Tsimihety Place Making, Knowledge Hierarchies and Intensifying

Jenni Mölkänen

Social and Cultural Anthropology

Doctoral Program of Social Sciences

Faculty of Social Sciences

Opponent: Prof. Genese Sodikoff, Rutgers University, Newark

Custos: Prof. Timo Kaartinen, University of Helsinki

Pre-examiners:

Prof. Andrew Walsh, University of Western Ontario

Prof. Paige West, Columbia University

Supervisors:

Prof. Timo Kaartinen, University of Helsinki

Dr. Anu Lounela, University of Helsinki

Published by: Unigrafia, Helsinki

ISBN 978-951-51-7166-5 (paperback)

ISBN 978-951-51-7167-2 (PDF)

Doctoral dissertation, to be presented for public discussion with the permission of the Faculty of Social Sciences of the University of Helsinki, in Metsätalo, Sali 1, on the 7th of April, 2021 at 16.15 o’clock.

Summary

This thesis is concerned with the rapid rearrangement of nature and the intensification of land use in rural northeastern Madagascar. I argue that despite intensive efforts of imposed environmental conservation based on notions of biodiversity loss and deforestation, the Tsimihety, a group of swiddeners and rice and vanilla farmers, claim that their environment is a good and viable place to live in.

This thesis weaves together an ethnographic account of how the Tsimihety interact and intertwine with environmental conservation efforts and how they transform and are transformed by them in a broader context of commercial interests in land. By focusing on three main themes, place making, knowledge hierarchies and political-economic schemes and values, the thesis shows how Madagascar has been defined as a hot spot of biodiversity conservation with its unique endemic animal and plant species and how the Tsimihety, who actually live in these environments, make sense and live with dynamics that they define as ‘strange’ or foreign. The thesis challenges simplifying narratives of the Tsimihety as an indigenous people living close to nature without modern technology. “This is a good place” is a Tsimihety statement of a good way of living that cannot be reduced into political-economic and technological schemes and solutions creating, for instance, new livelihoods, such as ecotourism. For the Tsimihety good life evolves through movement between places and to new places, subsistence practices and nurture work as well as living with relatives (living and dead) and strangers. Especially, in funeral rituals, the Tsimihety maintain and negotiate these values and highlight their autonomy. Moreover, the thesis notes that the places made by the Tsimihety, for example fields, villages or tombs, are not merely maintained by the Tsimihety because they are important for Tsimihety identity, but place making is a continuous and prospective process through which the Tsimihety are also willing to incorporate new crops and technologies into their social worlds. More recent political-economic restructuring processes resulting in the creation of markets and elevated living costs as well as working with and around powerful others, such as environmental conservationists, tourists and vanilla buyers, raise moral and existential questions about how to live well with others in places that the Tsimihety claim as theirs.

Acknowledgements

It has taken a moment to weave together this PhD. Along the way I have had an opportunity to meet, discuss and collaborate with several wonderful experts, colleagues, peers and friends who have adviced, questioned and encouraged to put the thesis together. First and foremost, I wish to thank people in northeastern Madagascar without whom this work would have not been possible.

At first, I thank my supervisors Prof. Timo Kaartinen and Dr. Anu Lounela who have meticulously and kindly pushed me to think through my ethnographic material and data and relate them with ongoing theoretical debates. During the moments of struggle, Timo used to remind with the words of Prof. Anna –Leena Siikala, “tee omaa työtäsi” that with a very flexible translation means “carry on with your own work”. I have found those words very useful. Anu consistently highlighted that look at the fieldwork material, and asked what it is saying. I appreciate my supervisors for patience as I have had to think from different perspectives and through different discussions how to put this work together.

Warmest thanks go to Prof. Paige West and Prof. Andrew Walsh whose careful and constructive comments pushed me to engage with new discussions and see the research material from another angle. I am impressed with their expertese and the way they were able to distill interesting and important themes out of the thesis. I am very glad that Prof. Genese Sodikoff has agreed to act as an opponent for the public defence.

I thank my colleagues, Timo Kaartinen, Markus Kröger, Maija Lassila and Tuomas Tammisto, in Human ecology, land conversion and the global resource economy (253680) 2013- 2016 funded by Academy of Finland for intriguing discussions and comments for the preliminary drafts of this work. I thank Kone Foundation that has funded my project in 2010 and again in 2015. I am also greatful for Oscar Öflund Foundation who enabled me in 2016 to travel again to Madagascar to represent my preliminary findings for the people who are the focus group of the PhD.

I give thanks for the teachers, colleagues and peers in the discipline of Social and Cultural Anthropology in the University of Helsinki who have provided me with insightful perspectives and spot-on advice for my work. I appreciate the doctoral seminar and visitor seminar of Social and Cultural Anthropology where it has been possible to ability to learn from peers and

more experiences colleagues about their work and different discussions and topics in Anthropology. In more detail, I want to mention Prof. Jukka Siikala and the late Prof. Karen Armstrong, who supported my work in the very beginning, Prof. Sarah Green for providing me with careful comments for my drafts that I presented in the doctoral seminar, Eeva Berglund and Timo Kallinen for attentive and patient editing of one my articles, Tuulikki Pietilä for networking me with African researchers, Katja Uusihakala who carefully read and commented my several drafts, Tea Virtanen for chatting of everything in and outside anthropology and last but not least, Arto Sarla who has not only helped me with practical issues over the years but shared his extensive knowledge concerning different research coordination tasks. I thank Petra Autio, Agnese Bankovska, Tero Frestadius, Matti Eräsaari, Saana Hansen, Heidi Härkönen, Senni Jyrkiäinen, Annastiina Kallius, Anni Kajanus, Marianna Keisalo, Touko Martikainen, Suvi Rautio, Tuomas Tammisto, Aleksis Toro, Sonja Trifuljesko, Pekka Tuominen, Mari Valdur and Heikki Wilenius for sharing their experiences and support.

I thank for the comments and conversation in the writing group with Henni Alava, Tuomas Järvenpää, Sonal Makhija, Liina-Maija Quist, Tuomas Tammisto and Heikki Wilenius. The political ecology study group with Markus Kröger, Mira Käkönen, Anu Lounela, Liina-Maija Quist and Tuomas Tammisto, was very interesting and helpful for this project.

I have had amazing opportunity to work with Sarah Green and the Crosslocations, funded European Research Council Advanced Grant (No. 694482), and Trade, Travel and Transit funded by the Academy of Finland, research group with researchers Phaedra Douziana-Bakalaki, Viljami Kankanpää-Kukkonen, Samuli Lähteenaho, Carl Rommel, Patricia Scalco, Laya Soto and Joseph Viscomi, a photographer Lena Malm and cartographer Philippe Rekacewics. Thank you for your inspiring work.

During the final years of my PhD I have worked in ALL-YOUTH project (312689) funded by the strategic funding of the Academy of Finland. I thank for the whole ALL-YOUTH group for a great and interesting multidisciplinary collaboration. More specifically I want to thank for lively discussions, all the good humour and practical as well as emotional support for this work Katri Dewald, Reetta Mietola, Marko Stenroos, Anna Suni and Reetta Toivanen and and for diligent collaboration and work Päivi Honkatukia, Jenni Kallio, Miia Lähde and Annika Valtonen. I thank the

project intern Otava Ojanperä for her careful work and help with the references of my PhD.

I thank for Dr. Albion M. Butters for his careful and excellent work with language and smooth and respectful attitude towards one’s text.

I am deeply grateful for Malagasy specialists and experts who have kindly advised and helped me: Maurice Bloch, Margaret Brown, Gwyn Campbell, Jennifer Cole, Lisa Gezon, Sarah Gould, Christian Kull, Eva Keller, Susan Kus, Rheyna Laney, Michael Lambek, Pier Larson, Hilde Nielssen, Jacques Pollini, Genese Sodikoff and Andrew Walsh. In Finland, I thank Madagascar specialists, Mar Cabeza, the late Ilkka Hanski, Jukka Lehtonen and Aili Pyhälä for their advices and recommendations. I thank people in Dodo ry for their interest and comments for this work.

In Madagascar, I am thankful for collaboration with the ESSA-Forêts institute in the University of Antananarivo who accepted me as an exchange student in 2011 and guided me in the beginning of my research. Dr. Bruno Ramanmonjisoa, Mme Sahondra Raherimanantsoa and Dr. Zo Rabemananjara, thank you for your collaboration. I thank Mme Toto for excellent lunch at the institute. I cherish the collaboration with Mieja Razafindrakoto who did excellent work with ecotourism questionnaires and was nice to work with. Moreover, I thank National Archives (Archives Nationales de Madagascar), Malagasy Academy (Academié malgasche) and IRD (L’Institut de recherche pour le développement) who allowed me an access to their archives. In the capital Monsieur Lala and his family took me always to stay with them and Julia Stenlund shared my first research experiences in Madagascar.

In northeastern Madagascar, I am grateful for Erik Patel, who kindly helped me to contact with my host family and general advices related with bureaucracy. I thank Madagascar National Parks and especially Fostin Behova, who is responsible for ecotourism, for their always helpful collaboration and who together with Forest and Water Department have permitted this research. I thank Leslie Beck and Carolyn Goedeken for their friendship, Eric Matthieu for his informations in relation to the Marojejy National Park and Laurence Briand concerning vanilla buying.

I am always thankful for the people who allowed me to stay with them, who took time to answer my questions and exlain me the most obvious things. I am grateful for the hospitality and friendship of Donatien Jambotsara, Marie

Angenique, Ulrisca and Tetrisca. I want to thank people in the villages (Manantenina, Ambohimanarina, Maroambihy and Mandena) where I have done the most parts of data gathering for this study. I am especially thankful for Darisoa, Marianne Sabotsy, Claudette and her family, Papa ny Jocelyn and his family, Mama ny Estofan and her family, Soahita, Venance, Paul Radozy, Theozen, Odon Ramanambohetra, Tohontasina Jacques Harison, Franco Rajaonarison and Mama ny Karen, Frisca Fabienne, Beangy Lucienne and Besidy Ginny for interesting and helpful discussions, your patience with my endless questions and shared moments. Misaotra betsaka.

In addition, I thank guides, cooks and porters of the Marojejy National Park for their collaboration and people involved with ecotourism: Mosesy Madiomanana, Rabary Desiré, Babazy, Dez Kely, Dylan Randriamihaja, Lanto Andrianandrasana, Joxe Jaofeno, Jean Luis, Rakoto Theore, Totohely Felix, Ramanantena Gerlain, Zeze Bruno, Richelin, Yoeckno, Paul Rosy, Ralaiwo Gil Lewis, Bruno Lee and Scoth Lo Pao.

My friends have encouraged, supported and discussed about this work and the research process on the way: Sanna Eriksson, Jussi Eronen, Lauha Halonen, Maarit Haukka, Riitta Huppe and her family, Tuuli Kirjonen, Maiju Korpela, Anu Laaksonen, Annukka Lindström, Karoliina Loikkanen, Petra Niinimaa, Joona Meriläinen and his family, Taina Miettinen, Elina Mäkilä, Laura Niskanen, Katja Nissinen, Heli Parikka, Katja Pulkkinen, Jenni Puustinen and Karoliina Wagnell-Mäkelä. I thank Tuuli Kirjonen for proofreading my research permission application in French. I don’t have enough words to express my appreciation for Liisa Taavitsainen who travelled to Madagascar in the beginning of my fieldwork. I am grateful for her friendship and memories we have made together. Paul Gitau has constantly asked me when the work will be ready and he has always kindly accepted the answer, “not yet”. Without my dance hobby I would not be able to think: Thank you Anita Isomettä, Emma Monto, Outi Kallinen, Minna Määttä and dancing friends.

Finally, I thank my brother Tero Mölkänen, and his family Katja, Sanni and Aino for their support and help and the time spent together. My parents Liisa and Kari Mölkänen have supported my studies in every possible way. Thank you for your care and love and for visiting us in Madagascar during my fieldwork. Finally, Elaine Gitau - the best person to travel and be with. I hope you will find your ‘good place’ in this world. All the mistakes in this work are mine

Contents 1. Introduction ...... 1 1.1 Theoretical concepts used in the study ...... 5 1.2 Fieldwork and methods...... 24 1.3 Ethical considerations...... 32 1.4 Overview of the Chapters ...... 33 2. In good places: Hills, valleys and water, ancestral customs and state projects ...... 35 2.1 In good places...... 37 2.2 In ancestral places...... 45 2.3 Spaces of “unruly” people and desires for development ...... 56 2.4 …And movement continues...... 65 2.5 Conclusions...... 66 3. In ancestral lands: Temporalities, work and Boky Mena...... 68 3.1 Rice cultivation: Temporalities and work...... 72 3.2 Work and social relations...... 82 3.3 Hard and enduring relations ...... 90 3.4 Creating markets, attracting investors and organizing governance.. 96 3.5 Boky Mena—A Tsimihety document of land relations...... 99 3.6 Conclusions...... 106 4. Situated histories of vanilla: From sacrifice to universal nature and nurture in small holder plots...... 108 4.1 Gifts to Gods in Mesoamerica...... 111 4.2 Making universalized nature and divisions of people ...... 113 4.3. Slavery at Réunionese plantations...... 117 4.4 In Madagascar: vanilla markets and state relations...... 119 4.5 Nurtured vanilla...... 126 4.6 Conclusions...... 129 5. Making Madagascar’s nature: “They come here to see something that they have never seen before”...... 132 5.1 Between inventories and calculations...... 135 5.2 Universal nature, unique lemurs and wild people ...... 140

5.3 Proliferation of lemurs and intensifying environmental conservation efforts...... 146 5.4 Experiencing nature and ironies of a national park ...... 152 5.5 Conclusion ...... 154 6. “My mother is a grandchild of a crocodile”: making kins and strangers and maintaining human boundaries ...... 156 6.1 Tsimihety kin relations: Containing and substances ...... 161 6.2 Commensality, kin and strangers ...... 166 6.3 “Some species are more suitable than others” ...... 175 6.4 On human boundaries: Joking, avoidance and taboos...... 183 6.5 Conclusions...... 189 7. “Ecotourism does not make us rich”: Hierarchies of labor, inequalities, differences and values...... 191 7.1 Labor hierarchies: Becoming aware of differences...... 193 7.2 Inequalities of ecotourism...... 199 7.3 Political, ethical and existential questions ...... 203 7.4 Conclusions...... 206 8. Ritual, gifts and debts and social differentiation ...... 208 8.1 Rituals and social order...... 210 8.2 Life is becoming more expensive...... 218 8.3 Increasing gifts and debts: solidarity and inequality ...... 219 8.4 A company building relations ...... 224 8.5 Moral concerns and contested values ...... 226 8.6 Conclusions...... 228 9. Conclusions ...... 230 Appendix 1: The interview guide for the 40 structured interviews...... 240 Appendix 2: Ecotourism questionnaires ...... 242 Appendix 3: Manantenina village drawn by Willy...... 243 Appendix 4: Monthly visitors in the park 1999-2007 and 2006-2010..... 244 References ...... 245 Index...... 285

Illustrations

Pictures

Picture 1. The village at the confluence of the two rivers. A view from the south

Picture 2. Manantenina village, rice fields and rivers

Maps

Map 1. Manantenina village with rivers, roads, houses and flat land

Map 2. A map of the landscapes of the Sambava-Andapa and Lokoho valleys. Madagascar Vegetation Mapping Project by Kew Gardens, Missouri Botanical Gardens and Conservation International.

Tables

Table 1: The most important plants cultivated and the various work phases

Table 2: Hard and soft work tasks

Table 3: Different funeral contributions in 2013

Table 4: Dried vanilla prices

Table 5: Boky Mena contributions in 2013–2018

Table 6: Example of a vanilla debt

Glossary of the main Tsimihety words used in the text

banja place fasana tomb havana relatives horaka swidden field mitady to look for razana ancestors tanana village tany land tany ny bary irrigated ricefield tavy swidden cultivation tanindrazana ancestral land vazaha a stranger, foreigner, usually regerring to a white-skinned person zebo cow

Notes on Orthographic Conventions

Here are few examples on Tsimihety ortography and how these words would be pronounced in English.

The Tsimihety pronounce written /o/ as [u]. Æ Zebo is pronounced zebu.

Written /tr/ is pronounced something like [tch]. Æ Andranomifotitra is pronounced Andránumifutitchra.

Written /j/ is pronounced as [dj] Æ Marojejy is pronounced Marudjedji

Written /y/ at the end of the word is pronounced like English e [i]. Æ Marojejy is pronounced Marudjedji.

List of Abbreviations

ANGAP The Association Nationale de Gestion des Aires Protégées

CBNRM Community-based natural resource management

DGEF the General Directorate of Water and Forests

GELOSE Géstion Localisée Sécurisée

IUCN International Union for Conservation of Nature

ICDP Intergrated Conservation and Development Programs

KWF Kreditanstalt für Wiederaufbau

MNP Madagascar National Parks

NEAP National Environmental Action Plan

WWF World Wildlife Fund

1. Introduction

This research is concerned with the rapid rearrangement of nature and the intensification of land use in rural northeastern Madagascar. Its focus is on the Marojejy National Park, a conservation area of 55,000 hectares established in 1998 at the initiative of the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) and the Malagasy state. The park aims at protecting a large number of rare and endemic animal and plant species found only in Madagascar. The human inhabitants, mainly of Tsimihety ethnicity, of the area near the park cultivate rice for their own subsistence and vanilla for the international consumer market. The conflicting global and national priorities that define these people’s environment lead me to ask how the Tsimihety respond to them, and what kinds of perceptions and actions constitute the Tsimihety claim to their landscape as a good, viable place to live.

The national park and intensified environmental conservation efforts constrain the place-making practices of the people I studied. People living in the vicinity of the national park have made and extended their settlement by clearing the forest for fields, building houses and burying their dead in a territory that overlaps with the park area. The primary focus of my thesis is how conservation efforts and the Tsimihety place-making practices are articulated and interact with each other in the broader context of intensifying commercial interests toward the land in rural northeastern Madagascar. Environmental conservation has transformed Tsimihety agricultural practices and prevented the people from hunting forest animals, even as it provides some of them with income from new livelihoods, such as ecotourism. I argue, however, that this has not turned the Tsimihety into conservation subjects; instead, they continue to use their repertoire of ancestral and agricultural rituals and funeral customs to claim the conserved environment as their place in the world.

Environmental conservation has a high priority in the Malagasy government’s policies. At the 2003 IUCN1 World Bank Congress in Durban, Madagascar’s President Ravalomana announced the Durban Vision, an initiative to more than triple the area under protection. In 2013, following the guidelines of the United Nations and the IUCN stated in the 2010

1 International Union for Conservation of Nature.

Convention on Biological Diversity, Madagascar met the 10% requirement of areas under protection (Corson 2011: 703–4). Simultaneously with the dramatic success of such environmental conservation efforts, Madagascar’s land has also been the focus of large-scale agricultural projects. The experience of booming food prices in 2007–2008 prompted an interest in making land available for food production around the tropical world. In the World Bank’s estimations, countries like Madagascar could expand their agricultural land by improving technology, infrastructure and institutions and by addressing the political obstacles to large-scale farming developments (Deininger et al. 2011: 10–43, 90–1). Following the policies of the World Bank and other transnational development and funding organizations, the Malagasy government planned to lease 1.3 million hectares of land to the South Korean company Daewoo for 99 years. The company wanted to cultivate palm oil and maize for sale and South Korean domestic consumption, but due to a coup d’état and political opposition to the project in Madagascar in 2009, the project was canceled (Vinciguerra 2013). Finally, despite the development schemes of the transnational organizations, natural scientists have estimated that Madagascar’s prospects for restoring land use, freshwater resources and livable biospheres face extreme challenges (Gerten et al. 2020).

This dissertation is based on eleven months of fieldwork in 2011, 2012 and 2013 and for two weeks in 2016 among the Tsimihety, a group of farmers who live in the vicinity of the Marojejy National Park. The Tsimihety inhabit mainly the northern inland areas of Madagascar and, in smaller numbers, the northern parts of Madagascar near Antsinaranana, the southern parts in Fianarantsoa, and Alaotra-Mangoro in the east of the Mahajanga province in western Madagascar (Ethnologue 2020). Depending on calculations, the number of the Tsimihety vary between 700,000–1.2 million.2 The Tsimihety speak a dialect that differs from the national language of Malagasy in vocabulary, phonetics and writing. For example, when the Merina say “Manahoana” when greeting each other, the Tsimihety prefer “Salama/e” or “A koré!” The national language, Malagasy, is based on the Merina dialect

2 The number of people depends on estimations based on places where people live, how they trace their ancestries, and the dialect they speak (Wilson 1967; Ethnologie 2020).

2 and written in the Roman alphabet. It is the official language of Madagascar, together with French.3

The Tsimihety landscape consists of hills, narrow valleys, streams and rivers. Scattered areas of forest, with a variety of trees, such as palm trees (Arecaceae), Albizia trees, palissandre (Dalbergia), bamboos (valiha diffusa), and fruit trees (for example, lychee, orange, and mango), lie on hillsides and near hilltops. Most of the land is under smallholder agricultural use and people cultivate swidden rice fields on hillsides and irrigated rice in the valleys. Depending on their taboos people also fish with nets and fishing lines and hunt for example fossa, tenrec, rodents, snakes, small birds and critically endangered lemurs causing alerted-ness among environmental conservationists (see Chapters 5 and 6). They gather honey, tree bark (bilahy) and various leaves, such as anamarongo (Moringa oleifera). The Tsimihety cultivate vanilla, coffee and cloves to be sold for international markets and, on a smaller scale, vegetables, beans and peanuts for their own use or to be sold in local markets. People keep a few cows, pigs, chicken and geese whose meat they consume occasionally, especially during the times of harvests, rituals or other celebrations highlighting importance of certain domesticated species in Tsimihety lives (Chapter 6). In addition, landscapes are not only inhabited by people and animals but also by spirits. For example, Marojejy refers to the place with many spirits (maro = ‘many’; jejy = ‘spirit’; it can mean also rock or rain) that expect a certain kind of behavior underlining ethics of these relations (see Chapter 7).

The Tsimihety inhabit the inland areas of northeastern Madagascar where they fled at the turn of the 20th century in order to evade the state. According to a historical narrative that I heard from a Tsimihety ecotourism guide during my preliminary field trip in 2011, the Tsimihety derive from the Betsimisaraka people living on the eastern coast of Madagascar. The ancestors of the Tsimihety refused to collect cauchu (rubber), and in a sign of resistance they did not cut their hair. In the Sakalava kingdom on the western coast of Madagascar, cutting one’s hair marked continued political

3 Malagasy and its dialects comprise an Austronesian language related to Ma’anyan, a language spoken in Southwestern Kalimantan, Indonesia (Dahl 1973). Malagasy vocabulary contains a number of Bantu words, as well as some phonetic and grammatical modifiers of Bantu origin (Adelaar 2012).

3 loyalty after a king’s death (Wilson 1992: 16–17; Deschamps 1960: 101–2). The story thus explains why the Sakalava have described the Tsimihety as unruly people4.

However, despite their antagonistic and suspicious relations with the Malagasy and French states and foreign projects, the Tsimihety have been remarkably open to new technologies and new forms of social organization (Laney 1999: 12, cit. Neuvy 1989; Portais 1972). Historical records have shown that by 1925, small producers in Antalaha, Sambava and Andapa provided 90 % of all vanilla produced in the region (Laney 1999: 26; Portais 1972). In these processes, the Tsimihety have become smallholders, who have adopted the crop into their subsistence cultivation systems and their fields (Molet 1959), producing vanilla to meet the conditions and quality requirements of the world market. As vanilla requires three years to mature and intensive care, the Tsimihety focusing on vanilla production have become more stabilized in their places.

Environmental conservation efforts, linked to the founding of the Marojejy National Park, have closed off large land and forest areas from Tsimihety livelihoods and allotted them for public use. Those who pay an entrance fee or work in ecotourism are allowed to access the park area. The park hinders the customary movements of the Tsimihety and place-making practices (see also Keller 2015: 130–41, 153–72; 2008). Like vanilla production, which the environmental conservation projects support, environmental conservation efforts seek to stabilize the Tsimihety in certain places. Global environmental conservation efforts and vanilla markets that are also in the interest of the Malagasy state have intensified in Tsimihety places.

Anthropological research on Madagascar has highlighted various cultural practices, such as clearing fields, building houses and burying of the dead, as the basis of the relations to places and the landscape among people who practice swidden cultivation (Keller 2008; Molet 1959; Thomas 1996; Wilson 1992). The participants of my study referred to sites of ancestral presence as “good places” (tsara banja) (Chapter 2). In this work I have interpreted ‘good places’ as ancestral sites, such as villages, fields or tombs, where socially valuable reproductive work (asa) is done. In the Tsimihety view, successful farming and social reproduction depend on ancestral

4 Personal communication with Michael Lambek in 2016 and 2017.

4 blessings. As more children are born in a place where the family or kin group has migrated, that place becomes increasingly imaginable as tanindrazana, the “land of the ancestors” (Bloch 1971: 105–14; Keller 2008; Chapter 3). Ancestral protection is associated with specific sacred places, like elsewhere in the Austronesian world (Fox 2006; Chou 2009); ritual access to them interferes with new land management schemes, such as the national park.

This research is concerned with the intersection of Tsimihety cultural practices, international environmental conservation, vanilla cultivation, and the position of the Tsimihety on the margins of the state. Through ethnography of these issues, I seek to understand how globally circulating social forms and forms of knowledge have affected Tsimihety life, and the ways in which they have been incorporated in the reproductive and place- making practices of the Tsimihety themselves. The picture that emerges from my fieldwork with the Tsimihety is one of a highly mobile people who actively transform their environment and stake various claims to it. This means that they are more than victims of territorialization driven by conservation, state-building and commercial agriculture; each of the external forces translates into relationships that the Tsimihety identify as part of their social order.

1.1 Theoretical concepts used in the study

Tsimihety place-making and ancestors

From the perspective of political ecology, the environment of the Tsimihety is not limited to the fields they cultivate and the villages in which they live (Biersack 2006: 16; Gezon 2006: 19–22). The concept of political ecology was introduced by Eric Wolf (1972), who pointed out that power relations mediate human-environment relations—something overlooked in former Marxist debates in which environmental relations were considered as an aspect of production, as well as in the concern of cultural and systems ecology with the problem of adaptation (Biersack 2006: 3). Today’s political ecology goes beyond the ethnocentric nature-culture dualism by focusing on the articulation of social and environmental relations at diverse scales. Emphasizing practice theory, agency and events, political ecologists today focus on differences and social inequalities (Biersack 2006: 4–5).

These processes of local-global articulation and interaction occur and happen in certain places, making them located and relational (see, for example, Massey 1992: 12; Cons and Eilenberg 2019). I highlight that places are made through heterogeneous processes and dynamics that challenge a systematic view of cultural life aiming for ecological balance, as Rappaport’s (1968) analysis of Tsembaga ritual suggested. For example, Tsimihety places are not marginal in relation to a global capitalist or national system but constituted by different processes of subsistence cultivation and the making of ancestral lands, ethnical relations produced by imperial order, economic relations of vanilla cultivation, and relations with European and North American tourists mediated by nature. In Chapter 2, I point out the various dynamics—such as ecological, historical, state relations and migrations—that intertwine in the places where the Tsimihety live. In political ecology, space is a byproduct of activity of its own creation (Biersack 2006: 17–18). In Madagascar, the Tsimihety make and maintain space and ancestral order through burial practices (Chapter 2 and 3).

