitaka, or deceit/scam, in this case does not derive its meaning solely from a notion of intended (and thus illicit) default, but also, and importantly, attends to the particular (im)materiality of carbon offsets, as a result of social detachment and invisibility. Three other failed or illicit exchange examples that in turn relate to particular substances or resources—graphite, gold and mercury—will help me elaborate on this. In 2011 money that Izouard owed people disappeared. As it turned out, men—or their families if already deceased—in Mahatsara were to receive their pension money from a lifetime of social security payments they had made to the national scheme, CNAPS, through their work for the mines. The Tangalamena, for example, had contributed for 43 years, until 2009, and Rakoto, who owns one of the two shops in Mahatsara, for 20. The money—around 18 million ariary in total (circa £5000)—however, had not arrived and there was general speculation that it had disappeared into the pockets of a locally based middleman. Being the leader not just for ancestral matters, but also for administrative ones, the Tangalamena travelled to the provincial capital of Toamasina in various occasions as village representative during the following months, as he took the case to court. Every time he came back from a trip to Toamasina and narrated the (slow) development of the case to everyone else he would appeal to their legal ‘right’ to the money, or zo—a concept that also denotes honour and dignity (Althabe 1969: 304), and which I explore below. Soon before I left the field, it seemed that the case had finally been settled, as news arrived that the money had finally been released and could be collected in Antananarivo. What is particular about this case is that it was never conceptualised as a scam. Although I only heard the Tangalamena appeal to this notion of zo, the approach generally taken—that of delegating the

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Tangalamena to solve it through legal means—already points to an important difference with the case of TAMS. I will come back to this below. Another case characterised by trickery but not conceptualised as a scam was one related to the surge of gold digging in 2012–13. Although small co-operatives of villagers tended to be formed for extraction, the tiny gold grains obtained were sold individually to particular ‘buyers’, mpividy, who came to digging sites or were based in Andasibe. The problem, however, was that these men ‘stole’, nangalatra, from villagers because the scales buyers used to weigh the gold were tampered. Again, an incident that a priori could have been understood as a form of ‘deceit’ was seen otherwise, this time as outright theft. Before elaborating on this, I present a final example, one that was indeed conceptualised as a scam or fitaka. It is a story I was repeatedly told in Mahatsara, and it concerns a mysterious character, the ‘Rasta’. This man had apparently appeared in the village claiming that there was mercury in the rivers and land, which could become a great source of wealth for those who were willing to invest. He had tricked people into giving him money, promising to double it, and had then disappeared, leaving no trace. Part of the ‘Rasta’s’ trickery, it is claimed, involved a pair of ‘x-ray glasses’ and other mysterious devices through which he claimed could locate the mercury. The similarities between this final example and TAMS are particularly revealing of the kind of aspects that make certain incidents be seen as scams, and not others. I suggest that, at least in this case, deceit points to notions of invisibility/intangibility, social distance and obscure forms of exchange and value production, and, therefore, to the particular ‘elusiveness’ (see also Onneweer 2014) of both carbon and mercury. These two resources in fact share some important elements in the way they were understood in Mahatsara. Just like the various organisations, big and small, which had arrived in Mahatsara claiming to see such great potential on the land through a resource that was both hitherto unknown and unlocatable, so had the ‘Rasta’ appealed to an invisible source of wealth that he alone could detect. It could be argued, in fact, that carbon and mercury, as invisible and intangible substances of great potential, shared some important elements with Malagasy understandings of potency/generativity encompassed in the notion of hasina (Feeley-Harnik 1991; Graeber 2007) and its embodiment in spirits and charms. According to David Graeber, hasina, or the (invisible) ‘possibility for creativity, action, or growth’ is embodied in spirits that are, in turn, ‘invisible, formless, nameless, incorporeal’

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(2007: 36). This invisibility seems to be, in fact, a key feature of hasina when contained in the specific objects or ingredients of charms, because, in Graeber’s view of this ritual logic, ‘it was the fact that the ingredients of charms were hidden from sight that gave them their capacity for action’ (Graeber 2007: 37). Invisibility and intangibility, then, might have played an important role in generating these substances’ potential in  local imaginaries—a potential that, unlike hasina, however, had to be channelled through extra-local actors and one that, ultimately, was never realised. In turn, just like the Rasta, who had come and gone out of nowhere and was impossible to track down, so did TAMS lack a cohesive presence in Mahatsara, attending more to rumour and the capricious agency of its distant actors. There is, in fact, an interesting parallel between the social distance of the Rasta and that of TAMS and its structural organisation as understood in Mahatsara. It is surprising, for example, that the ethnicity of the Rasta was never mentioned—one of the most straightforward ways that Malagasy people use to categorise each other. Instead, he remained a (nameless) ‘Rasta’, a somewhat peculiar and rare type of person that departs from the norm and hence marks a certain distance from Malagasy sociality/normality. In a similar way, agency in TAMS among farmers’ narratives always seemed to be located at a distance: the arrival of work or carbon credits, or the very continuation of TAMS itself, always depended on either the government, (in a moment of transition and high volatility), or most notably, on the elusive concept of the foreign funder, or mpamatsy vola. This concept was widely employed by people in Mahatsara when commenting on the interruptions and rumours regarding the arrival of carbon money. Like the ‘Rasta’, it lacked a specific social location, and was removed from the immediate, even national, landscape. Taken together, I suggest that these examples—all of them relating to illicit or failed forms of transactions of particular substances or resources— provide important clues as to why only some came to be identified as scams, and the reasons this relates to carbon’s materiality as natural resource, as I detail below. Questions of social distance and detachment, for example, were not present in the case of Izouard and the missing pension money. The ‘resource materiality’ (Richardson and Weszkalnys 2014) of graphite meant that it remained significantly entangled with the local context, and it was thus that the Tangalamena could recourse to legal means—through action in Andasibe, Antananarivo and Toamasina—to recover the money

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that was rightfully theirs, their zo. In his discussion on credit and debt, Graeber (2011: 337) points out that, historically, while credit among communities was largely based on trust, as it spread to strangers it often led to scams, a fact that highlights the connections between scams and distance: surely, the impossibility to track down an outside debtor must have played in favour of this type of intended deceit. But the notion of zo employed by the Tangalamena also offers an interesting insight into the social relations of exchange through which this particular situation was framed. Gérard Althabe (1969) has argued that zo for east-coast Betsimisaraka refers to a person’s honour or dignity, and is an inalienable element attached to the human condition. While inalienable, zo can nonetheless fluctuate in a quantitative manner, and is especially employed in situations of wage work or servitude, where ‘every subordination, everything that marks a condition of servitude, entails a deterioration of zo’ (1969: 303). Zo is in fact a ‘permanent reminder’ of a community that has been born out of its equal distribution, and every act that puts into question another person’s zo, Althabe argues, means to forget such community, and destabilise equality. Part of its meaning thus derives from questions of reciprocity (1969: 302), as when an appeal to one’s own zo is employed to establish some form of ‘dialogue’ or social relation where reciprocity is seen to have been disrupted (as in the case of coloniser-­ colonised). We can see how this notion of zo would fit in with the case of the missing pension money, as the reciprocity of employer-employee as a form of exchange had been fractured. An appeal to the money as zo may therefore be seen as an attempt to restore this imbalance, and at the same time, as a call for, and reminder of, a common or shared form of sociality between workers and Izouard. The case of the tampered scales in gold sales, on the other hand, may or may not have been socially detached (it seems that the buyers were from Andasibe) but there might have been other buyers from the regional or national capital. In this case, I suggest, it was the tangibility and visibility of gold, extracted and manipulated by villagers themselves, and the immediacy of the transaction, that favoured an understanding of theft over that of scam. By contrast, both carbon and mercury only existed as potential, yet elusive and invisible, resources that never materialised and which could only be accessed through dubious actors and hitherto unknown processes of exchange. It is in fact not difficult to see how, in the context of TAMS, the notion of mpamatsy vola—literally money provider—might have

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appealed to a sort of invisible capacity to create value out of nowhere (or at least from an unknowable source), a feature that can be evocative of trickery in Madagascar and elsewhere (Alexander 2004, Bloch 1971: 31). We can therefore see how the notion of scam was thus not just related to a failed exchange transaction, but also attended to questions of invisibility, intangibility, a dislocation from the local context and obscure forms of value production.

5  Conclusion In this chapter I have tried to make sense of the way carbon offsets were experienced by people involved in their production as I attended to the diverse relationships that were established in Mahatsara in order to bring this novel resource into being. Widening the scope of analysis and engaging with an understanding of natural resources that spans beyond the substance or object, has led me to an analysis of the types of labour regimes, infrastructures and forms of exchange and value production that this natural resource entailed. Taken together, these have pointed to a sense of volatility through notions of temporariness, social distance and invisibility, revealing carbon offsets as an elusive and hard-to-fathom resource with nonetheless very solid impacts in local landscapes. Interestingly, the chapter by Sodikoff in this collection, which explores the production of biodiversity offsets by a mining enterprise in these very same landscapes, also brings out questions of ambiguity and fuzziness. The biodiversity offset, and the idea of ‘net gains’ on which it rests, appear in this case as elements that are hard to define and quantify, subject to temporal uncertainties and to the inability to integrate aspects that escape metrics. Efforts to produce biodiversity offsets in contained spaces, as Genese Sodikoff shows, are problematic and can in fact pose health risks to the species they aim to protect. For the moment, then, it can be argued that offsets have failed to take root in these landscapes and create tangible benefits for both human and non-human populations. I finally return to the initial question posed by Leach and Scoones (2015: 2) regarding the ‘difference’ that carbon offsets ‘make’ to people with long histories of intervention and resource extraction. It is essential to note that the volatility that I have shown to characterise people’s experiences of carbon offset production in Mahatsara also defines the political possibilities that this resource affords (see also Mitchell 2011). The

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unstable and elusive entanglements established to bring offsets into being thus also determined the specific possibilities for action available to people. If, in the case of the missing pension money, the Tangalamena was able to resort to legal means and recover it, making claims against TAMS’ distant and often unknown actors, on the other hand, proved much more difficult. This does not mean that TAMS was impervious to local political action. I was told by ANAE’s Director that during reforestation work, for example, as people’s grudges increased due to a delay in payments, the work rhythms began to slow down and planting was done incorrectly in ‘bad faith’, in order to damage tree seedlings. Similarly, the one time a World Bank representative made it to Andasibe, he encountered a crowd of ‘angry peasants carrying knifes’ demanding their money. Either through ‘silent resistance’ (Scott 1985) or in very rare occasions, TAMS workers were able to assert a certain political agency, yet it remained—like offsets themselves—quite diffused.

References Alexander, Catherine. 2004. Values, Relations and Changing Bodies: Industrial Privatisation in Kazakhstan. In Property in Question: Value Transformation in the Global Economy, ed. Katherine Verdery and Caroline Humphrey. Oxford: Berg. Althabe, Gérard. 1969. Oppression et libération dans l’imaginaire, les communautés villageoises le la côte orientale de Madagascar. Paris: F. Maspero. Appel, Hannah. 2012. Offshore Work: Oil, Modularity, and the How of Capitalism in Equatorial Guinea. American Ethnologist 39 (4): 692–709. Bloch, Maurice. 1971. Placing the Dead: Tombs, Ancestral Villages and Kinship Organization in Madagascar. London: Seminar Press Ltd. Dolch, Rainer, Tina Vahanen, François Busson, Christopher Holmes, and Hantaniaina Rabesandratana. 2009. REDD Madagascar Interview. Madagascar Conservation and Development 4 (2): 1. Feeley-Harnik, Gillian. 1991. A Green Estate: Restoring Independence in Madagascar. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press. Ferguson, James. 2006. Global Shadows: Africa in the Neoliberal World Order. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Graeber, David. 2007. Lost People Magic and the Legacy of Slavery in Madagascar. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. ———. 2011. Debt: The First 5,000 Years. Brooklyn, NY: Melville House. Ingold, Tim. 2000. The Perception of the Environment: Essays on Livelihood, Dwelling and Skill. London: Routledge.

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Keller, Eva. 2015. Beyond the Lens of Conservation: Malagasy and Swiss Imaginations of One Another. New York: Berghahn Books. Leach, Melissa, and Ian Scoones, eds. 2015. Carbon Conflicts and Forest Landscapes in Africa. London: Routledge. Leach, Melissa, and Thomas Winnebah. 2015. Old Reserve-New Carbon Interests: The Case of the Western Area Peninsular Forest (WAPFor), Sierra Leone. In Carbon Conflicts and Forest Landscapes in Africa, ed. Melissa Leach and Ian Scoones. London: Routledge. Lohmann, Larry. 2005. Marketing and Making Carbon Dumps: Commodification, Calculation and Counterfactuals in Climate Change Mitigation. Science as Culture 14 (3): 203–235. ———. 2010. Uncertainty Markets and Carbon Markets: Variations on Polanyian Themes. New Political Economy 15 (2): 225–254. Mitchell, Timothy. 2011. Carbon Democracy: Political Power in the Age of Oil. London: Verso. Onneweer, Maarten. 2014. Rumors of Red Mercury: Histories of Materiality and Sociality in the Resources of Kitui, Kenya. Anthropological Quarterly 87 (1): 93–118. Parry, Jonathan P., and Maurice Bloch. 1989. Money and the Morality of Exchange. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Richardson, Tanya. 2014. The Politics of Multiplication in a Failed Soviet Irrigation Project, Or, How Sasyk Has Been Kept from the Sea. Ethnos: Journal of Anthropology 81: 1–27. Richardson, Tanya, and Gisa Weszkalnys. 2014. Resource Materialities. Anthropological Quarterly 87 (1): 5–30. Scott, James C. 1985. Weapons of the Weak Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance. New Haven: Yale University Press. The Nature Conservancy, Conservation International, and Wildlife Conservation Society. 2010. Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation (REDD): A Casebook of On-the-Ground Experience. Virginia: Arlington.

The Emptiness of the Nature-Culture Dichotomy: Perceptions of Reef Fisheries and the Will to Improve Well-Being Among the Vezo Frank Muttenzer

1   Introduction It has long been noted by anthropologists that certain ethnic categories in southwest Madagascar reflect people’s dependence on ecological niches for their livelihoods, such as subsistence by coral reef foraging and fishing among the Vezo, forest gathering among the Mikea, and agro-pastoralism among the Masikoro or Mahafale (Iida 2005; Koechlin 1975; Tucker et al. 2010). For them to say that it is their marine way of life that “makes Vezo people Vezo” is not to deny the constitutive role of rituals, some of which are specifically associated with fishing, whereas others are concerned

F. Muttenzer (*) Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology, University of Lucerne, Lucerne, Switzerland © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 F. Muttenzer et al. (eds.), Perceptions and Representations of the Malagasy Environment Across Cultures, Palgrave Series in Indian Ocean World Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-23836-9_6

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with descent.1 However, it is true that Vezo narratives portray ethnic identity as unrelated to descent (Astuti 1995), suggesting instead that Vezo-­ ness (the concept of “being Vezo”) is a matter of learning how to fish and forage coral reefs. The focus on empirical cognition and technical skills stands in contrast with the ritual-mindedness of other Malagasy rural populations with regard to land and livelihood, and this contrast is one reason why ritual has not loomed large in anthropological studies of Vezo fishing and human-environment relations (but see Koechlin 1975; Muttenzer 2020; Tucker et al. 2015). Yet, the Vezo do seem to accept the general Malagasy concept of fertility and creation in assuming that “the resources people need to keep themselves alive exist a priori in an ever present and ever abundant container—the sea” (Astuti 1995: 48). The perception of the ocean as an inexhaustible resource container does not necessarily add up with other ideas the Vezo hold about the environment.2 They also say that fish in the ocean are scarce and that they are scarcer today than they were 10, 20, or 30 years ago. Given their knowledge of resource depletion, how can they, at the same time, be confident that the ocean is a “giving environment” (Bird-David 1990)? If one takes seriously the people making these statements, what is one supposed to do with the claim that the ocean is an inexhaustible container of fish? There are three possibilities. The first is to conclude that the statement is mistaken, and speakers are mistaken in believing it or in having confidence in its truth. The second possibility is to conclude that this idea is metaphorical and that the speakers are not expressing an opinion about the ocean but are instead expressing a wish or enacting a desire by making such statements. The third is to conclude that people of different cultures actually live in different worlds consistent with their cosmologies. Option three seems extravagant but is the most interesting.3 It says that in the Vezo’s world, the ocean is an inexhaustible 1  The two kinds of rituals are related as follows: rituals defining descent establish criteria of membership in a group called Vezo. Normative expectations as to what constitutes the best way of life for Vezo people apply only to Vezo group members. That is, the question of group membership has to be settled before the question can be raised for how to reproduce a fisher ethos by means of learning fishing skills and the practice of rituals specifically associated with the marine way of life of group members. 2  I heard these kinds of statements made by Vezo fishers on countless occasions, but the question is whether the speakers mean the statement literally. 3  “Actually different worlds” here refers neither to different physical worlds (which would be extravagant) nor to different cognised worlds (which would be trivial, because cognised worlds differ even between individuals), but to different cognisable worlds, in other words, different conceptualisations of the same physical world (see Sperber 1982).

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resource container that warrants their having confidence in the sustainability of the marine way of life. The giving environment (Bird-David 1990), then, is not merely a concept or “cultural representation” but the actual object fishing people interact with daily. In this chapter, I will try to apply an “enactivist” theoretical approach to Vezo perceptions of the changing physical environment in the context of fishing, ritual, and marine conservation projects. My argument is that the object the Vezo perceive as inexhaustible is the ocean itself, not a mental representation of the ocean. There is a difference between falsely predicating a property of a real object, on the one hand, and representing an imaginary object on the other. Since I am less interested in imaginary inner objects (cognised models, cognitive scripts, schemata, and so on) than in what people do with the real objects of perception and thought, or what Keane (2018) calls the “anthropologically real,” I propose to frame the description of human-environment relations in terms of “environmental affordances”: objective features that only exist relative to properties of some other perceiving and acting entity (Gibson 1968). According to James Gibson (1968: 127): The composition and layout of surfaces constitute what they afford. If so, to perceive them is to perceive what they afford. This is a radical hypothesis, for it implies that the ‘values’ and ‘meanings’ of things in the environment can be directly perceived. Moreover, it would explain the sense in which values and meanings are external to the perceiver.4

Applied to the Vezo case, this hypothesis necessitates that being perceived as an inexhaustible resource is but one of several environmental affordances of coral reef fishing. Just as the reef fishery may, under certain circumstances, be perceived as a giving environment (Bird-David 1990), it

4  Saying (as Gibson does) that values can be directly perceived and are external to the perceiver does not contradict the idea that values are ultimately subjective. It is me who attaches subjective value to my bank account. But if the account is empty and I have no way of accessing food tomorrow, then the lack of functionality of the account’s value for my being able to eat is as objective as an objective fact can be. Likewise, a watch that tells the time correctly is objectively a good watch regardless of whether I care about the correct time. So what the argument for affordances shows us is that the functionality of certain cognisable environments or ecological niches for certain ways of life are made possible by those cognisable niches.

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also affords being perceived as an ecosystem if the circumstances change. For example, under new marine protected area regulations, Vezo villages are now accountable for managing the local octopus fishery with temporal closures. Does local participation in fishery closures manifest the fishers’ intentions to improve  their well-being  by consciously  managing ecosystems? Some individuals in a village may have personal motives in signalling interest in conservation projects, such as client relations with NGO or government officials, none of which are directly related to resource management. Nevertheless, Vezo individuals must also have a general conception of well-being related to their way of life as fishing people. Reef areas are jointly owned but used individually by village residents. The reef’s surface is divided by named sections, but accessible to any potential user. Villagers and people from nearby villages harvest the different sections of a given village’s reef territory. To cope with the economic impacts of resource depletion, users of the commons avoid enclosures caused by conservationist access restrictions, migrate to distant resource-rich marine frontiers, target fast-growing species, and perform rituals that purport to affect their luck in fishing and marine foraging. At the same time, they question and doubt conservationists’ opinions that coral reef ecosystems can and ought to be managed for sustainable yield. Following Gibson (1968: 140): The perceiving of an affordance is not a process of perceiving a value-free physical object to which meaning is somehow added in a way that no one has been able to agree upon; it is a process of perceiving a value-rich ecological object. Any substance, any surface, any layout has some affordance for benefit or injury to someone. Physics may be value-free, but ecology is not.5

In line with this argument, conflicts over resource access can be interpreted as ethical disagreements about the desirability of actions afforded by one kind of perceived environment but not afforded by a different

5  Although physical worlds cannot be different simply by virtue of looking at them, the shape of human ecosystems may vary depending on agents’ cognisable worlds. Ecological niches differ  physically depending on how different groups of people conceptualise and materially construct human-environment relations.

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one.6 Perceived ecosystems make it possible for people to manage the ­fishery, which would be meaningless if the reef fishery were perceived as an inexhaustible giving environment. Confidence in a giving environment, on the other hand, makes it possible for fishers to propitiate sea spirits, which would be pointless if the reef fishery were perceived as an ecosystem instead.7 Perceptual experiences have satisfaction conditions (mental contents) that are satisfied by actual objects (Searle 2015). If the mental content was not satisfied by a real object, the perceptual experience would be an illusion or hallucination. For direct realists,8 what the brain infers from sensations is not an internal mental representation but a mind-­independent external object. The perceiving of this object is what a perceptual  Is what I say here inconsistent with the fact that “whether one can afford infinite fishing depends on resource availability, not on perceived availability?” I am simply saying that whether ecosystem management is desirable in the eyes of Vezo people depends on how they conceptualise resource availability. If they are aware of species depletion but know that the depleted species can be replaced for market purposes with a species that is still more abundant, then they need not think that ecosystem management is desirable. The fact that we judge it more desirable to manage the fishery for the sake of future generations does not mean that they cannot judge it more appropriate to deplete it. What happens once the fishery is depleted is a different question that they are not yet interested in. 7  Swidden farmers perform rituals to improve the harvest even though they know ecology, soil fertility, and rainfall to also determine the harvest. That is, they think spirits can determine rainfall, which is not a contradiction with the idea that ecology matters and that they live in an ecosystem (Jacques Pollini, personal communication). The pointlessness of rituals means rather that if people had a complete causal account of ecological processes, postulating the idea of spirits or God as having agency and affecting ecological outcomes would be unnecessary. Of course, they might continue to practise religious rituals even after having adopted ecological science as the correct worldview. But typically, when there is a straightforward technological solution for a problem like soil fertility or irrigation, people stop invoking supernatural agents to solve that particular problem. 8  The direct realist view that we perceive external objects themselves and not pictures of external objects drops the Kantian distinction between phenomena and the thing in itself. Put another way, the claim is that people cognise things as they are (in themselves), although they may make mistakes and predicate properties that the thing in question does not have. For example, people may say the actual ocean is inexhaustible or valuable as a source of well-­ being, when in fact the ocean does not have those properties if cognised from within a different conceptual framework. A different question is whether alternative conceptual frameworks can be ranked in such a way that one cognisable world (say, the ecosystem) is preferable to its rivals (say, the giving environment). It makes no sense to argue that biophysical science of ecosystems is truer than (and hence preferable to) a historical science of the human environment because ecology gives us a “more accurate representation of reality” than history or anthropology. Such rankings can only be established from within the conceptual framework that one assumes to be better equipped to answer the question at hand. In the face of coral reef degradation, conservationists think marine science is a better conceptual framework than spirit possession to manage fisheries. The Vezo scheme of thought differs from the conservationists’ mental scheme on precisely this issue. 6

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experience consists of when it is caused by the object of perception. If experiences were not caused by actual objects, nature would be unknowable because we would be left with only cultural representations. By contrast, if the perceived object is identical to the actual object, then the object of our cultural representations, if they are true, must be identical with actual nature. Similarly, given that the “essentialist concept of nature”9 is but one cultural representation of nature among many possible ones, it is not a credible benchmark for measuring worldviews or ethical stances. The chapter is organised as follows: the following section presents the enactivist theory of perception and contrasts it with the representationalist alternative presupposed by nature-culture dualism. The next section describes the main economic responses to environmental change in the coral reef fishery. I will then apply the enactivist theory to an ecological explanation of the fisher ethos and show that the environment has a range of affordances, some of which are specific to the Vezo conception of well-­ being, while more basic ones are not. A comparison of niche construction by animals and humans suggests that there is no contradiction involved in saying that the same physical objects may be part of several ecological niches that afford distinct possibilities of action.10 The last section argues that an enactivist theory of perception supports metaethical relativism, which says that “the truth conditions of a moral judgment depend on the context in which that judgment is formed” (Prinz 2007: 174). There is not a single true morality or set of criteria for deciding what constitutes

 Pollini (2017) defines this concept as follows: “Nature is the essence of all things and cannot be socially constructed, by definition. Only representations of it can be socially constructed. The most influential of these representations today is a system of intelligible processes that humans produce through the activity they call science. This system matches to some extent with things or phenomena that exist, because there is indeed an intelligible “world” out there. But this “world” is only a subset of the world. It is defined by a series of features which are mere human representations, some of them true, some of them false. This is why it must not be called Nature.” 10  From an ecological perspective, an ecological niche (or set of environmental affordances) is defined as the requirement of an organism. Thus, each organism has one niche. But that niche can be flexible, meaning that a range of different conditions can apply to the definition of the niche of that organism. As well, the niche is not a constant state, since the organism that lives in it modifies it. 9

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well-being among reef fishers.11 Accordingly, the chapter concludes that disputes between incommensurable worldviews cannot be settled simply by producing new scientific facts about nature; the answer to the question of whether conservation policy can improve Vezo fisheries and livelihood depends on the cognisable features of the world of those who make these assessments.

2  Two Theories of Perception: A Critique of the Nature-Culture Dichotomy Enactivism about cognition (also known as ecological psychology) holds that perception is embodied and that it is a form of action. We perceive other bodies when we touch their surfaces and explore them with our hands, and one might describe visual perception in similar terms. Rather than a form of picturing, seeing an object is literally the act of groping and grasping things in our environment. Enactivists argue that perception occurs not just in our heads, but also in the relation between the individual organism and its environment (Chemero 2009; Rietveld and Kiverstein 2014; Hutto and Ratcliffe 2007). As mentioned earlier, they refer to this organism-environment relation as “environmental affordance,” whereby an organism’s perceptions of the environment, including other people, constitute possibilities for action. Anthropologists debate how new and insightful this concept is, but the important theoretical point is that because human actions are defined by agents’ intentions, and because they act in material circumstances, knowledge of what an environment affords to agents is required to correctly describe their intentional actions (Gallagher 2020; Keane 2014, 2018). Enactivism supports “direct realism” about perception.12 Agents’ perceptions of the environment are part 11  Wong (1998) argues that there are objective constraints on what can constitute a functionally adequate morality, but no single correct morality, because many moralities can do the job a functionally adequate morality is expected to do. A good watch should tell the time correctly, but there is no criterion to decide which one is the best watch or even whether any one is better than another, supposing that they all tell time correctly. 12  Direct realism says that the primary objects of sense perception are physical objects, not ideas in human minds. It relies on a semiotic theory of perception following which sensations of sight, touch, smell, and so on are signs of the directly perceived external objects or their properties. What the brain computes (if we need to speak like this) is the direct perceptual experience of an external object, not an internal copy or picture of the object. The mind is not an “internal theatre.”

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of how they experience the activity of niche construction. They see the object of perception as located in the environment, such that the actual object satisfies the mental content of the perceptual experience, as defined by satisfaction conditions (Searle 2015, chapter 1). By contrast, “inferential realism” about perception supposes that the object of perception is a mental picture or a cultural representation the brain infers from sensations and that this perceived “inner” object is distinct from the actual object “out there.” Nature-culture dualism is rooted in the belief that culture does not represent nature “in itself” but instead represents distorted pictures of nature, not to be confused with the essence of the actual object. Nature-culture dualists believe that essentialism about nature is a condition for deconstructing these distorted pictures, in order to correctly perceive the outcomes that an environmental scientist may expect from a given course of action. Through its role in prediction, essentialism about nature aims to tell us what we should be looking for (because predictable outcomes are associated with specific goals). For example, conservationists may invoke the essentialist concept of nature as a benchmark to deconstruct obsolete and maladaptive views of nature, or to keep protected areas apart from human interference in order to preserve nature “in itself.” The argument works just fine as long as one takes for granted that the essence of nature can be known. This raises the question of whether a belief in essentialist nature is epistemologically any different from beliefs about nature that are non-essentialist. The view taken in this chapter is that there is no such difference because people never disagree about nature “in itself,” as it would appear from a god’s eye perspective. Nature-culture ontological dualism is vacuous because the world is intelligible to humans only in terms of prior semantic frameworks that are either innate or socially learned.13 Rather than picturing an independent reality, science conceptualises the scientist’s individual experience in accordance with the cognitive

13  Kant argued that causality exists only as a mental representation  (concept) because objects cannot be experienced as causally related unless a knowing subject places them into temporally and spatially determinate sequences  of events. Empirical knowledge claims are made about what is rendered intelligible to humans by its regularities. The philosophical mistake in nature-culture dualism is to assume that we could ever know anything about nature’s essence beyond its intelligible manifestations.

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purpose (related to the values) of his or her scientific community.14 For example, if a historian’s purpose is to explain the environmental ­consequences of a value system at a given historical juncture, the conceptualisation used by the physical sciences is inadequate because law-like generalisations that may predict or explain physical events do not allow the cultural scientist to explain historical events. Nature and culture are labels for the same reality viewed from contrasting conceptual perspectives based on incommensurable values.15 As the history of modern science shows, our ordinary modes of perception (e.g., that the earth is flat and at the centre of the cosmos, or that the ocean is an inexhaustible container of fish) may be misleading in ways that require correction by socially constructed, scientific modes of perception of the objects. Thanks to science we can know that the earth is a sphere (or more precisely an ellipsoid) spinning on its own axis and moving around the sun, and the ocean is an ecosystem whose capacity to regenerate has certain limits. The only way for us to know about the essence of the solar system is by socially constructing a theory of it. The solar system is not produced by astronomers––only the model of it is. Marine conservationists interpret their experience of declining fishery yields in terms of the latest ecosystem science, and yet, the semantics in which the perceptual experience of the fishery is expressed need not make any difference to the object that satisfies the content of the experience. But “picturing independent reality” is a misleading metaphor for how such knowledge is acquired. 14  Knowledge  in general, and scientific knowledge in particular, is not simply a matter of  picturing objects in the environment (mental imagery is  a capacity humans share with other animals) but of judging one’s representations to be valid in the light of certain conceptual  criteria (such as ecosystem management, or  communal subsistence in a hypervariable environment). 15  The argument that the nature-culture dichotomy is not a feature of reality but of cognition (that the dichotomy is “empty” because it is epistemological rather than ontological) consists of four steps (see Oakes 1990; Rickert 1926). First, the only possible object of knowledge is reality as perceived by a subject (ordinary people or scientists) not reality in itself. Second, because experience of a material continuum is indeterminate we need to apply concepts to make our perceptions determinate. Third, based on the cognitive goals two main contrasting kinds of scientific concepts (beyond everyday concepts shared by all speakers of a language) can be distinguished, namely generalising abstract (“nomological”) concepts and individuating concrete (“idiographic”) concepts. Fourth, although there is only one material reality, when we conceptualise our perceptions of it as determined by general laws we call the cognised object “nature”; when we conceptualise experience as determined by historically contingent value-relations the cognized object consists of actions and goods (i.e., of social agents’ valuations of certain events and objects), and we call the reality “history” or “culture.”