Anthropological literature on places has pointed out that they are socially constructed by the people who live in them and know them; they are “politicized, culturally relative, historically specific, local and multiple constructions” (Rodman 2003: 205). Austronesian-speaking peoples perceive their environments and social relations as spatially oriented through spatial relations and formations, which inform the engagement between people and places (Fox 2006: 89). Therefore, place is generally something that is made through performative but also practical means, as people discuss movements and places where other people live, maintaining the knowledge of meaningful genealogies and topologies (Hirsh and O’Hanlon 1995; Feld and Basso 1996; Fox 2006).

Topogeny, narrating through places, refers to the poetic process of spreading one’s roots and attaching them again (Fox 2006: 8–13; Keller 2008). In my PhD thesis, I explore how Tsimihety places are made through narratives on kin and land relations (Chapters 2 and 3). Genealogies of place are also topogenies of people (Pannell 2006: 165). Indeed, land in Madagascar, as in many other places of Africa, connects people to places that are inalienable from their social identity (see, for example, Brown 2004; Evers 2002: 2; Sikor and Lund 2009; Fay and James 2008). Different people in Madagascar tend to highlight differences between tompontany (masters of the land), zafintany (children of the land) and vahiny/vazaha (strangers) (Bloch 1971: 105–37; Nielssen 2012: 114–15). In this thesis, I will discuss how these

6 categorizations and relations are relevant for the Tsimihety when they negotiate and establish their belonging and access to the land (Chapters 3 and 8). I will show how the Tsimihety relate to plants, animals and land— for example, by nurturing and exchanging—in a way that differs from the nature-culture dualism held in environmental conservation (Chapters 6 and 7) and seeing vanilla only as a commodity that can be cultivated by means of agro-technological solutions (Chapter 4).

For the mobile Tsimihety, a good place is a sign of stability. By clearing forests for fields, building houses, having children and establishing tombs, the Tsimihety make places that are joined together in an extensive territory of ancestral lands or land of the ancestors (tanindrazana). Among the Tsimihety, like with different groups in Madagascar, people make their ancestral lands through their work (Deschamps 1959; Bloch 1995; Cole 2001: 155; Feeley-Harnik 1991; Keller 2008; Thomas 1996). By these practices of work and nurturing, people do two things. First, they “mark” their land by means of work and nurturing it to be theirs (Bloch 1995). Second, people “root” themselves to the land (Keller 2015: 15; 2008) through ancestral practices of working in the rice fields (Chapter 3), taking care of relatives (Chapter 6), and respecting the spirits in the landscape (Chapter 7) and their ancestors (Chapter 8), creating an inalienable relationship with the land. I will show that ancestors and ancestral places are central in practices of differentiation and that the Tsimihety document them in Boky Mena (Chapters 3 and 8.)

The perspective of dwelling captures the landscape as an enduring record of—and testimony to—the lives and works of the past generations who have dwelled within it and who have left there something of themselves. The landscape enfolds the stories and practices of those who have lived there and built them before. (Ingold 1993: 152.) Moreover, the act of remembering is always related to the landscape of memory, a metaphorical terrain defining how difficult or easy it is to remember socially defined events (Cole 2001: 289).

Recent changes in Tsimihety landscapes, due to the formation of the Marojejy National Park, have challenged the Tsimihety movement to new places and between already existing places. Comparative observations from the Masoala National Park have highlighted that the Betsimisaraka felt defeated and living like in a chicken coop because of the park boundaries. Moreover, as people were not able to anchor and root to new places, it has

7 become difficult for slave descendants overcome their status. (Keller 2008: 657, 660-1; Chapter 3.)

Indeed, places are essential for people’s identity, since places—along with people’s work and actions—determine what people do that further determines what one is. To walk a certain way on sand and to fish defines who is a Vezo, a group of people living on the southwest coast of Madagascar. Those who, on the other hand, practice swidden cultivation differ from the Betsileo, who practice irrigated rice cultivation. To be a Vezo is not determined by one’s ancestry; one becomes a Vezo (Astuti 1995: 9; Bloch 1995: 64). The Tsimihety belong to patrilineal ancestries, and people maintain and reproduce their relations by working in rice fields (Chapter 3), following taboos (Chapter 6) and practicing certain rituals (Chapter 8). Recently, the Tsimihety have highlighted their ways of walking, by which they signal their relations with the places where and in between they move in contrast to foreign ecotourists who do not know how to move around in Tsimihety landscapes (Chapter 7).

However, the Tsimihety place making is a continuous and prospective process through which the Tsimihety are also willing to incorporate new crops (Chapters 2 and 4), technologies (Chapter 3) and documentations, such as Boky Mena (Chapter 3), knowledge (Chapter 4 and 5), livelihoods (Chapter 7) as well as people and animals (Chapters 6 and 7) into their social worlds.

Important places, which inform of the hierarchy of places, are condensed with the ancestors and their nature and vital force, hasina (Cole 2001: 136). Ancestral tombs are located in places where descendants who have dispersed around different landscapes are supposed to gather the bones of their deceased relatives. Ancestral tombs are centers of the hasina, or life force, that people maintain and increase by their ancestral work, such as rice cultivation, building houses, taking care of their kin and children, and ancestral rituals (Chapter 3). A good place allows all this work (Chapter 2). According to Malagasy cosmologies, if descendants do not recreate hasina, the life force will end (Cole 2001: 135). In return, Malagasy ancestors give blessings to their descendants.

In general, ancestors created social order by imposing taboos on their descendants (Nielssen 2012: 28–30; Walsh 2002; Cole 2001: 110–13, 124; Graeber 2007: 151–2). The Tsimihety form a moral and political community based on ancestral authority and taboos (see also Graeber 1995: 275; Cole

8 and Middleton 2001: 6). This community requires constant service (Feeley- Harnik 1991). According to Graeber (2007: 62), a political community of equals can be formed under a transcendental image of ancestors. However, there are variations between different groups of people in different places and at different times as to how they perceive and interact with ancestors. In this work, I argue that despite constant awareness of the power of ancestors (Chapters 2, 3 and 8), the Tsimihety also maintain their human sociality through taboos and joking (Chapter 6). Funeral rituals make the division between life and death dramatic, as life enables people to make different relations while death places them into sameness (Bloch 1992; Chapter 8).

Moreover, different temporal relations intensify in certain places and inform quality of the lived time (James and Mills 2005). For example, ancestral tombs manifest the placeness of the past (Feeley-Harnik 1991: 159–62; Bloch 1971; 1995; Graeber 1995: 262). The past can be recalled through much more mundane places—areas of cleared forest, harvested rice fields, places that grow certain grasses, as I mention in Chapter 3—and in certain contexts, notable events become remembered through the place where they occurred, so that the name of a place becomes synonymous with the event that occurred there (Thomas 1996: 30). However, the Tsimihety live with multiple temporalities. Rice cultivation seasons have been organized according to the productivity of the harvests emphasized by the colonial French government and today by transnational development organizations, such as the Food and Agricultural Organization of the United Nations (FAO), but also according to ecological dynamics and what kind of work hill rice and irrigated rice fields, as well as vanilla, require. However, in time, despite fields do not produce good harvests anymore these places become gatherings of people’s (living and dead) movements and work as Tsimihety have moved forward to new places enabling good life (Chapter 2 and 3). Constant movement of the Tsimihety life differs with temporalities of the national park expecting preservation of pristine forests and animal and plant species that have evolved through a time span of billions of years (Chapter 5) or fairly standard seasonality of ecotourism between July and December (Chapter 7). The different temporal relations and orientations inform of the presence of multiple values.

Ancestral places tend to have centripetal tendencies. At the end of their lives people are pulled back to their ancestral lands, as they are buried in their patrilineal tombs (see Middleton and Cole 2001; Chapters 3 and 8). Furthermore, there are different historically formed tendencies in how

9 people should relate to ancestral land. While the Merina have been preoccupied with excluding from their land people who are not kin, the Tsimihety and other swidden cultivators, as well as migrants such as the Vezo, have been busy extending their social and land relations bilaterally (see Chapters 3, 6 and 8). The Zafimaniry in Southeast Madagascar seek to attach people to places, for example, by building houses of hardwood, usually done by a married couple, and through standing stones commemorating siblingship and ancestors (Bloch 1995: 71–4); these practices are relevant among the Tsimihety, too (Chapters 3, 6 and 8).

Spatial formations, such as villages, are poetically dense spaces that gather a multiplicity of social principles, structures of feeling and models of extra- local geopolitical elements of articulation from wider cultural and historical ﬁelds (Stasch 2013: 556, 560). For the Tsimihety, villages—and, more recently, the national park—refer to several overlapping historical transformations and heterogeneous sociocultural forces. These include the movements of ancestors and contemporary kin, ongoing landscape- transforming work, external institutions and projects (organized by state authorities and churches, as well as development and conservation organizations) and, more recently, the national park (Chapters 2, 5 and 7).

Recent environmental anthropology has highlighted places and landscapes as coevolving with different beings (e.g. Odgen 2011). In this approach, drawing from using Deleuze and Guattari’s horizontal approach of spatial philosophy defined by a rhizome concept and posthumanist notions of human as species among others, human places evolve with an intimate understanding of “what it means to be human that again is constituted through changing relations with other species and objects” (Odgen 2011: 2, 28; Deleuze and Guattari 1988; Latour 2004; Haraway 2008). In this perspective, places are contingent processes specific to “particular temporalities, power relations, and geographies” (both imaginary and material). This perspective seeks to (re)introduce and reinscribe the human back into the multispecies relations and trace the asymmetrical political relations between species and possibly reveal curious and unexpected connections that link and transform geography, people, animals, plants, and inorganic matter (Odgen 2011: 28-29). It is a world-making project that is not only reserved for human beings: to make world is to collaborate across difference (Tsing 2015: 22-23, 28).

In some scenarios of place-making, what ancestors called ‘a good place’ has transformed into a place with tenina (Imperata cylindrica), the speargrass that colonizes old swiddens and other soils cleared by fire. For the Tsimihety, such grass is more than just a sign of disturbed land. Tenina calls for migration to other places capable of sustaining good life (Chapter 2; see also Keller 2008). To the Tsimihety, this weed signifies the potential of place to sustain various human projects: it is economically and aesthetically trivial, and yet a party in people’s collaborations with the environment and something that helps people align their activities and relationships with it.5 The Marojejy National Park interferes with such alignments and forces the Tsimihety to pay attention to new kinds of collaborations, such as those with tourists (Chapter 7) and intensifying presence of markets (Chapter 3, 4 and 8).

Recent discussions of economic geographers have defended ecological economy that recognizes multi-species community that includes all of those with whom livelihoods are interdependent and interrelated (Gibson-Graham and Miller 2015: 10). While “collaboration across difference” does not produce the same kind of world and singular solidarity, collaboration opens up possibilities for new kinds of arrangements and organisations in different places with different beings (Tsing 2015: 22-23, 65; Bear et al. 2015). However, the way a society enacts people’s worth is a clear expression of its economic and political organization. As Narotzky and Besnier (2014: S6- 7) state, we need attention to the significant differences— boundaries, institutions, categories of people—those in power strive to reproduce in order to maintain their worth and their wealth; being sensitive to a broad range of human activity beyond the purely material means being attentive to different coexisting regimes of value. In this thesis, I have discussed how Euro-American scientific, political and economic activities and practices have influenced on making Madagascar as a focus of environmental conservation efforts (Chapter 5); I have also revealed how powerful transnational organisations place Madagascar into schemes classified according to potential resources (Chapter 3) and how the Tsimihety have organized their lives, for example Boky Mena in Chapter 3 and funeral rituals in Chapter 8.

However, people also seek for social incorporation (Li 2013a). Regularly functioning human institutions mediate between different temporalities,

5 I thank Timo Kaartinen for pointing out this topic.

11 techniques or rhytms (Bear 2014a: 6). In Bear’s example, capitalist time is a simultaneously ethical, affective, and technical problem. Its contradictions are solved through ethical and affective acts of labour (a sense of workmanship in Bear’s case), diverse interventions that seek to make work productive and that place human beings in relations with different materials and techonologies requiring affective and caring attention. This way we do not risk reducing the ethics and affects of work to serving the needs of capital or resisting it. (Bear 2014b: 71-2, 74.) Among the Tsimihety, working with different crops, such as rice (Chapter 3) and vanilla (Chapter 4), living with and taking care of their relatives and animals (Chapters 3 and 6), working with tourists (Chapter 7) and maintaining relations with state, vanilla buyers, ancestors and land (Chapters 3 and 8) highlight contradictory processes, dynamics and value that the Tsimihety live with.

Moreover, environmental conservation practices and the Marojejy National Park, Malagasy state’s settlement policies tend to restrict the Tsimihety movement that is essential for the social reproduction of Tsimihety ‘good places’ that are reproduced and negotiated in Tsimihety funerals (Chapter 8) and by Boky Mena (Chapter 3) practices. This does not mean that political economic processes should be undermined since they are, for instance, at very focus of the Tsimihety in vanilla cultivation; however, the notion of nurturing and caring highlights the work and expectations that result from that kind of intimacy (Chapter 6 and 7).

However, the attention living with diversity has not taken away human exceptionalism. The Tsimihety descriptions of their relations with different species are human-centric or more precisely Tsimihety-centric (Chapter 6; see also Howell 2014). Moreover and importantly, as Govindrajan (2018: 4) has remarked, to be related to another is to be imbricated in their making even when one is indifferent to, disgusted by, or hostile to them. Mutuality and connection do not imply an erasure of difference or hierarchy. Among the Tsimihety the division between relatives and strangers is clear; however, one can always cross this divide by becoming kin through acts of commensality or create it by becoming a stranger, due to living in faraway places and not maintaining contact with places where kin live (Chapter 6).

Finally, have dubbed the current epoch the “sixth mass extinction” because the current rate of species death is more than a hundred times greater than “nature’s chronic winnowing” (Angier 2009: 3). At the same time, indigenous languages, vehicles of entire cosmologies, are succumbing at a

12 rate of two per month as their last speakers perish. Extinction calls for a contemplation of the the death of forms and the reverberations of categorical loss in social life (Sodikoff 2012: 5). For the Tsimihety, signs of death in their places and landscapes were dry and dusty villages and red fields with no rain or running water that were not necessarily interpreted as signs of an extinction or climate change but as an information to move on to new places that sustain and support life (Chapter 2).

Today, when the Tsimihety negotiate their status in their localities, belonging to ancestral lands is crucial. Those who are able to present long- term historical connections with their ancestral lands are customarily regarded as “the owners of the place,” who have exercised ritual authority and who have made decisions, for example, about who can live in a certain place and who can clear fields and where. Slaves, hierarchically the lowest people, are those who have lost their ancestors (Brown 2004; Graeber 2007: 226–27). In Chapter 2, I point out that the Tsimihety emphasize the importance of first-comers and their ability to make good and prosperous places, allowing rice cultivation, peaceful living and the expansion of ancestral relations and lands. I argue that the question “Tamana?” (“Are you settled?”) is an inquiry whether one’s interlocutor is used to the ways in which he or she is expected to live in a particular place (Chapters 2 and 3). These practices and rationalities help to explain why the Daewoo project became the focus of Malagasy state politics and why the project was eventually canceled (see Vinciguerra 2013).

As an analytical tool, the concept of place allows to set the diverse processes of various scales, such as environmental conservation efforts or vanilla markets, in concrete places (with land, water, plants, animals and people, for example). The perspective of political ecology about places highlights their relationality with political, economic and power dynamics, while anthropological discussion emphasizes the particular sensible ways people make and relate with them. Joining these two perspectives, it is possible to make sense of the Tsimihety way of living in rural northeastern Madagascar, where global environmental conservation efforts and vanilla markets are found.

Hierarchies of knowledge production

Scientific knowledge production practices have played a crucial role in the establishment of Madagascar as a biodiversity hot spot that is rich in natural resources (Chapter 5), such as land or vanilla (Chapters 3 and 4). In

13 environmental conservation efforts, modern Euro-American scientific practices have organized different places on a global scale and sorted them according to their biodiversity and endemic species. Indeed, classifying species and rearranging these classifications have allowed conservation efforts in the tropics and have been used for practices modifying conservation policies. (Lowe 2006: 24, 50–1.) The anthropological analysis of the perception, knowledge and classification of the environment as something that arises from specific ways of using and inhabiting it (Descola 1996; Ellen 1978; Ingold 2000) is central for my own inquiries into how the Tsimihety make places and relate to them (Chapters 2, 3 and 8), and what kinds of knowledge they have about their environment (Chapters 3, 6 and 7).

Euro-American naturalism tends to make an ontological difference between human and natural domains of reality (Latour 1998). Nature is assumed to work on its own, according to physical laws and without human interference (Descola 2013: 199; Århem 2015: 280; Sahlins 2014: 282). This kind of nature can be harnessed for value accumulation and subjected to commensurate ideas of value. One example of this is how the nature-human division is cherished in visitors’ imaginations when they come to see Madagascar’s unique nature (Chapters 5 and 7). This is different from the Tsimihety imagination, in which different animals, plants and spirits are not rigidly outside the human domain but participate in various relationships that the Tsimihety perceive as social (Chapter 6).

From the point of view of scientific knowledge that justifies the conservation of nature, the Tsimihety relations to plants, animals and spirits fall in the category of “local knowledge,” which is inferior and, at best, a subset of universalizing scientific knowledge (Chapter 5). This is methodological reductionism (Ellen and Harris 2003: 11). Hegemonic Euro-American science tends to classify not only knowledge but also people as “local” (Lowe 2006: 75). This view has been reinforced by perceptions that traditional peoples often adopt wasteful, even delinquent patterns of resource extraction, as classically exemplified in the literature on shifting cultivation, requiring laws and governing (e.g. Dove 1983; in relation to Madagascar, see Jarosz 1993: 372–3; Keller 2015: 120–7; Kull 2004: 263– 4; Pollini 2007; Sodikoff 2012: 62–9).

Representing people’s patterns of land and resource use is also a political matter. Anthropologists have pointed out that in development schemes either

14 people have been defined as individual maximizers and goal-oriented “actors” in pursuing their ends and approaching questions of identity in consumer terms, as a matter of optimal selection or as indigenous and close to nature. Another view has been a false consciousness of the indigenous people, perhaps for articulating a tribal position rather than one defined in class terms. (Li 2000: 149–50.)

However, some scholars question ‘indigenous knowledge’ as an epistemic system that impedes certain people’s ability to benefit from technology and science, approaching them as indigenous and close to nature (Holt 2005; Dove 2006: 198). Actually, indigenous knowledge informs about ideological global hierarchies based on the universal order of species created by modern natural science, which disregards humans constituted in interspecies relationships (see, e.g., Dove 2006: 193–4; Li 2000; Lowe 2006).

Celia Lowe (2006: 13–14, 17) encourages investigation of actions and practices of science in order to understand how knowledge is produced. She shows, for example, that ICDPs (Integrated Conservation and Development Programs) were developed because of the resistance of people in places where environmental conservation efforts took place, not because of scientific practices. Indeed, Lowe’s (ibid: 73) example shows that rationality of what is valid and real knowledge is socially, historically and politically formed. In these processes, it is crucial to pay attention what will become valued as knowledge.

In this PhD thesis, I show that the uniqueness of Madagascar and Marojejy National Park has been created through scientific debates and practices, such as calculations and listings, and by making differences between the places of data-gathering and scientific analysis (Chapter 5). I have not followed the work of foreign and Malagasy scientists intensively in the national park, like Lowe has in her ethnography on Indonesia. My contribution is to look at historical documentations and narratives, natural scientists’ reports, and Tsimihety experiences and observations about scientific practices. In the joint efforts of environmental conservation and ecotourism, it is possible to become aware of the Tsimihety observations and interpretations of what is going and possible similarities and differences (Chapters 5 and 7).

Moreover, I challenge the modern scientific knowledge that regards vanilla as a plant originating from Mexico and I show that vanilla’s value has been

15 made in different historical relations in different situations (Chapter 4; Peluso 2012). By paying attention to situated histories, I remind of different situations—among the Aztecs, in early modern Europe, in Reunion and in Madagascar—where vanilla has been treated as a gift, a luxury, an object of scientific knowledge, a commodity produced by slaves, and a plant requiring nurturing. Situated histories reveal that knowledge and value are not preexisting universal categories but made and constructed in dynamics of particular time- and space-gathering processes of various scales. Situated histories call for deconstruction, an understanding of the process of construction (Haraway 1988: 578), and understanding not only political economic structures but sociality that is not necessarily determined by the world market, for example (Bear et al. 2015). Situated histories challenge hegemonic narratives of capitalism or science and make it possible to attend to more nuanced social processes.

Furthermore, the Tsimihety relations with animals, plants, land and rocks challenge the Euro-American ways of relating with nature. The Tsimihety treat the crocodile as their kinsman. The Tsimihety interest in bodily focused life processes leads them to categorize animals on the basis of their eating habits. Their classifications recognize animals that eat the same food as humans and thus cannot be eaten (e.g., crocodiles), those that eat leaves and fruits and can be hunted for food (e.g., lemurs), and those that eat grass and ruminate and can therefore be substituted for human flesh in rituals (e.g., cows). In addition, spirits are held to inhabit the same environments as the Tsimihety, and they require certain kinds of moral behavior. (see Chapters 4, 6 and 7.) These relations inform that the Tsimihety world is not based on the idea of nature-culture dualism, but that humanity is constantly made and maintained by such practices as exchanging food.

Moreover, for the Tsimihety, intimate environmental knowledge and relations with different animals, plants and land inform about and are a testimony to the Tsimihety capacity for place-making. When the Tsimihety speak about their relationships with spirits and crocodiles, they are affirming the moral orientation that living in these particular places requires (Chapters 3 and 6). Recent antropology has translated moral and sacred relations with natural entities, such as rivers or mountains, as indigenous requests for their sovereignty (de la Cadena 2010). For example, Whanganui River in Aotearoa/New Zealand became a legal person by act of Parliament in March 2017. The river was regarded as Te Awa Tupua, “an impartible living whole,

16 incorporating all its physical and metaphysical elements” (Muru-Lanning 2016). Such moves in language towards nature(s) as sacred, personable or possessing self-sovereignty and inalienable rights are more than philosophical or poetic in that they point to the potential for new alignments between conservationists and local and indigenous communities around new political strategies founded in alternative sovereignties (Mawyer and Jacka 2018; see this thesis page 23 for futher discussion about sovereignty).

Although the hegemony of scientific knowledge production has supported the establishment of environmental conservation areas, it has not determined the ways in which the Tsimihety relate with their environments. While the Tsimihety are clearly reflexive about their relationship toward the environment, their involvement with ecotourism has not transformed them into conservation subjects. When Chinese and Malagasy entrepreneurs requested the Tsimihety to log precious woods in the park, most of the men in the villages studied participated. In addition, hunting of the silky sifaka lemurs (propithecus candidus), classified among the 25 most endangered primates in the world, is not taboo for the local people. Hunting has not diminished because of the sifakas’ rarity but because these animals represent new opportunities in the eco-tourism context. The opportunities relevant to the Tsimihety are not limited to monetary income and work; they also include the potential for creating new relationships that the Tsimihety identify in tourists’ conspicuous affection for the animals (Chapter 7). The Tsimihety frame their knowledge of these new potential relationships through their cultural categories, such as whether tourists adopt lemurs (Chapter 6).

Finally, science and knowledge production are political matters. Malagasy reserachers have encouraged good collaboration and reciprocal sensibilisation between local people and environmental conservation and development organisations (Ratzimbazafy et al 2008) and paying attention how Madagascar is governed by its ruling elite and public resources are distributed (Randriamalala and Liu 2010: 19). Their concerns require consideration of large scale processes and structures and how Madagascar, Malagasy people, plants, animals and rocks, for example, situate, locate and act in them.

Political economic schemes, work and values

In this part, I will focus on global political economic schemes and models that seek to organize Madagascar according to its natural resources, such as land, vanilla and biodiversity. In addition, I focus on different forms of work, such as labor in ecotourism, individual nurture work with vanilla, and ancestral work in rice fields, which each require and enable different kinds of social relations and produce different outcomes of subsistence and commodities. For example, conservation most often involves the imposition of economic and environmental values that do not accord with those of the residents (West 2006). The moral authority of conservation typically overrides residents’ land-use rights and political opposition (Brosius 1999). By using the concept of value, or what people find good, desirable or meaningful, I discuss the ways in which the Tsimihety value different livelihoods and seek to answer why the Tsimihety thought that ecotourism did not make them rich, why parents were concerned that young people involved with ecotourism did not have time to work in the rice fields (Chapter 7), why the Tsimihety did not privatize their land despite the new land laws established by the Malagasy state (Chapter 3), and why they continued to reproduce ancestral order (Chapters 3 and 8).

In the schemes of transnational development organizations such as the World Bank, the Malagasy subsistence farmers have been defined as smallholders. According to Peluso (2017: 838), whether working on their own land or rented or common land, what matters that smallholders are able to make production decisions about their land and labor. Moreover, they may switch between different kinds of work and activities as opportunities present themselves over the short or long term. Indeed, historically the Tsimihety have lived and moved in different places, depending on whether they have preferred swidden cultivation, hunting or gathering forest products (Chapters 2 and 3). The Tsimihety live with a dual economy of subsistence rice production, requiring collective ancestral work (Chapter 3), and vanilla cultivation, which presumes individual work and whose production is aimed at consumer markets, with revenues used in the household (Chapter 4). Ecotourism also emphasizes individual work, as one sells one’s labor time (Chapter 7).

In this sense, the smallholder system is different from, for example, a large- scale plantation that usually standardizes and reduces multiple ecological relations into single species (Scott 1998; Tsing 2005). Modernization and

18 development processes tend to simplify and reduce, for example, forests of multiple species into forests of utilitarian rationality (Scott 1998; Tsing 2005), requiring an ideological connection to human mastery over nature (Tsing 2012). For example, the officials of the 18th-century German state saw only certain kinds of trees from the perspective of fiscal forestry, where the actual tree with its vast number of possible uses was replaced by an abstract tree representing a volume of lumber or firewood (Scott 1998, 11– 12; see another example of development project logic in Ferguson 1990).

Recent transnational and global policies have emphasized large-scale investment in land, privatization of land tenure, and technological solutions in order to create a monetary economy and attract investors. These policies have encouraged smallholders to become entrepreneurs or laborers on large- scale plantations (Deininger et al. 2011). Governmental techniques and practices have increasingly been structured in a way that facilitates the spread of free markets through privatization, marketization, deregulation, reregulation, public sector market proxies and the civil society provision of state services (Castree 2008: 142; Igoe and Brockington 2007). Market- based systems of management and development have also been regarded as the best way of conserving the environment with win-win scenarios (West and Carrier 2004; Brockington et al. 2008: 186, 194; Arsel and Büscher 2012: 66–7; Sullivan 2012; Büscher and Fletscher 2014).6 “Green” credentials are cited to justify the appropriation of land for food or fuel production through “more efficient farming” and “food security,” and by “alleviating the pressure on forests” (Borras et al. 2012; Fairhead et al. 2012; Corson and MacDonald 2012).

In order to make the Marojejy National Park economically sustainable, the World Bank, together with the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) and the Kreditanstalt für Wiederaufbau (KfW), a German investment Bank, encouraged the Malagasy state to promote ecotourism (Christie and Crompton 2003: 3). From the point of view of environmental conservation agencies, ecotourism was supposed to provide a livelihood for the people living in the vicinity of the park and to reduce their dependence on forest resources. (Scales 2014: 258.) However, the Tsimihety concluded that

6 There is a vast body of literature related with this topic. Here are only a few references.

19 ecotourism did not make them rich, and some of them started to focus on vanilla cultivation (Chapter 7).

Political ecologists and anthropologists have called for political and economic understandings of the uneven and unequal social impacts of environmental conservation and other “greening” projects around the globe (Arsel and Büscher 2012: 66–7; Brockington and Duffy 2010; West et al. 2006). Anthropologists have highlighted that the more general problem of “improvement” emerging from a governmental rationality focused on the welfare of populations requires attention (Li 2005; 2007). We have to ask what these schemes do and how they work in specific places and among specific people (Ferguson 1990). Moreover, Li (2011: 281, 289) has reminded that poverty reduction is very unlikely to result from large-scale land-grabbing projects defined by capitalist supply chains. The World Bank’s visions inform of general tendencies of capitalism, which have to be understood in terms of a long history of accumulation (Münster and Münster 2012). By creating an enclosure that excludes former land-use practices by local people, the park creates a site for preserving biodiversity that represents a potential resource for actors that are able to appropriate its globally recognized benefits in the future (Kelly 2011). Nature conservation puts the Tsimihety in a particular position in the political economy. However, this is not a sufficient account of their relationships with the larger world and their participation in different processes of value creation.

The work (asa) done by the Tsimihety challenges transnational visions of work, which expect that one sells his/her time and skills in return for money. In Chapter 3, I discuss that Tsimihety work, and especially the work in rice fields, cannot be separated from social and land relations and notions of ancestral land. I argue that rice cultivation among the Tsimihety is “a total social fact” requiring activities that organized practices and institutions throughout the society and were at once economic, legal, political, religious and so forth to “give expression at the same time” (Mauss 2002 [1925]: 3). In general, work referred to every kind of domestic labor—for example, cooking and taking care of children but also different cultivation work, cutting wood, building houses, organizing and practicing rituals (Chapter 3; about commensality and nurture, see Chapter 6; Li 2014: 58–83). I show that by working, people showed their morality and what they cared about. By working, people not only produced their subsistence but also themselves and their significant relations with kin and strangers—humans, animals and

20 spirits—maintained by taboos, joking and avoidance (Chapter 6). In other words, the Tsimihety work informed and produced Tsimihety values of egalitarianism, autonomy, movement and searching and, finally, belonging to ancestral lands.

I use the concept of value as something that people define as good, desirable or meaningful to explore how the Tsimihety live with different forms of livelihood, such as subsistence rice cultivation supporting ancestral customs (Chapter 3) or vanilla (Chapter 4) and ecotourism (Chapter 7) focused on individualistic work in the market economy and emphasizing foreign ways (see also Gregory 1997: 9, 27; see also Robbins 2004: 315–16). An action- oriented theory of value finds social systems as dialectical structures of creative action and worth, underlining that social structures and values have to be constantly made and produced (Graeber 2001: 55, 68; Munn 1986: 3– 7, 18). This approach is useful for analysing how the people like Tsimihety interact with transnational schemes and practices (Lounela 2020). I discuss how Tsimihety work produces ancestral values, such as movement, egalitarianism, autonomy, and mutual exchange. However, people’s actions inform how people’s lives are structured, conditioned and organized (Robbins and Sommeschuch 2016) and how people themselves socially reproduce their lives (Narotzky and Besnier 2014: S5). The Tsimihety movement to new places and between places structures Tsimihety lives. The Tsimihety, who themselves record these movements and social relations in Boky Mena (Chapter 3). However, values do not determine human action: To work alone in vanilla fields or away in the park challenges ancestral expectations for collective work (Chapters 4 and 7).

In addition to acts and practices, the different things exchanged inform about the nature of relationships and social distance (Gregory 1982; Sahlins 1965). For example, gifts bind different people into a reciprocal and continuous cycle through giving, receiving and obligations of reciprocity (see Chapter 6 about rice and commensality and Chapters 3 and 8 for funeral gifts). In contrast to market exchange, where things are exchanged for money, the norm of reciprocity does not continue (see Chapter 4 about vanilla and Chapter 7 about ecotourism). Usually there are different temporalities involved, as commodity relations entail short-term transactional orders and gifts relations expect long-term transactional orders (Gregory 1982).

According to Gregory (1997: 24), the same values require recognition; that is, people perceive acts, relations and events according to the same values. Reciprocal recognition springs from consanguinity, affinity and contiguity, which emerge principally in gift relations. However, asymmetrical recognition is possible in the world where aliens (strangers) are involved and people have different meanings about what the transaction is about. In Chapters 6 and 7, I discuss how the Tsimihety interact with strangers and what kinds of outcomes there are. Gregory (1997: 8, cit. Nelson 1969) has reminded that these differences are relevant in relation to making profit, as profits are generally taken from “the other and not from the brother” (see Chapter 8 about Tsimihety hierarchies). Moreover, to affirm multiple standards of value requires that the primacy is placed on the commonplace contradiction and not on the axiomatic relations. The commonplace contradiction can be, for example, antagonistic or non-antagonistic. (Gregory 1997: 9.)

According to Robbins (2004: 195), different values can actually be in productive relations to each other; among the Urapmin of Papua, New Guinea, contradictions between lawfulness and willfulness are in a mutually conditioning dialectic, highlighting law as the paramount value as “all realized relationships, those of coresidence, affinity, or active kinship set up expectations of ‘lawful’ behavior that ideally constrain or shape the will.” These two values presuppose each other, as people need to create new relationships and balance their lawful preservation (ibid: 196). Among the Tsimihety, a commonplace contradiction between centripetal ancestral lands and customs and centrifugal people working their way during their lives describes the main dynamics making ancestral relations and lands (Bloch 1971; Chapters 3, 6 and 8).

Finally, struggles over resources have also been struggles over values. Political ecologists and anthropologists have noted that to label a smallholder, for example, is to assert a certain politics of meaning that changes in relations to historical situations. Placing smallholders in the savage slot is to ignore this politics of meaning, and the role of smallholders in contemporary political realities (Peluso 2017: 834, 839; Li 2000; Trouillot 1991). In Madagascar during Ratsiraka’s socialist government in the 1970s, rural peasants were envisioned as central figures of the development of the Malagasy state. He gathered his visions of an independent Malagasy state in the Red Book (Boky Mena) (Gow 1997: 413). The Tsimihety have

22 appropriated the Red Book for their own use, as they document their important social and land relations in the book (Chapters 3 and 8).

According to Graeber (2001: 88), politics is ultimately about the struggle to define value. Indeed, among the Tsimihety Boky Mena demands money and depends on people’s generosity highlighting the two, sometimes competing values. When people gave less and less Boky Mena contributions, villagers reorganised Boky Mena contributions. (Chapter 8.) Focus on good, or how people carve lives worth living, is useful in apprehending human creativity that does not follow one single logic (Robbins 2013).

In order to make good living depends also on the question of sovereignty, the constitution of the political foundation and presumption of rights to govern, manage, exploit or conserve nature for all contemporary states and territories. Mawyer and Jacka (2018: 238) have urged to understand sovereignity that is found not only in the post-Westphalian constitutions of recognized states but also in ideologies and sets of practices that subjugated people often deploy in order to control access to their resources and territories. Frequently, these alternative sovereign rights are not recognized by the larger state, or assemblages of states, in which rights are enacted (Grip 2017; Corson 2016: 21). In conservation activities, the question of who has sovereignty over nature is always in the background of conservation decision-making (West 2016: 68-71).

While Ratsiraka’s Boky Mena tried to establish national sovereignty, the Tsimihety Boky Mena informs of their cultural sovereignty. I argue that by funeral practices, the Tsimihety placed themselves in the places they had lived and cultivated and pointed out that these were their places. The funeral contributions showed the Tsimihety values for movement, egalitarianism, work and exchange that differed from their historical experiences with the Merina and French states, which submitted people to forced labor, slavery and settled villages. Tsimihety funerals are not merely customs requiring culturally valued behavior but funerals, as they are situated in the cutting point of larger scale schemes and rights and obligations of social life, can be thought of as ’terrain’ where people negotiate boundaries defining worth. (Narotzky and Besnier 2014: S4). However, in the context of the intensifying presence of foreigners in environmental conservation, development practices and vanilla-buying, the Tsimihety have continued to negotiate their ancestral customs that allow make places essential for good living (Chapter 8).

1.2 Fieldwork and methods

The village seemed so empty when I pulled my daughter’s and my three bags out of the tourist guide’s car. Deacon, a short man who made his living by driving and guiding tourists and researchers, had given us a ride in his black five-seated, four-wheeled car. He was going to Andapa, known for its flat and fertile rice fields that gave extremely good harvests between the mountain valleys, where his father and mother lived. “I can drop you at the village for a regular taxi price,” he told me in the coastal town where our flight from the capital had landed. After driving about an hour on the road starting at the coastal plain and slowly ascending inland along the river, we had arrived at the village. The doors of the wooden or bamboo houses standing along the two village roads were closed. I did not find any movement on the terraces on the hillside where the village extended from the “flat land,” as the Tsimihety referred to the oldest part of the village established at the turn of the 20th century. Only one local shopkeeper on her porch was watching me collect the bags, and the only movement was in the banana and palm trees that gently waved back and forth in a calm breeze occasionally moving the hot air of midday. The only noise, aside from some chickens, came from a few children who had gathered on the terrace near Deacon’s car, shouting vazaha (‘stranger, foreigner’), a word that later turned out to be mainly used for foreigners passing through the village on their way to enter the Marojejy National Park. The quiet atmosphere of the village changed when the day began to turn to evening and dusk fell with the setting sun behind the hill on the west side of the village. Shouts and the chatting of peasants coming back (hody) from their fields to the village (tanana) filled the air, women hurried to the river to fetch water to boil rice for the dinner, and men wandered around the village exchanging the news of the day with their families and friends. These movements were the daily routine.

One day in October, however, people stayed in the village because of a funeral that gathered hundreds of people. Kin, friends and representatives of institutions, such as the Catholic Church and teachers who had worked together with the deceased, traveled from towns and villages to see the deceased person and consolidate the family. People had given their clan contributions, rice and money for the funeral, and others marked them in

Boky Mena. What was going on? What was so important that people stopped their daily routines and subsistence production, and were willing to travel and give gifts? What kind of importance did the Tsimihety place on funerals?

I collected the main material for this thesis during two fieldwork periods: in 2011, I spent three months between January–April at the University of Antananarivo in the Department of Water and Forest (Département de l’eau et forêt, ESSA) and between September 2012 and August 2013 I spent ten months in four different villages located in the valleys of the Lokoho River in the vicinity of the Marojejy National Park in northeastern Madagascar.

In 2011, my aim was to study Malagasy language at the University of Antananarivo and prepare for actual fieldwork in the northeast part of the country. In Antananarivo, I visited the National Archives (Archives Nationales de Madagascar), Malagasy Academy (Academié malgasche) and IRD (L’Institut de recherche pour le développement) to look for information about the Betsimisaraka and the Tsimihety, as well as historical land use patterns and population movements. During the preparation trip in 2011, I was not very successful at studying language in the capital. There was a strike at the university and it took me a while to find a suitable master of the northeastern dialect, either Betsimisaraka or Tsimihety, to give me private lessons. Only after my fieldwork preparation trip to the northeast was I able to concentrate on language for one month with the help of a sociology student, who had moved from the SAVA7 region to the capital in order to study at the university.

My preliminary intention in 2011 was to study the Betsimisaraka swidden cultivators in the northern part of Masoala National Park. As I was interested in questions of how people practice vanilla and subsistence cultivation in the context of intensifying environmental conservation efforts, I had considered that the northern part of the park would have been fairly near Antalaha, one of the most important places for vanilla production. I visited Antalaha in 2011, where I learned at the park’s information office that one could reach it by taxi-brousse, but

7 SAVA refers to the region in Northeast Madagascar. It consists of the towns of Sambava, Antalaha, Vohemar and Andapa.

25 during the rainy season one had to hike for two days. I consulted the Swiss anthropologist Eva Keller,8 who had conducted research in southern parts of Masoala, and she kindly informed me that there were no hospitals and no telephone connections in the park area at that time. I was pregnant during the preparatory fieldwork and I knew that I would take the newborn with me for the longer fieldwork period. As I pondered the nonexistent infrastructure, Papa ny Samuel, a French teacher whose family had kindly accommodated me in Antalaha (his nephew living in the capital and studying at the ESSA- Forêts had directed me to contact him), advised me to visit the Marojejy area: “It is near the road. The access is easier,” he told me. Following his advice, I visited villages near Marojejy National Park, further north from Antalaha.

My primary fieldwork was conducted between September 2012 and August 2013, altogether ten months. I settled in the village with 983 inhabitants (community information 2012). By living near the park entrance, I wanted to have access to different groups of people: the Tsimihety rice and vanilla cultivators, environmental conservation agents, park visitors and researchers. My daughter and I lived at the household of Willy and Angelina, which at that time also consisted of their two daughters, aged eleven and seven. Now their family has grown to include two sons. Willy had inherited his parent’s house on the western hillside of the village. Two of his married sisters had built houses right above (ambony) his house. In one of these, Willy’s mother, Dady, lived together with one of her unmarried daughters and her children. The other one was built by Mama ny Mirama, together with her husband. Below (ambany), right next to the village road connecting the neighboring village and the paved road, there were two houses settled by Willy’s cousins, Mama ny Evan, with her husband and three sons, and Cecile, who occasionally lived alone, sometimes with her adopted son, and sometimes with her male friend. What can be said about Tsimihety social organization and social relations based on the spatial and housing arrangements? What were the village and family histories of different people? How were the social relations and dynamics between the people in the village and with the people in the neighboring villages?

A few days earlier, before our arrival, I had agreed with Willy, a Tsimihety rice and vanilla cultivator in his thirties who also worked as an

8 I thank Eva Keller for excellent information and advices.

26 ecotourism guide and research assistant in lemur research projects at Marojejy National Park, that I and my daughter could live with his family. Willy’s family was recommended to me by an American primatologist who had worked for a long period of time in the Marojejy area. Before me, a US Peace Corps volunteer and environmental science Master’s student living with Willy’s family. This volunteer-student had lived for three years in Madagascar and spoke fluent Malagasy. In the beginning, Willy’s mother and sisters expected that I would be as fluent as her and they did not forget to remind me about it.

It took me eight months to learn the Tsimihety dialect, but I never became fluent in the language. Willy translated and transcribed the most important interviews and narratives in my notebooks during the fieldwork period. I was so concerned that I would lose the material from the recorder, I wanted to have them written in my books immediately. My insufficient language skills influenced that I was not very successful in reaching those whom the Tsimihety referred to as the people “who do not know many things” (tsy mahay maro raha) and who were not very prominent persons in the village or involved in collaborating on different important projects. My daily relations were spent with Willy’s and Angelina’s family, kin, friends and neighbors, with whom they spent their time. I also communicated regularly with people who were involved in ecotourism efforts, elementary school teachers from different villages, village representatives and two US Peace Corps volunteers living in one of the neighboring villages.

Obviously, especially at the outset of my fieldwork, I was one of the strangers who did not understand who were considered as kin (havana) and who were strangers (vazaha) (see Chapter Six). In the beginning of my stay, one late evening Angelina and Willy went to attend a funeral wake in the neighboring village; I had stayed alone in the house because my daughter was sleeping. Willy and Angelina’s friends, Mama and Papa ny Sandra, knocked on the door of the house. I did not understand the Tsimihety dialect very well at that time, and I thought that they were looking for Willy and Angelina, because they asked if they were at home. I told them that they were not there, I thanked them for visiting, and I told them to come another time. After I closed the door, I heard Mama ny Sandra telling: “She did not even invite us in.” If their friends’ house was open to me, of course it was open to them, too, and now I had closed them outside.

Also, in the very beginning of our stay, when my daughter Elaine was crying for hours, I became aware that it was not only human beings who could enter in and out of houses but spirits, too. People called Willy’s mother, who was a known midwife in the village, to give Elaine a massage. On another occasion, Angelina burned a piece of cloth and let the smoke drift into our room. These kinds of experiences led me to observe what kinds of beings were understood to inhabit these environments and landscapes? How did the spaces of different beings meet and intersect? What kinds of practices were done for different kinds of relations?

Throughout the fieldwork Willy was my guide. According to the policies of the Madagascar National Parks (MNP), which managed the national parks and reserves in Madagascar under the aegis of the Ministry of Environment, a researcher conducting research in national parks, reserves or villages nearby had to hire a local work. This practice sought to direct funds and revenues to local communities. Willy was fluent in English and French, and people in the neighboring villages knew these talents, as they sought his advice. Willy had studied for one year at the university in North Madagascar, but then he had to return to his home village, where he continued to cultivate his family fields. Willy was very enthusiastic and committed to his work and wanted to show his skills. He had worked both with the environmental science Master’s student and for an environmental conservation project in the park. He was a hard-working man who used the knowledge learned in different collaborations to enhance his and his family’s position and well-being.

Me and Willy conducted 40 semi-structured interviews9 including questions of village and family histories, subsistence production and understandings and experiences of the Marojejy National Park, environmental conservation and ecotourism (Appenidx 1). The questions that Willy formulated helped me understand what people expected that researchers will ask, such as questions about park or materials that people use for construction or what people found important, such as ‘what do need from the park?’ or ‘what are the greatest problmes here?’. During the first two months of my fieldwork, Willy asked the questions that I had formulated and translated people’s answers to me. I listened, learned the words and expressions people used,

9 We conducted 16 interviews in Manantenina and 24 interviews in three neighboring villages (eight interviews in each).

28 and picked up the few words I knew. Based on these interviews, I constructed histories of population movement, land ownership, territoriality, kinship relations and environmental governance.

In addition to the translations, Willy used to write down in my notebooks narratives or points that he thought that might be valid and interesting information for me: for example, the names of different lemur species in English and in Latin; the narrative of the people who came to Madagascar and cut its forest down, drove the Vazimba away and established human civilization (known also as the canonical narrative; see Keller 2015: 2); instructions on how to grow vanilla; and the latest rumors circulating in the village (for instance, in relation to sudden deaths or illnesses). These narratives were quite pertinent for me and allowed me to ask what he imagined that I might be interested in and what kinds of matters people found important themselves?

Observations from daily discussions and activities, as well as events related mainly with Willy’s family and clan, informed about places of living, work, movements and plans. Through Willy and Angelina’s family and close neighbors (for example, Mama ny Evan’s family with three sons under eight years old at the time, living right below Willy and Angelina’s house), I was able to follow repeated daily activities of cooking, fetching water and firewood, working in the fields, relations with family members, neighbors and relatives, ritual preparations, house-building and land-buying projects, to mention a few. Gossip and discussions with relatives living in the village “flat land” and in the small hamlet a bit further north from the village, as well as with other neighbors and friends, covered news about who was sick, who had given birth, how many visitors were in the park and who had a conflict with whom.

By focusing on agricultural practices, I wanted to elicit knowledge about the environment and its management, different places, soils, techniques, the different plants cultivated and land ownership and use. I drew maps and took photographs, but I also asked people to draw maps of their village and fields and used those for understanding the Tsimihety perception of territory, landscape, land ownership and aesthetics. I walked and worked in wild and domesticated environments in order to understand how agricultural practices and seasonal cycles affected peoples’ lives and their perceptions of the environment. I participated in rituals and local ceremonies that revealed

29 family histories, the political authority of the elders, ceremonial exchanges, performance and cosmologies.

As Madagascar has been the focus of transnational environmental conservation efforts, I was interested how land used for a national park—in this case the Marojejy National Park—affected land relations, cultivation and the land ownership of the people living in its vicinity. What kind of access did the Tsimihety have to the park? What did the Tsimihety think of the park? How were their relations with the park management? Did ecotourism reorganize social relations in subsistence production? What did the Tsimihety do with the salary they received? By means of these questions, I sought to study how people perceived and conceptualized these large- scale processes and projects of environmental conservation seeking to protect biodiversity. I conducted interviews with park and conservation personnel, NGO activists, company representatives, animal behavior researchers and park visitors. In addition, in collaboration with a Malagasy student from the ESSA Institute who was preparing her thesis on ecotourism in the Marojejy National Park, we conducted 40 structured interviews with tourists visiting the park. Furthermore, I followed and observed people visiting the park and guides working with the visitors. What did the Tsimihety guides narrate about the landscapes they knew intimately? What kinds of questions did visitors and tourists ask from the guides? Where did people move in the park? What did the researchers do in the park? What did the Tsimihety think of these people and practices?

I left the field twice. In November 2012, I was away for three weeks because I had to attend an AAA meeting in San Francisco, as the project10 that I worked for had a panel at the conference. I was also away in March 2013: my daughter had been constantly sick for two months, so we decided to go to Finland to meet with family. I think these comings and goings influenced my relations with the Tsimihety in two ways. On one hand, I felt that I would definitely miss something important when I was gone; on the other, leaving and returning created trust between the people and me, as I returned to the village as I had promised them.

10 Human ecology, Land transformations and global resource economy (253680), funded by the Academy of Finland.

The people in the focus of my study did not have previous experiences with anthropologists. There had been some researchers conducting socioeconomic interviews in the village. People were puzzled about what was I doing because I stayed in the village for many months. Some came up with reasons for my stay based on their historical observations and experiences: for example, since my daughter’s father11 was not with us, I had come to northeastern Madagascar to look for (mitady) a husband. In general, the Tsimihety were aware that there were older French men who came to meet Malagasy women. People also told stories of wealthy Chinese women who could attract a Malagasy husband with their wealth. What is important here is that nobody just comes to Madagascar, but they come to Madagascar due to some specific interest, looking for something (see Chapter 5; see also Walsh 2004: 235).

Conducting fieldwork with a child required me to consider ethical and moral responsibilities as well as emotional work, so that I could guarantee the child’s safety and well-being. Before going to the field—being really concerned about how things would end up, especially because of malaria, and what kind of fieldwork I would be able to do—I consulted people who had done fieldwork with children and families. I heard of various kinds of experiences, from those who had had the best time ever to those who had decided to do the fieldwork by themselves while the rest of the family stayed “at home.” Some had changed their research topic so that they were able to combine family and work. I had a so-called Plan B: if we would have been sick all the time, I would have ended the fieldwork. I want to highlight two things about doing fieldwork with a child. First, a child attracted people, who would always talk and ask something about her and observe what she was doing. This allowed me to start asking what people had been doing recently or what kinds of plans they had or about whatever matter was at hand. On the other hand, I could not move around as much I would have wanted. For the Tsimihety, it was not a problem to take a child aged a couple of months into the forest and stay overnight there, but I could not do it. For example, I did not take longer walks to other villages to understand where and how people moved around (see, e.g., Tsing 1993: 46), where the paths were or how people lived in the forest. I was also unable to follow researchers in the park for a longer period. My fieldwork was not as dense and full of

11 He had just graduated and gotten a job in the field of his expertise in Finland.

31 concentration, due to being by oneself, as some anthropologists have described (Lambek 1997: 49): I kept in contact with home, which required that we travel every other week to the town where I was able to make regular phone calls, informing about how we were doing and what was going on. In the end, I want to thank colleagues and friends for discussing with me professionally, critically and supportively. In Madagascar, Willy, Angelina and their daughters nurtured my daughter as if she was their own, and I will always be more than grateful to them.

1.3 Ethical considerations

In general, I have followed the instructions of the Statement of Ethics of the American Anthropological Association and the Ethical Principles of Research in the humanities and social and behavioral sciences outlined by the Finnish Advisory Board of Research Integrity. My main ethical concerns were related with people and whether they knew what I was doing there and what kind of work I was going to write. I introduced my research to the Ministry of Education in Antananarivo in order to obtain the research visa, to the Malagasy State’s Forest and Water Department and the Madagascar National Park in the SAVA region, as well as to the village heads in the four villages studied, and I asked for permission for the research. When doing the interviews in the beginning of the fieldwork, Willy or I presented who I was and what I was researching and asked if one was willing to contribute to this research. Usually people listened silently and then replied that they would be happy to reply to my questions. However, during the long-term fieldwork, although I almost always had my notebook with me, people tended to forget that I was observing them. For this reason, I have used pseudonyms in my work, although anyone who has been involved with this research will be able to recognize the key people and certain events that I have described here.

Finally, I have been pondering how to report my findings to the people, not all of whom read (and definitely not academic English). I am grateful to the Oscar Öflund Foundation and the Kone Foundation for funding a two-week trip in 2016 when I reported my preliminary results, consisting of short debates about environmental conservation efforts and how they are connected to larger political economic processes, questions of land use, ecotourism and vanilla cultivation, and finally what kinds of moral questions I had analyzed from the material. I presented some of the preliminary

32 findings to specific target groups, such as Willy’s kinfolk, who had contributed a lot to the study, and to people in four different villages who happened to be available and interested, to the MNP, to three personnel of the German vanilla-buying company, and at ESSA-Forêts at the University of Antananarivo in November 2016. In the end, I think that the preliminary research presentations turned out to be a data-gathering session for me, with different reactions, suggestions and comments. Moreover, I learned that for future work, these kinds of reporting sessions, especially in the villages with 1,000–2,000 inhabitants, would require better planning (informing and reminding in advance) and infrastructure (for example, identifying the need for a projector and a generator).

1.4 Overview of the Chapters

In Chapter 2, I discuss about the Tsimihety notion of a “good place” that combines the Tsimihety ancestral ways of living and larger-scale dynamics and processes, such as the development projects of state and transnational organizations. In Chapter 3, I focus more in depth on Tsimihety ancestral relations and how the Tsimihety produce them through work. Especially rice cultivation made the texture of Tsimihety everyday life, joining various dynamics of movement, clearing forest for fields, building houses and establishing tombs into a totalization of ancestral customs and expanding ancestral lands, showing the intimate relations between the people and land. However, the Tsimihety are aware of the existence of the Malagasy state, and they document their land relations in Boky Mena. In Chapter 4, I move to challenge totalizing narratives by discussing the situated histories of vanilla, showing that vanilla’s value varies, depending on the situation defined by political and economic relations and cultural dynamics. In Chapter 5, I highlight how Euro-American scientific knowledge and ontology based on nature-culture dualism emptying environments from people have influenced the making of Madagascar as a hot spot of environmental conservation. I point out that in the joint efforts of environmental conservation, different perspectives emerge. In Chapter 6, the Tsimihety relations with animals, plants, land and rocks based on exchange, commensality and hunting, challenge Euro-American scientific knowledge. Taboos, joking and avoidance inform how the Tsimihety maintain their humanity and divisions between kin and strangers. Chapter 7 is about joint ecotourism efforts that inform people about their differences, despite the

33 efforts of different development organizations sensibilizing the Tsimihety into a monetary economy. I explain that ecotourism is not only a matter of technical or labour questions for the Tsimihety but that there are political and ethical things that the Tsimihety relate with ecotourism. In Chapter 8, I show that in spite of intensifying environmental conservation efforts and lucrative vanilla markets, the Tsimihety have continued to practice ancestral customs. Despite the Tsimihety emphasis on egalitarianism informed by Boky Mena gifts, the Tsimihety involve people in debt relations. Especially those who were able to make money (for example, by selling vanilla or working in ecotourism or environmental conservation) were able to give debts. In the conclusion, I summarize the main points of the thesis.