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Perception is not so much a matter of representing objects as of judging states of affairs to be evident and propositions to be true in the light of prior criteria, interests, or values. According to Paul Feyerabend (1989: 404–5), scientists are “sculptors of reality-but sculptors in a special sense. They not merely act causally upon the world (though they do that, too, and they have to if they want to ‘discover’ new entities); they also create semantic conditions engendering strong inferences from known effects to novel projections and, conversely, from the projections to testable effects.” Molecular biologists modify genomes in order to represent their “essence”––even ordinary agronomists may produce ecosystems in order to represent them. These illustrations from science in action call into question the nature-­ culture dichotomy. It is also doubtful that the substitute notion of “nature-­ culture hybrids” can do justice to the sculpting of reality resulting from causal interactions between the observers’ apparatus and the objects observed.16 Indeed, “hybridity” sustains essentialism rather than offering a solution to the problem it poses (Pollini 2018). Essentialist ontology divides up reality into man-made artefacts such as hammers, tables, paintings, and songs on the one hand, and god-created objects like stars, rocks, oceans, forests, and wildlife on the other. The trouble is that paintings consist of pigments, hammers, and tables of wood and iron, and songs of sound waves. Because artefacts are physically indistinguishable from other material objects, they are described as nature-culture hybrids. The idea of hybrid objects appeals to basic constituents or underlying essences that are not hybrid. However, it seems that not only artefacts but even droughts and hurricanes, climate change, and mass extinctions of species are nature-­ culture hybrids since they also have a cultural significance besides being natural. The same is true of elementary particles if, as Feyerabend suggests, modern physics is a cultural practice that coproduces its own objects. Ultimately the essentialist has to accept that there is no material object or event that is not a nature-culture hybrid. The alternative to “hybridity” is to assume that material reality is a “continuum” (Pollini 2018: 212). On this assumption, the difference between nature and culture lies not in the 16  “Scientists, being equipped with a complex organism and embedded in constantly changing physical and social surroundings, used ideas and actions (and, much later, equipment up to and including industrial complexes such as CERN) to manufacture, first, metaphysical atoms, then, crude physical atoms, and, finally, complex systems of elementary particles out of a material that did not contain these elements but could be shaped into them.” (Feyerabend 1989: 404)

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material reality (which forms a continuum) but rather in the values and cognitive interests of academic disciplines. If the aim is to understand how material objects and events in a reef fishery are related to human values, the resulting knowledge is called “historical”; if the aim is to understand how the same material objects behave independently of human valuations, the knowledge is referred to as “natural scientific.” Nature and culture are labels for different conceptual schemes applied to the material continuum. Given that the hypothesis of the continuum is anti-essentialist, it is no small irony that the fact-value distinction is  also cited in support of the (essentialist) nature-culture dichotomy. Following this interpretation of the fact-value distinction, objective knowledge can tell us what to expect from the world, but values are subjective (and presumably cultural) because they orient our choices (Pollini 2013). Ethical values are indeed mind-dependent and relative to culture, unlike sound waves, ecosystems, and fish in the ocean (none of which depend on human minds). But it does not follow from this that only sound waves and ecosystems are material objects, whereas value-related songs and giving environments are merely mental representations. Are not the tunes people intonate and the god-given fish in the ocean standard material objects, and the sound waves and ecosystem particular  cultural beliefs held merely by scientists? Musicologists investigate the history of song forms in a culture, and physiologists study the production of sound waves by vocal cords. Both seek objective knowledge based on valid criteria. But whether the musicologist or physiologist chooses to study a “fact of nature” or a “historical fact” is not explained by these facts; it is a matter of the constitutive values of musicology and physiology. Following John Searle (1998, 2015, p. 41), institutional facts pertaining to money, marriage, selves, intentional agents, persons, families, ethnic groups, environmental niches, landscapes, and so on are “ontologically subjective,” that is, their existence is mind-dependent at least in part. Yet, our knowledge of them may be as objective as the workings of the solar system and the chemical structure of water. Ontologically subjective value-­ relations are “epistemologically objective” in the same way naturalistic arguments about organisms or ecosystem functions are epistemologically objective (Searle 1998). A heart that pumps blood is an excellent heart that performs its function well. An excellent person is one that performs their function as a human being well. Likewise, a bad fishery management policy is one that prevents coral reef fishers from performing their function as human beings well.

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Correct performance of function may depend in part on the performer’s ability. Humans cannot survive without food and shelter, but there are several ways to provide food and shelter. Objectivity of function does not require a unique evaluative standard or even a single true conceptual framework for appraising function. Some may use the essentialist concept of nature as a benchmark for the good life, others may use a religious concept, and yet others may use economic success as their benchmark. Epistemological objectivity means simply that the value system performs a function for the agents and does so independently of the cognising subject (who may have other values). Socially learned dispositions to act and approve or disapprove of others’ actions are a natural property of human individuals. How these dispositions vary between populations depends in part on how the individuals who learn these dispositions perceive their environments. How people represent objects in the environment depends in part on what these objects are like in themselves, part on the agents’ current needs and wants, and part on the ethical dispositions and standards of intelligibility they inherited from previous generations. As will become evident in the next section, socially learned dispositions and semantic conditions of experience (put differently, skills and habits) may causally affect not only the thoughts and actions of individuals but also the material objects of their perceptions.

3  Economic Responses to Perceived Changes in Reef Fisheries Vezo fishers of southwest Madagascar have sustained their lives for centuries with a combination of skills including gleaning and gathering on the coral reef, line and net fishing, hunting marine turtles, and diving for shellfish and, more recently, sea cucumbers. Had it not been for demographic changes since the 1950s and the commercialisation of the fishery since the 1980s, marine livelihoods might have remained unchanged for generations to come. Expanding fishery markets provide the Vezo with new livelihood opportunities. The octopus fishery sustains an export business in ancient settlements where reef fish no longer can. The Chinese trade in sea cucumbers makes possible a new form of seasonal migration to distant resource frontiers where these species are still found. Migration to resource frontiers has also become the economic alternative to subsisting on a declining reef fishery in ancient settlement territory (Cripps and Gardner

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2016; Iida 2005). Migrants leave in small groups for the season with the goal of earning cash. But the profits from the migration are not invested in economic alternatives to subsisting on a declining fishery. Instead, migrants purchase hardwood furniture, TV sets, loudspeakers, and electricity generators. These household objects are a sign of the wealth and exemplary character of those who purchase them, and as such, only sea cucumber divers can afford this style of living. As the display of desirable household objects sets a standard for what Vezo ought to do, migrants deplete these valued species even in distant resource frontiers (Muttenzer 2015). Migration does not relieve the strain on degraded ecosystems in the region of origin. Family members who stay behind must still sustain themselves by selling fish and octopus. When two seafood processing companies began collecting marine produce for export in the majority of Vezo villages along the southwest coast in the late 1980s, they first bought only reef fish. Locals became accustomed to obtaining daily cash income and concentrated their efforts on fish species suitable for the export trade. Fifteen years later, reef fish stocks were depleted. The trading companies responded first by extending the geographical reach of product collection networks and then by shifting the trade from reef fish to octopus (Muttenzer 2013). The Vezo way of life, as mobile coastal people, depends on the future possibility of fishing and reef foraging. In the past 40  years, they have diversified harvesting methods and skills, as well as intensified resource extraction. Despite the environmental degradation caused by these activities, it is clear that expanding fishery markets and changes to ecosystems provide them with new livelihood opportunities, at least for a time. What is much less clear is how long it will be possible to sustain the said “unsustainable patterns of marine resource extraction” and what can and ought to be done to ensure well-being for future generations of Vezo people (Chaboud 2006). Conservationists claim to be acting on behalf of resource dependent local populations whose well-being is said to improve as a result of resource management. If the actual structure of nature is perceived as an ecosystem, then nature can be managed by intervening on some of the constituents of that system. If the ecosystem is perceived as degraded, certain people might argue that it ought to be managed. Conservationists view reef fisheries as part of an ecosystem. On the coral reefs near the permanent ancestral Vezo villages, conservation efforts bear mainly on temporal closures of small sections of the reef flat where octopus is harvested during the neap

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tides. Reef flat gathering is mainly (although not exclusively) a female task, and so the closures, which are supposed to boost yields, have been justified as a poverty reduction measure that benefits the most vulnerable category of local society. The first temporal no-take zones were established by the NGO Blue Ventures in the fisheries area of the village Andavadoaka in 2004 (Oliver et  al. 2015). Octopus catches reportedly increased, and neighbouring villages adopted the same measures. Together they constituted a community-based marine protected area, operational since 2007 and now benefiting about 10,000 people across 25 villages. Temporary closures (two or three months) of small sections of the reef (less than 10 per cent of the total reef surface area is controlled by a village), together with fishing gear restrictions in the remaining areas, were implemented in response to coral reef degradation (Andriamalala and Gardner 2010). Fishers agree to access restrictions for the following reasons: 90 per cent of the fished area remains unenclosed, each village decides the location of its no-take zone, neighbouring villages close and open their reserves at the same time, and there is no more than one closure per year. Temporal fishery closures are part of a conservation narrative that takes for granted that sustainable reef fishery management is not undermined by unrestricted trade in reef fisheries. Conservationists also take for granted that allowing trade to proceed unregulated is a condition for local people’s voluntary participation in coral reef conservation. As a result of this narrative, marine protected areas do not envision regulating fishery markets. Instead, the policy assumes that the problem of overharvesting of fishery resources can be solved by restricting resource access for direct producers. This much is not controversial between local fishing people and international conservation NGOs. Fishers believe that their material well-being depends, over the long term, on the unregulated export trade in reef fisheries, which ensures that no matter how scarce a species becomes, other marketable species will provide them with a source of livelihood. Although Vezo fishers agree with conservationists that the reef fishing industry and export trade impact the well-being of local populations, the fishers do not agree with conservationists’ proposal to enclose the fishery commons by creating new marine protected areas. Fishers know that their livelihoods depend not only on unregulated fishery markets but also on unrestricted access to coral reefs harvested to supply the unregulated fishery market. Reef fishers and conservationists agree both about the causal explanation of resource degradation and about the fact that the commodity chains for marine products are controlled by exporters. Nevertheless,

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they disagree about access restrictions, what constitutes a desirable way of living, and the kinds of actions natural environments afford.

4  Causal Determinations of the Vezo Fisher Ethos Ecological science assumes that human actions are causally determined by the environment and that people’s choices are amenable to causal explanation. This is also true for historical materialist critiques of cultural ecology, known as political ecology, which lay greater emphasis on the economy and politics in causal explanations of human-environment relations.17 Both approaches are staunchly materialist and rightly so. As John Skorupski (1983) puts it: What is good in historical materialism is the rejection of idealist fairy-tales, and the insistence on seeing the way in which thought is historically shaped by material life: what is cramping is the notion that ‘all’ ideas are ‘in the last resort’ a product of technical problems posed by material needs. There could be beings with the same material needs and technical problems as ourselves, but with very different cognitive and emotional interests.

Cultural ecology and political ecology both operate with a “layer-cake” theory of culture change (McCay 2008). Following this theory, adaptation to new environmental conditions first produces a change in the cultural core (identified with the economic and technical) and then spread from the core to the periphery. People’s perceptions of environmental change are said to causally affect livelihood strategies and economic institutions more directly than they affect rituals and social ideology, both of which change only as a result of changes in the economic base. If one drops the “layer-cake” theory of adaptation, a less deterministic view of culture change is plausible (McCay 2008). Rappaport’s model of environmental regulation, for example, does not view ecological adaptation in the manner just described. Since in his model, causality may go in any direction and without implicating intermediate layers, economic institutions change sometimes as a consequence of changes in ritual or ideology, while 17  I assume for the sake of this argument that political ecology can be roughly defined as ecology plus political economy, and that political economy can be roughly understood in neo-Marxist terms.

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changes in livelihood techniques may fail to produce a corresponding change in the economy’s ritual organisation. It is possible that people make only minimal adjustments to livelihood strategies despite perceived resource degradation because conservative social ideology and rituals prevent economic institutions from adapting to environmental change. Likewise, it is possible that rituals are discontinued not because of environmental adaptation or economic strategies but because people convert to a new social ideology that rejects spirit beliefs and that ideological innovations spread from the religious to the economic sphere. The problem with cultural ecology and political economy, therefore, is not that these approaches are materialist and determinist, but rather that their view of the causal determination of environmental action is ill-­ equipped to explain how it is that the same technical skills and cognitions of the material environment may lead to widely different actions depending on what kind of person one is. Compared to the layer-cake theory of culture change, ecological psychology is more Aristotelian in that it explains human action in terms of an agent’s dispositions and the dispositions in terms of rationalisations (today’s rationalisations are tomorrow’s dispositions). People act in accordance with how they view the world, and they view the world in accordance with their habit of action. Since what the environment affords depends in part on the kinds of dispositions the agent has learned, specific environmental affordances may be grounded in ethical stances, whereas more basic affordances are simply relative to functions and abilities of the organism. To illustrate this idea, the fishers’ dispositions have as nonspecific (morally nonrelative) environmental affordance an actual ocean with actual fish in it; a specific (morally relative) environmental affordance of the fisher ethos is that the ocean is inexhaustible. That there are fish in the ocean is a necessary condition, but it is not sufficient to identify fishing people’s way of life, which presupposes the extra assumption that the ocean cannot be depleted. The Chinese trade in sea cucumbers led to a new form of seasonal migration to distant resource frontiers where these species are still found. Migration to resource frontiers has become an economic alternative to subsisting on a declining reef fishery in ancient settlement territory (Cripps and Gardner 2016; Iida 2005). Applied ecologists say that such human migrations to resource frontiers are causally determined by a combination of push and pull factors, and the resulting mechanism has been described as a socio-ecological trap (Cinner 2011). In Vezo country, agriculture is not generally a viable alternative to fishing, and the exclusive dependence

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on commercial fisheries exposes fishing people to inequality in the commodity chains through which marine resource extraction is organised.18 Since the Vezo environment offers no viable economic alternatives to fishing, people are “forced” to harvest the reef fishery unsustainably to achieve a level of income that allows them to meet subsistence needs, as they understand them. The economic and ecological constraints operating on the economy are mutually reinforcing, hence the metaphor of the social-ecological trap (Cinner 2011). Migrant fishers do not deny these facts; interestingly, harvesting a marketable resource until its near depletion followed by shifting activity to another more abundant species is not considered a poverty trap by them but a rational thing to do. Like other economic agents, their logic is one of resource substitution. They say there is enough fish in the migrant’s home villages for people to feed themselves. They migrate to marine frontiers because, by exploiting sea cucumbers, they can earn a lot more money than by ordinary fishing in their home region. The migration is driven as much by economic pull as by ecological push (since the “need” for TV sets is unrelated to how degraded resources are). But this still leaves unexplained why earning a lot of money in a relatively short time is considered a relevant motive to begin with, whereas ecosystem management is not. To answer this question, I investigated how migrant fishers use the surplus and found that they desire to purchase living room furniture and electronic equipment––TVs and DVD players, amplifiers, and loudspeakers––which, they say, they cannot access unless they dive for sea cucumbers. As it turned out, this seemingly unimportant detail was important for understanding why confidence in a giving environment is not undermined by what people know about the mechanism of resource depletion in the home region. I concluded that neither the Vezo fishers’ choice to migrate is a case of unconstrained economic freedom nor are the migrants’ choices determined by ecological factors to buy the furniture and TV sets that Vezo people all desire. There is ambiguity in this formulation, as it misleadingly suggests that free action is a matter of degree, such that freedom of choice begins where causal determination ends. To say that causal determination is a matter of 18  In a few places, where it is possible, some fishers also have a plot of agricultural land. This concerns areas where they neighbour farmers and make arrangements with them to farm. But it is marginal, both because it cannot be done in a majority of villages and because the work schedules for agriculture and fishing are difficult to reconcile.

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degree is misleading because all action, even flipping a coin, is causally determined. To say that involuntary actions are caused by circumstances over which the agent has no control is trivial. What is less trivial is that causal determination is also true of voluntary actions. The philosophically most interesting position, compatibilism, says that voluntary actions are both freely chosen or caused by the agent’s will, and yet also causally determined by antecedent events (McKenna and Pereboom 2016). Compatibilism does not say that an action is free insofar that it is not causally determined; instead, it states that any action is both causally determined and free to the extent it is not involuntary and that one is responsible for it. Given that an action instantiates the agent’s reason or motive, and that their motive is also causally determined by antecedent events, compatibilism admits that the voluntary agent could not have acted on a different motive than the one which caused them to act and for which they are responsible. Now, if acts of will (voluntary actions) are causally determined in the sense just described, how can it be that the same cognitions––for example, of ecological degradation, resource scarcity, or markets in different locations––may lead to very different actions depending on what kind of person performs it? The answer is that all voluntary actions are causally determined by the agent’s dispositions or character. Following Aristotle’s (2004) theory of ethical life, which unlike Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of practice (see Schatzki 2008) takes for granted that habits are learned through motivated actions and hence explicable in terms of reasons for acting, the same available motives lead to different choices depending on the agent’s learned dispositions. Characters are different in that they are susceptible to different motives or unevenly susceptible to the same motives. To understand what constitutes a relevant motive for Vezo migrants (why trying to make a lot of money is a reason for migrating as well as a causal explanation, we must ask about their character, the kind of person they strive to be, and how the goal of purchasing and displaying household objects fits into their conception of well-being. This conception of well-being has what one might call “specific” environmental affordances: it presupposes not only an actual ocean with actual fish in it but also that the fishery cannot be depleted. The assumption that the ocean is an ever-abundant resource container does not deny that resources may sometimes be scarce and that it takes effort to obtain them; it simply says that it is always possible to overcome scarcity by following ancestral precepts as to what constitutes the best life

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(which includes but is not limited to substituting a resource by another, such as harvesting shark fins when cucumber will be depleted or vice versa). Confidence in the giving environment is a presupposition of the fisher ethos, and their economic actions can only be understood for what they are in relation to that confidence. Migrant fishers are not forced by material circumstances to undertake risky seasonal expeditions to distant resource frontiers. They freely choose to do so, and yet their voluntary choices are causally determined by the habit of displaying their excellence as group members and capability of perpetuating the way of life designated as intrinsically valuable by their ancestors, by purchasing expensive household objects. Moreover, if you were taught to always try and overcome scarcity by migrating to places where resources are still abundant, and hence the fishery ecosystem affords being perceived as an inexhaustible giving environment, then asking the sea spirits for help to obtain a good catch is consistent with your perception of the environment in a way that access restrictions are not. Most sea cucumber fishers on marine frontiers work as skin divers in small family-based teams. Only a few migrants are hired into larger teams of up to 15 individuals by traders or middlemen who own speedboats and scuba gear. The divers in family-based work groups insisted that they are not able to spot the sea cucumbers on the seabed unless they use fishing charms. My intuitive response to this kind of explanation was to challenge my informants with a thought experiment. If there was anything that could make them doubt the purported effects of the charms, it would be scuba gear. I thought that superior technology might constitute evidence for them that fishing charms play no causal role in catching sea cucumbers. Whereas skin divers are limited to three minutes under water and a reach of 15–25 metres, scuba divers can remain on the seabed much longer and swim deeper. As it turned out, the scuba divers also use fishing charms. The rituals performed before, during, and after migration are all concerned with obtaining and operating a magical charm from a spirit medium that ensures the prosperity of the work group. The members of a work group are responsible for performing rituals correctly and avoiding fights with peers, lest the spirits get angry and their charms not work. Anointing their bodies, diving masks, and fins with a mixture of holy water and ground wood is part of a more encompassing sequence of distinct consecutive ritual performances through which divers are able to overcome their bodily limitations and gain the power of sight necessary for spotting and spearing the valuable sea cucumbers on the ocean floor. Prior to

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longer fishing trips, migrants consult the spirit medium’s oracle, where they promise a gift to the spirit in the case of success. The pledge outwardly commits the client to take the necessary steps to verify what has been foretold during the ceremony. His motivating reason for honouring the pledge is that he expects the diviner to be truthful. At the same time, an oracle is more likely to come true if the client takes the diviner at her word. Thus, the purported sincerity of diviners is established through the client’s desire to confirm the oracle. When an oracle is disconfirmed by subsequent events, it is commonly said that the diviner was not sincere or that she did not hold the ritual correctly. There are also other conditions for success with sea cucumber diving. To benefit from a fishing charm’s holiness, performers must be reconciled with their direct family ancestors; they must respect the desires of local place spirits in the areas visited by divers; they must be friendly with other members of their work group, that is, avoid conflicts and work together with them under the influence of the same charm; and they must be at peace with themselves, in that they must be truthful in ritual performances and committed to the pledge to confirm the oracle. By fulfilling these cumulative requirements, the performer attributes his own powers (of sight, as a successful diver) to a plurality of external agents or objects, such as his family ancestors, place spirits, his peer group, and the fishing charm. The performer’s own bodily agency as a diver is amplified and improved through enrolment of other agents external to his body, but to whose will his own will is now attuned. The ritual cycle serves to articulate an environmental affordance (namely, the perception that the ocean is inexhaustible) with an ethical stance (how Vezo persons should live).19 Even from the performers’ own point of view, the fishing charm’s purpose is not merely to ensure effective eyesight for divers. “Knowing how to fish” implies not just a technical skill, but a personal condition that involves having the right kind of desires appropriate to the situation and towards other people. Virtues differ from skills in that the former involve appropriate emotional responses, induced by people’s habits. The rituals I have described help people to realise a 19  Environmental affordance here refers to what someone has to assume to be the case in the actual world if they are to act in a certain way. For example, if you engage in ecosystem management, you need to assume that the fishery consists of systemic functional interactions between different populations of organisms and that harvesting or not harvesting a certain population has effects on it and other populations, and so on.

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disposition to have the appropriate feelings (confidence in the environment, the will to improve well-being by migrating to marine frontiers, displaying one’s excellence as a fisher by purchasing household objects, etc.). This interpretation is indebted to Rappaport’s (1968) “system-­ ecological” analysis of ritual, where the ecological effects of human action were measured by the number of pigs killed in a sacrifice. Given that the size of the herd was one of the reasons for performing the ritual, the local ecosystem was said to be regulated by ritual action. But one cannot expect similar outcomes when, as is the case in Vezo country, the economic and political interests that motivate resource users and environmental managers are quite unrelated to their knowledge of the ecosystem.20 Although it remains true even under global capitalism that environmental relations are ritually regulated (or perhaps “ritually framed”), it makes little sense to assume that such regulation maintains an ecological balance by keeping human activity well below the carrying capacity. The only thing the ritual organisation of economic actions regulates is the booms and busts of marketable marine products. Fishers know that a given marine species can become depleted when it booms. But the multispecies fishery as a whole is nonetheless believed to be in unlimited supply because fishers have experienced, in the past, that there is always a new market for a more abundant species to replace the depleted one. But it cannot continue like that forever.

5  The Argument from Environmental Affordances Nature-culture dualists worry that the concept of affordance opens the door to cognitive relativism––the idea that the truth or correctness of a perception is relative to the perceiver and their conceptual framework and evaluative standards. But environmental affordances are moral relativist rather than cognitive relativist. People disagree about how to improve well-being because they have incommensurable perceptions of the same environment, which can be known objectively.21 Vezo people just see a 20  The desire for TV sets or for living an expat life as marine conservationists, and the resulting motives for action, may be quite independent of factual knowledge about the ecosystem. 21  There is no single true perception of well-being, but there may be several incommensurable ones that are all objective in the sense of picking out some actual properties of things prerequisite for well-being.

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giving environment when they look at the reef fishery. When marine conservationists look at the same fishery, they just see a degraded ecosystem. Both groups “just see” what they have socially learned to see. The typical reader of this chapter and a typical molecular biologist having undergone professional training perceive two different objects when both are presented with the same perceptible evidence of coronaviruses. They do not see the same thing and simply interpret it differently. But they see a different thing. Yet, their visual perceptions of coral reefs and fish (or coronaviruses, as the case may be) are the same. Nature-culture dualists notice a contradiction here. They ask: how can a reef fishery be a significantly different thing for each group of observers and yet also be visually the same for both? Habits of thought and action, or the ability to have visual perceptions, are located in the people not in the material object. So, the nature-culture dualist asks, how do subjective abilities and dispositions connect to what Gibson (1968) calls “affordances”? According to Gibson, affordances are located in things and are just the properties of things that make it possible for some perceiving and acting entity to interact in a certain way with these things. As understood by enactivists, environmental affordances are objective features of things that only exist as such relative to properties of another perceiving and acting entity (Gibson 1968). They are directly perceived objective correlates of what is commonly referred to as “representations,” “cognised models,” or “cognitive schemes.” As I stated in the introduction, “direct realism” is the view that the objects of perception are external objects, not mental contents. Because the external object is perceived directly, the affordance does not need to be inferred by the perceiver. No logical-sentential understanding is involved in a lobster’s perception of fish. The only requirement for perceiving an affordance is that the organism be in some way causally related to and interacting with the perceived environment. This means that the affordance is perceived owing to the agent’s abilities, skills, desires, and conceptual and moral frameworks, especially if, beyond visual perception, the agent also entertains propositional thoughts about the object. Insofar as this can be the case only for human beings, but not for simpler organisms like lobsters, human affordances causally constrain what people will do with a reef fishery by constituting agent-relevant motives for intentional action, while excluding certain alternatives. Depending on how the speakers of a language define their well-being and view themselves as persons, the same coral reefs and fishes yield

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significantly different perceived environments. That is why the same fishery may both “afford” and “fail to afford” ecosystem management, depending on whether one has adopted the group ethos of a conservationist or a Vezo fisher. Whether ecosystem management is useful or not depends on whether it increases fish catches and Vezo well-being; these outcomes, in turn, depend on the local conception of well-being and on how successful conservationist or recipient governments are in transforming local people’s conceptions of well-being. Perhaps, instead of saying Vezo fishers and reef conservationists live in different physical worlds, which is contradicted by their identical visual perceptions of the same physical objects, one might say that they engage in radically different projects of ecological niche construction. Constructing ecological niches is something that both animals and humans do. As argued already, material properties of things can be perceived irrespective of conceptualisation (in other words, you do not need to conceptualise an affordance in order to “just see” it). In lobster and other animal affordances, it is the kind of activity the organism is engaged in, the process of niche construction itself rather than a conceptualisation of the niche, that serves to narrow the range of relevant material properties that get perceived by the organism, such that only perceptions of these (but not of other, different) properties can effectively structure the perceiving organism’s activity. This is certainly true for organisms such as lobsters whose “thoughts” are limited to perceptions and whose lobster niches are constructed based on lobster perceptions of what the environment affords. In the case of human beings, it so happens that learning some activity or skill, or cultivating the desire to be a certain kind of moral person, is also mediated to some extent by concepts that serve to organise the said activity or conception of well-being. This conceptual mediation of human actions means that the affordance of the same visually perceived object differs depending on the agent’s conceptual framework, even if a human being can still visually perceive the external object just like a lobster, without first having to engage in conceptual thought. If your habit of thought is to perform rituals to make sure you catch enough fish, then the same material environment that people with other habits would conceptualise as an ecosystem affords being perceived as a giving environment. The ritual performer “just sees” a giving environment when he looks at the fishery. But if your habit is to implement conservation projects successfully, then the same environment affords being perceived as a manageable ecosystem. To put it a little differently, if the

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environment is perceived by the Vezo fishers as “giving,” then they might see a reason to perform rituals that ensure the ocean will perform as expected––that it will continue to be giving. Their view of the fishery thus affords that certain rituals be performed. The environment has this “giving” affordance because of what people have been habituated to do with it. Take as many fish as you can, perform rituals to ensure everything works fine, and so on—and ignore conservation. Conversely, the fishery might have an “ecosystem” affordance if one has learned or has been taught that one should not take as many fish as one wants. The ecosystem affordance means that one should instead manage resources sustainably and be well paid by persuading oneself and others that the fishery is successfully managed owing to conservation projects. One visually perceives the same fish, but it nonetheless has an objectively different affordance because what one will do with it depends on one’s habits, among other circumstances, such as fishery markets or international aid for marine conservation. Markets and development aid are no less important than ecological knowledge for explaining what people do with the environment. This difference does not only come from a difference in the subject’s head. It reflects an objective difference about the ocean, which can objectively be two different things at once. There is no contradiction or incompatibility in the ocean objectively being both an ecosystem and also a giving environment; however, there is a contradiction between the practical implications of each because the same action cannot both manage and fail to manage the ecosystem. My claim is not that an animist is incapable of grasping the concept of ecosystem or a natural scientist is incapable of grasping the concept of fishing magic. They both live in the same world, and they might even understand each other about the ontology of fish, on a purely intellectual level. But what is or is not a relevant motive for either the conservationists or the Vezo fishers does not depend only on their theoretical knowledge, but on their habits of action (dispositions, character, ethos, personhood) learned in the course of constructing their particular ecological niche consisting of a set of environmental affordances. Following this line of argument, what is relevant in the sense of a meaningful reason for action depends on fishers’ or marine scientists’ moral dispositions, which are conceptually mediated by their respective training. Yet, what is effective action in terms of actually delivering the expected outcomes depends not only on these conceptually framed ethical affordances, but rather on the actual ecological possibilities. This is why rituals

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and ecosystem management may or may not work. The issue is that rituals and the corresponding dispositions may be outdated as environmental degradation progresses and actual possibilities decrease. This is why one cannot rule out that rituals fail, that Vezo people will eventually realise that they fail, and eventually adopt other approaches, such as ecosystem management, which purports to be objective and not merely “relative to local culture.” That is also why one cannot rule out that conservationists are wrong about temporal octopus closures and that the Vezo are right when it comes to maximising the chances that they improve their livelihood in a context of increasing resources scarcity. But to rule out that conservationists are right, one would have to do ecology, not anthropology. More to the point, one might try and combine both approaches and do ecological anthropology. What is known about the ecology of the octopus fishery is that conservationists wrongly assume it is possible and desirable to regulate the supply side of commercial fisheries with access restrictions such as fishery closures, without regulating market demand by export and national buyers. The assumption is mistaken because the fishers’ primary if not only reason for fishing less is that there are fewer buyers of fish and fewer fish. If conservationists want to protect coral reefs, they should consider doing conservation projects with economically powerful buyers of fish rather than with fishers. What is known about the anthropology of octopus fishers is that since they have not adopted a conservation ethos, they do not understand the concept of ecosystem, or their understanding of it is abstract and without practical import because they see no use for it. Both their learned dispositions and market logic pull them in the opposite direction of avoiding access restrictions. The truth insofar as it is not relative to any ethical stance is that the coral reef fishery is neither a social-­ ecological trap, since it affords the current livelihoods the Vezo know, nor an inexhaustible container of marketable resources, because as applied ecologists point out, it might not afford the currently afforded livelihoods indefinitely. Ecological analysis suggests that they are both right (if at different points in time) and that there is no fact of the matter as to whether a genuine disagreement about conservation is best described as a real confrontation of incommensurable worldviews or as a difference in opinion about the same world. The point here is that, once you have accounted for all explicable errors, and your interlocutor still disagrees, there is no way of knowing whether it is because they believe a different thing from what you believe (difference in opinion) or because they attach a different meaning to the words you use (incommensurability). Real confrontations

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between incommensurable worlds therefore cannot be settled simply by invoking more facts. “Difference in opinion about the world” corresponds to the first interpretative option outlined in the introduction to this chapter. This interpretation holds that the belief or statement saying the ocean is an inexhaustible resource container is a mistake and one would be mistaken, as Vezo fishers might be, to accept it as true and have confidence in the giving environment. The correct thing to do in view of maximising the chances of improving livelihoods in a context of increasingly scarce resources, from the conservationist viewpoint, would be to abandon the view that the ocean is an inexhaustible resource container and adopt instead the scientifically grounded perception of the fishery as an ecosystem that ought to be managed for sustainable yield or conservation. Or the Vezo might also adopt the scientific view of the ecosystem and still deplete the fish. Hopefully, once the concept of ecosystem has been properly understood by everyone, conservationists and local people might at last understand each other simply by referring to actual ecological properties of coral reef ecosystems (instead of merely referring to “cultural representations” of ecological properties), and thus reach an agreement about what needs to be done to manage them sustainably. Since agreement might be reached in the future, there would be no reason to suppose that the concept of affordance is not already idle in the present. All that is needed to describe moral disagreements and resource conflicts would be a concept of the actual fishery ecosystem and a concept of the false cultural representation of that system, supposing that there was no moral disagreement about whether conservation matters or is desirable for Vezo reef fishers. The problem with this interpretation is that it is backwards. It assumes, without acknowledging it, that every change in people’s material needs and every new technological problem will, by necessity, lead to a corresponding change in how people think of themselves as persons. But it may be the other way around.22 Whether a new material need or technological  For the Maasai in Kenya, the first step to change a livelihood system or strategy is to break the rule, which is done by a few self-interested individuals out of material needs, and against what is considered proper morality, causing community meetings and sometimes sanctions. But progressively, the new practice is acknowledged as materially advantageous, and more people break the rules until the new practice is accepted as new morality. That is what happens when they shift from communal to individual tenure, and from pastoralism to agro-pastoralism (Jacques Pollini, personal communication). Note how this pattern fits the standard expectation of cultural ecology which expects change to occur first in the cultural core. 22

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problem can constitute a recognisable motive for action depends on a prior change in people’s character, a change which might not occur. Even if fishers agreed with marine conservationists on all the technical facts about reef ecosystems, they might still disagree about how to improve well-being because they still interpret the facts through incommensurable moral frameworks. Different kinds of people want different things, perhaps even different worlds, from the same physical environment, which explains not only why they disagree about how to resolve the resulting resource conflicts, but also why they cannot simply switch to a different worldview, even when they grasp the conceptual alternatives.23

6   Incommensurable Values and the Will to Improve Fisheries Resource conflicts are disagreements about the desirability of actions afforded by one kind of perceived environment, but not afforded by another.24 Although conservationists may persuade villagers that temporal closures are desirable in the sense of (mistakenly) intending to increase the octopus catch, conservation narratives fail to be taken up as the motivating reason for taking part, because the concept of fishery management makes practical sense only if one already sees the fishery as an ecosystem.25 But their long-standing confidence in the giving environment is

23  According to a classical cultural ecology trope (Tucker 2013), changes happen everywhere following the layer-cake model of adaptation. Farmers become pastoralists, pastoralists become hunters, fishers become farmers, farmers become fishers, and so on. Material needs determine these changes. Then, the worldview changes to adjust to the new livelihood strategies. It is true that people may switch to a different worldview if they have an overriding reason to do so, such as ecosystem collapse or an industrial revolution. I doubt that such paradigmatic changes can happen through gradual piecemeal revisions in livelihood strategies or that it can be socially engineered by a resource management policy. 24  The reason I do not simply say “valued by one group and not valued by another group” and “whose perceived impact differs from one group to another” is because the value of the environment is directly perceived as an objective property of the environment. What is taken to be inexhaustible or valuable is the actual ocean, not a mental picture of the ocean. 25  This again refers to the fact that one cannot be said to manage an ecosystem if they do not possess the concept of “ecosystem.” If one does not know what an “ecosystem” is, one cannot knowingly manage the ecosystem. That is so no matter how sensible management would be from an ecological perspective.

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i­ ncommensurable with the novel desire or obligation to manage resources. What they currently do with the ecosystem is causally determined by their viewing the ocean as an inexhaustible container of fish. If their habit of thought already viewed their physical surroundings as an ecosystem, then fishery management might constitute a recognisable motive for them. But given that their present habit of thought is to view and use the ocean as an inexhaustible container of fish, management is not a recognisable motive or it is overridden by stronger contrary motives, even if they can understand what the concept of ecosystem management means.26 That is, the Vezo are able to understand and consider that motive, but it would nonetheless be discarded as a reason for action because it is not sufficiently integrated into their existing habits of thought and action. They doubt that fisheries can be managed for sustainable yield because they know that the unregulated fishery trade is a condition for human well-being, even when well-being is known to result in depletion events. They accept to pay this price for their well-being. Their ontology commits them to a conception of well-being that is not just incommensurable with ecosystem management but is in unacknowledged confrontation with it. Marine conservationists and fishing people can disagree about the desirability of enclosures and resource management only and precisely because they share an understanding of how the fishery works. Both parties accept that decreasing productivity and depletion events are caused by unregulated trade and that conservation projects do not aim to regulate trade. This nonrelative truth about coral reef ecosystems, however, need not make the disagreement over enclosures rationally solvable. The totality of facts no one denies about the state of reef fisheries cannot settle the question of what one should do with them or how one should live. If neither party cares about the other’s ethical stance, little can be done to reach rational agreement about incommensurable values. When each side is given an opportunity for signalling an empty commitment to the other’s goals, they may cooperate in conservation projects regardless of there being any substantive agreement. Given their differently motivated interests in maintaining unregulated trade, the need to find rational agreement does not arise because they both want to avoid conflicts. 26  Arguably, their lack of interest in conservation is not because they see the ocean as inexhaustible. It is because they did not yet experience exhaustion to the point that it threatens their livelihood. Indeed, my argument is precisely that they cannot be expected to act upon a perceptual experience they have not yet had.

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Incommensurable values do not mean that all moralities are equally true or equally false. If they were, conservationists and local resource users would have little to disagree about. The intractability of certain disputes shows rather that there are different types of disagreements. On the one hand, an apparent moral disagreement about well-being may not be genuine or fundamental because it is merely factual or due to a misunderstanding. On the other hand, genuine disagreement between fishing people and conservationists may not be apparent (or apparent agreements may not be genuine) because their incommensurable conceptions of well-being fail to make complete contact or because ecosystem discourse is declared by conservationists to be the only true morality. The analytical framework explored in this chapter is not cognitive relativist. It is moral relativist in the sense that people disagree about how to improve well-being because they have incommensurable perceptions of the same environment, but which can be known objectively.27 The parties’ conceptions of well-being (what the will to improve livelihoods means in practical terms) differ because there is no single true morality (Wong 1998). To argue that there is no single true morality is not the same as defending cognitive relativism. The scientific truth about fishery markets and coral reef ecosystems can be known objectively because actual disagreement in these domains can be removed through empirical investigation. Based on ecological science, certain management policies (e.g., access restrictions) do not achieve the desired ecological outcomes (see Muttenzer 2020, chapter 6). Yet, the factual knowledge fails to settle the conflict over resource access because conservationists, instead of changing the policy, invoke ad hoc explanations of why it might have worked had circumstances been different. Even when parties agree on all the facts, an implicit disagreement around intention might still persist over the enclosure of the unenclosed commons––despite it being apparently denied by the parties’ factual agreement. What is at stake in intractable conflicts such as these is not the mutual intelligibility and comparability of values, but their practical 27  The truth of a representation does not depend on whether we say it is cultural or natural-­ scientific, but on what is the case––for example, on whether the object fishery does indeed have the properties that afford its being perceived as inexhaustible, manageable, and so on. What matters is how abstract concepts like “ecosystem” or “giving environment” are grounded in perceptions of fish, sea cucumber, or octopus, and the extent to which conservationists’ and local fishers’ actions and statements are consistent with the perceptual experience.

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incommensurability. If the conflicting moral outlooks differed so radically as to be incomparable, conservationists and fishing people could never truly disagree about what it is to perform one’s function well as a human being; they would simply be “talking past” one another. For them to genuinely disagree about how to improve well-being, their conceptions must be at least commensurable enough to be framed as different from one another. Rather than incomparable worldviews, a more plausible explanation of the disagreement about resource access is that there is no single true morality to decide whether priority should be given to protecting coral reef ecosystems or to promote well-being at the cost of degrading the environment.

7  Conclusion This chapter proposed an enactivist critique of nature-culture dualism and applied the concept of “environmental affordance” to fishers’ and conservationists’ divergent perceptions of the coral reef environment. Intentional actions are defined by agents’ intentions and how people act in material circumstances. Therefore, knowing what an environment affords for an agent (i.e., knowing how they perceive it) is a necessary step in describing their actions. I argued that conflicts over incommensurable worldviews cannot be settled by invoking more facts about nature and that the answer to the question of whether conservation delivers its promise depends on which cognisable world the speaker lives in. I will now try to address three common objections to this outlook.28 The first objection states that the contrast between ethical stances and environmental affordances, which together allow one to interpret intentional actions, simply reproduces the nature-culture dichotomy in a new guise, rather than overcoming it. The short reply is that while affordances are objective causal properties of objects, they exist as such only relative to a perceiving mind.29 In contrast to environmental affordances, “nature” is 28  There are no sources in the literature these objections can be traced back to. Many readers are hostile towards the enactivist outlook not because the implications are not clear but because they are disturbed by them or have not given the matter sufficient thought. 29  How can it be objective if it is relative to a perceiving mind and thus to a subject? All actions are afforded by objective properties of things, but not all objective properties of things afford actions. Whether or not an objective property affords an action depends on the existence of a perceiving organism with a certain internal structure and hence capable of acting in ways afforded by that objective property.

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mind-independent. The ecological properties of a reef ecosystem exist in themselves regardless of human perceivers. But these ecological properties cannot become environmental affordances unless there are populations of organisms capable of perceiving them in their environment. What is relevant for explaining ecological niche construction is the mind-dependence of environmental affordances, not mind-independent ecological properties as such. The second objection is that the concept of affordance was developed specifically to account only for visual perception, for example, by lobsters of their environment, but not for the analysis of abstract concepts and disembodied logical-sentential thought. The reply is that conceptualised human affordances are no less about embodied perception than non-­ conceptual animal affordances, although conceptualisation entails the framing and organisation of perception and action in terms of abstract reasoning. This framing explains why different groups of people may “just see” different things (a “giving environment” or an “ecosystem,” respectively) while looking at the same physical objects in the ocean environment, whereas there is no corresponding variation in perceptions between different groups of lobsters (lobster perceptions of the environment are a function of their physiology, and concepts play no role in it). The third objection states that the perceiver-relativity of affordances, because it is a form of idealism, stands in the way of causal explanation of ecological processes. Here my reply is that the ideality and moral relativity of conceptions of human well-being, which follow from the fact that human abilities and character are socially learned, offer a better causal explanation of observable variation in human ecological niche construction than dualistic approaches that separate human choices and moral ends from material-causal explanations of how to achieve these ends. In this chapter I argued that ecological science and political ecology critiques of ecological science operate with an overly restrictive notion of what may count as a causal determination of human action. By focusing exclusively on material needs and technical problems, natural science excludes the question of the causal determination of character dispositions and habits from accounts of how ecological niches are constructed. If conflicts about ecological niche construction––of the sort exemplified by the difference between fishery management and confidence in an inexhaustible resource container––resulted from false cultural representations of nature, then the problem could be solved by discovering the scientific truth about nature and correcting the falsehoods. If Vezo fishers were prey

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to a perceptual illusion, one might hope to solve conflicts by using scientific knowledge as a benchmark for determining moral ends and policy tools. But if  the disagreement over ways of dealing with environmental degradation is caused by how different kinds of people experience themselves as persons in the world, then it is unlikely that environmental disputes can be solved by invoking scientific facts.30

References Andriamalala, Gildas, and Charlie Gardner. 2010. L’utilisation du dina comme outil de gouvernance des ressources naturelles: leçons tirés de Velondriake, sudouest de Madagascar. Tropical Conservation Science 3 (4): 447–472. Aristotle. 2004. Nicomachean Ethics. Translated and edited by Roger Crisp. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Astuti, Rita. 1995. People of the Sea: Identity and Descent among the Vezo of Madagascar. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bird-David, Nurit. 1990. The Giving Environment: Another perspective on the Economic System of Gatherer-Hunters. Current Anthropology 31 (2): 189–196. Chaboud, Christian. 2006. Gérer et valoriser les ressources marines pour lutter contrela pauvreté. Etudes Rurales 178: 197–212. Chemero, Anthony. 2009. Radical Embodied Cognitive Science. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Cinner, Joshua E. 2011. Social-ecological Traps in Reef Fisheries. Global Environmental Change 21: 835–839. Cripps, Garth, and Charlie Gardner. 2016. Human Migration and Marine Protected Areas: Insights from Vezo fishers in Madagascar. Geoforum 74: 49–62. Feyerabend, Paul Karl. 1989. Realism and the Historicity of Knowledge. The Journal of Philosophy 86 (8): 393–406. Gallagher, Shaun. 2020. Action and Interaction. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Gibson, James J. 1968. The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception. New York: Psychology Press. Hutto, Daniel, and Matthew Ratcliffe, eds. 2007. Folk Psychology Re-Assessed. Dordrecht: Springer. Iida, Taku. 2005. The Past and Present of the Coral Reef Fishing Economy of Madagascar: Implications for Self-determination in Resource Use. Senri Ethnological Studies 67: 237–258.

30  When the economic stakes are high, environmental conflicts cannot be solved by invoking ecological facts even when natural science is not used as a benchmark to define moral ends but merely as a diagnostic for evaluating actions and policies.

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Rietveld, Erik, and Julian Kiverstein. 2014. A Rich Landscape of Affordances. Ecological Psychology 26 (4): 325–352. Schatzki, Theodore R. 2008. Overdue Analysis of Bourdieu’s Theory of Practice. Inquiry 30: 113–135. Searle, John. 1998. Mind, Language and Society: Philosophy in the Real World. New York: Basic Books. Searle, John R. 2015. Seeing Things as They Are: A Theory of Perception. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Skorupski, John. 1983. Sacred Cows. London Review of Books 5 (16): 1. Sperber, Dan. 1982. Apparently Irrational Beliefs. In Rationality and Relativism, ed. Martin Hollis and Steven Lukes, 149–180. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Tucker, Bram. 2013. Cultural Ecology. In Theory in Social and Cultural Anthropology: An Encyclopedia, ed. R. Jon McGee and Richard L. Warms, vol. 1, 142–147. Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE Reference. Tucker, Bram, B. Tsimitamby, Frances Humber, Sophie Benbow, and Taku Iida. 2010. Foraging for Development: A Comparison of Food Insecurity, Production, and Risk among Farmers, Forest Foragers, and Marine Foragers in Southwestern Madagascar. Human Organization 69 (4): 375–386. Tucker, Bram, Tombo J.  Tsiazonera, P.  Hajasoa, and C.  Nagnisaha. 2015. Ecological and Cosmological Coexistence Thinking in a Hypervariable Environment: Causal Models of Economic Success and Failure Among Farmers, Foragers, and Fishermen of Southwestern Madagascar. Frontiers in Psychology 6: 1533. Wong, David. 1998. Moral Relativism. In The Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Taylor and Francis. https://www.rep.routledge.com/articles/thematic/ moral-relativism/v-1. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780415249126-L099-1. Accessed 6 October 2020.

Perceptions and Representations of Deforestation in Madagascar: From Cognitive Dissonances to Convergences Jacques Pollini

1   Introduction Forests are material things that humans can perceive. According to the cognitive sciences, their material presence generates stimuli that activate sensory receptors, which transmit messages to our brains. There, these messages generate sensations that are interpreted as perceptions that, once articulated together, constitute a representation: a mental image of a forest. The same can be said of processes like deforestation. They do or do not happen, and they have certain outcomes that we may or may not perceive, which we might or might not integrate into our own mental image of the world, and into the texts and speeches we produce.

J. Pollini (*) German Agency for International Cooperation GmbH, Kindu, Democratic Republic of the Congo © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 F. Muttenzer et al. (eds.), Perceptions and Representations of the Malagasy Environment Across Cultures, Palgrave Series in Indian Ocean World Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-23836-9_7

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The world as we see it cannot be a complete and accurate reflection of reality, because not everything can be perceived and because humans make mistakes. We produce mental constructs that correspond (or not) to the reality they represent. This lack of perfect correspondence (Popper 1963) is in part explained by the limitations of our sensorial apparatus and cognitive structures (certain things cannot be perceived) and in part by pre-­ conceptions that influence the processing of information provided by our senses (certain things are misperceived). In the 1920s, gestalt theory demonstrated that we have pre-established forms through which we perceive reality (Dortier 1998). Two lines that are objectively the same length, in the sense that we would find the same value if we measured them, can be perceived as having a different length if the context in which they exist differs. Cognitive science has generalised this discovery, showing that established “forms,” “scripts,” “stereotypes,” and “categories” precede the act of perceiving and help us make sense of what we perceive. With these pre-conceptions, we are biased, but without them, we would be lost. These templates or schemata are the outcome of evolution and/or may be acquired through prior experience and learning. Since what we learn can be either true or false, and is influenced by our own areas of interest, we carry cognitive biases derived from stereotypes or socially determined pre- or mis-conceptions. We are sensitive to certain aspects of our environment and eliminate information that we do not like or consider irrelevant. We each see the world in a different way because we each harvest information that we are interested in. We would be overwhelmed by information, pushed beyond the limits of our cognitive capabilities, if these filters did not exist (Dortier 1998). In this chapter, I show that perceptions of forests, deforestation, and the impacts of deforestation in Madagascar depend on these biases and filters. I argue that differences in the sensorial experiences of various stakeholders determine a “contrasting set of views” (Scales 2014) in the way they see forests and the impacts of deforestation. I contend that the ontologies (i.e., philosophies of what “existing” and “being” mean) and epistemologies (i.e., philosophies of what knowledge is and how it is produced) of local and international stakeholders do not fundamentally differ. The rate and impacts of forest clearing could be determined more objectively, and policies aimed at reducing or stopping deforestation accepted more consensually, if proper communication was established between groups having different interests and sensorial experiences.

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I do not reject the notions, embraced by cultural anthropologists and political ecologists, that the global political economy, regimes of discourses, and vested interests determine or strongly influence the representations being produced, the definition of problems, or the choice of solutions. I do not object either to the notion that these influences lead to oppression. Inspired by Bloch’s (1989) distinction between ritualised and mundane systems of knowledge, I argue that even though subjectivities and rituals associated with the production of knowledge act as “anti-­ cognitive machines” (Pollini 2011b), which cause cognitive discrepancies and perpetuate misrepresentations among local and global stakeholders, daily interactions with the material world matter too. By introducing a shared, objective dimension to knowledge production, these interactions can be utilised to fight against or at least mitigate oppression. This possibility of objective interaction and shared understanding justifies maximising a dialogue through which the representations of various stakeholders can complement each other. This dialogue will enable a broadening of the sensorial experience, displacing centres of knowledge production away from rigid ideologies and rituals towards more empiricism and mundane experiences, thus reducing the knowledge biases and gaps caused by cultural differences, unequal power, and diverging interests. Based on roughly 80 qualitative interviews conducted in 2001, 2002 (Pollini 2007), and 2011 (Pollini 2011a, c), I begin by exploring how Malagasy people interact with their forests on two sites in eastern and southwestern Madagascar, inhabited by the Betsimisaraka and Mahafaly people, respectively. I show that on these two sites, from the locals’ perspective, the forest is a place to be settled, not a place to be conserved, and that alternative land uses that do not require forest clearing are developed and adopted only when no forest remains to be cleared, or when all remaining forest land is unsuitable for farming. Further, I demonstrate that, in spite of this, policymakers could trigger a shift to alternative land uses before all forests are cleared, without causing oppression or cultural and socio-economic disruptions, if they support farmers in adopting alternative livelihood strategies that leave them materially better off (in contrast with alternatives proposed to date, which leave them worse off). In the discussion section, I show that the ontologies and epistemologies of Malagasy farmers and conservationists may not differ significantly. Both groups have an interest in the satisfaction of their material lives, but also have a spiritual relationship with the forest. They acknowledge that forests have a material as well as symbolic value. Both produce objective

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knowledge based on empirical observation and inference, and both implement rituals that fill knowledge gaps and validate uncertain knowledge or false statements. Their diverging views for how to manage forests results from differences in what they experience and in the type of material benefits they are searching for, rather than differences in how they relate to the world. Since they are in positions of unequal power, each group favours its objective over that of the other. The origin of their contention is thus political rather than cognitive, even though cognitive dissonance is generated in the end. Based on theoretical work by Bourdieu (1994) and Bloch (1989), I conclude by arguing that dissonances in representations of the Malagasy environment could be reduced if conservationists and Malagasy farmers had more opportunities to share the mundane experience of how they relate to their environment, while distancing themselves from ideologies and rituals that perpetuate obsolete or maladaptive views. It would be naïve to believe that contentions and political biases will disappear, but some space for transformative agency may, at least, appear.

2   A Betsimisaraka Forested Landscape in Eastern Madagascar Eastern Madagascar is covered by a rainforest that stretches north to south and that may have comprised about 11 million hectares before the arrival of French colonists; it was reduced to 3.8 million hectares by 1985 (Green and Sussman 1990). Today, after centuries of clearing, logging, mining, and the expansion of farmland by colonists and local people, the forest consists of a fragmented corridor and persists mostly on mountains and escarpments, except around Makira and the Masoala Peninsula, where vast stretches still exist. The Betsimisaraka people have been clearing this forest for centuries by practising swidden cultivation (tavy). When Europeans arrived, tavy was at the core of Betsimisaraka livelihood strategies, although irrigated rice cultivation in bottom land (horaka) had also been practised for centuries (Le Bourdiec 1974). The Betsimisaraka resisted colonial policies aimed at reducing the practice of tavy and promoting coffee cultivation and other cash crops. They continued to practise tavy (in spite of interdictions) in the forest in order to stay further away from administrative control. Claiming their right to practise tavy was a way to express their culture and

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maintain their identity and unity (Althabe 1969). This is still true today. During a 2003 meeting about fire management, a Betsimisaraka participant stated that “to suppress tavy is to wish the death of the Betsimisaraka people” (Bertrand and Randrianaivo 2003). The Betsimisaraka people have an intimate relationship with their forest. They divide it into segments called kijana, allocated to lineages or families that use them as grazing and browsing lands for livestock. The Betsimisaraka also have sacred groves where they bury their dead. They consider the spirits of mythical or historical figures (vazimba, jiny, lolo) to inhabit the forests, and when they clear it, they perform rituals to ask for the protection of these spirits (Razafiarison 2003) and to apologise for the destruction. A diviner performs a ritual to communicate with these spirits and asks them to cohabitate with humans. Sometimes a zebu is sacrificed. A pact is established between the spirits and the family that clears the land, which provides protection against the intrusion of other people. The forest then becomes a space for occupation by future generations (Keller 2017), especially if it is tanindrazana, that is, land of the ancestors asserted by the establishment of a family or lineage tomb. In sum, the forest is a place to be settled, not a place to be conserved, even though it provides products and services (construction materials, medicinal plants, the regulation of water, etc.) until clearing takes place. Through the practice of tavy, Betsimisaraka people inexorably advance towards the forest. This encroachment enables them to maintain the same land use and technological systems, by keeping the population density constant in spite of demographic growth. When a village located close to the forest becomes too large, the land becomes insufficient to feed the entire population unless it is cultivated more frequently, which requires the adoption of new techniques that produce more per hectare (intensification). More frequent cultivation using the same techniques would cause a yield decline, since a shorter fallow generates less biomass and thus less nutrients after burning and does not cleanse the soil from weed seeds as efficiently as a longer fallow (Styger 2004). To avoid this problem, some families with more children to feed or more adult males capable of doing the hard work of falling large trees move and settle on the forest edge and clear it to establish new fields. If moving to the forest is impossible due to government policies aimed at conserving it, then farmers must clear all forest patches that remain behind the frontier one by one (Nambena 2007), even though some may be sacred and serve as burial sites. The fallow period progressively reduces,

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and the whole landscape becomes more anthropised. When soil fertility declines below an acceptable limit, farmers “move to the bottom land.” They drain marshes and more intensively cultivate the lower parts of the slopes where nutrients accumulate (Pollini 2007). As well, they continue to cultivate on slopes, adopting crop rotation and ploughing the land to maintain decent yields in spite of short fallow. They generally avoid burning the biomass before cultivation, because the duration of the fallow is short enough to enable only herbaceous plants to grow. They also adopt perennial crops and establish home gardens where banana trees are usually the main cultivated plant (Pollini 2007). During this process, the landscape changes entirely and becomes devoid of natural forests, except when forests are under conservation status or are unsuitable for farming. Ritual spaces are also reduced, since there are no opportunities to establish protective pacts with the spirits of these new places. In spite of these changes, the Betsimisaraka people living far behind the forest frontier, some of whom do not practise tavy, do not consider themselves different from those who live on the forest edge. In the Ambodilaingo fokontany (Pollini 2007), several hamlets still possess forest land; one hamlet (Ampasintsiriry) does not and compensates the resulting lower upland rice production by having more paddy fields (horaka). We heard inhabitants of this hamlet express prejudices against their neighbours, similar to those formulated by government people enforcing bans on tavy. They mock tavy farmers for being backwards and making a living with a technique that has no future. Horaka fields make it possible to cultivate the same land twice a year. They require a high labour investment to establish, especially when the fields are created on land that is not completely flat and cannot be easily irrigated. However, once they are in production with a satisfactory control of water, they require less work for the same output than a swidden field established on a short fallow. In the end, after building this new landscape out of necessity, the inhabitants of Ampasintsiriry were better off than their neighbours who still relied on tavy (Pollini 2007). In northern Madagascar, profitable cash crops such as cloves or vanilla provide farmers with significant income, and repressive environmental policies against tavy do not necessarily result in economic collapse in the long term (Laney 2002). These examples show that Betsimisaraka identity does not disappear with the end of tavy; rather, it changes and the Betsimisaraka themselves welcome these changes when they lead to an improvement of their material condition.

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I do not wish to imply, however, that Betsimisaraka farmers have a better life undertaking intensive agriculture instead of tavy. Abandoning the practice of tavy can also cause suffering due to the myriad risks associated with adopting new techniques, and because of the financial and labour investment required to scale up these techniques. Typically, intensification requires additional works for the same output and reduces the time available for leisure (Boserup 1965). Conservation policies and projects are unethical when they exacerbate these difficulties by forcing the shift to new land uses without providing significant support for investment and risk alleviation. Experts propose ill-designed alternatives (Pollini 2007, 2009), mostly agroforestry technologies (hedgerows planted on contour lines or improved fallow) aimed at making it possible to cultivate deforested slopes with short fallow periods––technologies that are unsuitable because they require excessive labour input. Conservation or rural development projects sometimes support the construction of small dams and irrigation canals to expand irrigated paddy fields (horaka). But they make these supports conditional on adopting highly intensive cultivation techniques that generate extreme risk and also require excessive labour inputs. Thus, these policies and projects cause suffering by ignoring the material constraints, high risks, and labour requirements associated with shifting livelihood strategies (Pollini 2007). To simultaneously provide swidden farmers with an improved livelihood and conserve forest would require that policies aimed at controlling tavy propose alternative land uses that work (and that address the risk and labour constraints). If well designed, such policies or interventions may be accepted consensually, may not cause the confrontation of ontologies or worldviews, and may not exemplify oppression of the powerless by the powerful. Their outcomes may not differ significantly from the changes that farmers in Ampasintsiriry experienced without intervention. The reasons why such a success is possible is that Malagasy peoples’ perception of forests––the value given to them, the way they are used, and associations between identity, landscape, and land use––may, after all, be materialistic to a great extent, because they are associated with strategies aimed at satisfying livelihood needs. Culture certainly matters, but cultural ecologists (Netting 1986) have shown that cultural systems are partly determined by material necessities. Their functions include the satisfaction of biological needs like eating, having a shelter, living in a hospitable landscape, and belonging to a community. Hence different perceptions and representations of the environment between Malagasy farmers and

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conservation or development experts may reflect, to a great extent, differences in experiences, needs, and interests. Conservation interventions in eastern Madagascar may have failed not so much because their promoters have different worldviews or ontologies compared to those of Malagasy farmers, but rather because policymakers and their advisers did not experience the mundane realities of rural Malagasy people deeply enough to be aware of the trivial material constraints, such as peak labour or risks of crop failure, to the adoption of new farming practices (Pollini 2007).

3   A Mahafaly Forested Landscape in Southwest Madagascar Swidden farming is also practised in the dry forests of Madagascar, where it is called hatsake. In these forests, deforestation has taken place for centuries. In southern Madagascar, deforestation may have led to ecological crises, followed by outmigration and environmental recovery during cycles that lasted several centuries (Elmqvist et al. 2007). Like the rainforest, dry forests are also perceived as being inhabited by spirits. They constitute a link between the human world and the creator (Zanahary), who is perceived as replenishing them and making them inexhaustible (Scales 2014). Taboos prevent the clearing of some places, but are not sufficient to stop large-scale clearing, especially when migrants break the rules (Scales 2014). One important difference from swidden farming in rainforests is that once dry forests have been cleared and cultivated, it takes much longer for them to grow back (Razanaka et al. 2001). Dry forests are less dense in the first place and only bushy vegetation generally grows during the first decades after their clearing. Since livestock husbandry plays a greater role in the economy of southwest Madagascar than in the east (Fauroux 1994), most land, after being cleared, is turned into pasture or browsing areas for livestock (Razanaka et al. 2001). Some locations, though, may support the growth of a secondary forest (monka) with enough biomass to be cleared to practise hatsake again, generally after one or a few decades (Pollini 2011c). Only small pieces of land in humid, bottom places (baiboho) are cultivated more or less permanently after forest clearing. Clearing occurs in spite of the fact that forests play an important economic role, acting as a safety net during times of drought. The harvest of wild tubers contributes to resisting the famines (kere) that often follow major droughts (Pollini 2011c). However, given the high income

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generated by growing crops in hatsake (Ramamonjisoa and Rabemananjara 2012) and the advantages of expanding pastures and asserting tenure rights over larger areas (Razanaka et  al. 2001), the harvesting of wild tubers and other forest products does not suffice to justify preserving forests. Once a new forest area is open to clearing, it is quickly turned into hatsake fields by migrants attracted by this opportunity, especially if commodity booms result in high prices for maize and other crops (Scales 2014). I studied deforestation and the practice of hatsake in the northern part of the Mahafaly plateau, in the commune of Efoetsy. When a new forested area is accessible to them through clearing, Mahafaly people migrate there to practise hatsake. In 2010, the main destination for people from the communities we visited was the so-called PK32 forest, located 32 kilometres north of Toliara. This forest was close to acquiring conservation status, but it was owned in the customary sense by the Masikoro people who were interested in clearing it to grow maize, usually with financial support from urban investors. Maize commanded a high price on the market at that time, and one single person could cultivate five acres with their own labour and produce several tons of maize if the season was favourable (Ramamonjisoa and Rabemananjara 2012). High incomes were generated this way and quickly converted into savings in the form of livestock. The Mahafaly people leased land to and/or worked as sharecroppers for Masikoro landowners (tompontany) to grow maize after clearing a piece of forest. They sometimes settled permanently by marrying local girls or via land grants by local landowners. They generally arrived only during the growing season and stayed only a few years until they could buy a decent number of livestock (Pollini 2011a). After achieving this objective, they moved back to their native village on the Mahafaly plateau, where the primary forest had been cleared a long time ago or was not accessible because of protection status (it constitutes the Tsimanampetsotse National Park). The Mahafaly made their living there in spite of the fields’ low productivity, relying on selling the livestock they had accumulated during their migration to make ends meet. When, after a few hard years or following a major drought, they remained without enough livestock to make a living, they moved back to a forested area to practise hatsake again, especially when commodity booms caused high maize prices. The practice of hatsake, converting forest biomass into livestock, filled the economic gap that resulted from the low productivity of their agro-pastoral activities at home (in the Mahafaly plateau), where forest biomass could not be tapped into because of its protection status (Pollini et al. 2014).

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Mahafaly land use is thus unsustainable given the current population density on the Mahafaly plateau (if we exclude Tsimanampetsotse where no settlement and farming is allowed) and the technology available. To sustain their livelihoods, the Mahafaly depend on tapping into natural resources elsewhere by clearing remote forests to practise hatsake. They outsource their economic activities and the environmental degradation (forest clearing) associated with it. Before PK32, they migrated to another area where the forest has now been totally cleared. When asked what will happen when the forest in PK32 is cleared, one informant answered that “there will always be a beautiful forest somewhere where it will be possible to migrate” (Pollini 2011a). In sum, instead of being cleared little by little following population growth, as is the case in the eastern rainforest, forests around Toliara are being cleared one by one and at a fast pace by migrants from all over the region. Migrants are not necessarily an “external disturbance.” They can be part of the local system, and they may settle in various arrangements with local landowners. In such cases, the migrants remain attached to the communities where they originated, and their migration is generally temporary, constituting a legitimate and necessary element of their livelihood strategies. In other cases, migration is more anarchic, local governance institutions collapse under the pressure, and migrants settle massively and permanently, clearing large tracts of forests in a short time. This happens mostly during commodity booms, when high commodity prices stimulate greed and satisfy dreams of a better life. The outcome, however, is the same. Forest are being cleared; only the pace of clearing differs. As in the east, alternatives to swidden farming are available in southwest Madagascar, and they are welcomed and widely adopted by locals. The Masikoro people, who make the deals we described with the Mahafaly at PK32, are farmers who use ox-ploughs to cultivate irrigated land. They have a higher income than their Mahafaly counterparts. They sell cash crops on the market and invest their income in the clearing of forests to practise hatsake using cheap Mahafaly labour. Their way of life significantly changed during the last decade as a consequence of colonisation and investments in the development of irrigation schemes. Some Mahafaly communities also reaped the benefits of the diffusion of new farming technologies. During the 1960s, a tractor was available to plough the land in Antanandava, and peanuts were sold at a high price on the market (Pollini 2011a). This period is remembered as a “Golden Age,” but it did not last. Peanut prices eventually dropped, and the tractor was no longer available.

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The Mahafaly people reverted to their initial ways of life, relying on pastoralism, small-scale farming, and hatsake. Today, some struggle to use ox-­ ploughs and to again adopt more intensive land uses. With this tool, they can break the hard soil of savannah land and establish permanent fields to grow mostly cassava. Without it, they rely on manual labour and can only cultivate small plots, unless they have access to forest land that does not need to be ploughed, where they can practise hatsake. As in eastern Madagascar, alternatives to swidden farming exist, but they require investments (irrigation schemes, ox-ploughs, etc.) that many households cannot afford. Similar to the eastern rainforests, forests around Toliara are inhabited by spirits. They have sacred groves whose clearing is forbidden, which slows down deforestation; however, local communities often fail to enforce these taboos on foreigners. When people from elsewhere enter the forest to do hatsake, locals follow and clear forest too––otherwise they would lose the resource without even reaping the benefits. On the Mahafaly plateau, a taboo protecting a local forest caused fear among locals several years ago, when a few people died shortly after a sacred grove was cleared (Pollini 2011a). This was interpreted as revenge by the spirits of the forest, and the wave of deforestation was paused. But locals agree that the pause will not last, and that someday, someone will attempt to clear the forest land again, thereby resuming deforestation. Some rituals can also be performed to appease the spirits when sacred sites are disturbed. Many pluri-centennial tamarind trees grow on the Mahafaly plateau. They provide a great range of benefits including the supply of fodder and shade to livestock, food for humans in times of famine (kere), and nutrients for the fields. They are sacred trees protected by taboos, but they can be cut if proper rituals are performed, namely, the pouring of rum for local spirits. Young people searching for income opportunities cut down these tamarind trees on a great scale to turn them into charcoal, and increasingly without performing these rituals. Elders challenge these practices, but their authority is declining. New norms may eventually be established, permitting these trees to be cut down out of economic necessity. Like in eastern Madagascar, conservation and development projects attempt to introduce new land use strategies. They promote sustainable land management practices by putting in place community organisations in charge of managing the land and forests sustainably, and they promote new farming techniques like cover crops, agroforestry, and biochar. As in

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eastern Madagascar, experts working on these projects ignore and often negatively judge alternatives to hatsake that are adopted by locals. They do not significantly support the development of irrigation schemes and often criticise the adoption of ox-ploughs, which they consider “unsustainable.” Here again, the lack of overlap in empirical experience, rather than ontological dissonances, may explain the failure of policymakers and projects to find solutions to large-scale deforestation.