2. In good places: Hills, valleys and water, ancestral customs and state projects

“This place was called Tsarabanja,12 a good place” explained Sebastian, a thin man in his 60s with a small smile in his eyes, usually holding a self- rolled cigarette in the corner of his mouth while sitting on wooden stairs in front of his house in the south (atsimo) of the village.

All the people thought that here it was very flat (lemaka) and they left the place there to settle here. The place was [later] covered by a plant called tenina13 and that is why people started to call it Manantenina, “a place with tenina plants”14 [pointing toward the flat land right next to the river with the same name as the village, where the oldest houses were built].

In this chapter I ask what it tells about the place and the people that the place has been described as good and, during the process of habitation it has changed into a place referring to ecologies and landscapes with human markings. By following the movements of the Tsimihety, I highlight that the Tsimihety are place-focused people and that they perceive their lives in and through spatial dynamics and formations, such as villages and forests.

Anthropological literature on places has pointed out that they are socially constructed by the people who live in them and know them; they are “politicized, culturally relative, historically specific, local and multiple constructions” (Rodman 2003: 205). Anthropologists have argued that some people (for example, in the Austronesian world) are spatially oriented, meaning that they perceive their environments and social relations through spatial relations and formations, which inform the engagement between people and places (Fox 2006: 89). For example, place has been seen as important in the making of meaningful genealogies and topologies (Hirsh and O’Hanlon 1995; Feld and Basso 1996; Fox 2006).

12 tsara ‘good’; banja ‘place’ 13 manevika or tenina (Razafindraibe 2013: 9); Imperata cylindrica (Pollini 2010: 214; Sodikoff 2009: 194). 14 manana ‘to have’; tenina (see the previous footnote)

Several shared symbolic descriptions by the Tsimihety concerning their places such as flat (lemaka), red (mena) and water (rano), referred to culturally shared understandings of their environment. The Tsimihety made places by moving, building and working, but they were aware that places also influenced people. Places and people were connected to each other (also Thomas 1996: 8). Spaces and places can be mutually constitutive in relation to each other as well as to different spaces and places (Stasch 2013: 555), and they can create regional worlds in experience (Rodman 2003: 205; Munn 1990). For example, the Tsimihety ancestral lands have been made and related to through kinship relations rooted in particular places (see specifically Chapter 3).

On the other hand, spaces informed about abstract shapes, dimensions and relations of the world. For example, the Tsimihety understanding of north as a powerful direction or west as a direction of junior lines formed a generalized concept of Tsimihety space. However, spaces were not empty and homogenous; they are embodied, perceived and made through various overlapping dynamics, processes and social relations of various scales (see Low and Lawrence-Zúñiga 2003; Stasch 2013: 555; Munn 1986: 9–10).

The places themselves are grounded sites of global-local articulations referring to the distinctiveness of places, mixing various kinds of social relations and processes (Biersack 2006: 16), such as subsistence production, state development projects and political economical structures. On the basis of Jakobson (1960), Stasch (2009: 556) has pointed out that spatial forms can hold special historical power because of the multiplicity of the relational connections they mediate. I have applied this notion to a place. Poetics of a place has recognized the capacity of place to be poetically dense, with a multiplicity of qualities and experiences of articulations with new people, institutions and ideologies of various scales highlighting the heterogeneity of spaces (see Biersack 2006: 16). Moreover, as people expect that places are heterogeneous, it is normal to engage with difference (see Stasch 2009: 555; see also Chapter 6). However, people tend to perceive and interpret processes of various scales according to their cultural and historical logics.

The notion of a good place informed about shared understandings and practices of what people find valuable. Robbins (2013: 447–8) has pointed out that the different ways people organize their personal and collective lives fostered what they think is good, which is related to people’s experiences of

36 profound human existence and ethics. For example, the movement of Tsimihety between places despite different stabilization efforts by the state and swidden cultivation practices disparaged by environmental conservationists have to be understood in relation to historical processes of Merina expansion, Tsimihety ways of fleeing commanding relations, ecologies of northeastern Madagascar, and Tsimihety ways of expanding and maintaining ancestral land. At the same time, the notion of a good place was a political claim, demonstrating the way of living that the Tsimihety have found important and valuable, and revealing places that their ancestors have noticed and made prosperous. The designation of a good place informs that these places are Tsimihety places.

In this chapter, I discuss how a good place has been made and constructed by environmental and ecological relations with rivers, hills and valleys and water flows, soils and plants. A good place allowed movement between the settlement and the forest where subsistence production has taken place but also between the places where ancestors have lived and were buried (see Chapter 3). I continue to show that villages were sites of heterogeneous and multiple dynamics, processes and social relations that the Tsimihety have on one hand found alluring and, on the other, disturbing and constraining, such as different state practices of administration and development. Finally, I note that as the place where people lived started to decay, people began to move to new or different places, repeating their settlement patterns and practices of expanding their ancestral land.

2.1 In good places

A good place indeed. With 983 inhabitants15, Manantenina village was located partly on a small peninsula (tanjona) and bordered by two rivers, about an hour walk away from the forests and mountains of Marojejy National Park. The Marojejy mountains became a restricted reserve in 1955, and in 1998 the area was transformed into a national park (for more about the establishment of the park, see Chapter 5). A river with the same name as the village runs along the eastern side of the village, collecting streams from the tributaries of the Marojejy mountains. Manantenina river joins with a wider river, the Lokoho, which runs by the south of the village after collecting different streams in the highland valleys of Andapa, an area that

15 The community information from 2012

37 is famous for its rice fields and is the focus of several agricultural development projects (World Bank 2006: 53–4). These waters flowed to the Indian Ocean in Farahalana (see Picture 3). From a biogeographical perspective, rivers in this region are generally small to moderate in size, rocky in substrate, and swift in current; most of them flow all year-round, in contrast to rivers in the western parts of the country. The drainages of the upper reaches are steep, with rapids and cascades joining into more moderate flows. In general, rainfall is high (2,500–3,000 mm annually) in the Eastern Highlands, and water levels vary considerably with the occurrence of seasonal storms (Aldegheri 1972: 265–6; Goodman 2000: 13–16).

Picture 1. The village at the confluence of the two rivers. A view from the south. Map: Google Earth (Retrieved 3/10/2016).

“Go to the water!” (mandeha any rano), Mama ny Ursula tended to scold Teresa, the younger sister in the family. Only seven years old, she was sleepy and did not move fast enough to the river to wash the plates and cutlery from yesterday’s dinner before going to school. She stayed and yawned by the door, clearly intimidated by the coolness of the morning. Ursula, aged 11, was already used to the morning chores, so she took the bucket and rushed down the steep hill leading to the river. Mama ny Evan, Willy’s second

38 cousin16 living right below his house, watched the conversation as she threw yesterday’s rice water on the ground in front of their kitchen, for chickens and ducks that rushed to eat it after a night spent in small coops made out of bamboo.

“If you are one of the first ones in the river, you get really clean water (rano madio),” Willy educated me during the first days of my stay, on one of the cool mornings in September after the cold (manintsy) months of June and July transitioned to a warmer and drier season. If one was early, perhaps not too many people in the village of Mandena (meaning ‘to get wet’), with about 2000 inhabitants and closest to the Marojejy National Park upstream (ambony), had reached the water yet. According to the villagers’ stories, Mandena was named after an embodied experience of getting wet because before there was no bridge and people had to wade through different rivers order to get there. In between Manantenina and Mandena there was a small hamlet named Andafiamora (meaning ‘to go easily’) with five families and eight houses. Administratively speaking, the hamlet was divided because of its location: one half belonged to the village near the park and the other half to Manantenina. During the rainy season, the river could rise until Manantenina village. However, during my stay in 2013 the water level rose only about half a meter, because of little rain during the rainy season (January–March). People were worried about the diminishing water and rain, and they called the river water dirty (maloto).

Different activities occurred at different parts of the river. “Come here. It is dirty,” an elderly lady advised me when I entered the river for the first time. I had strayed too close to the river bank where women peed and washed their genitals. Bathing and washing dishes and cloths was done in the middle of the river, near small rocks where one could place plastic washbowls or the buckets that women used for carrying laundry, dishes or water from the river. In the morning after the sun had risen, and in the evening, usually after the days’ work in the fields, before dark, the women’s places at the river were crowded. While washing, women used to discuss and joke about daily events and people they knew, sometimes just taking care of their work silently without remarking that they were leaving back to their house, such as by saying Hody! (‘Go home’). One could see children swimming and jumping from the rock further upstream. From there, a little bit further from

16 Willy’s and Mama ny Evan’s fathers were cousins (zanak' olo- mpirahalahy).

39 the village, males washed on the cliffs. The river was not a homogenous place, but there were divisions and structured practices based on gender and work tasks.

In addition to rivers, the forest was another direction where people headed. “I am going into the forest” (mandeha any atiala), Willy answered a passer- by who had asked “Where are you going?” (Andeha hoeza?), a typical greeting when people passed each other in the village or on the road. I followed Willy to his irrigated rice fields, situated less than half an hour walk from the village in the valley called Ambarialoha (meaning ‘at the head of a stream’). The soil burst between our toes as we climbed a steep, soft muddy slope and continued on a shady pathway between the vanilla fields and vegetable gardens. The pathway led out of the secondary forest (savoka) to an open hilltop with great views of hill rice, cassava and vanilla fields and fallows on both sides of the hills and irrigated rice fields in the valleys. Some people had built small cottages or rice houses in the forest and they moved there during the rainy season in order to live closer to their fields. To reach Willy’s fields we deviated from the main path and descended along the side of a field of hill rice, full of loose, dry soil. “To go to the forest” meant that people could end up working on their fields, visiting friends, checking their gardens or chickens in the forest, gathering fruits or firewood, or going hunting. These forests were not empty of people and social relations: pathways, houses, fields, channels, people, plants, animals, water, soil and rocks. Everything crisscrossed, and forests and fields were not so clearly separated as seen in industrialized agriculture or environmental conservation efforts (see also Mölkänen 2019: 97–8; Tsing 2005: 162–200). However, the forest itself had changed over the years.

According to widely cited Perrier-Humbert island-wide forest hypothesis, Madagascar was largely a forested island with undisturbed habitats for its numerous, endemic animal and plant species before humans settled there about 4,000 years ago. People began to transform forests into grasslands, destroying the most of the island’s original forests. Scholars have highlighted that environmental degradation is in large part a myth, and they ask to view the Malagasy ecosystems as complex and changing rather than degrading (Kull 2004: 63–72; Keller 2015: 2; Pollini 2010: 717; Sodikoff 2012: 12). The critical debates have shown that population growth, poverty and different states’ projects and larger-scale political economic processes, such as the introduction of cash crops, for example, coffee, have to be considered when discussing Madagascar’s deforestation (Kull 2000: 432–3; Jarosz

1993: 370–2; Campbell 2013b; Olson 1984: 180; for more about the environmental history of Madagascar, see Chapter 5).

Management of Madagascar’s natural resources has been in the interest of different states. One of the first rulers of the pre-colonial Merina state banned the cutting of firewood and planting of trees on the hillsides of the capital, and just before the French occupation forest-burning prohibitions were confirmed by the 1881 Code of 305 Articles. In 1909, the Governor General Gallieni prohibited the practice of shifting cultivation in order to protect Madagascar’s forests from further deforestation and to impose rational forest management that could improve the state’s economy. The ban would also force the Malagasy to remain in one place, making it easier for the government to locate people and tax them. The people reacted to the ban by burning, and the practice of swidden cultivation, tavy, became a symbol of independence and resistance. (Kull 2004: 206–7; Jarosz 1993: 374.) Although the popularized forest destruction hypothesis does not reveal important political economic dynamics related to disappearance of the forest, agricultural projects have modified the landscapes of rural northeastern Madagascar.

Several villagers’ irrigated rice fields were located in the Ambarialoha valley, a marsh land that had been transformed to support that form of agriculture from the mid- 20th century onwards (Laney 2002: 707). Indeed, an elderly male cultivator highlighted that he had his land in the valley already when Didier Ratsiraka was the leader of the Republic for the first time17. According to him, the valley was already a secondary forest and it was possible to see that people had selected some parts for their cultivation.

The younger generation repeated the valley’s history. A middle-aged male cultivator, who also had his fields in the valley and used to walk there several times a week from the neighboring village, described:

This valley used to be a really dense forest. However, there were many people living in the two villages [Manantenina and Ambohimanarina] who did not have any land to live on and they cleared land here. Basically, the people from the two

17 Didier Ratsiraka was Madagascar’s president in 1975–1993 and 1997– 2002.

villages are responsible for its deforestation. They cut it down because of its goodness (tsara) and they started to cultivate rice and later vanilla there. After many years, people transformed it into a rice field. It is better now that it is transformed into a rice field, because rice is Malagasy food and because hill rice fields are not productive anymore.

These accounts tell how people tended to move into forested areas and clear them to become fields. In the next chapter (Chapter 3), I will discuss how these practices of clearing forest for fields and cultivating rice have been essential for establishing and marking social and land relations and expanding and maintaining the ancestral lands that the Tsimihety have found good and valuable. The goodness of the valley was related to available fertile and cultivable land with access to water and the possibility to transform the landscape for human use (see also Bloch 1995). However, the latter narrative tells also that some land in the valley was already occupied and as more people moved to the area, they were able to get access to cultivable land in the valley, informing about different migration histories. In addition, people were willing to do the time-consuming work of transforming and modifying the land into irrigated rice fields, a practice that was supported by the French and Malagasy states.

Indeed, the transformation of valleys into irrigated rice fields was promoted by the Malagasy and French states. In the rural inland areas of northeastern Madagascar, state-led projects were implemented unevenly, like in different parts of Madagascar. On the eastern side of the Marojejy mountains, Malagasy state institutions, such as the water and forest department, from the 1950s onwards built small irrigation dams and canals and instructed farmers on different techniques for soil conservation and intensive cultivation. On the other hand, on the northwestern side of the Marojejy mountains, some irrigated fields were already built by the 1950s, and they contributed a large proportion of the village’s subsistence needs before land pressures were high. (Kull 2004: 230, cit. Dez 1968; Laney 2002: 703; see also Jarosz 1993: 370–2.)

In general, for the Tsimihety, rice production provided their subsistence; they supplemented it with cash crops, such as vanilla and coffee. In addition, cattle were appreciated because of their aesthetics, and they were reserved for ceremonial purposes and represented a source of prestige (Laney 1999:

21; Wilson 1992: 75–6, 82–3). Wilson (1992: 73–4) has highlighted that in the 1960s in western Tsimihety areas in Androna, cattle pastured in communal lands (kijany). During my fieldwork, people had very few cows, although people appreciated and respected them (see Chapter 6).

Settlement patterns have shown that the inland areas of northeastern Madagascar attracted migrants who wanted to flee from the enforcement of state policies and maintain their autonomy, but also work on plantations and exploit forest resources, as encouraged by those same policies. Movements from the eastern coast inland occurred on a lesser scale from the 1830s onwards as the Merina state, using political alliances and military strategy, occupied the coast and established garrisons in the most important entrepôts of trade (for example, in Toamasina and Maroantsetra in 1825) (Bloch 1971: 17–18, 21–2; Campbell 2005: 164; Engel 2008: 16; Larson 2000: 4–5, 24). In 1875–1905, the main migrations from Mananara were northwards toward Antalaha and Sambava and westwards toward Mandritsara, whence people moved toward the north (Molet 1959: 9). These movements, especially northwestwards, intensified at the turn of the 20th century as the French occupied Madagascar in 1896 (Molet 1959: 8–10; Deschamps 1960: 229– 36).

Another intensification occurred in 1920s as the Tsimihety, attracted by vanilla and coffee, migrated to look for money (mitady vola). In the northeast, as the land was abundant and the hillsides produced enough rice, the Tsimihety cultivated vanilla and coffee mainly in the valleys. However, the land use for vanilla and cattle herds came into conflict. (Laney 1999: 25.) It has been suggested that the production of a large number of cattle and vanilla was not managed because there were not strong enough family heads who could have mobilized the labor needed for production, given a situation where family groups had become smaller and new immigrants moved into the area (Laney 1999: 26, cit. Cabanes 1982). I think that it is also possible that the family elders were not only thinking in terms of production; for other kinds of values, such as prosperous social relations, expanding ancestral land was also important (see Chapter 3 and Chapter 8).

During the 1920s, the colonial state opened the island’s forests to concessionary claims for exploitation. The colonial forest service reported that owners of concessions used forest resources for short-term gain as demand for precious woods, such as ebony, rosewood and palissander, intensified and concession owners harvested resources over the boundaries

43 they were granted (Jarosz 1993: 374, cit. Rapport du Service Forestier 1922). The irony of illegalizing tavy alongside practices of concessions has been noted, as roughly 70 percent of the primary forest was destroyed in the 30 years between 1895 and 1925 (Jarosz 1993: 375, cit. Hornac 1943; see also Scales 2014: 109 for a comparison). Moreover, state laws were used for dispossessing Malagasy peasants from their land. For example, a state decree (Decree 2 of November 1896) stated that anyone could purchase land of five hectares, and provisional titles were given to the French. Some lost their land in illegal ways (for example, as a debt for rum) (Cole 2001: 46– 9). These experiences with different states informed how Tsimihety made and related their places—and at the same time lived their “good life.”

The Tsimihety were very aware of their landscapes, their water flows, soils, topographies, temperatures and light. Although hillsides had started to decay, the flat land on the peninsula on the other side of the big river directly south of the village was fertile. One morning in July we headed to harvest Mama ny Rocco’s rice field; she was Willy’s talkative cousin, with whom he had a close relationship. Seven adults and three children climbed into two narrow canoes (lakana). The peninsula was full of fields of hill rice, maize (tsakotsako), vanilla, coffee, beans and trees of different kinds: banana, mango and albizia. Willy’s uncle and one of the biggest vanilla producers in the village, Papa ny Georges, had thick and shady vanilla fields on the peninsula, and he was very aware of different soils and cultivations:

If you compare the forests in the Ambarialoha valley and on this peninsula, the peninsular forest is much more humid. This is because there is a hill behind the flat land and all the good soil, the humus, flows down because of the rainwater gushing down to the flat part from the hill.

Indeed, on the flat land, there was no tenina grass, unlike on the hillsides near the irrigated rice fields of the village. To choose this kind of good and productive place, at the crossing of the two rivers that brought fertile silt onto the fields, located on the floodplains near the rivers and the hill directing water flows and influencing the lightness and warmth of the fields, required historically cumulative knowledge (see Chapter 3) and a wise clan leader. Papa ny George’s observations confirmed that the first settlers of the place were very aware of how water flowed and what types of places and soils were fertile for cultivation (Mölkänen 2019: 97–8). He himself had fields, swidden and irrigated rice fields, in four different locations.

A good place referred to a location where there was available forest, land and water enabling the subsistence rice cultivation. However, I am not claiming that material conditions determined the ways people live and organized their lives but I consider different materials and organisms and their dynamics as an invitation that people tend to organise and work with to in cultural ways (Keane 2003).

These places gathered various processes, dynamics and relations of different scales, temporalities, ecologies, developments and socialities. These places were definitely heterogeneous, but they were also structured and ordered.

2.2 In ancestral places

After the girls came back from the river, they took washed plates into a separate kitchen (lakozina) where they ate cold rice left over from the preceding day before leaving for school. Usually at this hour Willy came back from the forest, where he had been looking for firewood. This was a typical task for men in the mornings18, while women were expected to prepare the fire and cook rice (for more on work, tasks and gender, see Chapter 3).

Willy and Angelina’s house was located on a hillside in the middle of the village. According to Willy, the house was located there so that they could avoid the floods that often occurred on the flat land in the south of the village. Willy’s father’s rectangular house, supported by wooden piles in front while the back rested on the ground, consisted of two rooms with doors and a porch opening eastwards to the river. The house looked similar to what Thomas (2006: 343) has described among the Tenamborondro: the house (trano)19 as a rectilinear form built on piles, its posts (andry) erected with the “trunk” (vody) end planted in the ground and their “head” (loha) uppermost. Central to one end of the house is the hearth (fata), above which is a rack for drying wood and general storage. Nearby each house is its

18 Households where there were no males or men were not able to move in the forest (for example, due to illness or being too old) usually had relatives or neighbors helping and fetching the wood for them. 19 People also used the word trano for other constructions. For example, Mama ny Evan locked chickens in a small wooden trano where they were safe from animals and possible thieves.

45 granary (tranambo ‘high house’), which, as will be seen, is used for much more than storing rice.

Buildings and the way people lived in them informed about different historical relations and socialities. In Willy’s house, the kitchen (lakozina, the Malagasy name derived from French la cuisine) was a small separate building on the southern side of the main building. There was no separate granary, but people stored their rice in the northern room of the house. Historical documentation by a 19th-century British reverend describes the smoke of the fireplace inside the building as intolerable for Europeans (Ellis and Freeman 1838: 95). Today the smoke in the kitchens has been the focus of development programs, which have encouraged the Malagasy to build separate kitchens, as household air pollution has been defined as one of the main causes for death (Dasgupta and Martin 2014). Willy and Angelina’s kitchen had a wooden table with benches and they used to eat with spoons. This was different from the place that belonged to Dady, Willy’s mother, where people sat next to the fireplace on bamboo mats on the kitchen floor. According to Willy and Angelina, to eat at the table represented a more modern way of living while Dady’s style was more customary. Importantly, spatial concepts, such as ‘high’ and ‘low’, not only informed about hierarchies between people but also about people’s attachment to land and to the ground.

This was the house where Willy and his family lived. Right above (ambony), Dady lived with Willy’s sister and her two boys. Their house was built by another sister, Mama ny Karina, who worked in a city in North Madagascar as a teacher. In addition, another sister and her husband, Mama and Papa ny Mirama, and their three daughters, had built their house right next to the grandmother’s house.

In general, the Malagasy regard the north and northeast as superior spaces, being related to the ancestors and their spiritual domination (Cole 2001: 71– 4; Nielssen 2011: 28). In the Merina highlands, tombs were usually situated in the north of the village, following the same pattern as the spatial organization of the hierarchical order of village society. The highest-ranked lineage tomb was situated the furthest north, and the others were placed in the landscape according to their hierarchical order (Bloch and Parry 1982: 35). Also, among the Temanambondro of southeast Madagascar, the spatial

46 articulation of the hierarchy was principally played out through the cardinal points: north and east are respectively “above” (ambony) and therefore superior to the south and west, themselves being “below” (ambany)(Fox 2006: 4 cit. Thomas 1996: 92). Both east and north have more “strength” (heriny) than their opposites, west and south.

These spatial coordinates correspond to relations between people. East is the ‘eldest’ (zojabe), the direction of the ‘great head’ (loha-be) and ancestors; by association it is the direction of the senior generation and elder siblings. This set of cosmological architectonics played out in the spatial organization of houses, as the ‘elder branch’ was placed in the north and junior ‘branches’ in its south and west. (Thomas 1996: 123; 2007: 345.) It is important to note that among the Tsimihety, the higher-ranking places and people usually lived in the geographically lowest parts of the village, which, for example, in the case of Manantenina, was called the ‘flat land’ or ‘south’.

After Teresa and Ulrica were done with their morning tasks, they left for the school located in the neighboring village about 15 minutes’ walk away. The girls walked down the narrow path between the houses of Willy’s cousins, Mama ny Evan and Celeste, to the main village road, from where they had to further descend a bit before reaching the flat land of the village. In 2013 in Manantenina, there were two governmental elementary schools (EP1, l’enseignement fondamental) and the secondary school (EP2, l’enseignement fondamental du deuxième cycle) for children between 5–12 years old. However, Willy and Angelina preferred a private school that the people had organized themselves. Willy and Angelina considered that its quality of the education was better, because the parents paid the teachers directly and they could influence who the teacher was, unlike in state schools. In Willy and Angelina’s view, teachers in the government schools did not necessarily receive their salaries and therefore were not so keen to teach.

The main roads ran on a north-south axis. The main road of the village led to Mandena and another shorter parallel road was nearer the river. Along this shorter road one could find the communal meeting house, which was almost falling apart, and a flag pole. The weekly market (tsena) was organized along the road year-round on Tuesdays. The market gathered fewer sellers from March to June, as the vanilla harvests were sold in June and then people had more money to buy different things, such as cloths, pots and pans, clothes and other daily necessities.

Some of the houses in the village were organized along these two parallel roads running on north-south axis, a typical spatial arrangement organized by the French in Betsimisaraka and Tsimihety villages (for example, see Cole 2001: 5, 70; Nielssen 2012: 28; Wilson 1992: 57). Historically and also nowadays, people organized their houses around an elder (see, e.g., Keller 2005: 30).

Map 1: Manantenina village with rivers, roads, houses and flat land (not to scale). See Appendix 3 for a comparison.

Different clans sought to attach new people to them and houses marked these relations. People encouraged their kin to move into the same places with them (Chapter 3). For example, the relatives in the village further west from Manantenina where Willy’s father had been born requested Willy to move there. Although Willy knew that he had some land there, he stated, “Life is good for me here.” New people could also become attached through marriage. Ideally women were supposed to live with their husbands, while men were supposed to continue to work the land. For example, Willy’s sister’s husband Papa ny Mirama, who had wandered to the village some 15 years ago to look for work, had stayed with Willy’s sister’s family. He was

48 considered a jaloko, or ‘toy boy’, a man who lived in his wife’s yard. Cole (2010: 141; 2005: 892) has shown how political economic structures and dynamics, together with more traditional Malagasy ideas of labor, consumption and gender among the Betsimisaraka, have mediated and influenced the position of young men who have become jaombilo, men who are supported by girlfriends who gain their money from sex work. In spite of the fact that the terms jaloko and jaombilo refer to an ambiguous status of Malagasy men, I will show in Chapter 8 how a jaloko can be a successful and wealthy man in his wife’s place.

Houses as such are not simply physical structures. They are modified, moved and abandoned with the changing circumstances and structured ways of living of their inhabitants (Carsten 1995: 1). Importantly, a house society refers to people that do not group themselves by property, genealogy or residence; instead, house societies bring together antagonistic principles of alliance, descent, endogamy and exogamy governed by political consideration (Lévi-Strauss 1982; Carsten and Hugh-Jones 1995: 7–8). For example, house names or buildings highlight the ways in which the unity of antagonistic principles has been achieved (Carsten and Hugh-Jones 1995: 8; see also Bloch 1995; Chapter 6). I am not aware that the Tsimihety named their houses except by the name of the owner. However, the clan names informed about the clan ethos and unity of the clan.