4  Discussion 4.1   Forest as Frontiers The results of these two case studies, among the Betsimisaraka and Mahafaly, are consistent with Le Bourdiec’s (1974) statement that forests in Madagascar are areas of territorial expansion and frontiers where people settle when they are searching for land. Malagasy people belong to 19 groups that have always moved around the country to search for land and livelihood opportunities. They were pushed out by population growth, attracted to new areas by infrastructure development, and fled from conflict, slavery, or other forms of prosecution, particularly during the colonial period (Jarosz 1993). The Malagasy are deeply attached to their native land (tanindrazana), but also eager to establish connections with new lands and adopt new identities when they migrate and settle (Evers 2002). Their connections with their native land can be undone, reflecting the necessity to satisfy trivial, material, economic needs. When I asked a migrant from the Mahafaly plateau whether his ancestral land was where he was currently living or where he came from, he answered that “the land of the ancestors is the land when one can have a good life” (Pollini 2011a). This statement is a Malagasy proverb that I found cited in a source I have unfortunately since lost. 4.2   Material Forests Forests in Madagascar, like elsewhere in the tropics, have indeed the same basic functions for local people as for international stakeholders. They are places where untouched capital is tapped into to generate value, services, and products, and to sustain the livelihood, well-being, and economic systems of local and foreign people alike. Forests in the tropics have been described as the last frontier for capitalist expansion, but they are also a

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medium of capital accumulation for local stakeholders. They store carbon that is exchanged on global markets, as well as biomass that is turned into nutrients for crops through swidden farming (tavy or hatsake). The forests are managed as protected areas and enjoyed by tourists and scientists, or turned into landscapes that serve as a home for local people and livestock. They provide genes to bio-prospectors as well as medicinal plants to local dwellers. The trees are logged by greedy entrepreneurs as well as locals who want to capture a share on the local or international log markets. The forests provide land to international agri-business investors and to family farms eager to shift from small-scale subsistence to larger-scale cash crop production during commodity booms. The magnitude of the impact of global and local practices and strategies differ greatly, but qualitatively, similar logic and processes are at play. Malagasy farmers, policymakers, and their Western advisers all contribute to entering the Anthropocene, an age where ecological and biological processes are in great part determined by human choices and material interests, rather than conservation ethics that would recognise an intrinsic value to untamed and untapped nature or sacred land. The satisfaction of material needs to sustain a family is thus a key driver of decision-making for Malagasy farmers, as it is for anyone: humans carry an inescapable biological reality, together with their culture. They need to eat and access clothes, tools, and shelter. While the forests provide construction materials, food, and medicinal plants, it can do so only in limited amounts, to feed a limited number of people. Farming and livestock husbandry on cleared land are more effective ways to satisfy material needs than hunting and gathering in natural ecosystems, unless population density and thus pressure on resources are very low. Once the forest is gone, villagers farm, raise livestock, and plant Eucalyptus or other fast-growing invasive trees, such as Grevillea or Acacia, that provide them with poles and firewood in greater quantities than the same area of natural forest could. The villagers will also access modern medicine on markets and harvest medicinal plants on fallow land or around cultivated fields or settlements. There are differences, however, in the material relationship that Malagasy people and conservationists establish with forests. Conservationists have access to knowledge demonstrating the existence of ecological limits, endemism, biodiversity loss, desiccation, and climate change. With this knowledge, they are committed to avoiding forest clearing and other acts that would trespass upon ecological limits. Malagasy

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people, on the other hand, perceive the forest as having no limits. They believe there will always be more forest to clear somewhere, even if it is far away and accessible only through migration. They have this illusion because they do not monitor forests with satellites nor do they calculate annual rates of deforestation, or the number of years required to clear what remains. They do not know the concepts of ecological limits, endemism, and species extinction, and this is not because of a different ontology, but because they and their ancestors never made the observations that would lead them to formulate these concepts. The fact that they are engaged in a process whose outcome may be the complete disappearance of the forest (except in areas that are unsuitable to farming) does not only reflect cultural differences and a preference for certain livelihood strategies. Indeed, it mostly reflects their ignorance of certain ecological realities like endemism, biodiversity losses, and desiccation (Grove 1996). 4.3   Symbolic Forests For both local and international stakeholders, forests have a symbolic value, probably reflecting an awareness of their cognitive limits as well as the need to live beyond mere material experience. Malagasy primary forests represent voajanahare, that is, the “fruit of god” or “work of god,” a notion quite similar to that captured by the Western word “nature.” The primary forests are a domain where processes are not the outcome of human agency (Pollini 2013). Nature or voajanahare needs to be preserved for its own sake, on moral ground, because it has been put there by god, it shelters spirits and ancestors, and it serves purposes we may not recognise but that exist nonetheless––or simply because it is beautiful and fascinating. But for Malagasy farmers and international policymakers, economics and interests prevail over conservation ethics. Malagasy farmers and conservation biologists can constitute themselves as moral persons (Muttenzer 2020) even if forests are being cleared at a fast pace. They can be successful in their livelihood strategies and careers, such as managing a large farm or becoming a National Park director, while still looking directly at forest destruction. They may lament, apologise, or be sad about this destruction, but less so than if they could not support their family because of crop failure or a failed career.

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4.4   Political Forests Local and foreign stakeholders each use their own tricks to capture value and secure access to forests, which turns these ecosystems into political and contentious objects. The social scientists who analyse conservation policies in Madagascar have outlined the hegemony of Western conservation discourses and their instrumentalisation to justify control over access to natural resources by local people (Kull 2004). Aware that scant resources are available to achieve conservation, conservationists are looking for cheap solutions, which they cannot find at home. The last fragments of primary forests on their home continents (mainly, the redwood and rainforests in North America, and the Białowieża forest in Europe) continue to be logged for the same reasons as in Madagascar: the forests can be turned into commodities that generate income and sustain people’s livelihoods, mainly by providing jobs in the logging sector. Climate change mitigation policies, in spite of being the object of international negotiations since the 1990s, have not yet achieved any significant results. Conserving forest in Madagascar enables rich countries to escape the political struggle required to conserve or recover natural forests and mitigate climate change at home. Outsourcing conservation in low-income countries also offers a biodiversity premium since tropical forests are extremely biodiverse, and it secures resources that constitute a new frontier for capitalist expansion through the development of tourism businesses and bio-prospection. This outsourcing of climate activism to the tropics has a high ecological cost in terms of carbon footprint (Fox et  al. 2009), but a low financial cost. Investing a few hundred million dollars over a decade in Madagascar to produce glossy reports that highlight anecdotal “success stories,” enrolling a few model farmers into the conservation agenda, and creating protected areas in the least threatened places are sufficient to create the illusion that great efforts are being made to conserve natural resources (Pollini 2007). Real impact in terms of reduced deforestation costs even less. Before international donors committed to funding the third phase of the Madagascar National Environmental Action Plan, a fire and tavy repression campaign sponsored by communication experts in 2002–– which took the form of a presidential speech broadcast on radio programmes across the country and with the issuance of a decree and the arrest and jailing of a few farmers practising this land use––caused a drop in the deforestation rate that multi-million-dollar conservation and

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sustainable development programmes had failed to achieve (Pollini 2007, 2011b). The political cost of such a campaign would obviously have been much higher in a Western country; yet low financial cost does not mean low economic cost. The economic costs of conservation are high indeed, but they are outsourced and born by local people who have to abandon their ways of life and struggle to develop alternative livelihood strategies, given that the so-called alternatives proposed by conservation and development projects do not work (Pollini 2007). Discrepancies in interests, rather than in values or ontologies, thus explain the oppression of Malagasy people by conservation interventions. 4.5   Achieving Sustainability in Spite of Cognitive Discrepancies Is everything doomed? Are global power structures creating inescapable traps from which ethical conservation will never emerge? Acknowledging that changing global political structures will take decades (if it can ever be achieved), I believe it is worth envisioning pragmatic ways to reduce the strength of these traps, not by the promethean task of changing political structures themselves, but by taking advantage of the fact that locals and global stakeholders share the same cognitive structures, can perform the same empirical observations, and can both acknowledge that forests have material and symbolic value, whatever their political and economic agendas might be. Conservationists working in Madagascar, with whom I had the chance to work from 2004 to 2006 (Pollini 2011b), are not mean oppressors, but have an extremely limited knowledge and experience of local people’s daily lives. They interact with locals mostly in workshop settings where tavy or hatsake farmers are barely heard. They know the situation on the field mainly through glossy reports that carry many biases since they are produced with the aim of justifying funding and through data sets that fragment real-world situations to create abstract models with disputable relevance (Pollini 2007). How then can we address the conflicting ways that the environment and its management are perceived by various stakeholders? We have seen that the practice of swidden farming is perceived as being rational, in the sense of delivering expected livelihood outcomes, by the farmers who implement this land use, even though their practices can lead to the disappearance of all forests and to ecological and socio-economic crises. This is because the perceptions of these farmers are based on a finite number of

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observations and experiences that they can make in a given place, over a given time period, and with given tools and information processing and recording capabilities. An external observer (expert working on a conservation or development project) who confronts local systems of knowledge with facts that relate to other areas and time periods might find that these farmers’ practices are in fact irrational, in the sense that they would eventually lead to ecological collapse and livelihood decline. Locals would then need to be informed about their maladaptive practices and be provided with external knowledge that could help them make adjustments. Importantly, I am not arguing that conservationists provide rational solutions to environmental issues in Madagascar. They do not, as I have already stated. Conservationists are mostly ignorant of the specific livelihood challenges experienced by Malagasy farmers and propose inappropriate technical and institutional innovations to these challenges (Pollini 2007). I argue that conservationists should fill knowledge gaps for local peoples. The cognitive skills that local farmers require to assess the impacts of their collective actions in the long term may be far beyond what is available to them. Missing skills mostly concern what is required to assess the direct, short-term impact of their individual actions. Local knowledge, like any knowledge system, has limitations that justify using external expertise to guide actions that address collective challenges such as achieving environmental and livelihood sustainability. But conservationists must also be aware of the limitations of their own knowledge systems and trust locals in their assessments of the individual and short-term impacts of conservation or development projects. We can take as an example the tamarind trees of the Mahafaly landscape. These trees are beautiful and serve multiple purposes. Most human beings, including the Mahafaly as we will see, recognise their high value. They would adopt an ethical system that acknowledges the trees’ importance, and that values their conservation for both spiritual and utilitarian reasons. In that ethical system, the tamarinds, especially the largest and oldest, would be given sacred status. They would be valued beyond their utility, which would be incalculable. But ethics have multiple dimensions, even in relation to simple acts like cutting down a tree. Such acts raise more questions than that of knowing the value of the tree itself. How ethical would it be to reject cutting down a tamarind, if that act would enable someone’s survival? For a man who sees no other option to feed his family during a kere, a ban on cutting tamarind trees may be a threat to his survival––and it is difficult, in this

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case, to see how this person would consider conserving tamarinds as being ethical. Any practical solution to the issue of cutting down tamarind trees would thus have to reconcile the ethics of tree conservation with the ethics of permitting people to fall into poverty and experience hunger. It would obviously require enormous computing capabilities to simultaneously process the high mass of information required to identify conservation and livelihood strategies that are consistent with environmental ethics and human rights. It is doubtful that this computation can be performed due to the large number of variables to consider, but also because it is impossible to assign a numerical value to certain variables, such as the sacredness of trees and human life. This may explain why individual decisions often prevail over collective ones in difficult times, as reflected by the poor man who turns tamarind trees into charcoal bags against the collective rules that ban this practice. Very often, these individual decisions lead to the establishment of new norms where, for example, cutting tamarind trees is permissible, to the detriment of strategies that would achieve collective sustainability, since many of these strategies remain incomputable. The Mahafaly elders, as a group of people establishing sustainable rules, are indeed in the same position vis-a-vis the young men who cut tamarind trees as is the international community in relation to the community that practises hatsake or tavy. In both cases, different scales create different interests and different cognitive horizons. The international community sees that dry forests provide services and are a limited resource, just like the Mahafaly village elders see that tamarind trees are in finite numbers and provide great services to their community. The elders have a broader view than the young man; they have life experience behind them, and they carry collective knowledge in the form of a cultural system that they, as elders, are entrusted to preserve. Likewise, the international community has a broader view than the Mahafaly elders. Scientists study satellite imagery, conduct biodiversity inventories, and have access to knowledge produced globally over centuries. However, since the cognitive capabilities of humans are not infinite, adopting a broader scope, like the elders and the conservationists do, also leads to ignoring specific realities and failing to acknowledge local necessities. The elders, especially if they are in charge of a broad area and do not live in the same village as the poor men who make charcoal, may not be aware of the difficulties these men face, just as conservationists may not be aware of the struggles faced by households who are denied the right to practise tavy. Both may even prefer to ignore aspects of reality that complicate the implementation of their own agendas. As such, they abandon

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cognitive efforts and stick to simple political agendas. This is how conservationists eventually commit to politics rather than knowledge, the final outcome being poorly informed politics and, thus, policy failure. 4.6   Homo “Degradationus”? My position formulated above differs from what is found in many critical social science studies that explore conservation policies and that navigate somewhat ambiguously between cultural relativism (the idea that different cultures produce different representations of the world) and ontological and epistemological relativism (the idea that reality itself and the way it is apprehended depend on one’s point of view and culture). This ambiguity is found, for instance, among political ecologists who call for “more attention to indigenous epistemologies” (Scales 2014: 67) in order to make conservation compatible with local cultures. Scales (2014), adopting this agenda, argues that the policymakers’ view that hatsake are “irrational, since they lead to the destruction of forests that have many important uses” (Scales 2014: 74), is based on a “misunderstanding of the values and beliefs of rural households” (Ibid.). For Scales (2014: 74), “hatsake presents a way to make the landscape productive.” Environmental degradation would be caused by “irresponsible practices of newly arrived migrants” rather than forest clearance per se. A similar view has been proposed by Bertrand and Lemalade (2003: 135) regarding the practice of tavy in the eastern rainforests. These authors distinguish between tavy défricheur (clearing tavy) and tavy cultivateur (cultivating tavy)––the difference being that migrants do not participate in clearing in tavy cultivateur, while they do in tavy défricheur. This increases demand and competition for land, weakens local institutions, and accelerates the pace of clearing. This view carries both ecological and social biases. On the ecological side, it implicitly suggests that swidden farming does not require forest clearing in tavy cultivateur, which is seen as a system at equilibrium, contrary to tavy défricheur. Bertrand and Lemalade (2003), however, are explicit about the fact that tavy cultivateur also leads to forest clearing, although at a slower pace (less than 30 per cent of the land is cleared in their study area over one century). This means that both situations lead, indeed, to the same ecological outcome: the clearing of all forests, although at a different pace since migrants are not involved in tavy cultivateur. On the social side, this view discredits migrants by concentrating negative prejudices on their practices, whereas I have shown, in the case of the Mahafaly people, that migration is an integral part of local

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livelihood strategies. In many cases, migrant practices are indeed the same as those of locals, and it is the concentration of migrants in a specific place, rather than the specificity of their land use and livelihood strategies, that causes an acceleration of deforestation. In contrast with these views, I suggest that rapid deforestation and land degradation are indeed caused by the customary practices of rural Malagasy people, as conservationists argue, even though external factors typically accelerate the process. Extensive forest clearing, even at the pace of tavy cultivateur, is thus an unreasonable practice, in the sense that it is maladaptive unless the population is stable and the fallow period is long enough to restore fertility after each cultivation cycle. Tavy disrupts local climates, rain regimes, and soil fertility, and erodes the resources that livelihoods depend on, especially when practised with short fallow. Malagasy may very well develop alternative livelihood strategies once all forests have been cleared and all soils degraded. Experience shows that rural societies are generally very innovative (Boserup 1965) and capable of generating an environmental recovery (Tiffen et al. 1994). But there is no guarantee that this will happen smoothly and that no irreversible thresholds will be passed. In Madagascar, the rural population is growing, and the environment is actually being degraded by forest clearing and the practice of short fallow in secondary ecosystems. By degradation, I mean that we observe a reduction of biomass, biodiversity, and soil fertility, as well as the progressive disappearance of a resource (the forest) upon which livelihoods currently depend. Even Malagasy people acknowledge that forests become poorer in resources when the frequency and the intensity of cultivation increase beyond certain levels, and that crop yield and soil fertility also decline when the frequency of cultivation is above certain limits. They clearly distinguish between fertile and unfertile fields, and can describe the processes that lead to fertility decline. They also directly experience the negative consequences of these changes on their livelihoods. However, since they are not aware of the finite nature of their forests nor the disruption to climate and other ecological cycles caused by deforestation, they do not perceive these as major issues since they have the possibility of moving to new land by clearing forests. Just like any other human group exploiting natural resources on forest frontiers (Williams 2006), conservation is not on their agenda nor their priority. This is why all primary forests and all tamarind trees may eventually be cut, unless empirical experience demonstrates that the negative impacts of not conserving these resources overweighs the benefits of exploiting them.

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4.7   From Homo Calculus to Homo Habitus Communication between stakeholders working together to solve a common problem will not necessarily entail the discovery of a logical, straightforward solution. Bourdieu (1994) demonstrated that optimal behaviour in a complex situation cannot be achieved through mere calculation of the best course of action. Optimal, or “reasonable” behaviour, to use Bourdieu’s word, is historically constituted through the interaction of entire groups with their environment and sedimented into what Bourdieu calls the habitus. This is why, in the end, one can behave reasonably (in the sense of doing something that delivers the expected outcome), although not necessarily rationally (in the sense of doing a conscious calculation of the best course of action), without being able to explain the causal mechanism that links the behaviour to the outcome. The corollary is that acquiring new knowledge does not necessarily require a structured conversation and a logical demonstration. It can be done through a fuzzy sharing of experience and ideas from which new practices will emerge, through a series of trial and errors, and adjusting the habitus to challenges that were heretofore unknown. New behaviours are then adopted and integrated into the social system through new rituals, whose role is to cement knowledge and the outcomes of experiences that cannot always be stated in logical, explicit terms. During this process, external stakeholders will also learn. Their habitus will evolve with possible convergence towards the worldview of local stakeholders if they are open to accepting fuzzy or non-­ explicit knowledge, that is, if they accept not to have their life driven by calculus alone. 4.8   Mundane Knowledge and Rituals The model of dual knowledge production proposed by Bloch (1989) helps us understand how this communication effort can act to generate a convergence of worldviews. Bloch (1989: 1), in an attempt to solve the problem of seeing social processes simultaneously “in terms used by the actors” and “in terms totally alien to the actors”, distinguishes concepts “found in ritual discourses” from what he calls “mundane” concepts. The first are transmitted collectively through the social structures that characterise a given society. The second are not involved in rituals and can be learned any time, individually, through the direct interactions that humans have with their environment. Social theories that defend a view of

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“cultural relativity of cognition” would substantiate their claims by looking only at the first set of concepts (those found in rituals), which are, by definition, relative to a culture. These theories would overlook the second type of concepts, which are generated within the more mundane world of daily interactions with the material environment, in the context of “non-­ ritual practical communication” (Bloch 1989: 11). The consequence is an obscuring of “the universal nature of a part of the cognitive system available in all cultures” (Ibid.). Universal concepts would be found mostly “in contexts where man is in most direct contact with nature,” that is, in knowledge systems that relate to the way land and resources are being used to sustain human biological needs (farming, pastoralism, hunting, and gathering). For Bloch (1989: 12), there is “something in the world beyond society which constraints at least some of our cognitive categories,” and this thing might be “nature as the subject of human activity.” Bloch’s (1977: 287) model may explain why and how social and cultural changes are possible. While ritual communications carry “the past into the present,” more mundane communication with the visible present, which is “nature constrained,” can be used to challenge the “invisible system created by rituals” (the social and cultural structures). Universalist views of what environmental degradation and sustainability mean are thus possible. They can be communicated across various cultures because they belong to the mundane. Influenced by mundane cognitive processes, ritual systems can then evolve, and worldviews may eventually become commensurable. Coming back to Bourdieu’s notion of habitus, to experience the mundane using cognitive structures and skills that all humans share enables one to make the adjustments required to support reasonable behaviours. It enables solving the “don Quichotte effect” (Bourdieu 2017), that is, filling the gap between the adopted habitus, which may be out of date, and the habitus that would provide the optimal outcomes. The adjustments that are made are then integrated more deeply into the cultural system by modifying rituals or adopting new ones. These processes are experienced by any person and are at the core of the adaptive capacity of any society. One additional point made by Bloch (1989: 17) that is of great importance to this discussion is that societies with more hierarchies involve more ritual communication. Hierarchies structure the social space or “field” (Bourdieu 1994) where agents compete, exchange, and collaborate to constitute themselves as subjects and build a collective identity, and mobilise their habitus to successfully play the social game. In the field, agents

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move in hierarchies by constituting various forms of capital. They need rituals to create a “mystified nature, consisting of concepts and categories of time and persons divorced from everyday experience” (Bloch 1989: 18), and they use this “mystified nature” to increase their symbolic capital and move upwards in hierarchies. Rituals are thus systems with which humans conveniently “hide” some features of the world and emphasise others, including some that may not exist, to facilitate and justify their moves within the social space. More mundane cognitive systems, on the other hand, would be used by humans to “know” the world (Bloch 1989: 18). Rituals are practised in any society: by Betsimisaraka and Mahafaly people when they communicate with their ancestors to obtain agreement on their practices; by external stakeholders who set up conservation policies and reify their rhetoric through workshops, reports, communication campaigns, and other “anti-­ cognition” machines that orientate state decisions in desired directions (Pollini 2011b); and by researchers, when they “discipline” their knowledge by creating boundaries between fields and institutions that look at different aspects of the same realities. Rituals are instruments of power and domination, although they can also be employed for resistance (Sharp 1993). When conservationists organise workshops where they invite community leaders, they offer limited space for the exchange of mundane knowledge, and ritual communication predominates. This may explain to a great extent the persistent push for alternatives to tavy or hatsake that are unsuitable to Malagasy farmers. Bloch’s distinction between concepts relevant to rituals and those used in mundane activities is reminiscent of a distinction made by Marx and Engels. According to Bloch (1989: 108), these authors distinguished two types of processes involved in the construction of knowledge: “historical exploitative processes,” which produce ideologies and generate concepts such as property and the state, and the “cognitive adaptation to an environment,” which generates what Bloch calls “mundane” concepts. Ideologies develop only in class societies and would be used to subvert knowledge that is directly produced though interaction with the environment. Environmental policies in Madagascar, implemented over several decades now, can be regarded as an ideological apparatus maintained through rituals consisting of conferences, workshops, reports, scientific publications, and communication campaigns. These rituals are performances that validate false representations of the reality (“success” stories outlined in glossy reports) in areas where true representations (the

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statement of failure of environmental policies) would cause anxiety. They are instruments of power that mirror and confront local rituals performed by Malagasy people who clear forests, leading to cognitive dissonances that only a commitment to more direct experiences of mundane realities, and more sharing of these experiences, can reduce. 4.9   Conservation, Yes! I do not intend, here, to make a case against conservation. I was trained in biology and consider myself a conservationist. I believe that conservation matters, that is, things that exist independently of human intentions (which we usually call “natural things,” see Pollini 2013) need to remain in place to some extent, for their own sake, and not because of any specific utility they have for humans. The view that conservation matters emerged or gained momentum in Western culture after the discovery of limits: when European settlers on small islands observed desiccation following extensive forest clearing (Grove 1996); when migrants in North America closed the frontier (Marsh 1874); and when astronauts took pictures of earth from outer space and realised how vulnerable our planet is (Dryzek 2005). If Malagasy farmers also experienced limits and were provided with viable land use alternatives, we can hardly see why they would not be willing to conserve their land and forests too. But if policymakers continue to impose conservation as an ideology rather than through shared experience, if that ideology is set against the mundane experience of Malagasy people, and if it severs them from the material and spiritual relationships they have established with their land and forests, then it will fail. Or it will succeed without ethics, that is, in disrespect of elementary human rights like the right to a decent livelihood. It will also continue to meet the opposition of social scientists, including those initially trained in biology and who embrace conservation as a positive value.

References Althabe, Gerard. 1969. Oppression et Libération dans l’Imaginaire, les Communautés Villageoises de la Côte Orientale de Madagascar. Paris: F. Maspero. Bertrand, Alain, and Jean-Luc Lemalade. 2003. Riziculture de tavy et Sécurité Alimentaire. In Déforestation et Systèmes Agraires à Madagascar: Les Dynamiques des tavy sur la Côte Orientale, ed. Sigrid Aubert, Serge Razafiarison, and Alain Bertrand, 75–85. Antananarivo: CIRAD CITE-FOFIFA.

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Bertrand, Alain, and Didier Randrianaivo. 2003. Tavy et déforestation. In Déforestation et Systèmes Agraires à Madagascar: Les Dynamiques des tavy sur la Côte Orientale, ed. Sigrid Aubert, Serge Razafiarison, and Alain Bertrand, 9–31. Antananarivo: CIRAD-CITE-FOFIFA. Bloch, Maurice. 1977. The Past and the Present in the Present. Man 12 (2): 278–292. ———. 1989. Ritual, History and Power. London: The Athlone Press. Boserup, Ester. 1965. The Conditions of Agricultural Growth: The Economics of Agrarian Change under Population Pressure. London: Earthscan Publication Ltd. Bourdieu, Pierre. 1994. Raisons Pratiques. Paris: Editions du Seuil. ———. 2017. Anthropologie Economique: Cours au Collège de France 1992-1993. Paris: Editions du Seuil. Dortier, J.F. 1998. Le Cerveau et la Pensée: La Révolution des Sciences Cognitives. Paris: Editions Sciences Humaines. Dryzek, John S. 2005. The Politics of the Earth: Environmental Discourses. Oxford University Press. Elmqvist, T., M. Pyykönen, M. Tengö, F. Rakotondrasoa, E. Rabakonandrianina, and C. Radimilahy. 2007. Patterns of Loss and Regeneration of Tropical Dry Forest in Madagascar: The Social Institutional Context. PLoS One 2 (5): 402. Evers, Sandra. 2002. Constructing History, Culture and Inequality: The Betsileo in the Extreme Southern Highlands of Madagascar. London, Boston, Koln: Brill. Fauroux, Emmanuel. 1994. Les Echanges Marchands dans les Sociétés Pastorales de l’Ensemble Méridional de Madagascar. Cahiers des Sciences Humaines 30 (1–2): 197–210. Fox, H., E.P. Kareiva, B. Silliman, J. Hitt, D. Lytle, B.S. Halpern, C.V. Hawkes, J. Lawler, M. Neel, J.D. Olden, M.A. Schlaepfer, K. Smith, and H. Tallis. 2009. Why Do We Fly? Ecologists’ Sins of Emission. Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment 7 (6): 294–296. Green, G.M., and R.W.  Sussman. 1990. Deforestation History of the Eastern Rainforests of Madagascar. Science 13: 212–215. Grove, R. 1996. Green Imperialism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Jarosz, Lucy. 1993. Defining and Explaining Tropical Deforestation: Shifting Cultivation and Population Growth in Colonial Madagascar (1896–1940). Economic Geography 69: 366–379. Keller, Eva. 2017. Beyond the Lens of Conservation: Malagasy and Swiss Imaginations of One Another. New York and Oxford: Berghahn. Kull, Christian A. 2004. Isle of Fire: The Political Ecology of Landscape Burning in Madagascar. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Laney, R.M. 2002. Disaggregating Induced Intensification for Land-Change Analysis: A Case Study from Madagascar. Annals of the Association of American Geographers 92 (4): 702–726.

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Le Bourdiec, Francois. 1974. Hommes et paysages du riz à Madagascar: étude de géographie humaine. Antananarivo: Imprimerie FTM. Marsh, G.P. 1874. The Earth As Modified by Human Action. New York: Scribner, Armstrong & Company. Muttenzer, Frank. 2020. Being Ethical among Vezo People Fisheries, Livelihoods, and Conservation in Madagascar. London: Rowman and Littlefield. Nambena, Simon. 2007. Régionalisation de l’Utilisation des Ressources Naturelles à partir du cas de Beforona. Unpublished PhD diss., Universited’Antananarivo, Antananarivo. Netting, Robert. 1986. Cultural Ecology. Mountain View, CA: Waveland Press Inc. Pollini, Jacques. 2007. Deforestation and Slash-and-Burn Cultivation in the Malagasy Rain Forests: Representations and Realities. PhD diss., Department of Natural Resources, Cornell University, New York, August 2007. ———. 2009. Agroforestry and the Search for Alternative to Slash-and-Burn Cultivation: From Technological Optimism to a Political Economy of Deforestation. Agriculture, Ecosystems and Environment 133: 48–60. ———. 2011a. Comptes Rendus de Mission de Terrain. Toliara: SuLaMa (Sustainable Land Management Project). ———. 2011b. The Difficult Reconciliation of Conservation and Development Objectives: The Case of the Malagasy Environmental Action Plan. Human Organizations 70 (1): 74. ———, ed. 2011c. Diagnostic Participatif de la Gestion des Ressource Naturelles sur le Plateau Mahafaly, Commune Rurale de Beheloka – Toliara Rapport Final – 21 novembre 2011. Toliara: SuLaMa (Sustainable Land Management Project). ———. 2013. Bruno Latour and the Ontological Dissolution of Nature in the Social Sciences: A Critical Review. Environmental Values 22: 25–42. Pollini, Jacques, Neil Hockley, Frank Muttenzer, and Bruno Ramamonjisoa. 2014. The Transfer of Natural Resources Management Rights to Local Communities through GELOSE and GCF Contracts. In Conservation and Environmental Management in Madagascar, ed. Y. Scales. Oxford: Earthscan. Popper, Karl. 1963. Conjectures and Refutations: The Growth of Scientific Knowledge. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Ramamonjisoa, Bruno, and Zo Rabemananjara. 2012. Une Evaluation de la Foresterie Communautaire. Les Cahiers d’Outre-Mer 257: 125–155. Razafiarison, Serge. 2003. La Construction Sociale à l’Epreuve du Temps. In Déforestation et Systèmes Agraires à Madagascar: Les Dynamiques des tavy sur la Côte Orientale, ed. Sigrid Aubert, Razafiarison Serge, and Alain Bertrand, 89–106. Antananarivo: CIRAD-CITE-FOFIFA. Razanaka, S., M. Grouzis, P. Milleville, B. Moizo, and C. Aubry, eds. 2001. Sociétés paysannes, transitions agraires et dynamiques écologiques dans le sud-ouest de Madagascar. Antananarivo: CNRE-IRD.

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Scales, Yvan, ed. 2014. Conservation and Environmental Management in Madagascar. Oxford: Earthscan. Sharp, Leslie. 1993. The Possessed and the Dispossessed: Spirits, Identity and Power in a Madagascar Migrant Town. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Styger, E. 2004. Fireless Alternatives to Slash-and-Burn Agriculture (Tavy) in the Rainforest Region of Madagascar. Unpublished PhD Dissertation. Ithaca: Cornell University. Tiffen, M., M.  Mortimore, and F.  Gichuki. 1994. More People, Less Erosion: Environmental Recovery in Kenya. Chichester: John Wiley. Williams, Michael. 2006. Deforesting the Earth: From Prehistory to Global Crisis, an Abridgment. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press.

The Eastern Forest in the Precolonial Era, c.1795–1895 Gwyn Campbell

1   Introduction There exists a big debate in the literature over the relative contribution of foreign and indigenous factors in the degradation of Madagascar’s eastern forests. A major refrain is that foreign capitalist and imperialist forces constituted the chief causative agents in the destruction of the Malagasy forests and associated flora and fauna. Advocates of this argument point to efforts by Merina authorities to prevent the degradation of woodlands and the sustainability of traditional peasant exploitation of forest resources. This changed dramatically after the French takeover of the island in 1895

I wish to acknowledge the support of the SSHRC in this research.

G. Campbell (*) Indian Ocean World Centre, McGill University, Montreal, QC, Canada e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 F. Muttenzer et al. (eds.), Perceptions and Representations of the Malagasy Environment Across Cultures, Palgrave Series in Indian Ocean World Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-23836-9_8

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when “The forces of colonial capitalism, mirrored in state actions and policies concerning natural resource extraction and cash crop production for export, triggered changes in land use practices which dramatically affected tropical forest cover in Madagascar” (Jarosz 1993: 367). This chapter seeks to add greater perspective to this viewpoint through an examination of changes to the eastern forests in the imperial Merina era from approximately 1795 to 1895. At the start of the nineteenth century, forest covered much of eastern Madagascar. It fell into three broad categories: the lowland rainfall forest below 460  m in altitude, that of the steep escarpment between about 460 m and 750–800 m, and that from about 800 to 1372 m. It ran some 1288 km north to south and at about 17° Lat. S divided into two parallel strips, the eastern one, Alamazaotra being broader than Analamaizina to its west. These two forest zones remained separate to the north (the upper zone ending west of Amparafaravola), but joined on the eastern border of Betsileo, to the south (Sibree 1879; Baker 1882; Baron 1887, 1890, 1891). The first detailed French study of Malagasy forests conducted in 1896–7 noted the huge diversity of plant life. For instance, the forests in Antongil Bay region contained well over 1200 species of wild plant and the most valuable hardwoods grew at 300–400 metres above sea level in the middle altitude (460–800  m) zone (Girod-Genet 1899; Campbell 2005).