The seven extended families or patrilineal clans (lakoro) of the village were named after its elder (for example, Jean Guilbert, a pseudonym) or after the ethos or values of their clan (for example, ‘many relatives,’ ‘at the fenced rock,’ or ‘don’t steal/rob.’20 The clan called ‘at the fenced rock’ wanted to highlight the solid love (fitiavina) between kin and their unbreakable, rock- like togetherness. Usually elders (tangalamena) were the ones who had the knowledge about the history and juniors were supposed to gain that knowledge through proper acts, such as behaving in morally correct ways (Cole 2001: 156, 160; see Chapter 6 about taboos). In general, for the people like the Tsimihety and the Betsimisaraka, who move and do not take any physical relics with them, ‘knowing the history’ (for example, ancestors’ names) has been needed in order to reconnect with ancestors (Cole 2001:

20 I did not write the Malagasy names of the clans in order to respect the informants’ privacy and anonymity. However, a person who knows Malagasy language or Tsimihety dialect can quite easily decipher some of the clan names.

156). Indeed, knowing one’s ancestors, often expressed by their places of living, showed that one belonged to that ancestry (Chapter 3). Different clans came together under the concept of fokon’olona, a grouping of people who were connected by the ancestors and the same place of living (fokontany) (Condominas 1961: 24). Today, the fokon-olona has an administrative function (Cole 2001: 59).

From that flat land, the oldest part of the village, the village had grown toward the north and the hillside in the west, where people had made terraces for their houses. Some of the house yards were decorated with a plant fence or thin trees, such as anamorongo (Moringa oleifera) with few flowers, hasina plants (Dracaena marginata), taro or vanilla lianas. Thicker grass vegetation, which mainly grew along the road side, was cut twice a year; this was organized by the villagers (fokon’tany). Only a few of the houses had satellite antennas on the roof, but the ones that did offered movie nights for 200 ariary. In 2016, however, when I visited the village briefly, more solar panels and antennas had appeared in the village because of the lucrative vanilla harvests. As the Malagasy state had not organized electricity, people did it themselves.

In Manantenina, the oldest houses were in the geographical southeast, not in the north. It is possible that those who had established the village had not imagined that the village would spread toward the western hillside; therefore, they had not been able to calculate the amount of people who would live in the village after a hundred years. However, this matter should be confirmed with the people.

The oldest houses belonged to the first-comers, who lived on the flat land. During the fieldwork, the people on the flat land debated who the original settlers were, the zafin-tany (‘the children of the land’). The zafin-tany were those who conserved the deep patrilineal history, whose ancestors were known to possess a vast territory, its development and a prosperous community of people who were named after the lova-be, the inherited land that could not be divided (see Chapter 8). In addition to zafintany, the Tsimihety used Betsimisaraka the term tompon-tany (‘the owner of the land’). (see also Engel 2008: 16–17.) In the 19th and the first half of the 20th century, the abundant forest resources of the northeast allowed people of slave descent to reestablish their relations with their ancestors and lands. Among the Betsimisaraka in the north of Masoala, the notion of the first- comer did not carry a special status; there were so many migrants and so few

50 long-term settlers that settlement patterns in this region did not follow practices like in other agricultural regions of Madagascar (Brown 2004: 627), for example, among the Betsileo (Evers 2002: 145), Merina (Bloch 1971: 106, Graeber 2007: 106–7) and Sakalava (Feeley-Harnik 1991: 22, 162–70). I highlight the necessity of understanding the historical dynamics of why the Tsimihety stressed the importance of zafin-tany. Since there is no more available land that people can clear for their fields, knowing one’s history has become relevant, revealing hierarchies between people.

One afternoon in June, Willy came to the house and stated: “Now it is settled, the Veril Auguste (a pseudonym) clan was the first one to settle in the village.” According to Willy, the Veril Auguste clan comprised the first settlers because their clan leader had been wise and they had cleared the most fertile and prosperous land on the flood plain on the opposite side of the river. In addition, they had settled near the river on the flat land. For Willy, it was clear that his family was not among the first settlers. His aunt and father had come to the village during the 1960s when the village was already well-settled. Willy’s father, although he had been successful in clearing vast lands for fields, those fields did not locate in the most fertile places near the village along with the flooding rivers (Chapter 3).

The term “first-settler” does not necessarily refer to the one who cleared the forest but the first to take responsibility for making that particular place and settlement prosperous. This included clearing and cultivating fields, managing social relations, taking care of ritual responsibilities and looking for a suitable place that allowed protection against other raiding groups. People found that the original settler had to be thanked because of his wisdom in choosing such a fertile and fortunate place and that the settler had allowed different people to come there. According to the villagers, if one organized a celebration or a ritual, one had to invite the original settler. “This way people give him the power,” Willy pointed out to me. Politically, this is an important notion. People gave power to the chief.

In general, in Madagascar, elders (tangalamena) mediate ancestral powers, for example, by observing taboos (fady) and asking for blessings (mijoro). One February afternoon, when the day’s humid heat had diminished, Willy and I found Guilbert, an elder of one of the village clans, in his roadside vanilla field, where he was planting new vanilla lianas and placing their tutors.

“Are you free now?” Willy asked a small, thin, elderly man who was bent over a vanilla sapling that he was planting in the soil. “Wait for a while,” said Guilbert, who lived most of his time in Andapa, 40 kilometers away from Manantenina, with his wife but came occasionally to the village to visit his children and work on his land. Although I had lived six months in the village, I had not met Guilbert before. “Where did you get the saplings?” Willy asked while we waited for him to finish his work. “My brother gave them to me.” He climbed up the small bank and looked at us and greeted Willy cheerfully: “Good to see you.” Willy shook his hand, smiling. We greeted each other also—“Mbolatsara” [“How do you do?”]—in Malagasy. He looked at me briefly and then turned to Willy again. “Let’s go sit in the shade,” I suggested, and we walked together, both Guilbert and Willy carrying their kiso, the jungle knives that all men carry when they move around, especially when they go to the forest. We sat down, legs crossed, in the shade of a huge tsararavina (Flagenium pedunculatum) growing at the bank of the junction of the two rivers. We had come to meet Guilbert because Willy considered that he was able to explain well to me what was mijoro, a ritual in which people asked for blessings from the god Zanahary, the deity who created the world. Guilbert was a tanglamena, an elder who was able to share his wisdom and knowledge for the younger generations.

In the shade, Willy started the discussion with kabary, the formal thanking and apologizing: “Thank you for receiving us today and we apologize that we are spending your time.” Guilbert answered by nodding and stated, “I am happy to see you here.” Willy introduced me: “This is Jenni. She is a student from afar, from Finland, and she studies Malagasy customs and about the park.” Willy continued: “She is interested in knowing about Malagasy customs and she wanted to know about mijoro. You know how to explain that well.” Guilbert smiled to Willy: “I am not sure.” Willy persuaded him: “Yes, you can.”

Guilbert looked at Willy when he talked: “Before (taloha) we didn’t get any rain, we had to sacrifice a cow (zebo) and zafintany, meaning a person went to the confluence of the two rivers, and he asked for blessing there.

Jenni: Why did you have to go to the confluence of the two rivers?21

Guilbert: Then we were able to reach the spirits along the two rivers. Nowadays people go to church so they don’t practice that customs like that much.22

The Manantenina River grew out of small streams coming from the Marojejy mountains. People in the villages remembered that Marojejy was a place of spirits because its caves and forests had offered a hiding area from colonialists who, according to historical memories, had treated Malagasy in a rude and impolite way. When I asked more specifically from Willy about the spirits, he explained:

Malagasy people believe that the Marojejy is a place where spirits called tsiny and lantany live. They [the spirits] take care of the forest. Other human-type creatures can live there, too. They are called kalanoro. They are believed to have the power to talk to ancestors.

To live in a good place meant that one needed to be willing to live and negotiate with human beings, spirits or ancestors, renewing those different social relationships. A good place had to have water, which supported people’s daily needs and enabled life in the fields. However, there were spirits in rocks, trees, water and land that one had to be aware of and live properly together with in order to live well (see also Chapter 6.)

Among the Tsimihety, places had power over people and places affected people (Nielssen 2011: 118). The place determined what kind of people were and who one was. The place was connected to what people did. For example, to walk a certain way on the sand when fishing defined who was a Vezo, and

21 See Thomas 1996: 22–3, 25 for a comparative case. 22 This excerpt was produced for Prof. Paul Stoller’s course, Ethnographical Writing, organized at the University of Helsinki in 2014.

53 the Zafimaniry who practiced swidden cultivation differed from the Betsileo practicing irrigated rice cultivation (Astuti 1995: 9; Bloch 1995: 90).

The typical question the Tsimihety asked me was: “Tamana?” (“Are you used to/habituated?”) By asking this, people wanted to know whether one was accustomed to the way of life in the village and not constantly missing (ngoma) home. The comparative notions among the Temanambondro have shown that the pull toward one’s relatives and kin can be strong, as many migrants emphasized how they were not tamana (“attached to a place”) where they lived, and how they felt a ‘longing’ (manina) for their family and relatives back home (Thomas 1996: 41). I think tamana was also a political question. It referred to whether one was comfortable with how people lived in a particular place and if one had accepted people’s ways.

In Madagascar, ancestors and fertile and prosperous places emanated hasina, an invisible essence or force influencing the lives of the living. For example, ancestral tombs were sites of hasina. In addition, hasina spread from specific rocks, trees, areas of land and in the water. The rocks in the Marojejy mountains, a big rock in the village near the river or a big tree—they could be called tsararavina or hintsi (Intsia bijuga) in Tsimihety dialect. A deep slope where the main paved road made a steep curve was hasina. In general, ancestors—those people who had been buried properly and whose bones rested in the ancestral tomb—had hasina powers that could guarantee people good fortune and a prosperous life.

People gave sacrificial gifts in return for the prosperity that ancestors and spirits ensured. In the south of the village, cow horns were placed on a post to exemplify the victory of the village football team the previous year. The villagers considered that this victory had been enabled by proper actions regarding the ancestors; before the game, people had gone with one of the first settlers to the sacred rock, a bigger rock standing out a bit from the other rocks at the river side because of its size and round shape, and had asked for a blessing. The result was that their team had won.

In general in Madagascar, ancestors have hasina that they have made and accumulated through mundane actions while they were alive, such as farming, building houses and taking care of children (Cole 2001: 136; Cole 1999: 203; see Chapter 3). Historical information of the Betsimisaraka swidden cultivators reveals that in every village there was usually a tree carved in the shape of bull horns, where sacrifices to the ancestors were made:

There was one jiro for each family, before which they prayed, performed circumcision and so forth. When the tribe from the north was defeated [in war], they no longer had a right to a jiro, and all their prayers were made to the jiro of the southerners, the victors. The jiro is like the altar of the tribe and a new one was created when the chiefs moved from one village to the next because the jiro could never be removed. (Cole 2001: 172, cit. Grandidier 1958: 69)

It was evident that marks in places such as houses, ritual places, tombs and fields remained in the land but people moved (Bloch 1995). By moving and rooting to a place, people extended their ancestral lands (Keller 2008: 651– 3; about work and rooting, see Chapter 3). Enslavement interrupted blessings. When people were taken as slaves, their ties to their ancestors were broken, because they no longer received blessings from their ancestors during the various familial rituals (Bloch 1971: 135; Nielssen 2011: 246).

The village tombs were located in a joint cemetery of Manantenina and its neighboring village on a hillside facing east to the Lokoho River. Generally, people visited cemeteries on All Saints’ Day on November 2, during the famadihana celebration, or when they had to bury someone. In addition, some clans visited tombs after they received a good vanilla harvest, giving thanks to their ancestors and gifts such as vanilla, rum and honey. According to the memory of the people, before 1969 people used to bury their dead on top of the high hills, where they placed coffins in tree branches. In local memories, the people themselves decided to change the place from the high hill to a lower one nearer the river.

Simply put, hasina is the capacity to act upon the world by imperceptible means, for good or for ill, to sustain oneself and others in life or to bring about their death. Embodied in objects, people and most especially ancestors, hasina is the power to constitute the social order or overturn it (Middleton and Cole 2001: 16). Also spirits embodied the possibility of creativity, action or growth, referred to as hasina (Graeber 1996: 16). Establishment of hasina reflected the establishment of a society, people and ruler joined in a mutual moral contract (Graeber 2007: 135).

However, places accumulated diverse processes of multiple elements from wider cultural and historical ﬁelds. A ‘poesis of place’ regards the village as a node of complex coherence through which people can experience and fashion the orderliness of the wider cultural and historical ﬁelds to which the

55 village is so diversely connected. Stasch’s (2013: 556, 560) ethnographic focus, the Korowai, expected a space to be a field of heterogeneity, through which it is normal to engage with difference. The Tsimihety are also a place- and space-focused people (see also similarities with the Temanambondro), for whom the village is not only an ancestral place but an area for various dynamics and processes.

2.3 Spaces of “unruly” people and desires for development

The name Tsimihety refers to a relationship with another group. For example, cutting of hair during the time of mourning of a king was expected in the Sakalava kingdom The French started to use the name Tsimihety in 1896–1900 when they installed Sakalava leaders (mpanjaka) as local rulers in Androna. The French had failed to understand the cultural historical context in which the Sakalava chiefs had actually sought refuge among the Vohilava. In the 18th century, Sakalava kings from the southwest of Madagascar conquered the western part of Madagascar and established two kingdoms, Boina in the north and Menabe in the south. Boina was occupied by two clans. The Zafinimena, known also as the Zafinbolamena (‘Grandchildren of gold’), had slowly been driving to the north the Zafinifotsy, known also as the Zafinbolafotsy (‘Grandchildren of silver’), a junior line with no living rulers, who were identified with the Antandrona (present-day Tsimihety) (Feeley-Harnik 1991: 26–27; Wilson 1992: 18). When the Zafinifotsy were pushed to the banks of the Sofia River, they requested asylum among the Vohilava. The Zafininifotsy were granted refuge as long as they did not make claims to any land.23 The Vohilava people considered themselves hierarchically higher to the Sakalava, who should have followed Vohilava rituals. (Wilson 1992: 17–24.) When the French made the Sakalava rulers local chiefs, they inverted the hierarchy and the people in Androna showed their dissatisfaction by not cutting their hair when a Sakalava ruler died.

23 Northwest Sakalava identity is essentially a political one and refers to those people who claimed Zafinimena royal ancestry. Songs sung for the Sakalava monarchs have highlighted how the Sakalava royalty enslaved people. (Feeley-Harnik 1982: 31.)

The Sakalava living in the west of Madagascar found the Tsimihety unruly, lazy and without dignity or taboos (Lambek 2002: 99–100). One of the main differences between the Tsimihety and the Sakalava was—and is—their social structure: the Tsimihety social structure has not supported the centralized royalty and hierarchical organization central to the Sakalava but autonomy of households, constant movement between expansive lineages and clan tombs gathering hasina.

The Tsimihety have had a history of fleeing from Merina state practices (Wilson 1992: 25). The hierarchical Merina kingdom was organized around services (fanompoana), sometimes called forced labor, which differed depending on one’s status in the hierarchy: free people served the sovereign while slaves served their masters (Graeber 2007: 43). During the period of French colonialism, Merina rulers often collaborated with colonialists, combining royal service with forced labor and taxes (Middleton and Cole 1999: 15). With the expansion of the Merina state, the French and the elite members of the ruling Merina group of the highlands had the authority to conscript Malagasy residents of other ethnicities, or people of the non-royal classes, for labor in public work projects, such as irrigated rice production, infrastructure construction or plantation agriculture (Campbell 2012; Larson 2000: 230–1). As the empire expanded, so did its labor requirements grow. With the increasing demand for labor on the neighboring plantation islands, Reunion and Mauritius, as they shifted over to the production of sugar, sharp conflicts arose. In 1825, the Merina state closed the slave ports that transported people from Madagascar to the developing plantations in Reunion and Mauritius in order to secure labor needs for their own empire- building. As a result, Creoles and the French from Mauritius, Reunion and Comoros attacked the Merina; in response, the Merina enslaved over 200,000 people between 1828 and 1840 (Campbell 1981). When people, such as the Betsimisaraka or those who became eventually the Tsimihety, fled, the Merina intensified their presence on the eastern coast by dividing territory into different districts, with each town governed by a fort used for political domination and successful commercial exploitation (Cole 2001: 40).

The Tsimihety did not think themselves as a unified political opposition but they had a common experience of the Merina and French rules, which they found unfair and oppressive (Wilson 1992: 25). In 1824, the people in Androna had accepted Merina rule. However, relations took a violent turn

57 as more and more people found it to be sadistic and unfair, and several Antandrona and Vohilava chiefs rebelled against the Merina. When their rebellions were savagely repressed, there were number of suicides by the Antandrona and Vohilava chiefs. (Wilson 1992: 21, cit. Grandidier 1958: 128, n. 1.) Indeed, during the period of French colonial rule from 1898 until 1960—a period that represents a particularly violent chapter of African colonial history, with an estimated 100,000 Malagasy deaths attributed to colonial actions (Cole 2001: 61).

The official designations of “ethnic groups” used by governmental organizations today were in fact socially and historically constructed during the colonial period. The classification of Madagascar’s population was part of a broader strategy of the French indirect rule or politique des races (Randrianja and Ellis 2009), where chiefs were appointed and identified with specific territories carefully defined by ethnic labels (Rakotondrabe 1993: 18; Cole 2001: 57–8). By the 1930s, the government had classified the island’s population into official ‘tribes’ and drawn maps to delineate their geographical boundaries (Randrianja and Ellis 2009), and ethnic identities became categorically and geographically fixed. Today, however, ethnicity has been understood as more fluid, something achieved through performance and livelihood activities, with adherence to taboos playing an important part in this process (Astuti 1995: 2; Bloch 1995: 90; Evers 2002: 12; Chapter 6 this thesis).

The mobility of the Tsimihety was problematic for the French state, whose interest was to locate people into ordered settlements in order to secure an adequate labor supply, to increase the possibilities of taxing and to control people’s movements. For example, the French passed laws that were intended to settle the Betsimisaraka into villages: the village was to be composed of no fewer than twenty people, each paying a personal tax, with no fewer than five groups of houses (Cole 2001: 54). Moreover, the French organized different clans in fokon’olona, a collective of people living in the same place, for example, in a village. According to historical accounts, the custom of fokon’olona practices, representing a system of peasant militias for public work purposes, was developed by the Merina ruler Adrianampoinimerina for the use of the Merina state. Communal institutions were reformed among the people under conquest, such as the Tsimihety, to integrate newcomers and outcasts into village structures, giving an identity in relation to the physical space that the people inhabited (fokon’tany) (Allen

2019). The term fokon’olona referred to “the people living in a particular place.” According to Betsimisaraka tradition that was relevant to the Tsimihety, it was more of a principle for collective decision-making than an institution, like a village council, as the French perceived it. However, during the first decades of French rule, the experiences of the east coast showed that the Betsimisaraka did not fulfill their administrative expectations like the Merina, who were customarily used to doing that. (Cole 2001: 59.)

Indeed, the problem from the government perspective was comprised of the people who could abandon their villages “for no apparent reason” (Wilson 1992: 37–8). For the French state, it was difficult to grasp that the work of construction and development projects required by French imperialism was regarded by the Tsimihety as oppression (see also Sharp 2002: 210).

As of 2016, the public administration in Madagascar was organized on five different hierarchical levels:

1. Six autonomous provinces, divided into 2. 22 regions comprised of 3. 117 districts with 4. 1,693 municipalities, including 5. 18,251 fokontany, an administrative subdivision closely related to the traditional Malagasy village administration (The World Bank 2017: 4).

Heads of these different entities were elected. For example, the heads of the provinces were selected by a provincial council, while the heads of fokontany were voted on by villagers (Marcus 2016: 154).

Picture 2. Manantenina village, rice fields and rivers

Today each village has its village head, who is appointed by village elections. The village head is supposed to take care of state-related information being announced to the whole village, if there are matters with different vanilla organizations or if there is a conflict to be resolved between people, such as someone’s cow or chickens eating a neighbor’s crops.

One could see the Tsimihety attitudes toward the state in the condition of government buildings. Interestingly, state administrative buildings—such as the communal village house and elementary school teacher’s house, which were supposed to be taken care of by the villagers—were in really bad shape: roof supports were falling apart, and constructions were literally leaning over with their roofs and walls full of holes. “It is the village’s responsibility to take care of these houses,” the preliminary school teacher, who lived further west in another village, pointed out to me. “So why do people not take care of them?” I inquired. “Nobody wants to,” he replied. In general, people felt that if they paid taxes, the state (referring to the people in leadership positions, making decisions) would just use them for its own ends, not for the people. Even the elected village chief was suspected of this, and people blamed her for not being able to organize people to work together and not concentrating on village matters.

The Tsimihety understanding of power challenged the Hobbesian view of the modern European state as the only facilitator of peace. Sovereign

European power guaranteed peace by a monopoly of violence (Weber and Dreijimanis 2008: 156). In Clastres’ (1977: 29–31) view, power is not created by oppression and military actions but through constant exchanges between the chief and his people. In Clastres’ example, among the Amerindians, the main task for the chief was to maintain peace and harmony, usually through generous acts of giving (see Chapters 6 and 8). Graeber (2007: 50–1) has noted that to be Malagasy means rejecting entanglement in relations of command as far as it is practical to do so. The more that someone aspired to be seen as a legitimate figure of authority in a rural community, the more they would avoid to appear be publicly giving orders (Chapter 8 for ritual authority).

On the contrary, church activities were popular. People organized collective work in different churches (e.g., Catholic, Protestant (FJKM) and Adventist). Some offered their land for church buildings, some offered wood for construction and almost everybody brought food for various collective events. In contrast to tromba possession, the people who went to churches considered their services to be modern (Nielssen 2011: 255). Anthropologists have noted that in order for a new religion to become popular, it has to be sensible; in other words, it must make sense with the cultural frame of reference (Robbins 2004: 9). I did not investigate people’s relationships with churches, but I visited different churches and their events. I also discussed with people about church practices, especially FJKM ones, which Willy and Angelina occasionally participated in. I got the sense that church activities were recreated according to existing sociality emphasized by ancestral customs as people were, for example, eager to learn new knowledge and curing practices in order to renew their positions in the church hierarchy. However, confirming this point would require further investigation.

Historically, the Malagasy have interpreted Christianity as either a promise for development or a threat that goes against the way of the ancestors. In the 19th century, the head of the Merina state, Radama I (1810–1828), converted to Christianity and welcomed the London Missionary Society to educate Merina nobles. He abandoned the state rituals and performances based on idols and blessing of water, which were used to connect individual descent groups in the highlands. Following European military fashion in 1822, Radama cut his hair, which had traditionally been plaited, symbolizing how the king gathered diverse rural communities together like the plaits on his

61 head. People in the highlands usually cut the hair of captured slaves, and Radama’s style represented subordination and social disrespect, even calling into question the political order of his kingdom (Larson 2000: 5–6). Radama I’s actions embraced strangers, and the people devoted to Malagasy customs were worried that he replaced the powers and blessings of the Merina ancestors with Christian ones (Bloch 1986: 19). Radama’s successor, Queen Ranavalona, formally forbade the practice of Christianity among her subjects in 1835. The tension came to a head in the so-called menalamba or “Red Shawls” movement, which reacted to the French occupation in 1896. The Red Shawls aimed to expel the French and to restore ancestral customs; in doing this, the movement was not only anti-European but also violently anti-Christian (Keller 2005: 38).

Although state practices have created experiences of oppression, on the other hand, people have also welcomed its presence. When one continues along the main road toward the south, one passes by small kiosks where one can buy soap, oil, biscuits, sugar and salt. The main road of the village ends in the south of the village at the parking lot, the place where taxi brousses, usually packed with people, stop to drop off or take on passengers. As the villagers referred to the place, this was the south (atsimo) and busiest (maresaka ‘busy’) part of the village, where women and girls sold small cakes (mofo), fried bananas and fruits in season. There were a few small bars, shops and people wandering around (midendra) and men used to gather in the morning and talk about their plans for the day or recent news. In general, it is a bustling, busy and lively place usually considered prosperous (see Chapter 6 for divisions between the living and the dead).

Map 2. A map of the landscapes of the Sambava-Andapa and Lokoho valleys (Madagascar Vegetation Mapping Project by Kew Gardens, Missouri Botanical Gardens and Conservation International).

The infrastructure created a sense of development and possibilities. From the perspective of the Malagasy state and transnational organizations, the paved road connecting the mountains and coast was supposed to support development, progress and business with better access to natural resources, markets and transportation facilities (World Bank 2006). The road was built by a European development fund project (1962–1967). Some years earlier, in 1947, an airport had been established in Andapa in order to facilitate faster transportation of agricultural products to the capital, since it was the center of distribution (Laney 1999: 29). The road connected the coastal town Sambava with the airport, port and road connections to the south and north on the coast, as well as Andapa, known for its fertile rice valleys on the mountains. At the same time, the road allowed a more accelerated and intensifying presence of state officials and transnational agents in the rural landscapes of northeastern Madagascar.

The road led to visible divisions between those who conducted business and cultivated for their subsistence, those who were able to travel and those who stayed most of the time in the village. In addition, the paved road with trucks delivering wood or petroleum, for example, taxi brousses transporting people, a few smaller cars and motorbikes and people walking on its side

63 brought a constant sense of strangeness and imaginations that there was something elsewhere and outside Tsimihety places. Roads elicit powerful temporal imaginaries, holding out the promise (or threat) of future connectivity, while also articulating the political and material histories that often render these otherwise mundane spaces so controversial (Dalakoglou and Harvey 2012: 460). The road also signified concrete danger, due to the possibility of an accident because of the speeding cars and motorbikes. Parents hurried their smaller children further toward the bank, away from the road, when they heard vehicles approaching. Moreover, in the village, not everyone liked that vazaha—like me—were living there. In the beginning of my stay, one of Willy’s aunts said abruptly, “Now we have vazaha living in the village,” remarking that the people found it weird that strangers were living now in the same places and households as the Tsimihety.

As the villages were connected to infrastructure, mobility and elsewhere, for the Tsimihety the village also reflected modernity and possibilities for development. The people who lived in the village regarded the people living in the forest as more inclined toward fomba (customs), and they characterized them as not wanting to educate their children in government schools, walking barefoot, using leaves as medicine and being interested in tromba possession. The oscillation between the two kinds of ways of life reveals plural, contradictory and mutually implicated values (Stasch 2013: 565; see Chapter 8).

The Tsimihety also longed for the presence of the state. “The Malagasy state has forgotten us,” the Tsimihety would sigh, especially when looking at the government schools’ walls, full of holes, and the crooked roofs that let the rain in. At the same time, people complained about the teaching quality in the government schools and the lack of possibility to decide about the teaching, its content and the teachers. Interestingly, the state was actually more present than before, because of the intensified environmental conservation efforts implemented according to environmental action plans planned in the 1990s and orchestrated by different transnational and national organizations (see Chapter 5).

2.4 …And movement continues

Although the village was regarded as a good place, the villagers started to experience it as a declining one. The land on the hillsides looked tired (reraka)24 and red (mena), and the harvests on the hillsides were not good. People remembered that about 15 years ago, the fallow cycle used to be about seven years, but nowadays, because of the lack of land, the cycle was only three to four years, and sometimes just two. Indeed, I found that some hill rice fields that had been burned during my fieldwork in 2013 were burned again in November 2016, when I briefly visited the village. Villagers always compared how little land they had in relation to people in the neighboring villages, who got good and successful harvests. Willy used to admire the people living in the village closest to the park. In his opinion, they looked so healthy and strong because of the nice foods they ate and because of the fresh air they breathed, near the forest. In addition, the people complained that there was too little water in the river and it looked dirty. Some felt also that the air in the village was too dusty, like in the cemeteries where the dead were buried. Indeed, I experienced that my mouth started to dry out and it was difficult to breathe when Mama ny Rocco and her cousin cleaned the bones of one of their ancestors, whom they went to thank after a lucrative vanilla harvest. Lastly, there were accusations of witchcraft, which in comparative ethnographic cases have resulted in certain villages being abandoned (see Chapter 6 about witchcraft; see also Stasch 2013: 566). I think these signs and experiences have started to show that the village is decaying. However, I do not think that this was anything new for the Tsimihety, who were used to moving from place to place. Comparative observations among the Kantu’ swidden cultivators in West Kalimantan has noted how processes of decaying and rebirth are present in Kantu’ cosmologies and subsistence cultivation (Dove 1998: 28–32). Yet, one new thing was that because of Marojejy National Park, there did not remain any more new forest that could be cleared for fields. What can people do when the national park restricts movement?

In 2013, Willy had earned money from vanilla and he had plans to buy some land in the hamlet along the river. In 2016, when I briefly visited the village, he had bought the land and bricks for the foundation of his new house; the walls were already built. His new place was situated near the road leading

24 See Chapter 3 for the meaning of this word.

65 to the park on the peninsula and it had a small hill. As I have pointed out in this chapter, flat lands with a hill nearby were considered especially fruitful and prosperous by the Tsimihety. Willy was clearly on the move to live a good life.

2.5 Conclusions

In this chapter I have discussed that the Tsimihety are place- and space- focused people. Certain social relations, dynamics and processes have become meaningful and valued through spatial relations and categorizations, such as water, hills, valleys and flat lands. A good place was a place on the peninsula, reaching toward the confluence of the two rivers. Fertile lands were filled with humus from the hillsides, located in the valleys or flat lands prone to flooding. People were very aware of the various landscapes, their features and soil, as well as the flows of rain, water and earth.

I have shown that the movement of the Tsimihety was not random but organized in relation to cosmological understandings about orientations and directions where ancestors and their tombs, and kin and their houses located. These places were also the sites that gathered dispersed and moving people. The villages were sites for different people and multiple heterogeneous dynamics, including state and development projects. A forest represented a space of customs, where it was historically possible to avoid the presence of the state. People’s movements between villages and forests marked a way of living with plural values; on one hand, they reflected being open toward development and, on the other, safeguarding the ancestral way of living. I have highlighted that the reference to a good place by a Tsimihety man in the beginning of the chapter was also a political claim, suggesting that ancestors found the place and made it prosperous; it thus became the place of the Tsimihety as well as the place of the man’s clan. Despite of the emphasis on the Tsimihety autonomy, I have highlighted that the Tsimihety have been willing and interested in collaborating with foreigners. Even the name of the group was given by the French. However, Tsimihety movement and dynamics have to be understood in relation to political-historical and political-economic contexts (see also Gregory 2018). From the 19th century onwards, the Tsimihety have fled from the Merina as well as the colonial French states. In addition, they have not subjected themselves to other Malagasy kingdoms, such as the Sakalava,

66 who have called the Tsimihety unruly. The Tsimihety showed their disrespect toward different states and authorities that they found historically oppressive, violent and unfair. On the other hand, the Tsimihety knew that for example the French or the Malagasy state could bring development, technologies and lucrative opportunities. Although a busy village marked a possibility for a successful modern life and developments, one had to be able to navigate in the daily social texture that people did not find always simple. Finally, I have shown that some Tsimihety places, such as villages, are not staple but they can decay. However, processes of decaying and renewal are nothing new to the Tsimihety who have been used, for example, to swidden cultivation. In the next chapter, I also focus on Tsimihety land relations, which are relevant for subsistence production but also for defining social relations and hierarchies.

3. In ancestral lands: Temporalities, work and Boky Mena

Willy was conscious that he had to organize a secondary burial (famadihana) for his aunt, from whom he had inherited some of his rice field lands. As he was discussing with Angelina when and how they were perhaps able to organize the feast, he started to tell me how his father and his aunt [the father’s sister] had come to the village. When Willy’s father was a young man, he had come to Manantenina from the Bealanana region. His sister was already living in the village. Willy explained:

My father came here to visit his sister. The sister told him to clear some forest (atiala) for himself and the father went to Antsahabehasina (‘the place with many hasina plants’) and cleared the land (tany) there. We [Willy and his brother and sisters] inherited his land.

The narrative of Willy’s father and sister informed of ways siblings related with each other also by living in the same places. The sister [Willy’s aunt] had looked for money or fortune (mitady vola) in a new place, and after settling the sister had attracted her brother [Willy’s father] to come to the place and live there. The brother had cleared forest for fields, gotten married and had children. After the brother’s death, his children had inherited his land. The brother’s sister, who had no children, had left her land to Willy because, according to him, “I am a man and I am expected to continue working with land, while my sisters would be married and live with their husbands.” In this chapter, I ask what kinds of social relations and practices are related with land and what these relations and practices inform about the kind of life valued by the Tsimihety. I argue that the notion of ancestral land was “a total social fact,” requiring activities that organized practices and institutions throughout the society, being at once economic, legal, political, religious and so forth, to “give expression at the same time” (Mauss 2002 [1925]: 3). The Tsimihety way of life was made through various practices, such as movement, working in rice fields, building, having children and caring for them, and maintaining prosperous social relations through rituals.

Making and maintaining ancestral land required work (asa). In general, work referred to every kind of domestic labor, for example, cooking and taking care of children, but also to different cultivation work, such as cutting wood and building houses and organizing and practicing rituals (on

68 commensality and nurturing, see Chapter 6). On the basis of feminist substantivist approaches, anthropologists have pointed out that this kind of work cannot be separated from the “instrumental action of economic production” (Hardt and Negri 2000: 293), but separation itself has to be treated as an ideological construction. Researchers should look at how inequalities and accumulation are produced in processes in which divisions are constructed and economic diversity has been represented as a totalization (Bear et al. 2015; Tsing 2015: 65–6).

Rice cultivation was regarded as a traditional ancestral work (asa ny fombandrazana), and it created an everyday texture of rural Tsimihety life. Rice was the main form of subsistence and its cultivation was a strong focus: people planned, organized, planted, harvested and stored rice. Rice cultivation also included ritual activities and moral evaluations. By cultivating rice in new places, people expanded their ancestral lands.

Work in rice fields organized and was organized by different temporalities informing about relations and the dynamics of and with ecologies, the state system focused on production, and kin and clan members (Munn 1992). Rice cultivation enabled the reproduction of long-term kin relations and the maintaining of social organization. It also reflected the histories of people and their ways of settlement, movement and ways of working. At the same time, rice cultivation rooted people to the land and a particular place, creating a relationship with the future, strengthening ones that already existed and breaking away from others. Methodologically speaking, temporalities are relevant. Padoch (1998: 8–12, 16) has shown that in West Kalimantan, Dayak swidden cultivators did not replicate a crisis narrative when they overused their swiddens. Instead, they had long-term plans, as they were in a process of transforming their landscapes from swiddens into irrigated rice fields. For example, the over farming of a certain swidden produced the necessary subsistence while making permanent plots.

Different works were also divided according to gender, comprising hard or heavy (mavesatra) and soft (malemy) works, highlighting a range of ways how people should work with various materials, objects and modes of being. When the Tsimihety divided work in gendered terms and described male and female works with metaphors of hard and soft, they not only referred to materials that people worked with but also the more dominant divisions of social organization. Gendered divisions were relevant in the reproduction of households, and they informed about ancestral lands and places with tombs,

69 where people of the same clan would be buried in accord with patrilineal logic. Moreover, if the Tsimihety did not have rice to eat and significant social relations, they considered life hard (see Chapter 8).

In the case of the Tsimihety, the ability to show one’s relations to the land was evident in one’s status. In Madagascar people who did not have their own piece of land and were not able to show their ancestry were considered slaves, or “lost people” (Brown 2004; Graeber 2007; Feeley-Harnik 1982). Among the Tsimihety, people tended to claim that people had land. However, those people who were unable to work on their land or organize the work needed for subsistence production were considered “sad people” (olo malahelo). Cole (2010: 47) has reminded that malahelo means more than just sad; it also connotes the bitterness and resentment that Tamatavians in a port town on the eastern coast—the focus of her study—say they feel when mistreated because they were considered poor. Quite often these feelings have been connected to money. Cole’s examples vary from a boy being publicly mocked by his teacher because he did not have a ruler to the more opaque dynamics that produced this sentiment, such as, for example, when a man went into a store and tried to order something but was ignored and served last because his clothes, shoes or demeanor betrayed his poverty. Sad people informed about social inequalities and hierarchies (Chapter 8).

Working people not only produced their subsistence but work produced them. Different kinds of works were morally evaluated and by working, people also showed what they cared about and what they found valuable. The Tsimihety constantly evaluated each other’s work, whether one was working or not and in what ways. By working, people created and maintained their significant social relations (kin, neighbors, friends, ancestors) and also their relations with the land. In the end, these relations were ultimately strengthened, thereby becoming more sustainable, like ancestral tombs (see also Bloch 1995).

Work was also organized by means of socio-political organization and power (Bloch 1971). In more hierarchical systems, such as that of the Sakalava, work referred to a royal service (fanompoana), a ritual that supported the kingdom’s well-being and showed people’s political loyalty to the ruler (Feeley-Harnik 1991: 5). Among the Merina, in return for people’s loyalty, the ruler ensured the prosperity and well-being of his or her people (Bloch 1986). The Tsimihety organized people into clans according to their patrilineal descent. Those who belonged to a clan would be buried

70 in the same ancestral tomb and, consequently, determined who had rights to land. Understanding this organization reveals why the concept of “ancestral lands” was so relevant in national politics in 2009 (see also Vinciguerra 2013).

In general, the Tsimihety refer to life as “hard,” meaning that it is not easy and one has to work a lot in order to maintain one’s place. The metaphor of “heavy” or “hard” is familiar in ethnographies of Madagascar, highlighting harsh and demanding ancestral relations and enduring obligations (Cole 2001: 156). In addition, the past can be weighty in terms of historical experience, knowledge and the ways of life that people have to bear (Lambek 2002: 4). However, ancestral ways or ancestral work are not something that the Malagasy have always practiced; ancestral work has evolved in relation to French policies and practices (Feeley-Harnik 1984).

Ethnographies of Madagascar have noted that successful farming and social reproduction have depended on ancestral blessings. As more children were born in a place where a family or kin group migrated, that place became increasingly imaginable as tanindrazana (‘land of the ancestors’) (Bloch 1971: 105–14; Keller 2008). Clearing forests for fields, building houses, having children and establishing tombs are relevant for the creation of Tsimihety ancestral lands. These processes are relevant among the different people in Madagascar (Deschamps 1959; Bloch 1995; Cole 2001: 155; Feeley-Harnik 1991; Keller 2008; Thomas 1996). By these practices, people do two things: they ‘mark’ their land (Bloch 1995) and they ‘root’ themselves to new land (Keller 2008). In this chapter, I focus on practices of ‘rooting,’ namely, practices creating longer-term relations to the land and, at the same time, to kin, neighbors, friends, owners and workers, as well as one’s ancestral tomb.

Despite the relevance of ancestral land, however, the Tsimihety have been open to new technologies and developments. With ethnographical data, I show that the Tsimihety farmers were not only fleeing from imperial French and Malagasy states, but they looked for ways how to engage with its projects. Yet, different states’ violent and enforcing practices have created suspicious relations with the Tsimihety. Li (2007: 280) has shown how marginalized peasants are not seeking a revolution, a discussion highlighted in peasant studies, but actually finding ways of negotiating and relating to a state and different development programs, so that they would be recognized as valuable assets for their country. The Tsimihety documented their

71 significant social relations in Boky Mena, originally established by Ratsiraka’s socialist vision during the 1970s, consisting of funeral contributions. Boky Mena revealed the Tsimihety values of equality, solidarity and reciprocal exchange. On the other hand, socio-economic stratification has also been accepted by the Tsimihety (Laney 2015: 822).

3.1 Rice cultivation: Temporalities and work

The Tsimihety focus on rice cultivation throughout the year. People have two types of rice fields: irrigated (tany ny bary) and hill rice (horaka). Irrigated rice fields, located in valleys between multiple hills and near flood plains along river banks, are cultivated twice a year: The principal season (taona) is from December to June and the counter season (ririna) from August to December. On the other hand, preparations for hillside rice cultivation start in November and December, when males slash a suitable fallow (savoka) and, after slashing, burn it. According to cultivators before (taloha), the fallow cycle used to be seven years but nowadays the cycle is only from two to four years, revealing land degradation25 but also possibly landscape transformation, as Padoch and others (1998) have reminded.

Rice cultivation practices structure Tsimihety temporalities, the ways according to which experiences and actions are related with a certain time. The cultivation cycle of the irrigated rice fields start around the turn of the year (according to the Gregorian calendar), as people prepare mondra,26 young rice that is sown tightly together and transplanted about two weeks old. Willy and Angelina soaked the rice in the water, put it in a plastic rice bag and lifted the bag onto the kitchen roof for a few days so that it would become warm (mafana). Heat helped the rice to sprout more easily. I never saw how mondra was planted, despite my requests. One possibility is that people did not want show their rituals or my presence could have ruined

25 I am not answering the question what causes agricultural intensification. However, I note that land-use intensification has been explained by population growth (Holden and Otsuka 2014), producing greater social complexity without significant technological or political change (agricultural involution) (Geertz 1963), raising production at the cost of more work (Boserup 1965) and leading to different trajectories, some of which support reforestation (Laney 2002: 723). 26 Mondra is transplanted perhaps three weeks or one month later during ririna and two weeks later during taona.

72 them. A historical bit of evidence from Madagascar’s highlands has shown that the last handful of mondra had to be carried home by the shortest route and then placed in the northeast corner of the house where the family charm and offerings for the ancestors were kept. If this was not done, the harvest would fail. (Linton 1927: 656.) Among the Betsimisaraka, the hill rice cultivation cycle (tavy) started with asking for a blessing from the ancestors (Sodikoff 2012: 144). Through these practices, people looked to ensure a good harvest and people’s well-being. By rice cultivation, people not only structured the cultivation year but also social relations with ancestors that would ensure a good life for the people.

Mondra was transplanted between January and March, a period known also as fanitsahana27 (‘working time’) or maitso ahitra (‘green grasses’), referring to the hot and humid rainy season when plants and trees stretch their branches and leaves toward pathways, making them even narrower than before. This is also the time when vanilla fields need to be cleaned from fast- growing vegetation so that the vanilla plants can have some air and light. This is the season when people tend to move to forest and live closer to their fields (mijono) in order to avoid the crossing of flooding streams and rivers and be able to work on their fields requiring attention because of fast growing grasses.

During the principal season (la saison principale), rice harvests are almost double that of the season between August and December, known also as the counter season (la culture de contra saison), when there is not so much rain and temperatures are milder. For example, Willy’s uncle Vincent, who had rice fields on the flood plain near the village, estimated that one hectare of rice field gave 200 bags of rice during the principal season and 100 bags of rice during the counter season.

The hillside rice cycle starts around the end of October or November, when people clear their land and burn the forest. Papa ny Dikiny, living in one of the neighboring villages, burned his hillside right next to the village in mid- November, together with his son Kevin, a secondary-school student. The field had been fallow for three years, which was too short of a cycle, as I learned. “It is better that the fallow cycle is five or seven years,” Papa ny

27 The term hitsana refers to a footprint (http://malagasyword.org/bins/teny2/hitsaka), as well to an understanding and practices that leave marks (see Bloch 1995).

Dikiny clarified. A week before, I had seen on the hillside a collective work group (riaka) slashing the plants and small trees of the fallow (savoka), clearing the hillside borders from vegetation with sharp-pointed spades, so that the fire would not escape to other people’s cultivations and fallows. Hasina28 plants, regarded as sacred because of their red color, had been planted in some corners of the field to mark the land’s borders.

On the hillside, Papa ny Dikiny and his son started the fire from the downhill side because the wind blowing from the south would direct the fire uphill. The wind was favorable and in a few hours the field was burned. “The ash fertilizes the land,” Papa ny Dikiny pointed out (see also Linton 1927: 655). Indeed, the fire fertilizes certain types of soil, but if tavy has been repeated several times in the same place, it leads to a reduction of nutrients (Kull 2004: 75, cit. Brandt and Pfund 1998).

Historically, swidden cultivation together with population growth has been demonized as the main cause of deforestation (see Chapter 5). However, during the colonial period from 1895 to 1925, almost three-quarters of the primary forest was cleared due to the state’s economic objectives (Jarosz 1993: 375). To make the degradation narrative more complicated, researchers have noted that policies and changes in commodity prices have stimulated booms in the cultivation of cash crops and associated forest loss (Scales 2014: 106). In order to construct a more holistic narrative of swidden cultivation, Pollini (2010) has encouraged combining knowledge of different fields of science (ecology, paleontology, archeology, anthropology and political ecology); I support this idea, although in this work I limit the discussion to anthropology and political ecology.

After Papa ny Dikiny’s field was burned, we sat on the hilltop and looked quietly at the village and the hillsides behind it, as was the custom (fomba) (see also Bloch 1995). The following week, Papa ny Dikiny returned to the hillside, together with Kevin and one more man. They had about meter-long wooden sticks to make a hole in the smooth land, in which they then dropped rice from a small leather bag tied around their waist. In February, Papa ny Dikiny weeded the field once. “It would be good to weed it twice, but people

28 Madagascar Dragon Tree; syn. Dracaeana marginata named for its reddened leaf margins (KEW Science 2019).

74 do not usually have time to do that,” he explained. A month later, they harvested the field.

On another hillside, an elderly couple Papa ny Nelson and his wife Soahita, who was Willy’s father’s cousin, harvested their hillside rice in May, together with their three children, Papa ny Nelson’s sister and a neighbor. Each held a small knife in their hand with which they cut the grain and put it in a small bag tied around their waist. They stored the rice in a small granary next to the field. To store the rice next to one’s field was a vanishing practice, and nowadays people were worried that someone would steal the rice (for historical information, see Linton 1927: 658).

The different names of the seasons for the Tsimihety are the following:

Fanitsahana: “working time” in an irrigated rice field during January– March.

Maitso ahitra: “green weeds,” a rainy season in January–March, when hillside rice fields are weeded and vanilla fields slashed from fast-growing ground vegetation

Ranokelilalana: “a small deep river,” a two-week period in the end of April when there is not enough and the new harvest in not in yet

Fijinjana: harvesting time, usually during May–June

Taona / ririna: the two seasons when irrigated rice is produced

taona (principal season) Plants January February March April May June July cultivated Ranokeli Rice planting planting weeding harvesting “land is -lalana (varies) harvesting free,” rice field “land rests” Vanilla growing harvesting and drying fruit Coffee flowering flowering time time Clove flowering flowering time time Banana fruiting fruiting fruiting fruiting fruiting no fruit no fruit time time time time time Fruits jackfruit, oranges bread generally not too many coconut in fruit types of fruit, winter between February season January and and February March, sugarcane and mangoes Hill rice weeding, weeding harvesting harvesting during the (mitsongo (mitsongo weeding vary) vary) time people gather anantsindra for food

ririna (counter season)

Plants August September October November December cultivated

Rice planting planting weeding harvesting harvesting (varies) rice field

Vanilla From the end of flowering pollination pollination pollination August: flowering

Coffee flowering time harvesting harvesting harvesting harvesting

Clove flowering time harvesting harvesting harvesting harvesting

Banana fruits but not fruits but fruits but fruits but fruits but too many not too not too not too not too many many many much

Fruits mango mango, pineapple, pineapple, peanuts litchi, litchi coconut

Hillrice slashing slashing burning burning and and planting planting

Table 1: The most important plants cultivated and the various work phases.

The French terms la saison principale and la season contre organized the year according to the size of the harvests. This naming system reveals that the French regarded Madagascar as a source of resources for capitalistic production and imperialist efforts (Campbell 2005). Often these kinds of practices were organized according to a metric system and precise clock time of mise en valeur projects, bringing Madagascar’s land under capitalist production (Sodikoff 2012: 5–6, 61). Bear (2016: 488) has reminded that various timescapes and maps offer anthropologists possibilities for understanding diversity and heterogeneity. Indeed, the Tsimihety operated with their traditional seasonal names when referring to work that was carried

77 out during a particular time, showing how the ecologies were seen from the rice cultivators’ perspective.

In addition to the different seasons, different plants were important for the Tsimihety in marking time. As we were walking along the village road, returning from her field where we had been planting rice, she recalled the timing of the establishment of the rice fields near the village flood plain:

Coffee fields were transformed into rice fields a long time ago (efaela) because there was a liana called antaka29 that had invaded little parts of the coffee fields. It could not be eaten by humans. This is what I was told.

Mama ny Rocco’s account informs of knowledge being passed from one generation to another.

The Tsimihety made sense of what was going on in their environment and landscapes through signs (Bloch 1991). People described their degrading environment with concepts such as red (mena), referring to little vegetation, or tired (reraka). “Reraka?” Papa ny Sarina, Willy’s good friend who lived on a hillside a bit above Willy’s house and also worked occasionally as a cook in the park, winced as I had tried to explain how tired I had been after several days of a stomach ache. He listened as I fumbled with words and then felt it necessary to correct me. “Reraka refers to someone who is lying on a bed just waiting to die,” he clarified. Similarly, “tired land” was clearly so tired that it did not produce anything.

The locations and positions of fields were significant for the cultivation of different plants. When walking from Willy’s vanilla fields after working there for a short while in the morning, Willy pointed at some hillsides toward the south, from which most of the sunlight and heat radiated: “These fields are well positioned.” He continued: “There should not be too many tall trees near rice fields, because they would shade too much. However, vanilla requires shade.” On the other hand, some lower parts of the valley were too wet (leny) and cold (manintsy), because water tended to gather there. Rice

29 This is the cow pea or beach pea (Vigna marina).

78 did not grow well in wet and cold. “Rice requires hot (mafana) land. If there is water all the time, the land does not get hot,” Willy instructed me.

Different signs, experiences and processes informed about coming harvests, fruits and, for example, rains. Common knowledge among the Tsimihety cultivators was that if there were many mangos, it meant that vanilla would have many flowers. Another bit of well-known wisdom was that if there were many lychees, there would not be that many oranges. As anthropologists and ethnobotanists have pointed out, people are intimately aware of different types of soils, water flows, light and the temperatures of the environments they cultivate, as well as what kinds of conditions growing different plants require (Iskandar and Ellen 2000; Kull 2004: 150–2; Scott 1998: 275–9).

Indeed, the Tsimihety had profound knowledge about the landscape and the places which are suited for vanilla production. While pollinating flowers with his wife in his vanilla field on the peninsula on the other side of the Lokoho River, Papa ny Georges, one of the biggest producers in the village, explained:

The land on the peninsula is very smooth. Vanilla produces there long fruits that sprout well and weigh a lot. Grains are not that good. The weight diminishes after collecting and there are very few grains inside the fruit. It is cooler on the hills than on the peninsula. Coffee does not grow well on hills because the coolness. There is also enough rain for vanilla in the hills because it is near the forest and vanilla produces full, round grains.

This kind of information is built on a long history of settlement and work. Papa ny Georges explained that his father was known in the village for his knowledge about vanilla and its cultivation. His father used to explain cultivation practices to people if someone was interested, and Papa ny Georges has continued his father’s work. (Mölkänen 2019: 90–1.)

Evans-Pritchard (1940: 104; 1939: 135) suggested that oecological time refers to those objects, events and practices that people themselves find valuable and that have particular significance for them. The selection of points of reference for activities in the oecological rhythm are determined by the significance which these natural changes have for human activities. For the Tsimihety, rice cultivation activities and different ecological

79 processes (e.g., water flows, rain, temperatures) comprise “rhythms” of basic activity cycles, such as daily movements to the fields, the forests and the river, and the seasonal differences between rainy and hot and cooler and drier seasons (see also Mauss 1950). In this sense, time is understood as a motion or process, rather than static units or concepts functioning to reckon time (Munn 1992: 96).

For the Tsimihety, everything is a result of Zanahary’s plans, as the god was creative in putting together such a system that supported or enabled life for different kinds of beings. Only a deity was capable of doing that kind of work, which human beings did not have any control over (for a comparison, see Walsh 2010: 110). God’s work (asa ny Zanahary) was relevant during ranokelilalana, when people had eaten their rice from the previous season and were waiting for their new harvests to ripen. Instead of eating plates full of rice, people tended to prepare breadfruit between the midday and evening meals; in this way, they regulated the small amount of rice left before the harvest.

However, the Tsimihety do not observe and reckon time only in relation to plants and trees; they also reckon time in relation to their life histories and events. Willy’s cousin Vincent, a rice and vanilla cultivator and engaged Adventist, remembered when the rice fields next to the village were established: “When I came back to the village [after living in the western part of Madagascar] these irrigated rice fields were already here.” He had inherited his lands from his father, and he continued cultivating them. Another village elder, Naja reckoned that his father had had fields in the Marojejy mountains. However, the father had left his fields in the Marojejy area before being asked by the French state conservation officials. Naja remembered this because his father’s mother was not anymore together with her first husband at that time. Here, time-telling is operationalized by formulating a conjunction or synchronization between the reference point and the event to be located (Munn 1992: 96, 102, 116).

Moreover, the dwelling perspective captures landscape as an enduring record of—and testimony to—the lives and works of the past generations who have dwelled within it and who have left there something of themselves. Landscape enfolds stories and practices of those who have lived and built landscapes before. (Ingold 1993: 152.) Moreover, the act of remembering is always related to the landscape of memory, which is a metaphorical terrain

80 defining how difficult or easy it is to remember socially defined events (Cole 2001: 289). Mnemonic devices organize remembering and memory (Wassmann et al. 2011: 57). However, categorizations of temporalities are never stable but continuously negotiated and worked out. The concept of poesis, referring to making, creative production, craft or artistry, has regarded time as a motion or process, not static units or concepts functioning to reckon time (Lambek 2002: 15–6).

People did not merely objectify time by observing different signs and processes; their time-telling operated through experiences that are meaningful in their cultural texture. For example, in addition to being a metaphor, temporality is also a condition, feeling or experience. Willy, who had inherited some of the rice fields from his aunt, had promised to organize a secondary burial (famadihana) for her. Willy started to become really anxious, as seven years after her death came closer. It started to be the time when his kin expected that he should organize the ritual. He himself felt that the timing was not good; “it was too early in relation to his economic situation,” he pointed out. However, in the end, he decided to organize the ritual; otherwise “something bad could happen.” I never got to know what this “bad” thing could have been, but ethnographies from Madagascar have highlighted consequences of failed promises (Cole 2001: 88; Graeber 2007: 347). In Willy’s case, the feeling of too long a time passing started to pressure him. This is an example of phronesis, the ethics of right action that contain accounts of what time is and what it should be used for (Bear 2016: 494). Ancestral ways of life connected the present day with people’s pasts and futures. Through the intention to organize his aunt’s secondary burial, Willy emphasized respect toward and the importance of his aunt’s past actions and, more generally, toward the ancestral ways requiring a proper burial (see Chapter 8).