2   Merina Ban on Woodland Exploitation The Merina regime that ruled most of central and eastern Madagascar in the nineteenth century issued certain prohibitions on the destruction of the forest. Andrianampoinimerina (r. 1787–1810) banned the felling of trees on Imerina’s 12 sacred hills, and traditional taboos also existed on the destruction of forest on other hills associated with royalty, such as Ifanongoavana, on the eastern border of Imerina, and Ambondrombe, in Betsileo (Callet 1974: 638, 730–1; Shaw 1876; Anon 1877). Radama I (r. 1810–28) planted fig trees in Antananarivo (Tacchi 1892). Ranavalona I (r. 1828–61) proclaimed “If the people cut and burn my forests, their wives and children will be reduced to slavery, for forests that are cut down or burned are destroyed” (Callet 1974: 612, fn.8; see also Raombana 1853a). Moreover, the Codes of 101 Articles (1868) and 305 Articles (1881) specifically forbade the burning of woodland, including for shifting agriculture (tavy), and the creation of settlements in the forest (Parker 1883; Raik 2007). Indeed, the ban formed a cornerstone of the imperial

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Merina defence policy, the eastern forest being popularly projected, alongside malaria, as the most important natural defence against any European invasion force (Campbell 2005). However, Andrianampoinimerina permitted some exploitation for firewood of the forests on the 12 sacred hills, even at the ancestral capital of Ambohimanga, and elsewhere both encouraged deforestation and forbade tree planting in order to promote riziculture (Callet 1974: 576, 730–1; Tacchi 1892). Under Radama I, the firing of forests to create cultivable land for rice, haricot beans, maize, and tobacco was widespread (Campbell 2013), and Ranavalona I, while re-imposing the ban on exploitation of woodland at Ambohimanga, permitted exploitation of other hitherto protected sacred sites and large-scale forest exploitation for industrial and agricultural projects (Callet 1974: 576, 611; Campbell 2013). Moreover, of the later Codes, it was commented in 1889 that “Merina laws forbid people to burn or otherwise destroy trees, but it is a dead letter” (Baron 1889: 250). Indeed, the evidence is that Imerina had been largely denuded of trees by the early nineteenth century and that its remaining patches of woodland disappeared during the industrial experiment from 1830 to 1853. Thus, by the time of the French takeover, the only vestiges of forest were located on the sacred hills and in inaccessible elevated locations, such as on the eastern slopes of Mount Tsiafajavona (2643 m) in the Ankaratra mountain range (Baron 1891; Elliot 1892; Sibree 1894). Indeed, firewood was so scarce and highly priced that only the elite used it—most Merina using coarse grass, or harvest stubble, for fires to cook and to keep warm in the cold dry season (Toy 1878). The exception was in medicine making. Many forest products (leaves, roots, resins, etc.) were used for multitude ailments, ranging from sprains to smallpox and gonorrhoea (Baron 1882; Parker 1881), while multiple fires using forest wood were sometimes maintained in making medicines to be drunk hot (Mackay 1893).

3  Demography and Merina Imperialism A major refrain in the debate about woodland depletion is the issue of demographic pressure on natural resources. The conventional view is that natural impediments to population growth were overcome in the nineteenth century by a Merina state that provided security and progressive health and education facilities (Deschamps 1972). Thus, most would accept the McEvedy and Jones (1978) estimate of a Malagasy population steadily rising from 1.5 million in 1800 to 2 million in 1850 and 2.75

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million in 1900, although other scholars hold that, by 1900, the real population was considerably higher, possibly around 3.3 million. As Madagascar experienced significant demographic expansion only from the late 1940s, the conventional consensus is that the state played a crucial but contrasting demographic role, the precolonial Merina state removing natural obstacles to population growth, and the succeeding colonial state imposing drastic artificial constraints that curtailed such expansion (Campbell 2005; Paillard 1987; Robequain 1958). However, it could be argued that due predominantly to natural factors, Madagascar was by 1800 suffering from overpopulation—defined by the ability of the land under the existing technology to support a given population. An indication that maximum densities had been reached in both lowland and upland Madagascar by the early 1800s was the island-wide practice of infanticide, a ritual associated with perennial problems of overpopulation. In lowland regions, it was common for three days of the week to be taboo for births, babies born on those days being left to die, while in some societies, such as the Tanala, entire months were taboo. Also, a taboo against twins was widespread on the plateau (Richardson 1876, Sibree 1924, Decary 1947–8, Molet 1953, Decary 1958). Moreover, the fishing, swidden, and pastoral economies of the lowlands set far greater demographic limits than did the labour-intensive riziculture of the central highlands. Indeed, early colonial censuses reveal population densities of 1 to 6 people per km2 for the lowlands—except for the fertile valleys of the southeast, with 10 people per km2, and 6 to 16 people per km2 for the central plateau with—exceptionally—90 per km2 in and around Antananarivo (Grandidier and Guillaume 1908; Gautier 1898). Lucy Jarosz implies that major demographic disturbances, characterised by large-scale flight of Malagasy peasants to the forests where they survived for years as shifting cultivators, first occurred from 1896, due to the conflict, resistance, and famine that accompanied France’s annexation of Madagascar (Jarosz 1993). However, this pattern also clearly characterises much of the nineteenth century, particularly from 1820 to 1896. Although from the late eighteenth century the Merina state initially played a positive role, ending internecine conflict and eliminating food scarcity by draining and cultivating the vast Betsimitatatra marshland of central Imerina, autarkic policies adopted from the 1820s resulted in widespread conflict, resistance, and famine, with strongly negative demographic effects (Campbell 1987, 1988). Indeed, estimates garnered from a large number of precolonial sources, both speculative and informed, indicate the possibility that

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the island’s population remained stagnant during the nineteenth century at around 2–2.5 million, albeit with considerable regional variation (Randrianja 1992, Paillard 1987, Decary 1947–8).

4   Forest Exploitation 4.1   Cattle and Cattle Products From the mid-eighteenth century a burgeoning plantation economy on the Mascarenes led to major demand for provisions from Madagascar. The demand for live cattle was initially met chiefly by the Sakalava who, in the 1810s, drove some 30,000 oxen each year from northwestern Madagascar to ports on the northeast between Vohemar and Cape Amber. However, following the 1817 Merina conquest of the Tamatave region, the larger non-Merina cattle herders migrated to the western plains, and their exports via the east coast dropped dramatically (Campbell 2005; Mayeur 1785). Merina military expansion from the 1790s resulted for the first time in the accumulation of large cattle herds by the Merina elite. The Merina crown annexed the populous cattle-country of Vonizongo and until the 1850s launched devastating attacks on other regions to seize cattle and enslave captives (Campbell 2005; Raombana 1853b; Freeman and Johns 1840). However, outside major festivals the domestic Merina market for beef was limited to the elite—a tiny percentage of the population. Moreover, cold winters and lack of fodder hindered cattle raising in Imerina, where, additionally, the annual firing of topsoil cover to encourage new growth resulted in such erosion “as to leave many acres totally inaccessible to cattle” (Hastie 1824). Thus the Merina elite sought pasture at lower altitudes, from where cattle could be trekked either to the plateau or to east coast ports for export. The two main regions selected for pastureland were the Ankay plain, in Bezanozano country in the Lohasoa Valley, on the Antananarivo-Tamatave route, and a region at a similar altitude located to the northeast of Antananarivo. Some Bezanozano, all of whom owned oxen, entered the cattle trade, but from 1820, members of the Merina elite constituted by far the major cattle traders, organised through their slaves and deka (aides-de-camp) (Campbell 2005; Peake 1878; Jukes and Lord 1877; Sibree 1877; Mayeur 1896). The extensive rearing of large herds of cattle in woodland clearings was environmentally detrimental. Livestock grazing and trampling disturbed seed beds and prevented normal regeneration of tree growth. Repeated

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firing of grassland and undergrowth destroyed degraded stands and adversely impacted the fringes of the forest. Additionally, trees were cut down to provide wood for cattle stockades, and portions of the forest cleared to create fields to grow subsistence crops for cattle-tenders (Campbell 2013; Peake 1878; Moss 1876). This was the case with the Bezanozano, and the largely independent cattle-owning and trading Tanala and Antaimoro of the southeast, and Sakalava and Antankarana of the extreme northeast. The trekking of cattle to market further degraded forest fringes, notably along the main Antananarivo-Tamatave route, as did the pasture required prior to their embarkation (Faucon 1897; Shaw 1893; Baron 1892; Cowan 1882; Dumaine 1790; Mayeur 1777). Annual live cattle exports from the Malagasy east coast to the Mascarenes rose from an estimated 1350 between 1775 and 1800, to 5772 from 1824 to 1826, to 11,075 from 1835 to 1844, before falling sharply during a ban on trade with Europeans from 1845 to 1853, rising thereafter to about 11,000, and again to about 15,000 in the early 1860s (Campbell 2020a; Anon 1847). Dried and salted meat was also exported, to satisfy Mascarene demand. Thus from 1821 to 1845 some 1410 tons of dried beef was shipped to Réunion, while in 1835 alone between 1320 and 1584 tons was sent to Mauritius. More significant were hides of cattle slaughtered initially probably in east coast ports, but from the 1860s, when a huge demand arose in Europe and the United States, from Merina slaughter houses. By 1883, an estimated 42,000 hides were annually transported from Antananarivo to east coast ports, and by the late 1890s some 200,000 hides were each year sold for export from both east and west coasts, including hides supplied by the Tanala (Campbell 2020a; Besson 1893).

5  Rice From the mid-1700s, Mascarene demand for Malagasy rice also steadily grew, notably to feed its slave population. This was met initially chiefly by supplies from Foulpointe, which by 1800 was annually exporting between 2000 and 2500 tonnes of rice (Campbell 2005; Filliot 1974; Theal 1964). From 1800 to 1836, Mascarene demand for rice may well have led to the transformation of woodland to the immediate hinterland of the northeast coast between Tamatave and Foulpointe into rice fields. However, any such destruction of forest ended in 1836 when Ranavalona declared a monopoly over the rice export trades from northeast Madagascar and raised the price. In consequence, Mascarene traders who had previously

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bought provisions cheaply direct from Betsimisaraka farmers turned wholesale to India—which by 1830 had surpassed Madagascar as their chief source of rice—for their supplies. Thus, from 1835 to 1844, only 4668 tonnes (10 tonnes p.a.) of Malagasy rice was exported to Mauritius (Campbell 2020a; Raombana 1853b; Anon 1847). Nevertheless, rice continued to be grown for export. Thus in southeast Madagascar in 1893, peasant farmers practising tavy, while preferring local red rice, responded to market forces by growing the more internationally valued white grained rice for export (Shaw 1893). Far more destructive of the forest was tavy rice cultivation. This involved the selection of level or gently sloping forest land which, generally from August to October, was fired, then cleared with axes. The resultant ash enhanced the fertility of the soil on which rice, the staple crop, was grown, alongside maize or haricot and saonjo (an edible arum), and sometimes sugarcane, sweet potatoes, and manioc (cassava). Wherever possible, banana and plantain were also cultivated. Amongst the Zafimaniry, an average family worked 22 days to produce 800 kg to 1200 kg of rice from one hectare of land, an area generally sufficient to support a family in rice. The plot was fired and replanted with rice successively for five to six years, although yields steadily diminished. After the fourth year, the soil frequently proved too infertile to support maize and haricots, which were then replaced by sweet potato or manioc. Following the abandonment of an exhausted plot, another was cleared at a higher level. In principle this ensured that sufficient soil nutrients from the new plot would seep into the abandoned field to renew its fertility and enable re-cultivation after five fallow years. In reality, many nutrients washed away during the rainy season, and the depleted soil could bear only one or two additional harvests of credible yield. Moreover, removal of vegetation from the cleared plot and frequent accidental burning of adjacent forest exposed increasing areas of thin top soil to erosion by rain and to the tropical sun, which bleached the ground, killing the humus essential to continued soil fertility (Couland 1973; Grandidier 1928; Herbert 1888; Cowan 1882). Such practices were sustainable, provided population densities were low. However, during the nineteenth century, the number of people living in the forest increased dramatically due to flight from imperial Merina policies of military expansion and pillage, and fanompoana—unremunerated forced labour imposed on all subject to imperial Merina authority. Whereas for most of the late eighteenth century, Imerina was wracked by internal strife, by 1800 peace was restored, and from 1803 to 1817 the

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Merina crown brought the neighbouring plateau regions of Betsileo (to the south) and Antsihanaka (to the north), and in 1817 the main trade route to Tamatave and Foulpointe, under its dominion. From 1820, profiting from British military aid, it rapidly expanded to establish control by 1824 of the corridor to Majunga, the most important west coast port, and by 1826 entire eastern littoral. In 1825–26, Radama I rejected the British alliance and inaugurated autarkic policies that his successor, Ranavalona I reinforced (Campbell 2005). As the crown maintained the ban on slave exports agreed with the British in 1820, they employed other means to generate revenue, one of which was the pillage of non-Merina peoples. Merina military expeditions were until 1853 regularly despatched against lowland ethnicities notably those inhabiting the relatively densely populated valleys of the southeast, to enslave women and children (captive men were executed) (Shaw 1893, Standing 1887, Sibree 1876a). For example, in 1826–27, about 7000 troops attacked the Antaisaka of southeast Madagascar, killing 2000 men and enslaving an estimated 6000 women and children (Raombana 1853a); in 1829 an expedition from the “South” killed 1000 men and enslaved 800 women and children (Campbell 2011); in 1832, Merina troops attacked the Antaimoro in the Vohipeno region, seizing 10,000 cattle, enslaving 14,000 women and children, and killing an estimated 4700 men; and in 1838 ravaged the region between Vangaindrano (where they established a garrison) and Fort Dauphin, seizing 3579 cattle, enslaving at least 15,000 women and children, and killing 5704 men (Campbell 2005; Boudou 1932; Raombana 1853a, 1853b; Freeman and Johns 1840). From 1820 to 1852, an estimated one million lowland women and children were enslaved and carried to Imerina (Campbell 2007, 2011). An inevitable consequence of such campaigns was the flight of local populations to thickly forested regions to seek refuge from the Merina. In areas where the Merina effectively established military domination, as in Antsihanaka and Betsileo, and in Bezanozano in the Mangoro Valley of the eastern escarpment, and in Betsimisaraka land on the northeast coast, they imposed fanompoana which was unremunerated, brutally harsh, and removed peasants from their fields at critical periods of the agricultural year (Campbell 2005). Such fanompoana frequently resulted in acute food shortages and led to the flight of oppressed population to the forest. For instance, in 1833–34, Betsimisaraka in the Tamatave and Foulpointe regions fled en-masse into the forest to escape both excessive fanompoana and famine (Raombana 1853b). Again, in the 1830s or

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1840s, the crown attempted to impose fanompoana to provide the workforce for vanilla plantations at Mananjary, on the east coast, the local Tambahoaka population fled (Campbell 2005). This reaction was manifest up to the French takeover. Thus in 1892, it was commented that many Betsimisaraka in northeastern Madagascar had “on account of the grinding fanompoana and various monetary exactions” (Baron 1892: 441) imposed by the Merina fled “to distant and almost inaccessible parts of the forest away inland” (Raombana 1853b: 444). In similar fashion, political and religious dissidents, such as indigenous converts to Christianity from 1835 to 1861, sought to escape persecution by fleeing to the forest (Griffiths 1843).

Madagascar: Frequency of Famine, 1816–96 (source: Campbell 2005)

Those who fled into the forest were faced with a battle for survival, both in terms of subsisting in their new environment and against the Merina. Many hundreds of refugees died of starvation in the forest. Those who survived initially subsisted chiefly on forest yams (ovinala) and fruit (Campbell 2012; Baron 1890; Raombana 1853b). Any longer-term relocation to the forest entailed hunting and the adoption of shifting

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cultivation. Both forest peoples and those on the plateau living near the western edge of the forest commonly hunted lemurs (albeit sparing the aye-aye and indri which were protected by taboos), the fosa, wild boar, fish, wild fowl, and birds, all of which constituted important sources of protein and vitamins. Indeed, in the early 1890s, Louis Catat commented that the Tanala “live mainly from hunting and fishing” (Catat 1889–90: 209; see also Sibree 1896a; Cowan 1882; Pearse 1882; Baron 1882, 1890). Jarosz considered that when tavy was prohibited by the French, the ban “elevated the practice of tavy to a symbol of independence and liberty from colonial rule” (Jarosz 1993: 374). If that was the case, then the same could be said of those forced to adopt it in reaction to Merina imperial rule. Many refugees also practised brigandry, raiding plateau villages, and preying off trade routes (Walen 1887; Shaw 1875b; Lloyd 1850). However, Merina authorities, who maintained an efficient secret service, were well informed about the movement and activities of refugees, against whom they employed expert hunters, and who they tried to eliminate (Faucon 1897; Raombana 1853b; Lloyd 1850). The most famous example was the refugee community of Ikongo, in the eastern forest, some 90  km from the major Merina garrisons of Fianarantsoa and Ambohimandroso. Its population fluctuated: estimates run from 30,000 in the mid-1860s, to 9000 in 1875, to 10,000 on the eve of the French takeover (Martineau 1894; Shaw 1875b; Rooke 1866). The refugees settled the narrow Ikongo basin, some 24–32 km wide and 100 km long, where they lived in small hamlets, of 12–30 houses each, growing tavy rice, “potato, beans, and a species of millet” (Shaw 1875a). The Ikongo formed natural allies of the Taimoro refugees living on the Faraoni River who had escaped slavery on foreign-managed east coast plantations, and they cooperated at least once with the Sakalava in an attack on Fianarantsoa (Walen 1887; Finaz 1876; Shaw 1875a). Whenever a Merina force approached, the Ikongo fled to the hilltops, the most formidable of which was the impregnable mountain fortress of “Ikongo.” Through deceit, Merina commanders in 1832 slaughtered 8000 Ikongo men and enslaved some 20,000 women and children. However, the refugee community survived four major Merina onslaughts, and in 1862 Radama II recognised its independence (Cowan 1882; Shaw 1875b; Raombana 1853b). Refugee communities continued to form in the eastern forest until the French takeover. For instance, in circa 1889 the Andrarivo slaves of the Zafindravola of the Ionaivo valley fled to the high valley of the River Sahanony, an affluent of the Vorokatsy (Trousselle 1899). The consequent

THE EASTERN FOREST IN THE PRECOLONIAL ERA… 201

growth in the forest population—one informed estimate was that independent Tanala had a population of 12,000–15,000 by 1893 (Besson 1893)—inevitably resulted in significantly increased degradation of the forest. At the same time, other groups steadily encroached on the forest. Thus it was noted in the late 1880s that the largely independent Tanosy to the interior of Fort Dauphin “cultivate rice just like the Betsimisaraka … Each year, they clear sufficient land in the neighbouring forest to meet their requirements” (Catat 1889–90: 272). They also cultivated sugarcane, manioc and sweet potatoes, beans, maize, sorghum, arum, and tobacco (Knight 1895; Besson 1893). Again, the Bezanozano underwent considerable demographic expansion. Numbering possibly 12,250  in 1820, by 1878 their numbers had grown to an estimated 45,900, excluding Merina settlers and slaves, meaning a significant increase in the exploitation of the forests around them (Peake 1878). Additionally, Merina military expeditions, comprising often many thousands of men, inevitably impacted the forests through which they marched, because of the numbers involved, their duration, and their predatory nature. For example, the 1831 expedition against the Ikongo, a community of forest refugees, comprised between 2500 and 10,000 men, and accompanied by as many wives, concubines, and slaves. Such expeditions, several of which would be in action simultaneously in different regions in the period 1820–53, campaigned for six months during the dry season (Freeman and Johns 1840). Similarly, when in 1892 the governors of Maroantsetra and Anonibe travelled to the border of their respective provinces to discuss a dispute between two forest concessionaires, their retinues were so great that for some 100 km they widened a simple footpath into something resembling a road (Baron 1892; see also Grandidier 1894). Moreover, whenever a Merina dignitary travelled a long distance, temporary camps were built at night surrounded by a defensive palisade made from locally exploited woodland (Grandidier 1900; Callet 1974).

6  Plantation Cash Crops A variety of cash crops for export were grown in eastern Madagascar in the precolonial era, all of which had an impact on the forest. These included vanilla, probably first cultivated at Mahela in 1840, but which subsequently expanded along the east coast, being grown by the early 1890s notably at Mahanoro and Sambava, where by 1895 some 80,000 vanilla trees had been planted (Girod-Genet 1899, Prudhomme 1896a, Catat

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1889–90). From the 1860s, tobacco was grown along the eastern littoral by Malagasy peasants for sale to foreign merchants on the coast for export. For example, 400–500  kg was being brought annually to market in Vohimar in the 1880s (Oliver 1886 vol. 2). Raffia, from Antsihanaka, the Ankay, and the east coast as far south as the River Matitatana, was sold widely in the domestic market and was exported in the early 1800s to the Mascarenes to clothe slaves, and from the 1860s to Britain for use as twine and window curtains (Catat 1889–90, Baron 1892). Cotton, traditionally produced on a large scale for domestic consumption, was produced on a small scale for export on European-supervised east coast plantations from 1836 and by the Tanosy of the southeast (producing reputedly very fine cotton) by the mid-1880s. In the late nineteenth century, hemp was also produced for export on a minor scale in the Tamatave region (Campbell 2005, Wills 1885, Ellis 1838 vol. 1). Of greater significance were sugar, coffee, and cocoa. Sugarcane had long been cultivated by Malagasy peasants, who traditionally chewed and sucked the juice from the cane and used it to make rum (taoka) (Wills 1885; Baron 1878). It was, for example, widely cultivated on a small scale on the plateau (Moss 1876), in Bezanozano (Jukes and Lord 1877), and by the Tanala in the forest (Knight 1895; Besson 1893; Cowan 1882). However, from the 1820s, and the establishment of Merina rule over most of eastern Madagascar, the Merina crown entered partnerships with a number of foreigners for the establishment in coastal regions of extensive sugarcane plantations and factories for the production of sugar (for export) and rum (for the domestic market). These included in the early nineteenth century, Nicolas Lambros (along the River Mananjary) and Lastelle (Mahela, and along the Rivers Mananjary and Rianambo), and Ligie (Mahela and Mananjary). Lastelle at Mahela produced annually between 250,000 and 300,000 kgs of sugar and 1200 barrels of rum. The rise in the world price of tropical produce in the late 1860s and 1870s led to a rush of foreign investment in the production of Malagasy sugar (Campbell 2005, 2012). However, the sugar export sector was hit hard by competition on the European market from beet sugar in the late 1870s and early 1880s, accentuated on the northeast coast by cyclone damage to the sugarcane crop in 1884. Indeed, it is estimated that a cyclone strong enough to destroy 50% to 80% of plantation trees and cause considerable damage to the transport and ports infrastructure hit the east coast of Madagascar on average once every ten years (Campbell 2015; Madagascar Times 1884).

THE EASTERN FOREST IN THE PRECOLONIAL ERA… 203

1897

1892

1887

1882

1877

1872

1867

1862

1857

1852

1847

1842

1837

1832

1827

1822

1817

1812

1807

Known Incidence of Cyclones to hit Northeast Madagascar, 1807-99 (source: IOWC database)

Known Incidence of Cyclones to hit Northeast Madagascar, 1807–99 (source: IOWC database)

6.1  Coffee Lucy Jarosz argued that the colonial regime introduced coffee, the cultivation of which led to shortfalls in rice production because of the competing claims to land and labour of cash cropping and rainfed rice regimes (Jarosz 1993: 371). Coffee production contributed greatly to deforestation as it required tropical forests to be thinned to provide shade for the coffee plant. However, coffee was produced in Madagascar long before the French colonial era. It was grown for export possibly from the 1790s, certainly from the early 1800s. From the 1820s, with the establishment of Merina control along the eastern littoral, coffee there was produced in partnership with the Merina crown. In 1825 de Rontaunay’s agents, Arnoux and Delastelle, engaged to plant 150,000 bushes and in 1840 Nicol, another Réunionnais planter, signed an eight-year crown contract for a coffee plantation—both in the Mananjary region (Campbell 2003, 2012; Clarence-Smith and Topik 2003; Grandidier 1928; Rooke 1866). Coffee production remained limited until the late 1860s when, in response to a rise in global prices, a number of Creole and European supervised plantations were established on the east coast around Tamatave Mananjary and Vatomandry. However, when in 1878 settlers imported from Réunion liberia, a West African variety of coffee reputedly hardier

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than arabica, they brought with it Hemileia vastatrix—a coffee disease that had come to Réunion from Ceylon (Sri Lanka). By 1881, the disease had virtually wiped out plantations on land below 270 metres, and coffee exports declined precipitously (Campbell 2005, Oliver 1886 vol. 2). However, Malagasy peasants also responded with alacrity to rising demand and started to produce Arabica coffee for export, both on the plateau and in the forest. On the plateau (Betsileo, Imerina, Antsihanaka), coffee was generally grown in defensive ditches. The Bezanozano also cultivated “fine quality” coffee, as in forest clearings did the Tanala and Antaimoro emigrants to Antanosy (Catat 1889–90: 264; see also Cowan 1882, Peake 1878, Jukes and Lord 1877). As coffee beans needed to be planted in a nursery and transplanted after one year—always in the shade and shelter of trees—coffee production in woodland inevitably added to the incentive to both shifting cultivation and the degradation of virgin forest (Prudhomme 1896c). As peasant coffee plantations were located at altitudes of over 270 metres, they proved less vulnerable to Hemileia vastatrix (Annuaire 1900). Coffee growers affected by the blight, such as those in settlements on the Antananarivo-Tamatave route, recovered quickly due to smaller overheads and the ability to retreat temporarily into subsistence farming. In 1886, it was reported that the most successful coffee gardens were located “in the neighbourhood of the westernmost of the two lines of forest which stretch from north to south between the Capital and the east coast. The elevation there is suitable, and there is plenty of moisture” (Pickersgill 1886: 181). 6.2  Cocoa By 1843, Delastelle had also established cocoa plantations (Campbell 2012). Again, the rise in the world price of tropical produce in the late 1860s and 1870s led to a rush of foreign investment in Madagascar, chiefly in the Tamatave region, that included Mascarene Creole attempts to introduce cocoa (Campbell 2005). However, not until the 1880s, after Hemileia vastatrix had devastated all coffee plantations below an altitude of 270  m, was there substantial investment in growing cocoa introduced to the east coast of Madagascar from Réunion and Mauritius and sometime later from Ste. Marie to the Tamatave region. However, cocoa was not planted in virgin forest, as was typical of other cocoagrowing areas, but on land that had been used to grow other crops such as sugarcane, banana trees, the slower-growing “bois noir” being planted

THE EASTERN FOREST IN THE PRECOLONIAL ERA… 205

to provide them shelter and shade (Campbell 1996, Annuaire 1900, Prudhomme 1896b).

7  Exploitation of Forest Resources Foreigners lacked the ability to fully exploit forest resources until after the 1883–85 Franco-Merina War. A condition of the peace negotiated in 1885 was French seizure of Tamatave customs and the imposition of a $2 million indemnity on the Merina regime, which sought to raise the finance to pay it through granting of large-scale concessions, most notably in the context of this essay, for valuable hardwood timber from the eastern forests. 7.1   Gum Copal Gum copal (Mal. sandarosy), a generic term for a resin exuded from various tropical trees, was in high demand in Europe and the United States, where it was processed and used as a varnish. The resin was tapped directly from trees (congealing in irregularly shaped yellowish or colourless pieces) rather than, as commonly on the east African coast, dug up as a fossil. Americans exported it from the west coast from the mid-1820s, and in 1835–86 Garnot enjoyed a short-lived joint enterprise with the Merina crown for the exploitation of gum copal from the northeast coast. When that collapsed, Swahili traders stepped in, shipping large quantities from Mahavelona and Vohimar until the crown signed another contract granting Lastelle a monopoly of gum copal exports from the northeast coast in the 1840s. In the 1860s, there was increased interest in gum copal from Mascarene traders, and in the 1880s by European and American merchants—leading to the Betsimisaraka sourcing it along the east coast, and the Merina crown to intensively exploit the forest in the Maroantsetra region to the hinterland of Antongil Bay, in northeast Madagascar (Campbell 2005; Rasoamiaramanana 1973; Wills 1885; Rooke 1866; Guillain 1845). 7.2   Honey and Beeswax Honey was highly valued by the Malagasy and considered a luxury by the Merina. It was, except by the 1880s in a few villages where bees were kept (Wills 1885), a forest product. The Bezanozano, Tanala, Betsileo, and

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Betsimisaraka living in or on the margins of the eastern forest collected honey combs from natural or transplanted hives in tree or rock hollows, stored the honey in earthen pots, and sold them in local markets in the dry season (Campbell 2012; Cowan 1882; Pearse 1882; Baron 1882, 1890; Sibree 1877). Beeswax, an associated asset, was exploited for export on a minor scale from the forest of the northeast under the Garnot monopoly (1835–6) (Guillain 1845; Rasoamiaramanana 1973) and by the Bezanozano in the Mangoro River region by the 1870s (Peake 1878). However, in the 1880s, European and American demand led to an intensification in its exploitation along the entire eastern littoral, but especially from the Angontsy forest of northeast Madagascar (Catat 1889–90, Besson 1893, Baron 1892, Wills 1885). Overall, the collection of honey and beeswax did little environmental damage. However, commenting of the Bezanozano in 1878, missionary P.G. Peake stated: “Passing through the forest I came across a magnificent tree which had been felled for the sole purpose of getting the honey deposited in it by bees. I measured its girth 20 feet [6.1 m] from the roots, and found it to be 15 feet [c. 4.6 m] in circumference. The honey taken out sold for four shillings!” (Peake 1878: 34). 7.3  Rubber The collection of rubber did major harm to the Malagasy forest. Rubber was first noticed by Europeans in the 1760s (Rochon 1768), and by the early 1800s, Europeans were beginning to exploit rubber (Vahea madagascariensis, Bojer) known locally as fingotra, from the eastern forests which possessed several rubber-yielding plants, including a tree called barabanja or hazondrano, and vines such as the vahea, Landolphia, and Hancornia (Girod-Genet 1899; Wills 1885). The most valued east coast variety was “pinky,” extracted from the barabanja tree (a species of Mascarenhasia), which grew in the moist habitat of the northeastern forest, although the best quality rubber, characterised by a high (44%) latex content and low (c. 1%) resin content came from Euphorbia intisy from the southeast of the island (Danthu et  al. 2013; Campbell 2003, Grandidier 1928). By 1862, between about 20 and 25 tonnes of rubber (valued at between $2400 and $4000) was being exported annually from a forest exploitation of some 466 km2, south of Vohimar. However, exploitation of Malagasy rubber grew significant only from the late 1860s, when Merina crown

THE EASTERN FOREST IN THE PRECOLONIAL ERA… 207

declared it a royal monopoly. The rubber was collected by Malagasy peasants in the off-peak agricultural season from May to September, in both coastal and inland forests. Thus from the late 1870s, the Antsihanaka exploited rubber from the western edge of the forest, as did the Bezanozano in the central forests. They sold the rubber to indigenous traders (those in the interior often took it to Antananarivo where a specialist rubber market had emerged by 1884), who took it to Creole agents located in east coast ports such as Fenoarivo and Foulpointe who represented the larger Mascarene and European firms based in Tamatave on or close to the east coast (from 1870, 12 tonnes were annually exported to Europe from Mananjary alone) (Danthu et  al. 2013; Campbell 2005; Knight 1895; Catat 1889–90; Ransome 1890; Baron 1882; Peake 1878; Sibree 1877). Malagasy Rubber Exports to Britain, 1875-99 (cwt) (source; Campbell 2005) 12000 10000 8000 6000 4000 2000 1899

1897

1895

1893

1891

1889

1887

1885

1883

1881

1879

1877

1875

0

Malagasy rubber exports to Britain, 1875–99 (cwt) (source; Campbell 2005)

During the 1880s’ depression, Malagasy rubber remained competitive on the world market due to the pinky variety, which, in the early 1880s, fetched a price second only to Brazilian para. However, only small quantities were required. Moreover, the value of other Malagasy rubber varieties declined sharply largely due to poor production techniques. Rubber was extracted from vines by cutting a slit in the stem through which the juice flowed into a receptacle. Traditionally, the milk was coagulated in the cool of evening by adding salt water and kneading the mixture into balls or by cooking the milk over a fire. From the 1880s, sulphuric acid was also used. However, rubber-yielding vines were increasingly cut at the roots rather