Temporalities inform about values, people’s ways of living and their orientations, which are not necessarily neatly organized but can create tensions and conflicts. For example, Willy’s struggle with the time of the secondary burial in relation to his economic situation informs about the tension between different values: one connected to ancestral customs and the other to more individual efforts and economic prosperity.

3.2 Work and social relations

Mama ny Rocco was in a hurry on a Saturday morning in mid-January. “We will transplant our rice today,” Mama ny Rocco told me as she left Willy’s house, where she had been reminding Willy and Angelina’s daughters to join them in the rice fields next to the village. Mama ny Rocco herself had eleven children, five of whom were living at home. Three of them were old (11–15 years) enough to work in the rice fields. In addition to Willy and Angelina’s children, she had recruited her children as well as her sister’s family from the hamlet to do the transplanting. Willy and Angelina were constantly negotiating when to get their fields transplanted. Since the people (children and kin) were already recruited to Mama ny Rocco’s fields and children had to go to school on weekdays, Willy and Angelina’s own transplanting would happen on the next Saturday, at the end of January. In exchange, Mama ny Rocco’s children would be working in Willy’s fields. Willy’s and Mama ny Rocco’s families were close; they visited each other and wanted to maintain their relations.

Harvesting of rice is done between April and June, depending on the rice species, the time of transplanting and water availability. For example mamoriakafotsy, a long-stalked rice, took six months to ripen, while tsipalaiva, with a short stalk, matured in three months. Most of the cultivators preferred mamoriakafotsy because of its taste, but its long growing time was challenging if a family did not get rice from another field before June. Households preferred tsipalaiva because it was ripe after three months.

When harvesting, males usually cut the rice with a sickle and women pummel it. Papa ny Georges had gathered a group of eight women to pummel the rice, paying them a daily salary known as par jour, a French term referring to payment for one day’s work. Another way of evaluating labor was piecework, fixed to the prices of natural objects rather than hours; this was used, for example, by the colonial administration when pressuring Malagasy farmers to enter into wage labor processes in order to pay taxes. However, farmers found it morally and economically imperative to maintain their obligations to doing tavy, to their ancestors, and to their living kin. (Sodikoff 2004: 387; see Chapter 5 for environmental history and the relationship with swidden cultivation.)

People used different cultivation technologies. Near the end of January as we were proceeding to Willy’s fields to check how his mondra was growing, we found young girls transplanting rice saplings in a row in a valley extending by the stream running toward one of the main rivers. As the girls did their part, Papa ny Laurent, the owner of the field and the head of his clan, carefully measured the next line with a wooden measuring stick, marking it so that the girls could follow in a row. He used SRI (le Système de Riziculture Intensive)30 technique, preferring it because it enabled bigger harvests. Developed in the early 1980s in order to improve Malagasy farmers’ yields, the SRI technique was based on four principles that interacted with each other: early, quick and healthy plant establishment; reduced plant density; improved soil conditions through enrichment with organic matter; and reduced and controlled water application. (SRI-RICE 2015.) Agroecological technologies tend to presume that they are applicable in different ecological and social contexts. However, acro-ecological technologies do not recognize intimate ecologies, relations with different plants and trees, or the positions of fields that the Tsimihety were aware of.

According to Li (2011: 99), governmental practices make political, ethical and social questions into practical ones that can resolved with different technologies. For example, the SRI technique expected that it could be repeated in any place in the world. However, technologies are not value- free; what is determined as technology is related with imaginations, ways of governance and processes of inclusion and exclusion (Li 2011: 101; 2007: 7; Bear 2016: 490–2; see also Chapter 8). Despite their reputation of not respecting authorities or kings, clearly the Tsimihety were willing to be affiliated with development projects to improve their living conditions. This reflects the will to improve and a people’s desire to be part of and recognized in a government’s development and improving schemes (Li 2007). Boky Mena that I will discuss about in the end of this chapter, was a Tsimihety way of representing their social and land relations.

Tsimihety rice farmers generally admitted that harvests were bigger with the SRI technique. Willy felt, however, that it was too time-consuming and required more work. When Willy’s fields were transplanted, he reminded

30 The SRI technique was developed and synthesized in the early 1980s by Fr. Henri de Laulanié, S.J., who established the NGO Tefy Saina, which co-operated with the Cornell International Institute for Food, Agriculture and Development (CIIFAD) (SRI-RICE 2015).

83 the women and girls to separate the saplings enough from one another, in a diamond shape, as he showed with his hands. This shape ensured enough water, sunlight, heat and air for each sapling bun. Furthermore, the hotness (mafana) of the earth was managed through self-made channels that allowed the regulation of the water flow.

Technologies alone were not able to resolve, for example, timings related to the joint management of rice fields. In Manantenina, people’s irrigated rice fields were located next to each other in the valley on the river flood plain. Irrigation of the fields was organized with the help of a dam built by the World Wildlife Fund in the 1990s and small channels directing the water that the dam gathered. It was important for people to either transplant their rice at the same time or choose species that matured in three months. Papa ny Remy was late in transplanting his rice fields. He had spent time in town, where his father, a known elder of his clan, had moved to live. The father had been sick and Papa ny Remy traveled back and forth between the village and the town. Other villagers wanted to close the channel in order to allow their rice fields to dry up for the harvest, but Papa ny Remy’s field still required more water. In the end, his rice did not grow tall and it was still light green when it was supposed to have ripened. The event revealed the importance of people’s subsistence needs, but also that people were expected to do certain tasks at certain times.

Land relations revealed different statuses and socio-economic differences. Papa ny Ely was a regular worker in Willy and Angelina’s fields. He and his wife had a small child and they had their own rice fields that they had to take care of. Meanwhile, they were improving their house. As Papa ny Ely worked really well and he could be trusted, Willy and Angelina maintained good relationships with him and his family. Angelina took care of Papa ny Ely and his wife’s two-year-old boy while Papa ny Ely and his wife carried heavy sacks of rice from their own rice fields. Soahina, a talkative woman in her forties who also worked for Willy and Angelina, lived in a small cottage on a steep hillside to the north of the village. She tended to tell long stories about her husband and his illnesses while working. Willy sometimes visited their house to ask how they were doing. Brown (2004) has shown that on the eastern coast of Madagascar, the patron-client relationship could evolve over time into kinship relations. However, it is also possible that over time some people are able to accumulate capital and people start to find seemingly equal relations as a loss. It is possible that only one party recognizes the other as kin, friend relations or a gift (“asymmetric

84 recognition”). (Gregory 1997: 23, 65.) Englund (1999) has observed in Malawi that by recruiting labor, wealthy villagers made their relationships visible, thereby marking their wealth and status. These observations caution against viewing “agrarian change” as a uniform and teleological process in which the buying and selling of labor necessarily entail individualism. In Chapter 8, I will explore social differentiation among the Tsimihety.

All of these individuals—Willy, Papa ny Ely and Soahina—were land owners. As land owners they all made decisions about their fields, what was cultivated there, how the land was managed, whether parts of the harvests would be sold and so forth. As land owners they also had obligations for their distinctive clans, such as making funeral contributions (see Boky Mena contributions later in this chapter and in Chapter 8). However, in order to pursue long-term aims in life, Papa ny Ely worked for Willy in order to build a house of his own; thus, he had to subordinate himself into the position of a worker, rather than an owner. On the other hand, when working on his land and building a house, he could one day be the person who to provide work for others. Working for Willy did not make Papa ny Ely into a slave. As a comparison, among the Sakalava, working for a day’s salary includes notions of purchased slaves, who work for others for little benefit for themselves (Feeley-Harnik 1991: 250).

The main distinction from Papa ny Ely and Soahita was that Willy had been able receive significantly more monetary income as an ecotourism guide and he was able to pay for the extra work on his fields. In addition, as there was not too much available forest to be cleared, those people who had access to money were able to buy or rent more land. For example, in 2012–2013 Willy bought two new rice fields with the monthly guide payment that I had paid. Usually people who were confronted with some misfortune, such as sickness or an accident, had to sell or rent out their land in order to get money for hospital expenses or sudden funerals. When I visited Willy again, three years after my fieldwork, he had rented (mamondro) his fields to one his neighbors and shared half (misasaka) the harvest with him. When dividing half-and- half in this way, the owner of the field got half of the rice harvest from that particular field and the worker got the other half.

Some clans had created joint rice stocks in case of sickness or an accident. For example, in Willy’s clan, every clan member was expected to give a portion of their rice to the shared rice stock, which was preserved and

85 managed by one of Willy’s sisters. The idea was that if one was unable to work (because of sickness or an accident, for example), one could use the rice in the joint stock. Subsistence security was one of the reasons why people maintained their rice cultivation (Laney 2015: 823). On the other hand, some individuals were very alone, like Mama ny Nadia. She was unable to work in her rice field because of her three children, whom she had to take care of. Her aunt had taken care of her when she was a child, but when she was sixteen her aunt had left her alone in the village and moved somewhere in the west of Madagascar. Mama ny Nadia had a small bamboo house and worked occasionally in fellow villagers’ fields.

Another difference was how much land and in what places one’s ancestors had been able to clear the forest to have it for themselves. In 2013, those people who only had access to hillsides were having difficulties, as there was not enough rain and the hillside rice fields did not produce a sufficient harvest. People reported that they had sown three dabas of rice and received only six back; they had expected the harvest to be three or four times bigger, depending on their field and its fertility.

If one was not able or did not want to use money to hire someone for work, one organized a collective work group (riaka) with relatives, friends and neighbors. A riaka was established so that work-intensive phases, such as rice transplanting or slashing, could be done. Riaka was based on the principle of exchange; usually the group worked in every member’s field for one day and people did whatever the field owner required. The use of such work groups can be explained in many cases as a way of overcoming the time constraints imposed by techno-environmental factors on the practice of swidden agriculture (Dove 1983: 84). For example, the Tsimihety sometimes had difficulties in finding a free worker (for example, for transplanting the rice) because many people had their own fields to be taken care of at the same time.

Riaka could also be used for collecting money for some joint effort. For example, members of the “Do not rob” clan were gathering money for their clan’s Independence Day party on June 26, so in February a group of six men slashed a few vanilla fields and got some money in return. Also, different women’s associations in the village worked on people’s fields in order to collect money to make a trip to a Women’s Day event held annually in one of the bigger towns. The organization of a work group required

86 exchange as well as trust, respect and willingness to work together. One could fulfill one’s participation in a riaka with an agreed-upon sum of money.

To work in rice fields was morally evaluated. For example, Nelson’s father was worried about him, because he had to spend several weeks in the national park, where he worked as a research assistant for a lemur research and conservation project. “He does not have time to work in a rice field,” Papa ny Nelson stated, expressing his concerns that Nelson was not concentrated on the ancestral customs but lived long periods in the Marojejy forests, working for foreign projects. I consider Nelson’s father’s concern also as a political claim: respecting one’s ancestors informed about what kind of authority and relations one supported (see Chapter 8).

Certain kinds of labor were regarded as ancestral work: rice cultivation, making ritual sacrifices of zebu cattle and chickens, performing everyday rituals and gestures of respect, and observing familial taboos (fady)(Bloch 1985: 635 among the Merina; Sodikoff 2012: 26, 141). Importantly, for the Betsimisaraka swidden cultivators, the thought of abandoning the practice of jinja (=tavy) has caused farmers anxiety, because it not only poses the economic risk of rice scarcity but also the greater existential risks of angering the ancestors and alienating oneself from family relations (Sodikoff 2012: 388). In 2016, Willy acknowledged that he had stopped working in the rice fields to concentrate on his vanilla. I did not realize at first what a big decision this was. He had spent most of his working time in his vanilla field, not in his rice fields, for which he had made a half-and-half contract (misasaka). His efforts were successful, as he got a good price for his vanilla.

In general, rice cultivation work is gendered. Both women and men carry rice home from the fields, sometimes several kilometers away from the village, using tiny and—especially during the rainy season—muddy paths. Before storing the rice, it has to be dried and cleaned. Drying the rice is women’s and children’s work. Angelina and Mama ny Evan spread rice sacks on the ground and threw the rice on them in order to dry it under the sun. Together with the children playing in the small yards near the houses, they drove away chickens seeking to eat the rice. If there was rain, they hurried to gather it back into a sack and take it under cover inside.

The work that males carry out is regarded as hard work (asa mavesatra; mavesatra ‘heavy’) and women’s work is referred to as soft work (malemy, bokaboka).

Hard work (men) Soft work (women)

digging the land (mangady tany) weeding (mikapa)

flattening the land (manarintany) growing vegetables (mamboly anana) slashing the fallow (mifira savoka) transplanting rice (manetsa) cutting down trees (manapaka hazo) cleaning rice (manadio vary)

fetching firewood (maka hazo) drying rice (manapy vary)

finding food when starving (mizaka washing laundry (manasa lamba) sakafo rehefa lamy hamina cleaning the house (manadio (silaona) house)

cooking food (mahandro sakafo)

taking care of children (mikarakara zaza)

Table 2: Hard and soft work tasks (Note: I have written words as people have advised me to do.)

The terms for hard and soft work not only refer to the physical strength required for the various tasks but also to the materials of different things and how they are expected to be handled. For example, when doing hard work, men work with materials requiring physical strength, such as carrying firewood from the forest, transforming soils and land or cutting down trees. On the other hand, pollinating vanilla flowers is essentially women’s work, as it is generally believed that women know how to handle flowers gently and pollinate them carefully and quickly with thin sticks with their smaller hands (see Chapter 4 about vanilla pollination and Chapter 6 about women and how they take care of babies; see also Cole 2010: 74). Mauss (1973) reminded that people’s bodies, their movements, postures and positions are determined by the social relations that people have. Techniques reflect a body evolved in social relations and practices. Bourdieu’s (1977) concept of

88 habitus highlighted learned habits, skills and dispositions and informed about differences between people in the same society. However, relations with materials are always potential. Affordance is evident in situations that are not yet stabilized or do not have a determined sign or value; affordances afford action, and they have undetermined potential for joining form and materialization (Latour 1993). A chair is an invitation to sit down but it does not determine the action (Keane 2003: 7, cit. Mead 1962: 280).

However, people tend to “cut” constant flows and process by means of socially shared categorizations and practices (Strathern 1996). The ways in which people perceive actions is related to ideological contexts (Keane 2005a) and political-historical relations and dynamics (Navaro-Yashin 2009). Among the Tsimihety, the gendered differences of work refer to the different substances of men and women: men are the bones of the ancestral lineage while women’s blood enables new relations and social reproduction (see Chapter 6 for the different substances of the genders).

In general daily life, however, things did not work out so ideally; women’s work and men’s work were not so clearly separated (see also Li 2013: 61– 2). For example, when visiting Papa ny Georges, I found out that he was cooking rice because his wife was traveling. In addition, there were households managed solely by women like Mama ny Mimy, who owned a small shop in which people used to gather after their day in the rice fields. She managed her house and two children alone and with the help of her mother and father, who lived on the other side of the village road. Nadine, a young woman in her 20s, built her own house. She carried tree logs one by one from the forest after the rainy season and, after several months, her house was ready.

In Madagascar, hard things were associated with hard (mafy) histories. Research has revealed that the imperial Merina rulers sent emissaries to Mananara Nord to govern the area. These officials instituted violent policies, including forcibly conscripting men into fanompoana labor to move large hardwood logs from the northeastern forests down the coast to the port city of Foulpoint. Certain things, such as commodities, condense the hard histories born out of struggles for power (Osterhaudt 2016: 268; see Chapters 2, 4 and 5). Tsing (2015: 65–6) has argued that gifts and commodities do not necessarily fall into neat categories of either/or. Tsing has encouraged scholars to pay attention to economic diversity and look for

89 non-capitalist elements, for example, the salvage accumulation on which capitalism depends. Also the Tsimihety relations with power had a double potentials: ancestors, although they support lives of their descendants with their blessings, ancestors could be hard and demanding.

According to ancestral custom, making money was considered hard work. Rocco, Willy’s cousin’s son, who admired Willy and had followed his example of being an ecotourism guide and planting vanilla in his fields, had learned his responsibilities. “I have to help my parents and work in the rice fields. The man of the house has to figure out how to make money and that it not easy work,” he explained, as we exchanged the latest news. He had built a small bamboo house for his wife and their small baby, working as an ecotourism guide to make the money for it. He had also planted some vanilla and expected to get some monetary returns from it after three years, when the vanilla matured. Women also confirmed the separation between men’s and women’s works. Among Willy’s clan’s women’s association, the six women who had been planting vanilla saplings in Willy’s new vanilla field in order to gather money for their event unanimously confirmed as I inquired about the division of work: “That is the custom (fomba).” Interestingly, in order to get money the women themselves were working in vanilla fields, which had been regarded as men’s work. In addition, there were several women in the market (tsena) who sold things that they had grown, such as tomatoes, onions or beans. Some were well-known business women who owned restaurants or kiosks and did successful trade in the market. Clearly the notion of such customs did not always apply to practical everyday life.

3.3 Hard and enduring relations

The ethnographical literature from Madagascar has shown that different Malagasy groups have inscribed permanence into ever-changing landscapes (Bloch 1995; Keller 2008). Successful markers included getting married, building a house, having children and burying one’s dead. For example, people who had worked as research assistants for a lemur researcher in the park and received a monthly salary had fixed a house made out of timber planks, processed by a circular saw and paid for with money. In general, it was regarded that bamboo was a material available in the forest for anyone. People who had made a big profit in 2003, when vanilla prices were 20 times more than today, had built cement houses with two or three floors.

For the Tsimihety, a house was an enduring sign of relationships. For Lévi- Strauss (1984: 195), a house reflected “an objectification of the core unit’s relationship,” which in his case was that of a matrimonial couple. In his alliance theory, he highlighted incest taboos and exchange relations in the creation of societies. In Lévi-Strauss’ model, social relations were mainly based on balanced exchanges and, as societies became more complex and hierarchical,31 relations had to be objectified. However, anthropologists have questioned Lévi-Strauss’ notions and showed that in every society there is a need to objectify certain socially meaningful and continuing relations. (Carsten and Hugh-Jones 1995: 9–11.) For example, arguing against Lévi-Strauss’ notion of house societies tending to be hierarchical, Bloch (1995: 71) highlighted that the Zafimaniry’s egalitarian and non- stratified society emphasized houses, while the Merina, a hierarchical society, focused on tombs. Furthermore, comparisons between the Zafimaniry and the Vezo have shown that while the Zafimaniry seem to insinuate the ancestors’ permanence into daily life, the Vezo, who are long- term migrants of various origins and have abandoned their ancestral homeland further south, seek to loosen the connection between the ancestors and place (Astuti 1995: 102; Nielssen 2011: 118–19). As I have explained in Chapter 2, Willy’s mother, Dady, lived in the house that was built by his sister who was working as a teacher in the north of Madagascar. Dady shared the house with Willy’s other sister, who was not married, and her two children. The house built by the sister was the materialization of her presence in the village and her care for her clan and family.

Among the Tsimihety, a house tended to ‘harden’ as the relationship of the matrimonial couple got stronger. It was expected that a girl’s father would build a small house for his daughter where she could meet her friends. As Willy’s father was dead, Willy built a small bamboo house for his youngest sister after she had met a man in town, who had followed her to the village. However, their relationship did not stabilize in a way that they would have started to build a house of their own.

In the course of life, the married couple is expected to generate more wealth, that is, children. Children connote life and good fortune. Willy extended his house with a salary that he had received from working with me. The new

31 For example, descent, property or residence can be taken as the criterion for constituting groups (Carsten and Hugh-Jones 1995: 8).

91 room was made out hardwood planks and the floor was made out of cement. When the room was finally ready in the end of December 2012, Willy invited his relatives’ and his neighbors’ kids to eat soft-cooked rice (ahandro sarona) in the new room, in order to wish for a happy and healthy life. Angelina and Mama ny Evan invited about ten children from the neighborhood and had the children eat the rice on rice bags placed on the floor. After the meal, they ordered them to disappear from the room. There were no special words, no kabary, a stylized form of speech usually used in rituals or in more official meetings. In order to ensure a prosperous life in the house, different plants—either raw or cooked—tended to be significant in rituals. For example, after building a new house, the Zafimaniry rub a second-year taro on its posts in order to ensure the continuity and successful survival of the future inhabitants. (Bloch 1995.) Janowski (1995: 94–7) has reminded that growing rice, getting married and having children mark two individuals as “big people,” full social adults. Among the people who practice swidden cultivation, such as the Tsimihety and the Zafimaniry (Bloch 1995), similar kinds of observations are valid.

There is a clear strong association between a house and its children. When Willy and Angelina’s youngest child was born, Dady buried the newborn’s placenta near the compound of the new part of the house. She left the burial place quickly, placed a stone to mark the spot, and did not look back. I inquired why did she did not say anything. She replied something about looking and eyes and the living house (trano velona) that I didn’t understand. Willy explained that she had probably said that if she looks back, the child’s eyes will be crossed. “I paid 5000 Ar for my mum to make my son’s eyes bright (mazava),” he stated. A comparative ethnography from the Malay has noted that people bury the placenta of a new baby, which is thought of as the baby’s spirit sibling, in the grounds of the house compound (Carsten 2004: 44).

Houses and sets of children are physically connected. Among the Malays, each child was supposed to have some spiritual essence (semangat), which is thought of being part of a sibling set, a paradigm of kin harmony. However, when brothers and sisters marry, they have to move into their own houses in order to prevent quarrels (Carsten 2004: 44–6). Indeed, by 2016 Willy and Angelina had named their four children with names that ended with the same four letters (-isco or –isca). In house societies, kinship and political relations are not organized according to descent groups or lineages but around corporately organized dwellings (Lévi-Strauss 1982). According

92 to Carsten and Hugh-Jones (1995: 39), the house not only represents a sibling set but also the marriage, referring to a continuous two-way process in which siblingship becomes affinity and affinity gives rise to a sibling set. These kinds of societies reproduce themselves by integrating strangers, for example, through marriage and adoption (see Chapter 6). Cole (2001: 143) has argued that when the Betsimisaraka seek to draw non-ancestral power under their control in order to make it part of their social world, this lies at the heart of Betsimisaraka political processes.

Patrilineal hard relations are evident in relation to the importance of the sibling set who manage the group’s joint inheritance, or lova-be (see Chapter 8). In Willy’s case, the siblings had inherited two pieces of land from their father. In addition to their individual land parcels, Willy and his brothers and sisters from the same father (the sibling set), had together inherited two parcels of land from him. The siblings called this inherited land lova-be, or a “great inheritance.” It was expected that the sibling set would together manage the lova-be and if someone needed extra land for cultivation, this person could cultivate the land if agreed upon by everyone in the sibling set. While the lova-be required joint efforts and management, which in the best case strengthened the love and respect of the sibling set, lova-be also referred to people’s belonging to the certain place and the patrilineal clan whose members were ultimately united in the patrilineal tomb. Through inheritance and burying people in the ancestral tomb, the Tsimihety stabilized otherwise dynamic people and their relations. Engel (2008: 18–19) has reminded that lova-be practices have to be understood in relation to frontier dynamics, by means of which people have spread to the available land and forest.

Anthropologists have shown that inalienable possession acts as a stabilizing force against change because its presence authenticates cosmological origins, kinship and political histories. These possessions then form the most potent force in the effort to subvert change, while at the same time they stand as the corpus of change (Weiner 1992: 9–11; see also Chou 2009). The ability to keep inalienable possessions outside exchange represent a source of difference, and hence they bring high status. However, these possessions require cosmological authentication (Weiner 1992: 101–2; Chapter 3) that in the case of the Tsimihety, as among different people in Madagascar (Bloch 1995: 82), is hasina (see Chapter 3). In addition to inheritance, already deceased ancestors are important for bringing good luck and giving blessings, informing that constructions such as houses and tombs, as well as places, have ritual importance (ibid: 82).

Ancestral blessings, or actually the ability to ask for them, represent the sign of people with a known ancestry, while their absence marked the status of other people as slaves (Cole 1998: 622; Evers 2002; Feeley-Harnik 1982: 37; 1991: 57–8; Graeber 1997: 374; 2007: 226–7). Slaves were people whose ancestors were “lost,” and one way a person of slave descent can be identified was through his or her shallow genealogy (Brown 2004: 621). Because people who were enslaved were permanently torn away from their kin and from their tanindrazana (‘land of the ancestors’), they could no longer take part in the rituals through which Malagasy people receive the blessing of their ancestors. Not being able to receive ancestral blessing, in turn, means that one stops being kin and, possibly, stops being a full person (Keller 2008: 659; Bloch 1971). This is because in Madagascar, kinship is not simply a matter of being related by birth (see, for example, Bloch 1985; Southall 1986: 417–26) but, to a large degree, something continually (re)created through the passage of ancestral blessings from the dead to living kin and the joint reception by the living of their ancestors’ blessings. If slaves could not be regarded as kin or persons because of having “been ripped from their ancestral landscapes and left unanchored to any place” (Graeber 1997: 376), then slaves were excluded precisely from the joint processes of movement and anchorage to the land that are so fundamental to Malagasy societies (Bloch 1971; Keller 2008: 659–60).

Ancestors not only give blessings but expect that they should be remembered. Willy had gotten his rice fields from his aunt, who had passed away seven years before. The only promise he had given to his aunt was that he would do an exhumation (famadihana) and send her bones back to the tomb “where her father was from,” as Willy put it. Ideally, sending the bones back should be done after five to seven years. This event took place after I had already left, but he estimated he would spend about 1,100,000 Ar for the feast, representing a third of what he could earn from ecotourism in a year. He was expected to provide a feast with a cow (zebo), which is ritually important in Malagasy society, a cement coffin and around 30 daba32 of rice for about 500 guests to eat, plus smaller expenses such as petrol, oil, tomatoes and so on. He complained to me that this feast was too expensive for him at the moment, but he was afraid that if he didn’t do it bad luck would come and he might not get what he wanted. Ancestors are believed to

32 A daba is an oil can, which can fit about 10 liters of oil.

94 have the power to make people sick or to cause bad luck if angered (Cole 2001: 85–7; 1999: 202; Graeber 1995; Bloch 1971).

Ideally children helped their parents with the work in the house and in the fields and finally took care of them when they were old. Children were also responsible for taking care of the famadihana, informing of the expectation of communication and exchanges between the generations.

Ancestral places are those where ancestral tombs and people who belong to that tomb live and work. When people move to a new site, they do not lose ties to previous ones; instead, after the successful establishment of fields, houses and descendants, a site becomes imaginable as a branch of the kin group. For example, Willy could claim land in a place where his father was from but “at the moment here [the village he lived in] was good for him,” to borrow his words. The village further west was part of Willy’s tanindrazana, the place where he would be buried eventually, because that was the place where his father was from (see also Lambek and Walsh 1997: 317; Keller 2008). All these relations become visible in funerals (Chapter 8). People’s relationships with their environment becomes manifested through work, building houses and tombs. Movement expands cultivators’ territories and landscapes, and the expansion in space is matched by expansion in time when cultivators return their bones to their family tombs. This world has an axis that is simultaneously temporal as well as spatial (Lambek and Walsh 1997: 320). ‘Ancestral lands’ gathers the Tsimihety ideal values of egalitarianism, autonomy and mutual help into a coherent hierarchical structure.