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G. CAMPBELL

than bled. Ideally, trees should have been bled morning and evening, the juice coagulating in the sun through natural evaporation, but were increasingly cut down or burned before the juice was collected. The latex sometimes contained 70% impurities, natural or deliberately added. Also, the juices of the different varieties, including pinky, were increasingly mixed indiscriminately. Thus whereas from 1879 to 1893 the total value of Malagasy rubber entering Britain rose from $8195 to $454,920, its price fell from $74.5 to $43.26 per cwt. Moreover, the cutting down of rubberyielding vines and trees meant that by 1886 such vines were “now found only in the depths of the forests” (Pickersgill 1886: 182), and by 1893 certain forested regions, such as that to the east of Vohipeno, had become completely depleted of India rubber (Danthu et  al. 2013; Grandidier 1928; Shaw 1893; Baron 1882, 1890; Ransome 1890; Oliver 1886 vol. 2.; Peake 1878; Jukes and Lord 1877). There was, however, another brief rubber boom in the early 1890s, initially along the entire east coast, focussed on Landolphia rubber, sold internationally under the name “Madagascar rose” and, in the northeast, on pinky. However, this quickly subsided due to over-exploitation, except for Intisy variety from the hinterland of Fort Dauphin that was marketed internationally as “Kilwa rubber” in order to hide its origins. In 1894, an absolute decline set in, both in the quantity and in the value of rubber exported, it being commented in 1895 of Fort Dauphin that “the natives were no longer bringing in India rubber-the principal article of exportfrom the forests” (Knight 1895: 364). The main reason for this was that by then, a significant proportion of rubber-yielding vines and trees had been destroyed (Shaw 1893; Baron 1892). 7.4  Charcoal Charcoal-making caused enormous damage to the forest. Charcoal (arina—a word of Austronesian origin) had been employed from the beginning of human settlement in Madagascar (Ellis 1838 vol. 1). It was produced from trees set alight and carbonised. This was achieved in crude earth kilns, or pits that had a wood-to-charcoal ratio of around 10–15% (compared to 20–25% using modern methods). The making of 100 bags of charcoal weighing 40 kg each (the average carried by porters) by traditional methods would have entailed the destruction of an estimated 89 trees or 2.57 ha of forest. It was preferred to wood as an industrial fuel on the plateau because it was much lighter, thus cheaper to transport, and

THE EASTERN FOREST IN THE PRECOLONIAL ERA… 209

could be preserved for long periods without damage from weather, insects, or fungi. Moreover, charcoal contains double the energy of ordinary firewood, and its burning is much hotter and easier to manage (Minten et al. 2013; Gade and Perkins-Belgram 1986). Charcoal was extensively used in early communities in Imerina and Antsihanaka, in the production of ceramics and, particularly from the sixteenth century of iron-headed agricultural and wood-cutting tools and weapons. It is unknown how much woodland existed in Imerina at the start of the eighteenth century. Placenames including ala (forest or wood) indicate that many hills, where most human settlements were founded, were once wooded. These include Ialaroa (“Two-woods”), Analabe (“Greatwood”), Ivohialabe (“Hill-of-much-wood”), Analamanantona (“Hanging-wood”), Analamiraviravy (“Overhanging-wood”), Analamanara (“Coldwood”), Analamahitsy (“Upright-wood”), and Analambano (“Heron’s wood”) (Wright 2007; Vérin 1964; Sibree 1896b). However, most existing woodland in the central highlands had by the late eighteenth century been depleted. This was due firstly to the Merina civil wars. These greatly enhanced the demand for iron weapons, such as spears, javelins, and knives, and iron utensils to build and maintain defence ditches and walls around settlements. Secondly, the conversion of the Betsimitatatra marshlands and surrounding region into a vast area of irrigated rice fields, and the erection and maintenance of dykes along the River Ikopa, as of a complex of canals and rice fields across surrounding lowlands and hillsides, required an endless supply of spade (angady) heads (each 22.5–61 cm long and 10–15 cm wide) (Wills 1885, Ellis 1838 vol. 2). The charcoal demands of this increased iron production were large, particularly as iron ore underwent two furnace smelting processes before being transferred to smiths who used charcoal-fed kilns to manufacture iron utensils and weapons. As a result of the associated demand for wood, the plateau had become largely denuded of trees by the late 1700s, and the costs of carrying charcoal and wood to iron-producing sites distant from, or ores and bloom to, the eastern forest grew increasingly onerous. Consequently, most pottery-makers on the plateau used rice husks to fire their kilns. Additionally, although some iron production (including, by the 1830s, bayonets) continued in the celebrated iron ore mining and smelting district of Ambatolehivy about 113  km west of Antananarivo, with a dependent population in 1822 estimated at between 385 and 580—a significant industrial concentration—the centre of iron-smelting moved east to the Amoronkay District on the western border of the

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Analamaizina forest (Gabler 2005; Grandidier 1928, Oliver 1886 vols. 1 & 2, Wills 1885, Raombana 1853a, Ellis 1838 vols. 1 & 2, Mayeur 1777, 1785, 1896). Following the adoption of autarky in the mid-1820s, the Merina crown declared a royal monopoly over all iron ore mines in Antsihanaka and Imerina and inaugurated a major effort to industrialise in and around Antananarivo, building workshops and mills constructed of wood and iron. For example, from 1829, the production of gunpowder and soap was carried out at Analakely (“Little wood”), then just northwest of Antananarivo. Until the early 1800s, nearby Ankorahotra was heavily wooded, and Analakely clearly possessed a vestige of forest, as charcoal was prepared there for gunpowder manufacturing (Callet 1974, Chauvin 1939, Tacchi 1892, Raombana 1853b, Ellis 1838 vol. 1). However, local trees were quickly depleted, and fuel sought in the eastern forest. From 1837 an additional, larger, industrial centre was created at Mantasoa on the western edge of the great eastern forest. There, under the supervision of Frenchman, Jean Laborde, a massive fanompoana and prisoner workforce produced a considerable range of items, including guns, powder, cannon and shot, brass, steel, swords, glass, silk, lime, black paint made from bones, blue and red paint, ink, white soap, potash, lumpsugar, sugar-candy, bricks and tiles, and lightning conductors—all of which required firing (Hewlett 1887). From 1840 to 1845, in conjunction with Rontaunay, the crown also established workshops on the east coast building and repairing boats employed on inland and coastal waters, and manufacturing pickaxes, axes, and shovels for export to Réunion (Fontoynont and Nicol. 1940). During the 1883–85 Franco-Merina War, local blacksmith fanompoana units, the main ones being located in Amoronkay and Mahatsara, also produced lead bullets and machine guns (Gendronneau 1897; Wills 1885). Eastern Betsileo was also a significant centre of the iron industry, as was the western edge of the forest to its east (Cowan 1882; Shaw 1878) (Table 1). This unprecedented expansion in industrial production induced the Merina regime to promote charcoal-making in proximate regions of the forest. The crown created fanompoana units of 500–600 charcoal burners, all males, who it settled with their families first in the western fringe, and from the 1820s in the eastern fringe, of the great forest (Peake 1878, Ellis 1838 vol. 1). As these settlements were, by royal order, permanent, charcoal burning communities were obliged to clear forest to build dwellings and grow subsistence crops, chiefly rice. Charcoal production was

THE EASTERN FOREST IN THE PRECOLONIAL ERA… 211

Table 1  Creation of permanent skilled metal and wood fanompoana units, 1790–1883 (Campbell 2005) Under Andrianampoinimerina (c.1790–1810) Title Manjakaray Total 1790–1810 Under Radama I (1810–28) Amparibe Mpandrafitra Mpanefy vifotsy Fehin’Andrianambo Deka Borigedry Mpamaky hazo Total 1810–28 Under Ranavalona I (1828–61) Analakely Avaratr’Ilafy Mantasoa Vodivato Mpanefy volamena Fehin’ dRamarosambaina Mpanao tsorahy Total 1828–61 Under Ranavalona II (1868–83) Manjakamandroso Antsahandriana Fehin’dRamangetrika Fehin’Andrianavy Total 1868–83 Total 1790–1883

Royal fanompoana

Number

Gunpowder Manufacturing

86 86

Ironwork Carpentry Tin and zinc smithery Copper work Maintain iron tools and missiles Sawing (using long saw)

4167 463 128 111 43 27 4939

Manufacture cartridges and gunpowder Gun smithery Cannon founding Manufacture gunpowder and explosives Gold and silver smithery Machine-gun manufacturing Wire making

1621

Fanompoana Dynamite manufacturing Forge work Making of machine guns and precision parts Ditto

303 287 124 69 42 30 2476 Number 138 107 39 36 320 7.821

concentrated in the dry season (April to September) during which time accidental fires often occurred, resulting in further degradation of the forest (Callet 1978; Ellis 1838 vol. 1). Indeed, “Amoronkay,” the wooded region around Mantasoa, derives from “Tan-kay” (“the country that burns”), it being recorded in the Tantara that “the entire frontier of the forest was burnt” (Callet 1974: 70).

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Charcoal making in Highlands, northeast of Antananarivo c.1980 (credit Julian Olsen, in Olson 1984)

Every one to two months in the dry season Sihanaka and Bezanozano fanompoana collected and transported charcoal (ari-mainty), and wormwood (for soap manufacture) from the forest, primarily to service industrial centres concentrated around Antananarivo and at Mantasoa (Grandidier 1971; Chauvin 1939; Standing 1887; Wills 1885; Raombana 1853b). However, charcoal was also used to coat freshly interred corpses to slow decomposition (Haile 1892, Ellis 1838 vol. 1), in powder form as a dentifrice (Pearse 1899), as a marker and for colouring in sacred and magic ceremonies (Dahle 1887; Anon 1876), in fine-powdered form to protect food from ants (Pickersgill 1893), and by the end of the nineteenth century, as a cooking fuel on the plateau amongst the Merina elite and amongst ordinary Malagasy in the southeast of the island (Gade and Perkins-Belgram 1986; Lord 1892).

THE EASTERN FOREST IN THE PRECOLONIAL ERA… 213

7.5  Timber The peoples of eastern Madagascar traditionally exploited the forest for a vast range of uses. On the east coast, hardwoods, such as rosewood and ebony, were extensively used canoe and boat-building. Canoes, each fashioned from a single trunk, were the predominant form of transport on inland and coastal waters (Campbell 2005; Ransome 1890). They varied in size, from narrow 1.5- to 2-m-long canoes for use on rivers, to seagoing canoes up to 7-m long and 1.5-m wide that generally carried two men. It was commented of coastal canoes in the northeast: Whether large or small, the shape is always the same; both prow and stern being pointed and slightly raised. They are made from the solid trunk of a tree, being hollowed out by burning fires on the surface and scooping out the charred wood until a sufficient depth is reached, the outside of the canoe being shaped with an adze. They are propelled by means of a short paddle with a wide blade, having a crescent-shaped handle on the top. (Ransome 1890: 304)

By contrast, to cross rivers and to fish at sea, people in southeast Madagascar used 2.7-m long boats with square pandanus-leaf sails, long prows and long deep keels, built of planks, lashed together with vegetable twine, and caulked with bark. Those used in coastal waters carried a crew of eight (Shaw 1893; Campbell 2005). Some, such as the Antanosy of the southeast, constructed wooden coffins (Grandidier 1891). All Bezanozano and east coast villages were also surrounded by a wooden palisade (Ellis 1838 vol. 1, Linton 1928, Mattheeuws 2008). However, the primary use of hardwoods by coastal and forest people was to build dwellings, primarily to provide the posts, driven into the ground over which, at a height from 0.30 to 1.5 m, the structure was built, as well as the frame (Linton 1928, see also Appendix A). Thus in 1818, the French at the trading post they established at Tintingue, on the Malagasy mainland opposite Ste. Marie, noted that local Betsimisaraka exploited the highly valued hazovola (Dalbergia baronii), a superior rosewood, chiefly for construction (web ref. 1). Forest exploitation for hardwoods also increased exponentially in the imperial Merina era. From the mid-eighteenth century, plateau peoples sourced trees in the eastern forest to make spades that customarily possessed 3.3-m-long hardwood handles, wooden buttresses to strengthen the sides of agricultural dykes and canals (Ellis 1838 vol. 2, Wills 1885,

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Tacchi 1892), palisades that surrounded all important settlements, and wooden supports for large stones used as village gates (Callet 1974, Ellis 1838 vol. 1, Linton 1928, Mattheeuws 2008). The forest also supplied materials used in funeral rites. The tombs of some elite Merina families were lined with timber (Ellis 1838 vol. 1). Again, when a Sihanaka man died, firo, comprising slender hardwood trees 9–15 m high, with forks at the top resembling ox-horns, were selected from the forest, stripped of branches, and raised along the main thoroughfares of his district. Subsequently, wooden stakes, from 2.4 to 4 m high, were planted either at grave or around these firo on which were impaled the heads of the oxen killed in connection with the funeral—their number reflecting the wealth of the deceased (Pearse 1882; Sibree 1877). By far the greatest exploitation of forest resources by plateau peoples was for the construction of buildings. From the time of Andrianampoinimerina, the Merina sovereigns greatly promoted the construction of royal edifices, notably in and around Ambohimanga, the ancestral capital, and Antananarivo, 15 km distant, the administrative and military capital (Ellis 1838 vol. 2, Kus and Raharijaona 2000). For example, Manatsaralehibe, “the best of the royal huts” in the Bevato royal enclosure at Ambohimanga was built with hardwood from the Volosarika portion of the eastern forest, to the southeast of Antananarivo, it being commented that “the walls were of ambora, and the corner pillers of merana” (Callet 1974: 597; see also Raombana 1853a). Raombana commented of the construction of buildings in the royal court in Antananarivo that “Their pillars are enormous and has excited the astonishments of Europeans who has seen them” (Raombana 1853a: 69). The two-storey Soanierana Palace, built from 1824 to 1829, and hailed as an architectural wonder, possessed a ground space area of 318 m x 254 m, and was built entirely of wood (Ellis 1838 vol. 1). It remained largely uninhabited, eventually being demolished by the French after their conquest of the island in 1895 (Callet 1974, Oliver 1886 vols. 1 & 2, Chapus 1925, d’Unienville 2004). The crown also built country retreats. Ranavalona, for example, built one at Mantasoa and another five-building complex at Tsinjoarivo in the Vakinankaratra region (Gendronneau 1897, web ref. 2). Moreover, the Merina elite followed the example of their sovereigns. Thus it was commented in 1893:

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Here and there throughout the province one comes across a village which was formerly the capital of a petty kingdom, where we find a number of strong and well-built timber houses. Such a place is Ambohitritankady… It is on a high hill, and in the centre of the village are ten large houses of massive timber framing and with very highpitched roofs, with long “horns” at the gables, arranged five on each side of a long oblong space sunk a couple of feet below the ground… One of the houses, where the chief himself resided, is much larger than the rest, and the corner posts, as well as the three great central posts supporting the ridge, are very large massive pieces of timber. It was all in one great room without any partitions, the whole being well floored with wood. (Sibree 1893: 23)

The arrival of European missionaries and artisans from 1820, and the transformation of Antananarivo into a major military, administrative, and industrial centre in the 1820s and early 1830s, further stimulated the building boom in Antananarivo, one promoted by the infusion of foreign architectural influences (Griffiths 1843; Raombana 1853a; Raombana 1853b). Indeed, the population of Antananarivo rose from about 17,000 to 50,000 between 1820 and 1860, and to 100,000 by 1880 at which level it remained until 1895 (Campbell 2005). This accentuated the exploitation of forest resources as, until 1868, the crown forbade any materials other than wood in the construction of buildings in the capital. Thus in mid-1822, after authorising the building of a house and chapel for LMS missionary David Griffiths, Radama I “donated the land, selected twelve carpenters, and allocated wood from the nearby forest—immediately despatching 700 axe men to prepare the required timber for construction” (Griffiths 1843: 30). By the time the building was finished in December 1823, fanompoana gangs had made six trips from the eastern forest with the requisite timber (Griffiths 1843). In their turn, elite Merina families in Antananarivo erected trano kotona, houses characterised by a “massive timber framework with walls of thick planking, and mostly with high-pitched roofs covered with herana rush” (Sibree 1888a: 401). From 1868, materials other than wood were permitted, and there was a gradual conversion to brick, both in the capital and elsewhere on the plateau. Moreover, while brick production necessitated kilns, it did not require as intense a heat as that needed to smelt iron ore, so peat rather than charcoal was used as fuel (see Grifaa et al. 2017).

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Antananarivo: Growth 1820–35 (key: green: inner city; brown: suburban growth)

Again, the industrial experiment entailed considerable construction. The degree to which building the Mantasoa complex and providing fuel for it quickly depleted local forest resources is indicated by the fact that when, in 1849, Ranavalona I ordered 19 new buildings to be erected there, the nearest available forest trees suitable as construction timber by then was some 11 to 13 km distant (Raombana 1853c; Gendronneau 1897). In order to ensure a constant supply of construction timber, the Merina crown commanded a fanompoana of between 700 and 2000 tree fellers to settle with their families in the eastern forest where, like the charcoal burners, they also cleared to cultivate subsistence crops (Ellis 1838 vol. 1). However, the manufacture of beams and planks was extremely wasteful of wood, Baron commenting in 1889: “in getting planks for building

THE EASTERN FOREST IN THE PRECOLONIAL ERA… 217

purposes from the forests, there is most extravagant waste of timber. A tree is felled, and the native woodmen, not having saws, set to work with their hatches on each side of it until the timber is reduced to the required thickness, and thus each tree, however large, supplies but a single plank” (Baron 1889: 250). A further fanompoana was imposed, notably on the Antsihanaka and Bezanozano, to bring the wood to central Imerina from the northeastern and mid-eastern sectors of the great forest, by 1870 over 60 km distant. Some 75 men, using ropes, were required to drag an average tree trunk, although a 5000-strong fanompoana was drafted to transport a 39 m-high trunk to the Manjakamiadana palace site for which, in 1861, a further timber transport unit of 15,000 was summoned (Hewlett 1887, Peake 1878, Callet 1974, Ellis 1838 vol. 1, Chapus 1925). To supply timber for Soanierana and Tsinjoarivo, a road was cut into the forest, from which each trunk was dragged some 65–80 km from source by from 10 to 40 labourers (Gendronneau 1897, Ellis 1838 vol. 1, web ref. 2). There also existed quarries in the forest from which large stones were cut and dragged to the plateau to be used in making tombs, and this process resulted in further destruction of trees, Richard Baron, an LMS missionary, commenting in 1891: “I once saw a road which had been cut through the forest for a long distance, for no other purpose than to allow passage for the dragging of a tombstone which had been quarried in the neighbourhood. To make this road no fewer than 25,000 trees had been cut down” (Baron 1891: 325). In all, such work involved cutting roads ever deeper into a retreating forest (Gendronneau 1897, Ellis 1838 vol. 1, web ref. 2). It also gave rise to the development of special markets, selling highly priced timber, such as those “midway between Antananarivo and Angavo, and to which the builders and others repair for the purpose of making purchases” (Ellis 1838 vol. 1: 316–7). The main ones were at Alarobia and Alakamisy, to the northeast and southeast respectively of Antananarivo— where the Zoma (Friday) market also had a timber, and wooden door and furniture sector (Sibree 1894; Gazety Malagasy 27 mars 1896) (Table 2). Raombana reported that under Ranavalona, the guardians of the “national” sampy (talisman) Rakelmalaza—whose principal residence was Ambohimanambola, close to Alakamisy—“often attended the great Alakamisy market … where they would seize goods—with impunity until the timber sellers united to beat them up” (Raombana 1853b: 215–6). Building construction also accompanied imperial expansion, notably in the form of garrisons and churches. Military garrisons were established in all Merina-dominated regions and in isolated outposts in largely

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Table 2  Main construction timber on the Merina market, 1896 (Richardson 1885, Gazety Malagasy 27 mars 1896) Local name

Species

Forest of origin and market

Use

Lalona

NE—Alarobia

House construction

Varongy

Weinmannia—Especially Weinmannia Bojeriana Ocotea tricoplebia

NE—Alarobia

Chiefly beams and single-piece doors

Sary Merana Hetatra Ambora

Vernonia merana Baker Podocarpus Thunbergii hook Tambourissa parvifolia Baker

NE—Alarobia NE—Alarobia NE—Alarobia SE—Alakamisy

Voamboana

Dalbergia Baroni Baker

SE—Alakamisy

Hazomena

Weinmannia Rutenbergi Engler Angavodiana Agauria salicifolia hook and A. Polyphylla Baker

SE—Alakamisy SE—Alakamisy

House construction For Andriana houses and coffins House construction, furniture Hardwood–corner posts of houses House construction

independent regions. All Merina garrisons followed the same pattern: a fort with a thick wooden defence was built on an elevated position, the surrounded land being deliberately thoroughly deforested. The residence of the Merina governor was erected inside the fort. Both were constructed in wood, the most non-perishable hardwoods being used for corner posts and central columns (Campbell 2013). Around the fort were built the huts of garrison soldiers and those local people who accepted Merina domination (e.g., see Faucon 1897). Baron commented that these settlements were: surrounded by palisades, frequently in a double series, made of the trunks of young trees, six or eight inches [15-20 cm] in diameter, fixed in the ground and placed in contact with each other. I once counted the trees that had been used in a certain village, and found that there were about 10,000. These trees, moreover, in many of these places are renewed every eight or ten years… Even where stone and lime or other suitable materials are abundant and close at hand, the people prefer or are obliged, to make these timber barricades, though the forest may be miles away, and though the trees have to be dragged along the ground or carried on men’s shoulder. (Baron 1889: 249-50)

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However, from 1834, following the 1829 French assault, the forts at Tamatave and Foulpointe which were rebuilt with stone walls, although the lime used as mortar was fired using wood (Raombana 1853b). Most garrison settlements comprised a few thousand soldiers and their families, and those in the lowlands were regularly depleted by malaria. Fianarantsoa, founded in 1830 as the centre of Merina imperial power in Betsileo, was an exception. Its population grew to an estimated 7500 in 1869 and 8000 by 1895, and its houses from about 938 houses in 1869 to 1000 by 1895—making it the island’s second largest urban centre (Jukes and Lord 1870). Between 1830 and 1890, demand for hardwoods to build and maintain the main fort, dwellings, and defences, for charcoal, and for subsistence for forest-based workers, forced the retreat of the forest from 4 to 60 km to the east of Fianarantsoa (Catat 1889–90, Shaw 1878). Moreover, the governor formed a permanent fanompoana of 900 men, including 100 carpenters, and 700 woodcutters who were settled in the forest (Nilsen 1943; Campbell 2013). Demand from other Merina garrisons in Betsileo resulted in the development of other specialist woodcutter forest settlements, such the Imahasila, those around Anjolobato, and the Zafimaniry (Brockway 1876; Cowan 1882). In 1869, the Merina court adopted Christianity and created a statechurch, provoking a rush of church building in all Merina-dominated regions and garrisons (Jukes and Lord 1870). Because of intensive rivalry between Catholic and Protestant missionaries, many settlements erected two chapels. While most of these were built of clay or bricks, large hardwoods were inevitably sought from the forest to supply corner posts and beams (Sibree 1892). London Missionary Society & Friends Foreign Mission Churches 1863-96

1024

1400

1223 1000

621 68

98

1863

1868

1870

1880

1890

1893

1896

London Missionary Society & Friends Foreign Mission Churches 1863–96 (for sources, contact author)

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A missionary commented of church building outside central Imerina that the greatest difficulty was in procuring the hardwood for the roof, which had to be dragged from the eastern forest which, by the late nineteenth century, was some 65–80 km distant (Pearse 1895). All timber buildings were subject to natural pressures and, despite the use of hardwoods, were ultimately perishable. They were also subject to storms, especially during cyclones which in the rainy season regularly hit the east coast, and sometimes also the plateau. For example, on 20 February 1876 a cyclone damaged many buildings in Imerina, particularly roofs, and additionally uprooted or snapped “thousands of large trees” in the Analamaizina forest to the east (Sibree 1876b: 120). Timber buildings were even more vulnerable to fire, especially in urban settlings, such as Antananarivo, which especially up to 1868 experienced many conflagrations. For instance, on the day that Ranavalona I was interred in 1861, all five buildings in the royal enclosure of Nanjakana in Ambohimanga were destroyed by fire, and were rebuilt by Queen Rasoherina (r. 1863–8) (Tacchi 1892). Wooden constructions therefore needed constant repair and were sometimes totally rebuilt, which entailed additional exploitation of forest hardwoods (Callet 1974; Raombana 1853c). Hardwood trees were also sought for export from the late eighteenth century to supply construction timber on the Mascarenes (Campbell 2005). From 1820, the Merina court declared the forest a royal monopoly and occasionally granted select foreigners forest concessions. For instance, garrison commanders on the northeast coast summoned local people to collect and transport ebony and other timber for the Garnot monopoly (1835–36) (Guillain 1845; Rasoamiaramanana 1973). However, only from the late 1880s, due to the reparations imposed by the French following the 1883–85 Franco-Merina War, did the imperial court grant major forest concessions to foreigners who sought the most valuable woods for construction and carpentry such as mahogany, ebony, rosewood, as well as sandalwood, which was used in the making of perfumes and pharmaceutical products (Girod-Genet 1899; Campbell 2005). For example, in 1890, return for $85,000  in cash, and $60,000  in shares, the Merina crown granted a concession 2575 km2 in area to the hinterland of the northeast coast between Vohimar and Antongil Bay to the UK-based “Madagascar (Sumbava and Antalaha) Forests Syndicate” (Madagascar (Sumbava and Antalaha) Forests Syndicate Report 1890; see also Ransome 1890; WoodWorker 1898), Sibree 1888b). Further forest concessions to the interior of Antongil Bay were granted to Désiré Maigrot (1836–1908), the Italian

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Consul, and to a French company (Baron 1892). Others were granted further south, by 1890 in the Fort Dauphin region, and by 1892 to the hinterland of Aniribe and Tanjona at the mouth of the Mananara River (Baron 1892, Catat 1889–90). Such concessions generated such a demand for valuable hardwoods, which grew at altitudes of between 300 and 600 m, that the Merina crown proved incapable of supplying the necessary labour. Thus foreign companies paid traditional tree fellers to supply the timber. As in the northeast local labour proved insufficient, this resulted in seasonal migration of Taimoro and even Bara to the Antongil Bay region to work as tree fellers (Sibree 1888b; Girod-Genet 1899; Ransome 1890; Baron 1892).

8   Forest Cover at the Time of the French Conquest in 1895 Conventional assertions that foreigners did most harm to Malagasy forests are, for the nineteenth century, misplaced. The Merina state declared a monopoly over all valuable produce, which could only be exploited by foreigners in partnership with the crown. It also forbade sale of land to foreigners, who were forced to rent on 99-year leases (Campbell 2005). Further, malaria, endemic in the Malagasy lowlands, generally either killed or physically enfeebled Europeans (Knight 1895; Shaw 1893; Elliot 1892; Campbell 2020b). These factors deterred most foreigners, except impoverished Creoles from the Mascarenes, from settling in Madagascar. The Creoles bypassed formal obstacles to alienation through liaisons with local women in whose names they purchased houses, small parcels of land, and slave labour. Nevertheless, few planters were able through their Malagasy “wives” to gain a workforce sufficient for their needs, while court hostility, the imposition of arbitrary judgements, and especially official Merina manipulation of plantation labour through state fanompoana were sufficient to create rank insecurity among Creoles. At the same time, the adoption of autarky by the Merina regime, and its ban on trade with Europeans from 1835 to 1853, meant that few Western trading concerns maintained a presence in the island until the 1860s and thereafter chiefly through agents in Antananarivo and Tamatave (Campbell 2005). Even then, only from about 1890 did the Merina crown authorise foreign agents to deal directly with its subjects. Thus until the French takeover in 1895, exploitation of forest resources was overwhelmingly the work of the Malagasy.

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The greatest blame for degradation of the eastern forest falls on the imperial Merina regime. Under Andrianampoinimerina it instigated unprecedented conversion of plateau land to riziculture, production of iron weapons and tools, and elite buildings, all of which did much to destroy remaining woodland on the plateau and impinge on the western fringe of the eastern forest. The degradation of the eastern forest continued at an ever-increasing pace under subsequent Merina rulers due chiefly to the creation of industrial hubs and their demand for fuel; the transformation of Antananarivo into a huge administrative and military, as well as industrial centre requiring massive amounts of construction timber; the establishment of military garrisons and state churches throughout its imperial domain, which similarly resulted in massive exploitation of the forest for hardwoods; oppressive military campaigns launched against, and harsh forced labour imposed upon, non-Merina peoples that forced them to flee to the forest and further exploit its resources; and partnerships forged by the state with select foreigners for the establishment of cash crop plantations such as coffee, and exploitation of forest resources, notably rubber and timber. However, Malagasy peasants, of their own volition, also inflicted considerable damage to the forest, notably through tavy cultivation and the wholesale destruction of rubber-yielding vines and trees. The net result was that just prior to the French takeover of the island in 1895, much of the eastern forest was seriously degraded. In the northeast, most of the forest between Diego Suarez and Sahambavahy had been, or was being, burned for conversion into pasture or tavy-based cultivation (Faucon 1897; Baron 1892), while tree felling for export had resulted in the depletion of most valuable hardwoods along both the coast and rivers in Diego-Suarez, Vohimar, and Antongil Bay regions (Girod-Genet 1899; Baron 1892; Ransome 1890). Between Fenoarivo and Tamatave, and between Andevoranto and Farafangana, even more significant portions of forest had been cleared to make way primarily for cash crops, and remaining patches of forest were separated by deforested areas, swamps, and lagoons (Girod-Genet 1899). Along the entire eastern littoral below Fenoarivo, the edge of the great forest had significantly retreated to the west, due to tree felling and burning, a notable increase having occurred from the early 1880s (Elliot 1892, Baron 1892, Catat 1889–90). Similarly, the western edge of the forest had retreated significantly to the east (Gendronneau 1897; Baron 1892). Thus the time taken to cross the

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Alamazaotra was reduced by half during the nineteenth century, from two days to one day, while the Analamaizina was eroded at an even faster rate, passage through it being reduced from about two hours in 1777 to probably less than an hour as early as the 1830s (Campbell 2013). Many sectors in the heart of the great forest had also become degraded. By 1890, it took only three days to traverse the forest along the busy Tamatave-Antananarivo route (which was nevertheless generally only about 0.6 m wide) and two days to cross the forest on the AntananarivoMahanoro route. Moreover, by then the number of settlements in the forest, accompanied by agricultural clearings, had increased (Catat 1889–90, Hewlett 1887, Jukes and Lord 1877, Elliot 1892, Baron 1895). As early as the mid-1870s, much of the formerly heavily forested regions south of the escarpment close to southeastern Betsileo, including Ambohimanga and Ikongo, had been significantly degraded due overwhelmingly to peasant exploitation for timber and agricultural land (Brockway 1876). Again, in 1889 it was commented that the well-populated Antaisaka region, to the hinterland of Vangaindrano, had been “completely deforested” for agriculture (Cowan 1882). In 1892, it was estimated that the band of remaining virgin forest on the route from Fort Dauphin to Angalampona, the first Merina military post in Betsileo—a five-day journey on foot—took only six hours to cross (Knight 1896, Elliot 1892, Catat 1889–90, Shaw 1875b). In 1874, Shaw, the first LMS missionary to visit Ikongo, stated that it lay “the thickest forest I have been into in Madagascar” (Shaw 1874 quoted in Mullens 1877: 155), but by 1893 the Ikongo regions was largely deforested, and the band of virgin forest which ran through the Antanala (“people of the forest”) region was only some 19- to 24-km wide (Besson 1893). Such degradation prompted Baron, a botanist who travelled extensively throughout Madagascar, to write in 1890: let me express a hope that the present wholesale destruction of the forest by the natives may be soon effectually stopped by the [Merina] Government, and that its valuable resources may be speedily utilized. If this does not take place, in a few more generations there will be no forest left to expatiate upon, and as the majority of its trees are found nowhere else in all the world, they will have become absolutely extinct. (Baron 1890: 211)

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9  Annex A: Eastern Madagascar Forests: Some Valuable Trees, Shrubs, and Plants1 (Listed According to the Malagasy Name) Local name

Species of tree

Use

Ambora

Tambourissa parvifolia Baker

Anjananjana Anjavidy

Leptolkena paucillora Baker Philippia floribunda Bth

Arivona

?

Atafana

Terminalia catappa or Madagascar almond

Azovola

?

Barabanja Bonara

Mascarenhasia arborescens D.C. Acacia Lebbeck

Bongo

Dionychia Bojeri Naud

Bontono

Adansonia madagascariensis B.—Baobab

Diro

Tamarindus indica—Tamarind tree

Small tree of very hard and durable clear yellowish wood used in the house construction of sovereigns and nobles; also for coffins, and canoes Hardwood used in construction A heather that grows on worthless land on the margins of the eastern forest, used formerly mainly for fuel in Antananarivo (as it gives great heat but little smoke), charcoal for the forge, thatch, and kindling Soft white wood used in walls and floors An important, fast-growing, multi-purpose tree, providing shade, food, medicines, dyes, tannin, and timber Kind of rosewood useful for cabinet making, used chiefly for building Yields rubber Found mostly in West Madagascar, but also in far northeast; used for small pieces of carpentry Gives a black dye; used to treat syphilis The wood soaked in water is given to cattle to fatten them for market; fibre also used The tree’s heartwood is narrow, hard, durable, and difficult to work, used to make furniture, carvings, and turned objects such as mortars and pestles (continued)

1

 Those wishing to consult the sources for this table should contact the author.

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(continued) Local name

Species of tree

Use

Faho

Cycas circinalis –palm tree

Produces sago

Famelona

Chrysophyllum boivinianum

Fangoavana

?

Fanidy

Toddalia aculeata; Choetaeme madagascariensis; Toddalia asiatica (L.) lam.

Fantsikahitra

Plectronia sp.

Fatray

Urophyllum lyalli

Filao

Casuarina equisetifolia

Foraha

Calophyllum inophyllum L.

Beautiful wood used for house and boat construction, carpentry, furniture, and ornamental work; edible fruit; leaves used in traditional medicine to treat fever, muscle pain, relieve fatigue, counter scorpion stings, and treat digestive and genital disease, while bark decoctions are used to treat syphilis Tree of average height 10 m, diameter 50 cm; greenish hard wood that easy to work and generally used for corner poles of houses Spiny hard-wooded tree; root and bark are used for fever; and charm against crocodiles Toddalia asiatica: Widely used in Malagasy medicine: The root bark as a decoction against profuse diarrhoea and diseases of the urinary tract; infusion of the leaves is a febrifuge; resin tapped from stems is oxytocic and an abortifacient Tree can grow 20 m high but has a maximum diameter of 20 cm; hardwood used in house construction, notably for ridges, and for walking sticks Bark used notably in the manufacture of rum Grows in sandy soil near the sea; yellowish very hard durable wood used in house construction, and for tannin Used in boat construction; resin used by Betsimisaraka to heal wounds, and as bird lime; fruit yields oil used by women in their toilet (continued)

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(continued) Local name

Species of tree

Use

Fotona

Leptoloena turbinata Baker

Fototra

Barringtonia butonica

Fotsimavo

Various: Homalium axillare, Pittosporum madagascariense, Pittosporum pachyphyllum, Xylopia ambanjensis, Xylopia buxifolia, Xylopia danguyella, Xylopia flexuosa, Xylopia humblotiana, Xylopia lemurica, Xylopia perrieri Senecio cochlearifolius Bojer

Hardwood used in house construction; edible fruit Hardwood used to make house foundations in humid territory Various species of tree can grow up to 10 m, 60 cm diameter; whitish-brown softwood used by Tanala as firewood and as a charm to ensure the success of an undertaking

Fotsinanahary

Hafotra Harahara

Harongana

Unique to Madagascar, reaches 6 m height, 30 cm diameter; grey soft wood, much used to make ridges of houses; leaves are used to counter stomach disorders Astrapoea, Dombeya, Yields fibre used chiefly to make Sterculiaceae cord and rope Neobaronia phyllanthoides Baker; N. phyllanthoides: Extremely hard N. xiphodada mottled wood with remarkable colours used to make spade handles (3.3 m long) N. Xiphodada: Similar to above Haronga madagascariensis Tree average height 20 m, 60 cm; knotted white hardwood difficult to work but excellent for house ridges, floors, coffins, canoes, cattle park fences; and sometimes used to make musical instruments. Excellent firewood as it burns long and slow. A decoction of its leaves is used for dysentery and diarrhoea, while the Betsileo mix its leaves with those of the tsimandra, pounded and dried in the sun, to apply locally in cases of scabies. Flowers good for honey production. (continued)

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(continued) Local name

Species of tree

Use

Hasa

?

Hazino

?

Hazoambo

Various: Bivinia jalberti, Calantica cerasifolia, Calantica grandiflora, Homalium albiflorum, Pittosporum viridiflorum

Hazomainty

Erythryoxylum myrtoides Bojer

Hazomamy

Chamaecrista pratensis (R.Vig.) Du Puy

Hazombiby

Erythroxylon myrtoides Baker

Hazomena

Weinmannia Rutenbergi Engler

Hazondrano

Elaeodendron

Hazotokana

Vernonia sp.

Hazovola

Dalbergia baronii

Reddish imperishable hardwood 50 cm diameter, used to make posts to support houses especially in wet surrounds; and fences the dwellings of rulers and lords Yellowish wood, average 2 m diameter, much used in carpentry Hardwood trees that can reach 20 m in height and 60 cm diameter; used chiefly to construct important houses; also to make wheel-less carts to drag large stones to graves Black wood used in ornamental work; one of most prized ebony woods for export; oldest (150– 200 years) that 12–14 m high and 70 cm diameter so exploited that rare by 1903 Bark tastes like cinnamon; the Tanala employed the leaves as a remedy for children ill with malaria. Very hard grey wood that reaches a height of 20 m and 60 cm diameter, used to make house ridges and in ornamental work Tree grows to 20 m, 50 cm diameter; knotty hardwood much used in house construction, especially for corner posts of houses Valuable fine-grained hard white wood used to make poles (which c. 2 m long) of men’s palanquins; also yields rubber Hardwood much used in construction, notably house posts; a decoction of its leaves are used as a vermifuge and for indigestion A kind of rosewood, resembling mahogany but superior in weight and density, used chiefly for building purposes; and dyeing hair (continued)

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(continued) Local name

Species of tree

Use

Havozomangidy; havozomanitra

Ravensara aromatica

Hetatra

Podocarpus thunbergii hook; Podocarpus madagascariensis, Baker

Tree with strong aromatic bark used in composition of laro or belahy to flavour drinks reserved for circumcision ceremony; to flavour toaka; and for medicines to treat boils and swellings. Tanala burn the scented leaves as ody varatra to protect against thunder; exported to Europe under incorrect label “sassafras bark” for use as component to flavour root beer, medicinal preparations, and in perfumes for soap Only precolonial pine species known in Madagascar; very valuable whitish wood similar to deal; much used in house construction, notably for flooring

Hidina (see fanidy) Hintsina

Afzelia bijuga

Hitsikitsika

Colea Telfaireae Bojer

Intry

Large much valued heavy hardwood tree, inelastic and cross-grained, hard to work but very durable, used for posts of the best houses, and furniture, and by the Betsimisaraka to make coffins Small tree with hard durable wood very common in defensive ditches in Imerina, generally used to make the three central posts supporting the roof of a house; edible fruit Large tree, of superior durable brown hardwood, resembling teak but heavier and closer in grain; chief wood used by Betsimisaraka of Antongil Bay region in house construction—Valued on UK timber market by 1890; bark yields a red dye

Kintsina (see hintsina) (continued)

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(continued) Local name

Species of tree

Use

Lalona

Saxifragaceae; Weinmannia Bojeriana Tul Nuxia sphterocephala Baker & N. terminalioides Baker

Used chiefly in house construction and cabinet making Widely used in house construction; leaves used to make taoka (Malagasy rum) Small tree giving soft wood; large cabbage-like leaves used to make infusion to counter malarial fever; believed to have properties to counter a bad destiny.

Lambinana

Landemy

Levaro [?] Mabibo

Mahibo / mahabibo / mahabiba Mananotsa (see hazotokana) Merana Mokarana / mocarano

Anthocleista sp.

Khaya madagascariensis— Madagascar mahogany

Anacardium occidentale— Cashew tree

Vernonia merana Baker Macarena echinocarpa Baker, E. macropoda Baker; alnifolia Baker; macaranga obovate; M. ferruginea

Nandrorofo

Trachylobium verrucosum lam

Nanto

Labramia Bojeri; Chrysophyllum Inophyllum

Fast-growing tree with reddishbrown wood highly for the manufacture of fine furniture, for joinery, implements, carving, etc. the trunks are used traditionally for making canoes Edible fruit; leaf used to treat diabetes, haemorrhoids, stomach ulcer, allergies, hepatitis, wounds, incontinence, anorexia

Used in house construction Large tree; wood used in house construction M. obovata: Wood used by the Betsimisaraka in house and canoe building M. ferruginea yields abundant resin Its root (sandarosy) provides gum copal, which is extracted only for export Very hard mahogany-coloured wood widely used by Betsimisaraka for house and canoe building; and by the Betsimisaraka and Tanala to construct coffins; its bark yields red dye and tannin

Nato (see Nanto) (continued)

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(continued) Local name

Species of tree

Paka

Name for several large trees including urena lobate L.; Homalium nobile

Ramy

Ravenala

Rotra

Sohihy or sodindranto Tambintsy / tambitsy

Use

Urena lobate L: Gives a fibre used by the Betsimisaraka Homalium nobile: Hard reddish wood Canarium madagascariense Most valued for resin used as a stimulant, for incense, to heal large wounds, to protect against infection, seal cracks in boats, trap birds and small mammals, and as an insecticide. The timber is not durable, but because of the large diameter of the trunks (sometimes over 1 m) is used to construct canoes; also for the hidden parts of fine furniture; the dry heartwood is used as a torch. Strelitziaceae—Traveller’s tree All parts of tree used, for variously human and animal food, medicine, house building, tools, and utensils Eugenia sp., Myrtaceae Eugenia, Several species of fast-growing Syzygium sp. hardwood, one with edible fruit; used in herbal medicines due to its vaunted properties against cardio metabolic disorders and dysentery; used in talismans to bring desires to fruition, protect against enemies, and ensure success of a new village; yields a black dye Rubiaceae tambaribarina Used in house construction Psorospermum androsaemifolium Grows 1–4 m high; straight Baker red-brown hardwood, used to make houses; decoction used as lotion to treat eczema; leaves and bark crushed, mixed with other mainly aromatic plants to make a plaster applied to stings and bites. The decoction is also administered by mouth; poultices made from its root used to treat scabies. (continued)

THE EASTERN FOREST IN THE PRECOLONIAL ERA… 231

(continued) Local name

Species of tree

Use

Tandroroho (see nandrorofo) Tangena

Tanghinia venenifera

Tapia

Chrysopa sp.

From which the tangena poison extracted Used to feed silkworm; edible fruit; stem mixed with snuff.

Varo Tavolohazo

Dilobeia thouarsii

Tsipatika Valanirana

Streblus dimepate Nuxia capitate Baker

Valomborona

Albizia fastigiata

Vanana

Various related species: Elaeocarpus quercifolius Baker; E. dalechampioides Baker; E. rhodanthus Baker

Vanjaka (see vanana) Vantsilana

Cussonia vantsilana Baker and panax ornifolius Baker

Varo

Hibiscus tiliaceus L.

Varongy

Ocotea cymosa (Nees) Palacky; Ocolea trichophlebia

Large tree; wood splits easily so little used; gives fruit the oil of which is used by women in their toilet; slips of wood are taken and used as torches by tsimandoa, royal messengers when travelling at night Used to make pestles Hard wood much used in house construction, and making of harpoons, diffing sticks, and fences for cattle parks; one of woods used for Merina sovereign’s firewood at Fandroana Common tree used in house construction, to make soap, and often planted as shade for coffee and vanilla plants Tree 18 m tall; wood much used in house construction and cabinet making

Used in house construction; and in composition of odi-fo, a traditional remedy to prevent vomiting. Betsimisaraka extract twine to make string High-quality timber extensively used: For house and ship construction and cabinet making; leaves and fruits are used as condiment, bark used in preparing alcoholic beverages. (continued)

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(continued) Local name

Species of tree

Use

Vintanina

Calophyllum sp.

Vivaona

Dilobeia Thouarsii R. & S. A

Voamboana

Dalbergia Baroni Baker

Widely used to make canoes, but not houses lest it attract lightening Large tree of hardwood used in house construction and for joinery, but not for flooring because of its high shrinkage rates. Branches are used as firewood and the wood produces a good charcoal; oil is extracted from the seeds and used in cooking, but more commonly used as cosmetic, in soap production, and for illumination. The bark has emetic properties and bark decoctions are administered to treat gonorrhoea, and as diuretic and vermifuge Very valuable reddish-brown hardwood, similar to rosewood, used in house construction and for furniture (tables, cupboards, etc.)

Voanana (see vanana) Voapaka

Uapaca thouarsii Baill.

Hardwood used in house construction; edible fruit; bark used as anti-cholic

Albizia polyphylla E. Fournier/ albizzia polyphylla E. Fournier

Used to make musical instruments; leaves in medicine to counter asthma, cough, fatigue, postpartum infections, side stitch Medium-sized bamboo used mainly in house building; for walls, and lath before plastering roofs; also as fishing rods. Tree with hard durable wood used to make spade handles; leaves used as poultices for syphilitic symptoms Type of ebony, found in E and NE Madagascar Type of ebony, found in E and NE Madagascar

Vofaho (see faho) Volomborona

Volotsangana

Cephalostachyum chapelien; Phyllostachys bambusoides

Zahana

Phyllarthron bojerianum

?

Diospyros fuscovelutina

?

Diospyros megasepala

(continued)

THE EASTERN FOREST IN THE PRECOLONIAL ERA… 233

(continued) Local name

Species of tree

Use

?

Diospyros sphaerosepala

?

Diospyros gonoclada

?

Landolphia gummifera

?

Landolphia madagascariensis

?

Rhodolcena acutifolia

Type of ebony, found in E and NE Madagascar Type of ebony, found in E Madagascar Climbing plant which yields India rubber exported from the island Climbing plant which yields India rubber exported from the island Large tree in the forests east of Antsihanaka, used in house building

References Archival Sources Dumaine. 1790. Voyage au pays d’ancaye, autrement dit des Bezounzouns, Isle de Madagascar, British Library Add. 18128. Finaz, Marc. 1876. Mémoires sur le commencement de la mission dans la province du Betsileo Diaires II no. 24, Archives historiques de la Vice-Province Société de Jésus de Madagascar, Antananarivo. Hastie, James. 1817. Dairy. CO. 167/34, National Archives, Kew. ———. 1824. Report on Missionary Instruction in Ovah (17 Mar), CO.167/78, pt. II, 25, National Archives, Kew. Madagascar Times. 1884. II. 44 (5 Nov) and II. 41 (15 Oct). Mayeur, Nicolas. 1777. Voyage au pays d’ancove, autrement dit des hovas ou Amboilamba dans l’intérieur des terres, Isle de Madagascar, British Library Add.18128. ———. 1785. Voyage au pays d’ancove, par le pays d’Ancaye autrement dit des Baizangouzangoux (related by Dumaine), British Library Add.18128. Nilsen, John A. 1943. Ny tantaran’ny distry Fianarantsoa, 1878–1943. ms. 57H. Isoraka, Antananarivo: Archives of the Fiangonana Loterana Madagaskara/ Norwegian Missionary Society. Raombana. 1853a. Histoire. Antanananarivo: Archives de l’Académie Malgache. ———. 1853b. Annales. Antanananarivo: Archives de l’Académie Malgache. ———. 1853c. Annales B2 Livre 13. Antanananarivo: Archives de l’Académie Malgache.

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———. 1875b. Notes on Ikongo and its People. Antananarivo Annual & Madagascar Magazine 1: 64–69. ———. 1876. The Ghosts of Ambondrombe Laid. Antananarivo Annual & Madagascar Magazine 2 (1876): 57. ———. 1878. The Betsileo: Religious and Social Customs. Antananarivo Annual & Madagascar Magazine 4: 2–11. ———. 1893. The Arab Element in South-East Madagascar. Antananarivo Annual & Madagascar Magazine 17: 99–109. Sibree, James. 1876a. South-East Madagascar. Being Notes of a Journey through the Tanala, Taimoro, and Taisaka Countries, in June and July, 1876. Antananarivo: A. Kingdon. ———. 1876b. The Cyclone of February Last. AAMM 2: 120. ———. 1877. James Sibree, “The Sihanaka and their Country”. Antananarivo Annual & Madagascar Magazine 3: 51–69. ———. 1879. History and Present Condition of Our Geographical Knowledge of Madagascar. Proceedings of the Royal Geographical Society and Monthly Record of Geography 1 (10): 646–665. ———. 1888a. A Quarter Century of Change and Progress: Antananarivo and Madagascar 25 Years Ago. Antananarivo Annual & Madagascar Magazine 12: 397–420. ———. 1888b. Brief Summary of Important Events in Madagascar during 1888. AAMM 12: 516–517. ———. 1892. Imerina, the Central Province of Madagascar, and the Capital, Antananarivo. Proceedings of the Royal Geographical Society and Monthly Record of Geography 14 (11): 735–753. ———. 1893. An Imerina Village. Antananarivo Annual & Madagascar Magazine 17: 21–25. ———. 1894. The Changing Year in Central Madagascar. Antananarivo Annual & Madagascar Magazine 18: 210–232. ———. 1896a. The Aye-Aye. Antananarivo Annual & Madagascar Magazine 20: 502–507. ———. 1896b. Malagasy Place Names. Antananarivo Annual & Madagascar Magazine 20: 401–413. ———. 1924. Fifty Years in Madagascar. Personal Experiences of Mission Life and Work. London: George Allen and Unwin. Standing, H.F. 1887. The Tribal Divisions of the Hova Malagasy. Antananarivo Annual & Madagascar Magazine 11: 354–363. Tacchi, Anthony. 1892. King Andrianampoinimerina and the Early History of Antananarivo and Ambohimanga. Antananarivo Annual & Madagascar Magazine 16 (1892): 474–496. Theal, George McCall. 1964. Records of South-Eastern Africa. Vol. 9. Cape Town: Struik.

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Toy, Robert. 1878. The Meteorology of Antananarivo. Antananarivo Annual & Madagascar Magazine 4: 66–76. Trousselle, [Léon]. 1899. Renseignements généraux sur le secteur de Mahaly: historique des races. Notes, Reconnaissances et Explorations 50: 507–518. Walen, A. 1887. Madagaskars Sydøstkyst. Stavanger: Det Norske Missionsselskabs Forlag. Wills, James. 1885. Native Products used in Malagasy Industries. Antananarivo Annual & Madagascar Magazine 9: 91–99.

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———. 2015. Madagascar: Colonial Period: French Rule. https://www.worldhistory.biz/sundries/42309-madagascar-colonial-period-french-rule.html. Accessed 29 December 2021. ———. 2020a. Commercialisation of Cattle in Imperial Madagascar, 1795-1895. In Animal Trade Histories in the Indian Ocean World, ed. Martha Chaiklin, Philip Gooding, and Gwyn Campbell, 181–215. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan. ———. 2020b. Malaria in Precolonial Imerina (Madagascar), 1795-1895. In Disease Dispersion and Impact in the Indian Ocean World, ed. Gwyn Campbell and Eva-Maria Knoll, 129–167. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Chapus, Georges-Sully. 1925. Quatre-vingts années d’influence européennes en Imerina (1815–1895). Tananarive: G. Pitot. Chauvin, J. 1939. Jean Laborde, 1805–1878. Tananarive: Imprimerie moderne de l’Émyrne. Clarence-Smith, William, and Steven Topik, eds. 2003. Coffee under Colonialism and Post-Colonialism: The Global Coffee Economy in Africa, Asia, and Latin America, c1800–c1960. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Couland, Daniel. 1973. Les Zafimaniry: un groupe ethnique de Madagascar à la poursuite de la forêt. Tananarive: Université de Madagascar. d’Unienville, Raymond. 2004. Victoire Rasoamanarivo: la Bienheureuse. L’Expresse (18 October). Danthu, P., et al. 2013. When Madagascar Produced Natural Rubber: A Brief, Forgotten Yet Informative History, . Decary, Raymond. 1947-8. “La population de Madagascar” Bulletin de l’Académie Malgache 28: 29–47. ———. 1958. Le voyage d’un chirurgien philosophe à Madagascar. Bulletin de l’Académie Malgache 36: 319–329. Deschamps, Hubert Jules. 1972. Histoire de Madagascar. Paris: Berger-Levrault. Filliot, Jean-Michel. 1974. La traite des esclaves vers les Mascareignes. Paris: ORSTOM. Fontoynont, Antoine Maurice, and Nicol. 1940. Les traitants français de la côte est de Madagascar de Ranavalona I à Radama II. Tananarive: Imprimerie Moderne. Gabler, Sigrid Carrie. 2005. Iron Furnaces and Future Kings: Craft Specialization and the Emergence of Political Power in Central Madagascar. PhD. Michigan: University of Michigan. Gade, D.W., and A.N.  Perkins-Belgram. 1986. Woodfuels, Reforestation, and Ecodevelopment in Highland Madagascar. GeoJournal 12 (4): 365–374. Grandidier, Alfred, and Guillaume. 1928. Histoire physique, naturelle et politique de Madagascar. Paris: Hachette. ———. 1908. Histoire physique, naturelle et politique de Madagascar. Paris: Hachette. Grandidier, Guillaume. 1900. Voyage de la reine Ranavalona Iere à Manerinerina. Revue de Madagascar: 2–16.

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Newspaper Wood-Worker. 1898. 17.1.

Dissertations Mattheeuws, Christel. 2008. Towards an Anthropology In Life: The Astrological Architecture of Zanadroandrena Land in West Bezanozano, Madagascar. PhD, University of Aberdeen, Aberdeen.

Web References 1. malagasyword. http://malagasyword.org/bins/teny2/hazovola. Accessed 13 January 2022. 2.   Tsinjoarivo. https://www.sadabe.org/Tsinjoarivo.html. Accessed 30 January 2022.

Glossary

alam’boly  planted forest ari-mainty  charcoal baiboho  land flooded during the rainy season, cultivated after the waters have receded deka  aides-de-camp fanompoana  forced unremunerated labour fingotra  rubber fosa  cat-like mammal habitus  concept of French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu (1930–2002) indicating a system of preferences or predisposition to act that influences the daily practices of individuals, as in how to dress, speak, and perceive. hatsake  dry fields cultivated after firing Hemileia vastatrix  fungal disease affecting the coffee plant horaka  lowland wet rice cultivation jiny  relics of the Maroseranana and Sakalava kings kere  famine kijana  natural pasturage lolo  ghost/phantom mikarakara  care or nurturing

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 F. Muttenzer et al. (eds.), Perceptions and Representations of the Malagasy Environment Across Cultures, Palgrave Series in Indian Ocean World Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-23836-9

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244 

GLOSSARY

monka  secondary forest ovinala  forest yam sampy  national talisman sandarosy  gum copal saonjo  edible arum tanindrazana  ancestral land taoka  Malagasy rum tavy  swidden tavy défricheur  clearer of tavy tavy cultivateur  cultivator of tavy tompontany  master/owner of the land trano  house Zanahary  God vazimba  alleged original inhabitants of Imerina voajanahare  fruit or work of God fady  rules for correct behaviours, analogous to taboo maha’afaka fô  satisfied sabaraha  ancestral ceremony tangalamena  guardians/stewards of family burial sites ambony  up asa  work cauchu  Rubber fitezana  nurture Havana  relatives lamba  cloth maditry  naughty mamaka  grow, mature manana vola  to have money miasa fatratra  work hard mijoro  apologize, ask for blessing mitady vola  look for money mitombo  to root, grow rano  sap tamana  habituated tangalamena  an elder taho  liana, handle vahiny  stranger vazaha  stranger zaza-rano  water babies

 Glossary 

Tangalamena  village chief Carbone  carbon Crédit carbone  carbon credits Patron  boss Fitaka  scam Babakoto  Indri Indri lemur Tetik’asa mampody savoka  the project to restore the fallows Asa maharitra  work that lasts Chef d’équipe  team supervisor Technicien  technician Toby  mining camp Mpamatsy vola  funder Matahotra  scared Mamitaka  deceit Manome  give Zo  a right which encompasses dignity and honour Manolotra  offer Mpividy  buyer Nangalatra  stole Hasina  a kind of invisible force or power Savoka  fallow land

245

Index1

A Academic, 10, 138 Adaptation, 185 Agency, 166, 176 Africa, 18, 91, 110 East, 205 Sub-Saharan, 17 West, 203 Agriculture, 2, 5, 7, 9, 14, 15, 18, 22, 25, 32–34, 38, 40, 44, 46, 48, 52, 62, 66, 66n7, 68, 83, 89, 107, 109, 110, 116, 144, 145n18, 169, 192, 193, 198, 207, 209, 213, 223 Agroforestry, 8, 14, 15, 31–54, 169, 173 Alakamisy, 217 Alamazaotra forest, 192, 223

Alarobia, 217 Alternatives to swidden farming, 172, 173 Althabe, G., 167 Ambatovy, 17, 18, 83, 84, 87–95, 97, 100, 114, 116 Ambohimanambola, 217 Ambohimandroso, 200 Ambohimanga, 193, 214, 220, 223 American, 68, 205, 206 Amoronkay, 209–211 Amparafaravola, 192 Analakely, 210 Analamaizina Forest, 210, 220 Ancestor, 167, 174, 176, 185 Andasibe, 81, 82, 107, 109, 110, 112, 114, 115, 118, 119, 123–125, 127

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

1

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 F. Muttenzer et al. (eds.), Perceptions and Representations of the Malagasy Environment Across Cultures, Palgrave Series in Indian Ocean World Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-23836-9

247

248 

INDEX

Andasibe-Mantadia National Park (AMNP), 18, 108, 109 Andavadoaka, 7, 141 Andevoranto, 222 Andrarivo, 200 Andrianampoinimerina (r. 1787-1810), 24, 192, 193, 214, 222 Angalampona, 223 Angola, 120 Angontsy Forest, 206 Animal, 1, 2, 5, 11, 16, 17, 31, 62, 66, 73–75, 82, 87, 92, 96, 97, 134, 136n14, 151, 159 See also Fauna Aniribe, 221 Anjolobato, 219 Ankaratra Mountains, 193 Ankay, 195, 202 Ankeniheny-Zahamena Corridor, 7, 89 Ankorahotra, 210 Anonibe, 201 Antaimoro, 196, 198, 200, 204, 221 Antaisaka, 25, 198, 223 Antalaha, 62n2, 68, 69n9 Antananarivo, 25, 62, 62n2, 88, 89, 119, 122, 124, 192, 194–196, 204, 207, 209, 210, 212, 214–217, 220–222 Antankarana, 196 Anthropologist, 8, 11, 13, 35, 42, 44, 129, 135, 165 Anthropology, 153 See also Ethnography Anthropocene, 175 Anti-cognitive machine, 165 Antongil Bay, 5, 24, 36, 40, 192, 205, 220–222 Antsihanaka, 198, 202, 204, 207, 209, 210, 217 Ari-mainty, see Charcoal Aristotle, 146

Arnoux, Jean Joseph (d. 1829), associate of Rontaunay, 68, 203 Artisan, 215 Arum, 197, 201 Ash, 197 Asia, 6 Association National de Gestion des Aires Protégées (ANGAP), 64 Association Nationale d’Actions Environnementales (ANAE), 110, 117–119, 121, 127 Attack, 25, 195, 200 Autarky, 194, 198, 210, 221 Axe, 197, 210, 215 Aye-aye, 91, 92, 200 B Baiboho, 170 Bali, 10 Banana, 82, 168, 197, 204 Bara, 221 Baron, Richard (1847-1907), LMS missionary and botanist, 192, 193, 196, 199–202, 206–208, 216–218, 221–223 Bat, 5 Beam, 216, 219 Bean, 40, 48, 70, 193, 200, 201, 204 Bee, 205, 206 Beef, 195, 196 Beeswax, 205–206 Bertrand, A., 167, 181 Betampona, 95 Betsileo, 25, 47n8, 192, 198, 204, 205, 210, 219, 223 Betsimisaraka, 5, 38, 47, 63, 64, 88, 125, 165–170, 174, 185, 197–199, 201, 206, 213 Betsimitatatra, 194, 209 Bevato, 214

 INDEX 

Bezanozano, 88, 195, 196, 198, 201, 202, 204–207, 212, 213, 217 BioCarbon Fund (BioCF), 110, 117 Biochar, 173 Biodiversity, 16–18, 36, 42, 52, 62, 83–94, 96, 98–100, 109, 126, 175–177, 180, 182 Biodiversity offset, 83–94, 99, 100 Bio-prospection, 177 Birds, 1, 31, 52, 89, 200 Bloch, M., 34, 35, 40–42, 47, 47n8, 49, 50, 165, 166, 183–185 Blue Ventures Conservation, 8 Boar, 200 Boat, 7, 213 Borneo, 1 Boserup, E., 169, 182 Bourdieu, Pierre, 166, 183, 184 Botanist, 24, 39n5, 66, 223 Brazil, 1 Breadfruit, 14, 32 Brick, 210, 215, 219 Brigandry, 200 Britain, 1, 202, 207, 208 British, 24, 88, 109, 198 Brundtland Commission of the United Nations, 64 Bushmeat, 5, 97 Business, 8, 9, 84, 91, 96, 115, 140, 177 Business and Biodiversity Offset Program (BBOP), 83–85, 88 C Calculation, 183 Camp, 73, 98, 118, 119, 201 Canal, 169, 209, 213 Cannon, 210 Canoe, 52, 81, 213 Cape Amber, 195 Capital, 174, 175, 185

249

Capitalism, 149, 192 Capitalist, 24, 174, 177, 191 Captive, 195, 198 Carbon, 175, 177 credit, 10, 13, 18, 19, 107, 108, 110, 112, 115, 119, 121, 122, 124 dioxide (see CO2) offset, 8, 12, 13, 18, 19, 107–127 sequestration, 14, 32, 49 sink, 18, 110, 112 Carpenter, 215, 219 Carpentry, 220 Cash, 4, 12, 14, 140, 141, 201, 220 Cassava, see Manioc Catat, Louis (1859-1933), French physician and explorer, 200–202, 204, 206, 207, 219, 221–223 Cattle, 42, 43, 195–196, 198, 214 hide, 196 Ceramic, see Pottery Ceremony, 44, 44n7, 45, 49, 50, 148, 212 Chapel, see Church Character, 146, 152, 155, 159 Charcoal, 5, 52, 173, 180, 208–212, 215, 219 burner, 210, 216 Charms (fishing magic), 147, 148 Children, 12, 16, 48, 65, 74, 75, 117, 167, 192, 198, 200 Christianity, 49, 199, 219 Christmas, 62 Church, 25, 215, 217, 219, 220, 222 Circonscription de l’Environnement et Forêts (CIREF), 110, 114, 117, 121 Clean Development Mechanism (CDM), 18, 19, 110 Climate, 7, 10, 13, 66, 86, 96, 112, 138, 175, 177, 182 Climate change, 175, 177

250 

INDEX

Clove, 14, 32, 34n3, 38–42, 44, 46–48, 168 cultivation, 32, 34n3, 38, 40, 46–48 Coast, 32, 36, 38, 63, 68, 69, 83, 141, 195, 196, 198–208, 210, 213, 220, 222 Cobalt, 17, 83, 95 Cocoa, 202, 204–205 Code of 101 Articles (1868), 192 of 305 Articles (1881), 192 Coffee, 14, 15, 25, 32, 38, 40, 46, 52, 63, 166, 202–204, 222 cultivation, 32, 38, 46 Coffin, 213 Cognitive dissonance, 163–186 Cognitive science, 163, 164 Cole, Jennifer, 35, 40, 42–44 Collapse, 168, 172, 179 Colonial, 24, 25, 40, 43, 63, 66, 68, 69, 74, 81, 99, 166, 174, 192, 194, 200, 203 Colonialism, 40, 43 Colonisation, 115, 172 Comité d’Orientation et de Soutien des Aires Protégées (COSAP), 72 Commodity boom, 171, 172, 175 Communication campaigns, 185 Community, 5, 8–14, 16, 18, 19, 24, 36, 42–44, 46, 47n8, 53, 54, 72, 86, 91, 96, 107, 108, 110, 112, 125, 136, 142, 154n22, 169, 171–173, 180, 185, 200, 201, 209, 210 Company, 13, 18, 83, 85, 91, 120, 141, 221 Compensation, 9, 11, 12, 86 See also Compensatory Compensatory, 12 Concession, 25, 81, 205, 220, 221 Concessionaire, 201 Concubine, 201

Conflict, 15, 19, 36, 46, 51, 132, 148, 154–160, 160n30, 174, 194, 197 Conquest, 68, 195, 214 Conservation, 8, 10–13, 15, 17–23, 32, 34–36, 42, 50–53, 62, 64–68, 66n6, 71, 74, 75, 81, 83–86, 89, 94, 99, 108, 109, 118, 131, 132, 135, 142, 151–156, 156n26, 158, 168–171, 173, 175–181, 185, 186 Conservation International (CI), 8, 110, 114, 116, 117, 119 Conservationist, 5, 8, 11, 14–17, 19, 20, 22, 23, 73, 83, 109, 132, 133n8, 136, 137, 141, 142, 149n20, 150–158, 165, 166, 175, 177–182, 185, 186 Consortium, 8 Construction, 5, 25, 32, 52, 72, 91–93, 97, 118, 120, 134, 135, 151, 159, 167, 169, 175, 185, 213–217, 220, 222 Contract, 8, 19, 110, 114, 117, 118, 121, 203, 205 Convention on Biological Diversity, 65 Coral reef, 7, 8, 19–21, 129–132, 133n8, 134, 139–142, 150, 153, 154, 156–158 Cornell International Institute for Food, Agriculture and Development (CIIFAD), 66n7 Corpse, 212 Corridor Forestier Analamay-Mantadia (CFAM), 114, 118 Cotton, 202 CO2, 10, 112 Council, 9, 12, 48 Cover crops, 173 Covid-19, 12, 82 Creole, 24, 68, 69, 203, 207, 221 Crop

 INDEX 

cash, 5, 15, 16, 25, 38, 48, 63, 68, 69, 99, 166, 168, 172, 175, 192, 201–205, 222 subsistence, 14, 32, 41, 196, 210, 216 Cultivation, 15, 22, 32, 38, 39, 41, 43, 47, 48, 62, 63, 68–71, 74, 116, 166–169, 182, 194, 197, 200, 203, 204, 222 shifting, 41 (see also Swidden) See also Agriculture; Riziculture Cultural, 15, 16, 20, 21, 23, 34, 35, 41–43, 49, 50, 52–54, 63, 74, 113, 131, 134, 136, 138, 139, 143, 144, 154, 154n22, 155n23, 157n27, 159, 165, 169, 176, 180, 181, 184 Culture, 11, 22, 23, 53, 87, 97, 130, 136–139, 137n15, 143, 144, 153, 166, 169, 175, 181, 184, 186 Curtain, 202 Customs, 14, 205 Cyclone, 40, 43, 202, 220 D Da, 115 Dadan’i Lala, 121 Dead, the, 11, 15, 35, 44, 122, 167, 193, 214 Deceased, see Dead, the Deceit, 120–123, 125, 200 Deforestation, 4, 7, 8, 10, 13, 22, 23, 25, 66, 83, 163–186, 193, 203 Degradation, 172, 181, 182, 184 Deka (aides-de-camp), 195 Delastelle, 202, 205 Delastelle, Napoléon (1802–1856), Breton merchant, 203, 204 Demography, 167, 193–195 Development, 8, 12, 15–17, 32, 34–36, 42, 50–54, 63–65, 66n7, 68, 84, 89, 110, 116, 118, 120,

251

122, 152, 169, 170, 172–174, 177–179, 217, 219 Dialect, 13, 38 Diego Suarez, 222 Direct realism, 135n12, 150 Discourses, 177, 183 Disease, 24, 82, 86, 88, 92, 95–99, 204 Dispositions, 140, 144, 146, 149, 150, 152, 153, 159 Dispute, 46, 135, 157, 160, 201 Dissident, 199 Diviner, 167 Domination, 185 Donor, 12, 177 Durban, 64 Durban Vision, 9, 64, 64n5 Dyke, 209, 213 E The Earth Summit, 64 Ebony, 39, 213, 220 Ecological limits, 175, 176 Ecology, 5, 97, 132, 133n7, 133n8, 143, 143n17, 144, 153, 154n22, 155n23, 159 Economic, 8, 13–16, 32, 35, 40–42, 48–54, 68, 74, 87, 116, 122, 132, 134, 140–145, 147, 149, 168, 170–174, 176, 178 Economy, 13, 15, 17, 25, 41, 63, 72, 85, 91, 143–145, 143n17, 165, 170, 195 Ecosystem, 5, 15, 18, 19, 32, 34, 38, 53, 66, 68, 84, 86, 98, 132, 132n5, 133, 133n6, 133n7, 133n8, 136n14, 137–139, 141, 145, 147, 148n19, 149–159, 149n20, 155n23, 155n25, 157n27, 175, 177, 182 discourse, 157 management, 133n6, 137n14, 145, 148n19, 151, 153, 156

252 

INDEX

Ecotourism, 8, 9, 12, 16, 61–75, 98 Education, 71, 193 Electricity, 5, 38, 74, 140 Elite, 25, 109, 193, 195, 212, 214, 215, 222 El Niño/Southern Oscillation, see ENSO Emission Reductions Purchasing Agreement (ERPA), 19, 110 Empiricism, 165 Enactivism, 135 Endemism, 175, 176 Enslavement, 195 ENSO, 7, 8 Environment, 1–25, 34–36, 40, 46, 48, 50, 51, 53, 54, 62, 64, 65, 67, 68, 71, 73–75, 85, 88–92, 109, 111, 114, 130–136, 131n4, 133n8, 134n10, 136n14, 139–155, 148n19, 155n24, 157–160, 157n27, 164, 166, 168–170, 172, 178–186, 199, 206 Environmental affordance, 134n10, 135, 144, 146, 148–155, 148n19, 158, 159 Environmentalist, 8 Environmental recovery, 170 Epistemology, 15, 17, 34, 35, 42, 47, 50, 75, 137n15, 140, 164, 165, 181 Erosion, 5, 91, 100, 195, 197 Escarpment, 24, 25, 166, 192, 198, 223 ESSA-Forêt institute, 62n2 Ethics, 175, 176, 179, 180, 186 Ethnicity, 89, 124 Ethnography, 34, 35, 53, 72, 73 See also Anthropology Ethos, 9, 11, 12, 14, 20, 21, 73, 130n1, 134, 143–149, 151–153 Euro-American, 65

Europe, 40, 177, 196, 205, 207 European, 12, 16, 17, 19, 24, 63, 65, 66, 68, 74, 75, 166, 186, 193, 196, 202, 203, 205–207, 214, 215, 221 European Union (EU), 10 Evers, S., 174 Eviction, 8 Exclusive Economic Maritime Zone, 7 Execution, 198 Exploitation, 6, 7, 9, 11, 24, 25, 191–193, 195–196, 201, 205–223 Export, 7, 14, 19, 24, 32, 40, 68, 69, 70n10, 99, 140–142, 153, 192, 195–198, 201–206, 210, 220, 222 Extinction, 1, 53, 91, 92, 94, 97, 138, 176 Extractivism, 100 F Facilitating Agents (FA), 110 Factory, 202 Fady, 46 Fairhead, James, 17, 84, 85 Falierana, 118 Fallow, 5, 18, 39, 41, 107, 109–111, 114, 167–169, 175, 182, 197 Faly, 121 Famine, 170, 173, 194, 198, 199 Fanompoana (forced unremunerated labour), 197–199, 210–212, 215–217, 219, 221 Farafangana, 222 Faraoni river, 200 Farmer, 7, 11, 14, 15, 19, 21–24, 31, 32, 33n2, 34, 35, 38–44, 39n5, 46–54, 69, 71, 98, 99, 107, 109, 110, 112, 116–118, 121, 122, 124, 133n7, 145n18, 155n23,

 INDEX 

165–170, 172, 175–179, 185, 186, 197 See also Peasant Farming, 165, 168, 170, 172, 173, 175, 176, 178, 181, 184 Fauna, 9, 14, 32, 62, 63, 71, 90, 97, 191 See also Animal Fauroux, E., 170 Fertility, 168, 182 Fence, 5, 14, 32, 52 Fenoarivo, 207, 222 Festival, 49, 195 Fianarantsoa, 200, 219 Fig, 192 Finance, 86, 205 See also Funding Fingotra, see Rubber Fire, 5, 53, 83, 167, 177, 193, 207, 209, 211, 213, 220 Firewood, 5, 14, 15, 25, 32, 52, 63, 175, 193, 209 Firing, 5, 99, 192, 193, 195, 196, 210, 211 Fish, 7, 15, 19, 89, 130, 137, 139–141, 144–146, 148, 150–154, 156, 157n27, 200, 213 Fishing, 7, 19, 21, 38, 47, 63, 129–132, 130n1, 133n6, 140–142, 144, 145, 145n18, 147, 148, 152, 153, 156–158, 194, 200 Flight, 194, 197–199 Flora, 1, 9, 14, 32, 39, 62, 63, 90, 97, 191 Fodder, 173, 195 Food, 5, 13, 14, 22, 32, 41, 42, 44, 48, 50, 52, 64, 65, 66n7, 83, 97, 98, 100, 131n4, 139, 173, 175, 194, 198, 212 Foreign, 14, 16, 17, 19, 21, 24, 63, 68, 72, 74, 88, 111, 119, 124,

253

174, 177, 191, 200, 202, 204, 215, 221 Forest, 163–178, 180–182, 186 rain, 7, 17, 22, 73, 81, 83, 88, 89, 97, 166, 170, 172, 173, 177, 181, 197 resources, 6, 7, 24, 25, 99, 173, 177, 180, 182, 191, 205–223 Fort, 218, 219 See also Garrison Fort Dauphin, 83, 198, 201, 208, 221, 223 See also Tolagnaro (current name for Fort Dauphin) Fortress, 200 Fossa (cat-like mammal), 5, 200 Foulpointe, 196, 198, 207, 219 Fowl, 200 France, 68, 71 Free action, 145 French, 63, 66, 66n7, 68, 69 colonial state, 66, 99 colonisation, 24, 25, 191, 193, 194, 199, 200, 221, 222 Friendship, 12 Frontier, 167, 168, 174, 182, 186 Fruit, 14, 15, 32, 47, 52, 63, 69, 70, 74, 75, 199 Fuel, 25, 208, 210, 212, 215, 216, 222 Funding, 10, 34, 72, 111, 118, 177, 178 See also Finance Funeral, 62, 214 G Garden, 15, 43, 168, 204 Garnot, French trader, 205, 206, 220 Garrison, 25, 198, 200, 217–220, 222 Gemstone, 7 Geographer, 4

254 

INDEX

Germain, 115 Germany, 71 Gestalt, 164 Gift, 16, 72, 148 Giving environment, 130, 131, 133, 133n8, 139, 145, 147, 150–152, 154, 155, 157n27, 159 Global, 8, 10, 11, 17, 19, 21–23, 40, 64–65, 71, 75, 85, 88, 91, 149, 165, 175, 178, 203 Global South, 11, 13, 17, 36, 51, 65, 86 Gold, 7, 113, 115, 116, 120, 122, 123, 125 Governance, 13, 17, 65, 172 Governor, 201, 218, 219 Grassland, 5, 66, 196 Greenhouse gas, 13 Greenland, 1 Gross domestic product, 7 Gum copal, 205 Gun, 210 Gunpowder, 210 H Habit, 140, 144, 146–148, 150–152, 156, 159 Habitat, 2, 7, 14, 17, 18, 32, 52, 66, 83–87, 89, 92, 96–100, 206 Habitus, 183, 184 Hamlet, 88, 168, 200 Hanta, 121 Hardwood, 6, 25, 39, 140, 192, 205, 213, 214, 218–222 Haricot, 193, 197 Harvest, 16, 38, 70, 71, 132, 133n7, 145, 164, 170, 175, 193, 197 Health, 14, 18, 32, 50, 71, 81–100, 126, 193 centre, 9, 38 Hegemonies, 177 Hemileia vastatrix, 204

Hemp, 202 Herder, 195 Hierarchies, 184, 185 Highlands, 40, 81, 83, 88, 168, 194, 209, 212 See also Plateau Hill, 15, 31, 63, 192, 193, 209, 215 sacred, 192, 193 History, 11, 17, 35, 40–44, 46, 50, 51, 62, 68–71, 75, 107, 108, 126, 133n8, 137, 137n15, 139 Holloway, Louise, 109, 117 Honey, 15, 40, 63, 205–206 Horaka, 166, 168, 169 House, 5, 24, 65, 196, 200, 210, 213, 215, 219, 221 Human rights, 180, 186 Humbert, Henri, 66 Humus, 197 Hunter, 155n23, 200 Hunting, 15, 63, 73, 140, 175, 184, 199, 200 I Identity, 16, 35, 46–48, 47n8, 50, 130, 167–169, 174, 184 Ideological, 15, 23, 34, 35, 144, 185 Ideology, 11, 15, 22, 23, 34, 35, 143, 144, 165, 166, 185, 186 See also Ideological Ifanongoavana, 192 Ikongo, 200, 201, 223 Ikopa River, 209 Ilmenite, 6, 83 Imahasila, 219 Imerina, 192–195, 197, 198, 204, 209, 210, 217, 220 Imperialist, 191 Income, 7, 11, 36, 42, 44, 46, 48, 51, 52, 115, 141, 145, 168, 170–173, 177 Indemnity, 205

 INDEX 

Independence, 200 Independence Day, 62 India, 40, 197, 208 Indigenous, 1, 14, 181, 191, 199, 207 Indonesia, 10 Indri, 91, 92, 95, 109, 200 Industry, 17, 25, 40, 83–85, 87, 96, 111, 113–115, 118, 120, 138n16, 142, 155n23, 193, 208–210, 212, 215, 216, 222 Infanticide, 194 Infrastructure, 38, 49, 50, 108, 109, 113, 118–120, 126, 174, 202 Innovation, 179 Institute de Recherche pour le Développement (IRD), 62n4 Intensification, 167, 169 International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), 64 Invasion, 87, 193 Investment, 12, 17, 24, 34, 70, 71, 85, 86, 88, 168, 169, 172, 173, 202, 204 Ionaivo valley, 200 Iron, 25, 94, 138, 209, 210, 222 ore, 209, 210, 215 Irrational, 179, 181 Irrigation, 169, 172–174 Island, 1, 4, 7–9, 11, 13, 14, 24, 25, 32, 61, 63, 64, 66, 68, 69, 83, 97, 186, 191, 195, 206, 212, 214, 219, 221, 222 IUCN World Bank Congress, 64 Izouard, 81, 115, 116, 118–119, 122, 124, 125 J Jane Goodall Institute, 8 Jailing, 177 Jarosz, L., 4, 40, 61, 66, 174, 192, 194, 200, 203 Jones, Richard, 193

255

K Keller, E., 167 Kere, 170, 173, 179 Kijana, 167 Kiln, 208, 209, 215 Kinship, 16, 65 Klein, Joergen, 4, 5 Knowledge, 5, 8, 15, 19, 20, 34, 35, 41, 42, 44, 46–48, 47n8, 50, 53, 54, 65, 113, 119, 130, 135, 136n13, 137–139, 137n15, 149, 149n20, 152, 157, 160, 164–166, 175, 178–181, 183–186 Korea Resources Corporation, 83 Kreditanstalt für Wiederaufbau (KFW), 67n8 Kull, Christian, 4, 5, 34, 51, 64, 66, 66n6, 177 L Laborde, Jean (1805–1878), French master artisan, 210 Labour, 8, 22, 24, 25, 53, 63, 65, 68–70, 108, 109, 113–118, 120, 126, 168–173, 197, 203, 221, 222 intensive, 16, 194 Lambros, Nicolas, trader and planter of Greek origin, 202 Land, 1, 13, 14, 16, 18, 19, 22–25, 32, 38, 41, 43, 44, 46–50, 53, 54, 63–65, 68–71, 74, 81, 89, 97, 108, 110–112, 115–123, 130, 145n18, 165–175, 181, 182, 184, 186, 193, 194, 197, 198, 201, 203, 204, 215, 218, 221–223 use, 14, 23, 33, 177, 178, 182, 186, 192 Landscape, 14, 17, 18, 23, 31–54, 65, 74, 75, 81–100, 107–109, 112, 113, 115, 118–120, 124, 126, 139, 166–175, 179, 181 Lastelle, see Delastelle

256 

INDEX

Law, 137n15, 193 See also Code Leach, Melissa, 17, 84, 85, 108, 112, 126 Le Bourdiec, F., 166, 174 Lemurs, 2, 5, 18, 39, 52, 81–100, 109, 200 aye-aye, 91, 92 bamboo lemur, 82, 87, 91, 92 black and white ruffed lemur, 82, 91 brown lemur, 82, 91 diademed sifaka, 82, 91, 92 eastern woolly lemur, 91 greater bamboo lemur, 91, 92 greater dwarf lemur, 91 grey bamboo lemur, 91 hairy dwarfed lemur, 91, 92 health, 81–100 indri, 91, 92, 95 red-bellied lemur, 91, 92 weasel sportive lemur, 91 Liberia, 203 Ligie, 202 Livelihood, 165, 166, 169, 172, 174, 176, 178–180, 182, 186 Livestock, 167, 170, 171, 173, 175 Local knowledge, 179 Logging, 4, 83, 99, 107, 166, 177 Lohasoa Valley, 195 Lokoho River, 63, 69 London Missionary Society (LMS), 215, 219, 223 Louys, 115, 116 Lowlands, 24, 38, 192, 194, 198, 209, 219, 221 Luxury, 115, 205 M Madagascar government, 6, 8, 9, 13, 15, 18, 19, 61, 110, 117 president, 9, 64

Madagascar Forests Syndicate, 220 Madagascar National Parks (MNP), 64, 71, 73 Madagascar’s Water and Forest Department, 64 Magic, 152, 212 Mahafaly, 165, 170–174, 179–181, 185 Mahanoro, 201 Mahatsara, 18, 108–124, 126, 210 Mahavelona, see Foulpointe Mahela, 201, 202 Mahogany, 220 Maigrot, Désiré (1836-1908), Italian Consul, 220 Maize, 171, 193, 197, 201 Majunga, 198 Malagasy, 1–25, 31, 32, 34–36, 38–40, 42, 43, 48, 49, 52, 53, 61, 62, 65, 66, 68, 69, 71, 73, 74, 83, 84, 99, 114, 123, 124, 130, 165, 166, 169, 170, 174–176, 178, 179, 182, 185, 186, 191–194, 196, 197, 202, 204–208, 212, 213, 221, 222, 224–233 Malagasy National Parks, 39 Malaria, 24, 193, 219, 221 Malnourished, 12 Malnourishment, 12 See also Malnourished Mammal, 1, 82, 96 Mananara Nord, 31, 34–38, 40–42, 45–50, 52 Mananara Nord Biosphere Reserve, 38 Mananara River, 221 Mananjary, 199, 202, 203, 207 Mananjary River, 202 Manantenina, 73 Manatsaralehibe, 214 Mangoro River/Mangoro Valley, 198, 206 Manioc, 14, 32, 173, 197, 201

 INDEX 

Manombo River, 7 Mantadia, 90 Mantasoa, 210–212, 214, 216 Maritime, 7 Market, 6, 13, 14, 16, 32, 35, 38, 40, 41, 48, 50, 52–54, 69, 70, 70n10, 72, 75, 85, 116, 133n6, 140–142, 146, 149, 152, 153, 157, 171, 172, 175, 195–197, 202, 206, 207, 217 Maroantsetra, 201, 205 Marojejy mountains, 66 Marojejy National Park, 15, 16, 61–64, 66–68, 71 Marsh, 88, 168 Mascarene, 195, 196, 202, 205, 207, 220, 221 See also Mauritius; Réunion Masikoro, 171, 172 Masoala National Park, 75 Matitatana river, 202 Mauritius, 196, 197, 204 See also Mascarene McEvedy, Colin, 193 Meat, 196 Memory, 15, 34, 35, 41–44, 46–49, 63, 115 Memoryscape, 42 Mental images, 163 Merchant, 202 See also Trader Merina, 63 army, 24, 25, 63, 195, 197, 198, 201, 217, 222, 223 authorities, 63, 191, 197, 200 court, 24, 219, 220 crown, 24, 25, 195, 198, 202, 203, 205, 206, 210, 214, 216, 220–222 elite, 195, 212, 214, 215 imperialism, 193–195, 210 law, 193 monarchy, 63, 192, 214

257

regime, 40, 192, 205, 210, 221, 222 state, 24, 25, 193, 194, 221 Metis knowledge, 47 Migration, 171, 172, 176, 181 Military, 24, 25, 63, 195, 197, 198, 201, 214, 215, 217, 222, 223 Miner, 72 Mineral, 6, 94, 95 Mining, 7–9, 13, 17, 18, 72, 83–86, 89–92, 94–96, 98, 99, 115, 118, 119, 126, 166, 209 Missionary, 206, 215, 219, 220, 223 Money, 12, 19, 52, 68, 69, 72, 73, 108, 110–112, 116, 117, 120–125, 127, 139, 145, 146 Monka, 170 Monopoly, 24, 196, 205–207, 210, 220, 221 Moramanga, 17, 88, 89, 119 Morarano, 114 Motives, 132, 145, 146, 149n20, 150, 152, 155, 156 Mountain, 66, 166, 193, 200 Multinational, 17, 40 Mundane, 165, 166, 170, 183–186 N Nanjakana, 220 National Archives, 62n4 National Environmental Action Plan, 177 National park, 16, 64, 66, 86, 90, 116, 118, 176 Natural scientist, 13, 152 Nature, 5, 11, 17, 19–21, 23, 46, 47, 50, 51, 66–68, 75, 83–86, 100, 108, 134–141, 137n15, 158, 159, 175, 176, 182, 184, 185, 201 reserve, 9, 11, 66, 83 Nature-culture (dualism), 129–160

258 

INDEX

Nedbank, 91 New Guinea, 1 New Year, 62 NGO, 8, 12, 49, 132, 142 Nickel, 17, 83, 88, 94, 95 Northeastern Madagascar, 61–75 Nurture, 16, 17, 39, 62, 64, 68–71, 73, 74, 88 See also Nurturing Nurturing, 16, 64, 69, 70, 73, 74 Nutrient, 167, 168, 173, 175 O Octopus, 19–21, 132, 140–142, 153, 155, 157n27 Onilahy River, 7 Ontologies, 165, 169, 170, 178 Oracle, 148 Overpopulation, 194 Ovinala (forest yam), 199 Oxen, see Cattle Ox-plow, 172–174 P Paddy field, 168, 169 Paint, 6, 210 Paleontologist, 4 Palisade, 201, 213, 214, 218 Pandanus, 213 Pandemic, 12, 99 Paper, 6 Papua New Guinea, 73 Partnership, 15, 24, 25, 61, 85, 114, 202, 203, 221, 222 Pastoral, 194 Pastoralism, 184 Pasture, 170, 171, 195, 196, 222 Peasant, 5, 6, 9, 11–16, 22, 24, 25, 127, 191, 194, 197, 198, 202, 204, 207, 222, 223 See also Farmer

Peat, 215 Perfume, 220 Perrier-Humbert hypothesis, 66 Persecution, 199 Pillage, 197, 198 PK32, 171, 172 Plank, 213, 216, 217 Plant, 1, 14–19, 24, 32, 35, 38, 39, 43, 44, 48, 49, 62–66, 69–71, 74, 75, 87–90, 94, 99, 118, 119, 167, 168, 175, 192, 203 See also Flora Plantain, 197 Plantation, 5, 16, 25, 63, 68, 69, 99, 195, 199–205, 221, 222 Plateau, 25, 171–174, 194, 195, 198, 200, 202, 204, 208, 209, 212–215, 217, 220, 222 See also Highlands Policies, 164, 166–169, 177, 181, 185, 186 Political, 4, 12, 15, 21, 23, 34, 35, 40, 42, 43, 49, 50, 54, 126, 127, 143, 143n17, 144, 149, 159, 165, 166, 177, 178, 181, 199 Popper, K., 164 Population, 2, 5, 7–9, 11, 12, 17–21, 25, 36, 62, 63, 66, 68, 86–89, 92, 95–98, 100, 119, 121, 126, 130, 140–142, 148n19, 159, 167, 172, 174, 182, 193–196, 198–201, 209, 215, 219 density, 24, 96, 97, 167, 172, 175, 194, 197 Port, 17, 38, 88, 198, 202, 207 Potato, 200 sweet, 197 Pottery, 209 Poverty, 5, 66, 67, 107, 109, 141, 145, 180 Power, 165, 166, 178, 185, 186 Presidential speech, 177

 INDEX 

Price, 16, 40, 44, 45, 70, 71, 75, 88, 111, 112, 122, 156, 171, 172, 196, 202–204, 207, 208, 217 Primate, 1, 83, 84, 98 Prisoner, 210 Profit, 91, 140 Protein, 83, 200 Protest, 13, 19, 89 Provisions, 9, 117, 195, 197 R Radama I (r. 1810-28), 192, 193, 198, 215 Radama II (r.1861-63), 200 Raffia, 202 Rain, 17, 21, 22, 73, 74, 81, 83, 88, 89, 97, 166, 170, 182, 197 Rajoelina, Andry, president of Madagascar since 2019, 13 Rakelimalaza, 217 Ranavalona I (r. 1828-61), 192, 193, 198, 216, 220 Ranomafana, 95 Ranomafana national park, 95, 97 Rasoherina (r. 1863-8), 220 Ravalomanana, Marc (President of Madagascar 2002-09), 9, 64 Razanaka, S., 170, 171 Recession, 12 Reciprocal, 16, 72 Reciprocity, 12, 72, 75, 125 See also Reciprocal Recruit, 18 REDD, 10, 117 REDD+, 10, 13 Reforestation, 18, 19, 108, 110, 111, 117, 118, 127 Refuge, 25, 91, 198 Refugee, 25, 199–201 Relativism, 181 Rent, 221

259

Reparations, 220 Reports, 177, 178, 185 Representation, 163–186 cultural, 131, 134, 136, 154, 159 Repression, 177 Reptile, 1, 89 Research, 13, 15, 34, 42, 51, 53, 62, 88, 96, 98 Resistance, 185, 194 Réunion, 68, 71, 196, 203, 204, 210 See also Mascarene Reunionnaise, 69 Rianambo River, 202 Rice cultivation (see Riziculture) field, 38, 71, 196, 209 Rio de Janeiro, 64 Rio Tinto, 6, 8, 83, 89 Rio Tinto/QMM, 83, 89 Ritual, 8, 16, 23, 42, 44, 50, 62, 63, 124, 129–132, 130n1, 133n7, 143, 144, 147–149, 151–153, 165–168, 173, 183–186, 194 River, 7, 21, 91, 123, 200, 202, 209, 213, 221, 222 Riziculture, 15, 24, 25, 38, 39, 41, 47, 63, 166, 193, 194, 222 Road, 9, 63, 91, 92, 99, 116, 118, 119, 201, 217 Rontaunay, Julien Gaultier de (1793–1863), Breton merchant, 203, 210 Rosewood, 6, 39, 213, 220 Rubber, 25, 40, 43, 63, 206–208, 222 Rural, 2, 5, 8, 11, 36, 38, 41, 61–75, 88, 130, 169, 170, 181, 182 S Sacred, 73, 167, 173, 175, 179, 192, 193, 212 Sacred grove, 167, 173

260 

INDEX

Sahambavahy, 222 Sahanony river, 200 Sainte Mairie, 204, 213 Sakalava, 63, 195, 196, 200 Sambava, 62n2, 68, 69n9, 201 Sampan’Asa momban’ny Fampandrosoana FJKM (SAF-­ FJKM), 116, 117, 119 Sampy, see Talisman Sandalwood, 220 Sandarosy, see Gum copal Saonjo (an edible arum), 197 Sapphire, 7 Satellite, 176, 180 SAVA (Sambava-Antalaha-Vohermar-­ Andapa) region, 62n2, 68 Scales, Y., 164, 170, 171, 181 School, 9, 20, 21, 38, 71, 72 Scientist, 13, 20, 21, 82, 86, 94, 97, 136, 137, 137n15, 138n16, 139, 152, 175, 177, 186 Scoones, Ian, 17, 84, 85, 108, 126 Sea cucumber, 19, 140, 141, 144, 145, 147, 148, 157n27 Season, 201 dry, 70, 206, 211, 212 wet, 69 Sea Surface Temperature (SST), 7, 8 Secret service, 200 Sector, 7–9, 12, 72, 91, 177, 202, 217, 223 Seedling, 18, 19, 38, 39, 43, 51, 108, 111, 120, 127 Sensation, 163 Settlement, 66, 87, 97, 108, 140, 144, 172, 175, 192, 204, 208–210, 214, 218, 219, 223 Settler, 24, 68, 186, 201, 203 Shaw, George (1842-1883), LMS missionary and botanist, 192, 197, 198, 200, 208, 210, 213, 219, 221, 223

Sherritt International Corporation, 83 Sierra Leone, 112 Sihanaka, 212, 214 Slaughter, 196 Slave, 24, 40, 65, 195, 196, 198, 200–202, 221 Slavery, 174, 192, 200 Smallholder, 8, 14, 15, 23, 24, 32, 34, 35, 38–42, 48, 50–53 Soanierana Palace, 214 Soap, 210, 212 Social-ecological trap, 145, 153 Social science, 10, 14, 49, 181 Soil, 5, 14, 32, 38, 52, 69, 91, 94, 109, 133n7, 167, 168, 173, 182, 197 Soldier, 218, 219 Sorghum, 201 Spade, 209, 213 Spain, 71 Species, 18, 87 Spirit, 17, 63, 73–75, 123, 133, 133n7, 133n8, 144, 147, 148, 167, 168, 170, 173, 176 Spirit medium (diviner), 147, 148 Stakeholder, 22, 23, 164, 165, 174–178, 183, 185 Starvation, 199 State, 15, 24, 25, 47, 64, 66, 73, 83, 84, 86, 99, 117, 120, 134n10, 137, 146, 156, 158, 185, 192–194, 219, 221, 222 Stimuli, 163 Storm, 41, 220 Strength-based development, 36, 53–54 Subsistence, 4, 14, 19, 32, 38, 41, 65, 68, 98, 99, 109, 129, 136n14, 145, 175, 196, 204, 210, 216, 219 Success stories, 177, 185 Sugar, 40, 197, 202, 204

 INDEX 

Sugarcane, 202 Sumitomo Corporation, 83 Supernatural, 11, 133n7 Sustainability, 17, 61–75, 85, 131, 178–181, 184, 191 Swahili, 205 Sweet-potato, 201 Swidden, 5, 14, 22–24, 33, 33n2, 38, 44n7, 66, 74, 83, 89, 107, 109, 110, 115, 116, 118, 119, 133n7, 166–170, 172, 173, 175, 177, 178, 180–182, 185, 186, 192, 194, 197, 200, 222 Swidden farming, 170, 172, 173, 175, 178, 181 Symbolic, 165, 176, 178, 185 Système d’Aires Protégées de Madagascar’ (SAPM), 64n5 Système de Riziculture Intensive (SRI), 66n7 T Taboo, 8, 46, 72, 170, 173, 192, 194, 200 Talisman, 217 Tamarind, 173, 179, 180, 182 Tamatave, see Toamasina Tambahoaka, 199 TAMS, 18, 19, 107–112, 114–121, 123–125, 127 Tanala, 194, 196, 200–202, 204, 205 Tangalamena, 46 Tanindrazana, 167, 174 Tanjona, 221 Taoka (Malagasy rum), 202 Tavy, see Swidden Technical, 10, 15, 34, 36, 53, 110, 130, 143, 144, 148, 155, 159, 179 Technology, 17, 22, 63, 65, 83, 113, 147, 169, 172, 194

261

Tenrec, 5, 31 Tenure, 19, 53, 110, 154n22, 171 Tetik’asa Mampody Savoka (TAMS), 107–112, 114–121, 123–125, 127 Texas, 1 Theories of perception, 135–140 Timber, 5, 25, 40, 205, 213–223 Tintingue, 213 Titanium dioxide, 6 Toamasina, 17, 38, 88, 89, 122, 124, 196, 198, 202, 204, 205, 219, 221, 222 Tobacco, 193, 202 Tolagnaro (current name for Fort Dauphin), 6, 83, 198, 201, 208, 221, 223 Tolagnaro tobacco, 201 Toliara, 171–173 Tomb, 65, 72, 118, 167, 214, 217 Tompontany, 171 Tool, 25, 160, 173, 175, 179, 209, 222 Torotorofotsy, 88 Tourism, 12, 15, 66, 97, 177 Tourist, 16, 62–64, 66, 68, 71, 73–75, 81, 82, 90, 95, 116, 175 guide, 9 Tractor, 172 Trade, 6, 40, 68, 83, 140–142, 144, 156, 195, 196, 221 route, 195, 198, 200 Trader, 40, 147, 195, 196, 205 See also Merchant Trano, see House Transport, 202, 208, 213, 217, 220 Tree fig, 192 planting, 193 trunk, 217 Trial and errors, 183 Tsiafajavona (mountain), 193 Tsimanampetsotse, 171, 172

262 

INDEX

Tsimihety, 5, 15–17, 61–75 Tsinjoarivo, 214, 217 Tuber, 14, 32, 170, 171 Tulear, 7 Twine, 202, 213 Twins, 194 U U.N. Conference on Environment and Development, 64 United Kingdom (UK), 71 United Nations (UN), 2, 10, 64 Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCC), 10 United States (US), 40, 196, 205 Universalist, 184 University of Antananarivo, 62n2 V Vakinankaratra, 214 Vakona Lodge, 81, 82, 84, 95 Vangaindrano, 25, 198, 223 Vanilla, 14–16, 32, 34n3, 35, 38–50, 52, 62–64, 66, 68–71, 70n10, 74, 75, 168, 199, 201 cultivation, 32, 34n3, 47, 48 Vanilla planifolia, 68 Varnish, 205 Vatomandry, 203 Vazimba, 167 Vegetation, 5, 69, 109, 170, 197 Vezo (people), 19, 20, 47n8, 129–160, 130n1, 130n2, 133n6, 133n8 Village, 5, 7, 22, 43, 44, 46, 49, 62, 62n3, 70–72, 98, 110, 111, 111n1, 114, 115, 118, 119, 121–123, 132, 141, 142, 145,

145n18, 167, 171, 180, 200, 205, 213–215, 218 Violence, 13, 70n10 Vitamin, 200 Voajanahare, 176 Vohimar, 195, 202, 205, 206, 220, 222 Vohipeno, 198, 208 Volosarika, 214 Vonizongo, 195 Vorokatsy river, 200 W War civil, 209 Franco-Merina (1883-85), 205, 210, 220 Warsaw Framework, 10 Wealth, 54, 74, 117, 118, 120, 123, 141, 214 Weapon, 25, 209, 222 Western Area Peninsula forest carbon project (WAPFoR), 112 Wetland, 17, 88 Wife, 121, 192, 201, 221 Wilderness, 18, 51, 87 Wildlife, 14, 17, 32, 83, 84, 86, 97, 98, 138 Wildlife Conservation Society, 8 Winter, 195 Women, 19, 24, 112, 198, 200, 221 Wood, 147, 193, 196, 208–210, 213, 218–220 See also Timber Woodcutter, 219, 221 Woodland, see Forest Workforce, 24, 118–120, 199, 210, 221

 INDEX 

Workshop, 23, 111, 178, 185, 210 World Agroforestry Center (ICRAF), 33 World Bank (WB), 10, 16, 18, 61, 127 Biocarbon Fund, 18, 110 Worldview, 11–13, 20, 21, 42, 43, 133n7, 134, 135, 153, 155, 155n23, 158, 169, 170, 183, 184 World Wildlife Fund (WWF), 8, 15, 16, 61, 64, 66

263

Y Yam, 199 Yield, 132, 137, 141, 150, 154, 156, 167, 168, 182, 197 Z Zafimaniry, 47n8, 197, 219 Zafindravola, 200 Zambia, 120 Zanahary, 170 Zoonosis, 96