Criticism of ethical anthropology notes that a “well-integrated” culture contains only habitual action and has no space for ethical reflection (Laidlaw 2013: 26). I show in this thesis that it is not only that the Tsimihety repeat obediently ancestral logic, but they evaluate and reflect on processes and practices and acts, making decisions even when unsure of the end result (see Chapters 7 and 8). However, the social relations and practices that structure people’s daily lives reveal a generalized understanding of the Tsimihety and their ancestral customs and Tsimihety values emphasising egalitarianism, relatedness, movement and mutual help. These differed from the aims of the Malagasy state and transnational organsiations, such as the World Bank, who encouraged efficient agricultural production.

3.4 Creating markets, attracting investors and organizing governance

The 2005 law change concerning land in Madagascar was driven by larger- scale political imaginations and the planning of influential transnational finance and monetary institutions, such the World Bank, the IMF and the Millennium Challenge Corporation Compact, that is, “an innovative and independent U.S. foreign assistance agency that is helping lead the fight against global poverty,” as they describe on their webpages. The expectations of land reforms were: 1) greater effectiveness by local authorities and greater equity in meeting considerable social demand for land tenure security and 2) the economic development of households and communities, enabling the environment for investment, decreasing the number of land conflicts, and reducing the pressure exercised on natural resources (Teyssier et al. 2008: 10–11). The following year, the government passed Law No. 2006-031,33 which allowed individuals and groups asserting rights to untitled land to obtain certificates recognizing their rights from the local land administration office (la Collective Décentralisée). Before 2005, all land that was not registered in the state land registration office was considered state land. After the changes of 2005, such unregistered land was referred to as “unregistered private property.” (Evers 2013: 119–21.) In 2013, only a few people in the villages studied had registered their land. As I have discussed in this chapter, the Tsimihety regarded their ownership through customary practices; they owned their land because of their work or through inheritance.

According to the World Bank adviser and economist Hernando de Soto, land registration would allow calculation of the amount of existing property and guarantee taxes to the state. On the other hand, property security would enable private capital investments that would further enhance the productivity of the land. In the long term, Malagasy farmers would start to respect their obligations and pay taxes. (De Soto 2000; Evers 2013: 119–20, cit. Otto 2009.) De Soto repeated modern European views of the state securing people’s property (Hobbes 2005 [1651]; Weber and Dreijimanis 2008: 156). From the Malagasy point of view, his suggestions mirrored the type of suggestions made by vazaha, involving taxing or village formation

33 Loi No. 2006-031 de 24 Novembre 2006 fixant régime juridique de la propriété foncière privée non titrée.

96 during French colonialism (see, for example, Cole 2001: 55, cit. Gallieni 1899).

New municipal land registration offices were created in order to decentralize state structures. The state’s new land registration was regarded as too difficult and expensive by the Tsimihety (see also Evers 2013: 122; Teyssier et al. 2008: 3). This is how a young Merina woman working in the customer service of the state land office (Domaine) explained the issue:

First cultivators have to make a request (demande) in the office of the Géomètre, [or Topo as people referred to it], the office responsible for measuring the area to be entitled. However, the Géomètre cannot put he border markers; he just makes the plan, called a “formal plan” (le plan regulier). After that, the person requesting marking of the land goes to the Domaine office with the request. A Domaine official goes to check (reconnaissance) that the land is really his or hers, meaning that they confirm, for example, from the makers of the request the land of the neighbors that the land borders. If the recognizing process goes well, the document comes once more to Topo, just to check if there were any problems with the process. If everything is clear, Topo gives the border markers to the persons for the marking and the neighbors should be there when the person marks his or her land.

The difficulties of land-titling has been confirmed by the preliminary report concerning land reformation. Individual registration will be unlikely to be implemented: the procedure has no less than 24 steps and can last, depending on the users’ ability to mobilize land tenure officers, over a decade. Furthermore, the processes can cost several hundreds of euros; this was also confirmed by the young woman in the land registration office. The explanations for these excessively long procedures have blamed the administrative and centralization culture, as well as the willingness to perpetuate a source of income and profit for the agents working for an impoverished administration. (Evers 2011: 115; Teyssier et al. 2008: 3.)

In the village, the Tsimihety prepared paper documents when they sold their pieces of land. When Mama ny Rocco sold a plot in order to get some money for a dentist to repair her teeth, she asked Willy to prepare the document with the names of the seller, buyer, date of sale and which piece of land was in question, as well as the price. Among the Betsileo in Madagascar’s highlands, these “petit papiers,” or so-called small papers, were self-made documents that people made in order to secure their relationships with land

97 that they had customarily accessed. However, these documents did not have any official status in state courts or offices, because they were not accorded state “power” (see Evers 2002).

The privatization of land ownership has mainly been aimed at attracting investors. In the World Bank’s report Rising Global interest in Farmland: Can it yield sustainable and equal benefits (2010), countries around the world are divided according to their land availability. Madagascar belonged to the group of “suitable land available, high yield gap,” meaning that Madagascar has land for cultivation but a large proportion of smallholders with very low productivity. According to the World Bank’s logic, the country had resources. For example, Madagascar’s cultivated land could be doubled, but it did not have the necessary technology, institutions and infrastructure to be able to use them. According to the World Bank experts, if things were done correctly, large-scale investments could enable sustainable agriculture and rural development. The report encouraged large- scale land acquisitions to be a vehicle for poverty reduction through three main mechanisms: the generation of employment for wage workers, new opportunities for contract farmers, and payments for the lease or purchase of land. In this way, sustainability—usually approached as “growth-centered” development while setting aside prior concerns about equity (Beyerlee and Deininger 2010: xiii, 65; Kirsch 2010)—could be encouraged. This modernist developmental dream could be achieved through correct technologies, industrialization and urbanized citizens (Ferguson 1999: 6).

Moreover, in 2004, Madagascar passed legislation permitting foreign land ownership (up to 2.5 hectares) that was conditional on $500,000 investment in Madagascar‘s real estate, banking, insurance or tourism industries. The Investment Law (2007-036) passed in 2007 was meant to incentivize foreign investors to acquire real estate property through leases with a maximum, renewable duration of 99 years, as long as the property was solely and continuously used to carry out commercial activity. According to the law, foreigners were not able to directly own land, but a company incorporated in Madagascar and managed by foreigners can purchase land. However, the law specifically prohibited the acquisition of land by foreign investors for resale in its original state or for resale after development. (Skipper and Mizner 2018.) Recently, there has been extensive foreign investment in agricultural land in Madagascar; an estimated 800,000 hectares of agricultural land has been leased out to investors in the 2004– 2009 period (USAID 2010: 6).

The recent governmental processes have been increasingly structured in a way that they facilitate the spread of free markets through governmental techniques and processes such as privatization, marketization, deregulation, reregulation, public sector market proxies and civil society provision of state services (Castree 2008: 142; Igoe and Brockington 2007). Through these developments, political problems were be approached as a financial and technological problem (Bear 2015: 12). These developments tend to reduce historical relations with land, which have been intimately developed through people’s work and kin relations, to governmental and institutional structures.

Following the World Bank’s logic, ex-President Ravalomanana planned to lease the land to Daewoo for 99 years. Daewoo, in return, promised to improve the infrastructure, such as roads and granaries. The deal raised fierce opposition, and over 100 people were killed during the violence. Rajoelina, the new president of the transitional government at the time, amended the constitution, saying that Madagascar’s ancestral land (tanindrazana) is not for rent or sale. (Vinciguerra 2013.) Indeed, the Tsimihety had their own document marking people and their relations to land.

3.5 Boky Mena—A Tsimihety document of land relations

“Remember Boky Mena today,” Angelina reminded Willy few days before a middle-aged elementary school teacher’s funeral in one of the neighboring villages. Boky Mena, the “Red Book,”34 was a thick book found in each village35 with several hundred pages, including all the funeral contributions. In 2013, each adult person living in the same village between 18 to 60 years old was supposed to give a fixed amount of money—200 Ar—and two cups (kapoaka)36 of rice for the funeral. As Angelina went to make their contribution, Willy added: “We [referring to his brother and sisters] will pay37 also for Boky Mena in Andapa on Tuesday because there is a funeral on Monday of next week. The person will be buried in the village where my mother is from.” Interestingly, Boky Mena has been known as a Malagasy

34 mena ‘red’; boky ‘book.’ 35 While it may be different elsewhere in Madagascar, in the villages where I worked and in the closest town, the Boky Mena practice existed. 36 A cup (kapoaka) equals a 400 g Nestlé condensed milk tin can (see also Keller 2015: 1). 37 This additionally meant “do our duty.”

Charter, in which the speeches of Madagascar’s President’s Ratsiraka were gathered (Sharp 2002: 36). Ratsiraka envisioned the creation of a new republic with more autonomy for Madagascar through socialist protectionism (Gow 1997: 413). The Tsimihety Boky Mena did not contain speeches but marked funeral gifts.

Boky Mena was a thick book with several hundred pages containing funeral contributions. Mama ny Sandra and Papa ny Jocelyn, the responsables for collecting the contributions for Boky Mena of their clan, sat behind a wooden desk in the communal village house that provided the necessary shade. Each clan collected their contributions for the coming funeral in order to share the funeral expenses. The contributions of different clan members were marked in two Boky Mena books of the village, one for men and the other for women. In Boky Mena, people marked the name of the deceased person and the date on top of the page. Right below, the names of the clans, the clan members and their contributions were listed in the section reserved for each clan. In 2013, there were 544 members in the book.

There were different kinds of rules related to Boky Mena. For example, people between 18–60 years old were supposed to participate. If people missed three years of Boky Mena contributions, one was no longer a member. If someone missed two years, they still had to pay them if they wanted to participate again in Boky Mena.

Boky Mena contributions were set and emphasized equality between the people. In 2013, there were fixed contributions (adidy ‘responsibility’): 200 Ar and two cups of rice. Young people, who usually worked as cooks at funerals, were obliged to give one cup of rice and 100 Ar. In addition to adidy, there was an annual payment (zanakampielezana) of 2000 Ar for those people who had moved away and did not live in the village but still had land or other relations there. For example, Mama ny Karina, who worked as a teacher in the north of Madagascar but wanted to maintain relationships in the village, paid zanakampielezana. Angelina also gave zanakampielezana to the village where she was born and where her mother lived, cultivating family land. Finally, tatibato (‘offering’) was a donation that people living in another villages and who were not family members were able to contribute.

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adidy responsibility; 200 Ar and two kapoaka of rice tatibato an offering; people living in another villages and who were not family members were able to contribute zanakampielezana a fixed, annual contribution by those people who had moved away from the village where they had relatives or land Table 3: Different funeral contributions in 2013.

These different contributions marked people’s different relations. While those who lived together in their daily lives in the village were requested to fulfill their responsibility and help each other, people who were not kin but had a relationship with the deceased or his or her family could contribute an offering that was voluntary. Finally, people who were born in the village and had kin and land there were able to make an annual contribution. Through these acts of giving, people maintained their relations with the place and the people living there (see Chapter 2).

The fixed contributions emphasized egalitarian values; every member contributed the same amount and everyone in the village was allowed to participate. There was an expectation of reciprocal exchange, so that if one made a contribution to a funeral, other people—whether villagers, kin or friends—were supposed to contribute to his or her funeral. According to Sahlins (1972: 193–4), generalized reciprocity informs of kin relations within a household or kinship group. A balanced reciprocity occurs in a spatial community (for example, in the village). However, in northeastern Madagascar, even though all the people living in the same village were not kin, Boky Mena supposed the same kind of care and responsibility as existing between kin. In order to understand this, it is necessary to understand the Malagasy state and nation-building and Tsimihety relations in those dynamics.

Boky Mena has evolved in relation to the decolonization and nationalism of 1970s socialism and peasant policies. The vision of Lieutenant-Commander Didier Ratsiraka (president in 1975–1993; 1997–2002), a Betsimisiraka from the Toamasina coast, was collected in Boky Mena, the Charter of the Malagasy Socialist Revolution. The first Malagasy government—headed by Philibert Tsirananana, who was president in 1959–1972 and the leader of the pro-French Parti Social Democratique (PSD)—had been forced to step down

101 in 1972 in the face of an urban-led revolutionary movement (rotaka). The movement organized a series of farmer and student protests in the south and the capital of Madagascar, only months after Tsirananana won the presidential elections with over 99 percent of the votes. There was growing discontent because of Tsirananana’s government’s strong relations with the French (Gow 1997: 409; Raison-Jourde and Roy 2010: 244). Ratsiraka’s revolution was also supported by the Malagasy military.

Ratsiraka framed the “revolution” to liberate Madagascar from imperialist efforts following politics of non-alignment (tous azimuts), reaching toward socialism and rejecting Tsiranana’s policies privileging France, to benefit the poor and decentralize administrative functions (see Ratsiraka 1975: 11, 29; Gow 1997: 411–12). Ratsiraka’s policies aimed to maintain and direct the presidential power away from Merina competitors in the capital. With the help of his ministers, Ratsiraka collected his goals in Red Book, following what Mao had done in China. The contents of Boky Mena were formed from a number of radio broadcasts held by Ratsiraka after taking power (Sharp 2002: 36). His collectivist visions and policies were appreciated in rural areas (Rabenirainy 2002: 88).

The Red Book contained Ratsiraka’s vision of a “new society” founded on socialist principles and guided by the actions of the “five pillars of the revolution,” which were the Supreme Revolutionary Council, peasants and workers, young intellectuals, women and the Popular Armed Forces. According to Ratsiraka, Madagascar would be organized according to different administrative levels: village councils (fokontany) would have revolutionary power on the village level and the state would represent revolutionary power at the level of the nation (Ratsiraka 1975: 33). Important changes included a move toward economic independence through state capitalism: large-scale, foreign-owned forms were nationalized, foreign technical advisers (mainly French) were eliminated, assistance in schooling was offered, military was supported, cutting economic dependence on South Africa and educating the Malagasy in their national language (Sharp 2002: 36, 39). In the agricultural sector, one of the aims was to develop types of cooperation that, according to Ratsiraka, should aim toward the development of irrigation, reforestation and protection of soils, as well as the redistribution of lands to the advantage of the village (fokonolona); love (fitiavina) and mutual help (fifanampiana) were cherished in communal life (Ratsiraka 1975: 57–8).

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Following examples from the Soviet Union with its Leninist “scientific socialism,” Ratsiraka strived toward a social revolution with “a new man” who would liberate Madagascar finally from colonialism and its structures and practices, and who could create national development able to be handed over to the people (fokontany) (Gow 1997: 413). A significant change would come through collective action that required a shift of consciousness (mentalité). According to this mentality, to be a Malagasy referred to a valuing of rural agricultural labor; these citizens were recognized as the backbone of a primarily agricultural nation (Sharp 2002: 37–9). At the local level, Ratsiraka’s policies often bolstered local rulers, reviving customs that had been outlawed during the colonial era or seen as backward during Tsiranana’s government. These customs did not necessarily contribute to the state’s aims, but created tensions and conflict in villages and between clans. (Middleton 1999: 119.)

However, although emphasizing values that in general can be related with social reproduction, such as care and mutual aid, these collectivist policies could be violent. Comparative experiences from Tanzania’s peasant ujamaa policies emphasizing familyhood and collectivism have shown that the resettling of people into village collectives destroyed productive land and created opposition among the peasants, as they were forced to leave their farms without any capital. Furthermore, peasants were not trained in the technical skills required for machinery use. As capitalist farm productivity declined, together with production shortages due to ecological conditions, there were no food reserves. Finally, the ujamaa reform was too fast. In some cases, people held onto their land and used the machinery provided by the state for their own private plots, demonstrating that the ujamaa policies were unable to “capture” peasants. (Hyden 1980: 119–22.) Indeed, the Tsimihety modified the state efforts, such as Boky Mena, into their own customs.

Sharp’s (2002) ethnographic observations and discussions from the 1980s reveal that the Malagasy had been very impressed by Ratsiraka and his charismatic speeches. Sharp’s interlocutors had described that for Ratsiraka, freedom was not just political independence but freedom intellectually, emotionally, politically and economically from foreign dominance. As I asked from people about historical experiences or about memories about different governments, the people noted that Ratsiraka’s era was hard, and they mentioned that Ratsiraka favored people who were already rich. However, some agreed that his rule was better than French colonialism,

103 when all the Malagasy were enslaved; at least during Ratsiraka’s governance the Malagasy were free.

Ratsiraka’s policies become also understandable in relation to the global political processes of decolonization emphasized by the United Nations from the 1940s onwards and the US plan for a global order in which new independent nations practiced free market relations. Countries preferring the Soviet system, including Madagascar, emphasized independent production systems and protective state policies, and perceived that the US relied on free markets in order to hinder the industrialization of the rest of the world. However, the aim of the US was to secure its rights in global trade, keep the crucial sea lanes open and project military force against its enemies. In its politics of multilateralism, to rule different people was never in the interest of the US. (Kelly and Kaplan 2001: 16–19.)

Ratsiraka’s socialist visions ended with huge national debt and the World Bank and IMF orchestrating structural adjustments. Like other developing countries, Madagascar followed the advice of wealthy country lenders and international financial institutions and borrowed heavily from commercial banks (which were cash-rich from oil-exporting countries following the energy crisis of the 1970s) to invest in education, the military, transportation, communications and industrial development. Irresponsible lending, ill- advised borrowing and a global recession led to a rapidly deepening crisis of deficits, debt and inflation. (Kull 2014: 152.) The IMF austerity plans in the 1980s deserted state bureaucrats and activities (see Chapter 5 for structural adjustments in relation to environmental conservation efforts).

Despite the end of Ratsiraka’s socialist government, the Tsimihety continued to maintain Boky Mena. According to Mama ny Sandra, Boky Mena was established in the village in 1977. “I don’t know who established it or how,” Mama ny Sandra explained, and continued: “Before, when a family had very good solidarity (solidarité), Boky Mena was not needed but a family was able to resolve the problem when there was a death.” Boky Mena highlighted egalitarian values, as every adult was expected to give exactly the same contribution, regardless of their status. Young people who generally worked in the funeral as cooks were able to give half of the adults’ share. Moreover, Boky Mena highlighted the moral expectations that people living in the same spaces should take care of each other. Ratsiraka’s Boky Mena was “captured” by the Tsimihety.

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Boky Mena stabilizes the movement of the Tsimihety. At the same time, it produces calculative and census information on the number of clans, the people of the clans and where people lived. In Boky Mena, the Tsimihety define those who have shared the same space (village) and those who live somewhere else but have a relation through birth or habitation (zanakampielezana) or through social relations, friendship, business, a relative of a relative and so forth (tatibato). These relations also define the Tsimihety space that is different from the villages and regions documented by the Malagasy state (see Chapter 2). Boky Mena is a documentation of Tsimihety social and land relations but also their values and the kind of life the Tsimihety find valuable.

The Tsimihety’s Boky Mena practice challenges the notion that a modern European state is the main legal instrument in the monopolization and regulation of all legitimate and coercive power (Weber 2008: 156–78). In classical European political philosophy, the state was required to secure peace and the people’s possessions and property that otherwise, “in the state of nature,” would be in the mode “war against all” (Hobbes 1968 [1651]: chapter xiii). Nation-states have been considered crucial for capitalist development, which requires its legal order to guarantee private individual ownership along class lines (Weber 1978: 336–7; see also Kelly and Kaplan 2001: 8–9). In order to implement state plans, a modern state has to make a society legible, for example, through census data or standard language, so that it is easier to tax and control the people (Scott 1998: 11).

As Boky Mena was originally a Malagasy state project, the Tsimihety thereby incorporated parts of the state into their ways of life. One familiar theme in Madagascar ethnography has been that the Malagasy, including the Tsimihety, have preferred to avoid the state. However, the Tsimihety have not avoided the state but have been active in making it. For example, the first president of Madagascar was a Tsimihety. Indeed, people do not flee the state but also cooperated or make the state present in their relations, practices and values (see Chapter 7). I would argue that people have avoided a certain kind of state, such as a violent and commanding one, and the Tsimihety have welcomed state projects that have improved their living. I argue that in the contexts of plural land tenure systems, one system is based on the French Colonial Civil Code and the other is based on collective memory and understanding (fomba gasy) (Cole 2001: 42), Boky Mena was the Tsimihety way of of marking their land ownership and use.

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Over the years, however, Boky Mena has started to show the social and economic differences becoming more and more visible in the rural northeast villages. Thus, Boky Mena is not only about solidarity but also about differences, as I will discuss in Chapter 8.

3.6 Conclusions

In this chapter I have discussed the Tsimihety mode of work (asa) as “a total social fact” combining different social aspects, ranging from subsistence production, developing one’s fields, caring for one’s children, spouses, neighbors, rituals and moral evaluations. Work not only refers to subsistence production or paid labor but also caring, cooking and ritual work, which reproduce significant social relations. In other words, work is not only about making a livelihood but reproducing Tsimihety social and land relations and their society. Rice cultivation work is the main livelihood of the Tsimihety, creating a daily texture through which temporalities informing about significant social relations, events and experiences are placed in landscapes and reflect the work of previous generations. With the concepts of dwelling and phronesis, I have reminded that temporalities are not only schematic but experienced and considered by the Tsimihety.

Rice cultivation work makes visible social relations and relations to the land. A household is supposed to take care of subsistence production while relations of ancestral land require strong relations between a sibling set and clan members. Critical divisions in the Tsimihety social organization are between genders, with males and females being expected to take care of different kinds of work and know how to work with different materials. Tsimihety society has been organized to include strangers (see further in Chapter 6). On the other hand, land ownership is secured through one’s ancestors, from whom juniors inherit their land and who are supposed to bless their descendants. As pointed out in several ethnographies, however, ancestors in Madagascar constantly require gifts and remembering, or else they can cause hardships for their descendants.

A successful life is achieved through ancestral work, cultivation of fields, having children, building houses and remembering one’s ancestors. The ultimate ‘hardening’ of relations occurred in the second funeral

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(famadihana), when one’s bones are reburied in the main ancestral tomb. Without descendants, one cannot become an ancestor.

By working, people root themselves to the land; they also do this by producing hard and enduring things, such as houses and tombs and raising children to adulthood. By rooting to new land, the Tsimihety expand their ancestral domain and relations that are crucial for one’s status. If one does not have a relationship with the land, it can be considered that one has lost their ancestors. People’s distinctive relations with the land, places and other people, whether kin, neighbors or friends, are marked in Boky Mena. Boky Mena, originally a socialist state project, reveals the Tsimihety values, which emphasize egalitarianism, autonomy and shared responsibility based on reciprocal exchange.

The totalized notion of “ancestral land” helps understandings of why the concept of ancestral land has been politically significant in opposition to Daewoo. The metaphor not only refers to losing land but one’s status and dignity, and it would have indicated that Malagasy have again become slaves of a foreign power. In the next chapter, I pay attention how the Tsimihety have formed a relationship with vanilla, a foreign crop introduced by conquerors.

The Tsimihety did not reject development projects but instead looked for ways in which they could develop their lives and villages. Violent experiences with Malagasy and French states were remembered and influenced Tsimihety relations with the present state. According to my understanding, the Tsimihety have not rejected state and development projects but they do not want to enter into commanding and enforcing relationships. They looked for more equal relations based on reciprocal exchange and mutual care.

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4. Situated histories of vanilla: From sacrifice to universal nature and nurture in small holder plots

“Vanilla comes from Mexico,” taught Jay at the village library built by an US environmental conservation project in the north of the village on the way toward the park. The conservation project built the library to teach people about diverse species and biodiversity, and also to establish its presence in the village. The library was called simpona, the word in the Tsimihety dialect for the silky sifaka lemur. Jay was a young man who had studied at the University of Antsinaranana and spoke excellent English. After working for a regional tourist office of SAVA, Jay had been recruited in the US Lemur Conservation Network’s environmental conservation project to teach English to the current and prospective ecotourism guides living in the vicinity of the Marojejy National Park. “This is relevant information for ecotourism guides,” Jay continued. However, Jay acknowledged the talents of Tsimihety vanilla cultivators when going through the English vocabulary related to vanilla cultivation: “You know better than me the process of vanilla cultivation and production, so these words help you to explain it to tourists.”

Although vanilla is not native to Madagascar, the country is the most important vanilla producer in the world. Madagascar produces arounf 80 percent of the world’s vanilla (Financial Times 2018). Most of Madagascar’s vanilla is produced in the SAVA region, where there are around 70,000 planters (of Madagascar’s 80,000 planters) producing over 80 percent of Madagascar’s vanilla (Packer 2008). The Tsimihety and their families have been cultivating vanilla for generations and they were very aware how to cultivate (mamboly) and take care of (mikarakara) vanilla (see also Osterhaudt 2016: 268).

In ecotourism, vanilla has been represented as a commodity that sustains Madagascar’s forests. According to developers and funders, vanilla provides Malagasy cultivators with additional income and alternative form of livelihood to reduce the pressure to cut Madagascar’s forests (see, e.g., GIZ 2019; Symrise 2018). In addition, for European and North American tourists, vanilla represents a commodity, and it has been marketed through narratives appealing to its sensuous qualities and environmentally friendly aspects.

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In this chapter, I ask why it is relevant to know that vanilla comes from Mexico, although it is well stabilized and intensively cultivated in peasants’ fields in Madagascar (see also Osterhoudt 2016: 268). To answer this question I explore vanilla’s journey from Mexico, via Europe and Reunion, to Madagascar. In spite of the fact that vanilla was a crop of conquerors and settlers, it is also a commodity that the Malagasy cultivate to be sold in markets. In every situation, its value—as a gift, a commodity or a natural part of nature—has been created in particular dynamics and the social relations of each situation. Situated knowledge and paying attention to social relations, their dynamics and histories have highlighted that it is social relations and dynamics that constitute values related to nature rather than its natural properties or the ecological contexts within which it has been produced (Peluso 2012: 79). I highlight, as Peluso does, the importance of understanding history and historical processes in the making of value and valid knowledge. How is vanilla’s value determined in each place? What kinds of relations and processes have been involved?

Situated histories refer to tensions and examine the coalesced temporal and spatial components of a complex historical trajectory in a “conjunctural moment” when previous separate forces merge to create political and economic transformation (Gramsci et al. 1971). History-making practices often disguise exploitation and oppressive associations. Thus, understanding how history is told or remains untold is an essential part of the politics of knowledge production, but also of human experience and mobilization for change. Looking at vanilla in different places and in different situations allows to challenge universalizing narratives of nature and binaries of global and local (Haraway 1988; Tsing 2005).

According to Sahlins an event “centers the structures of conjuncture and the practical realization of cultural categories in a specific historical context, as expressed in the interested action of the historical agents, including the microsociology of their interactions” (Sahlins 1985: xiv). Sahlins has reminded about the importance of recognizing not only power relations but how people themselves, always acting within and in relation to cultural structures, relate to processes of globalization. In this chapter I suggest that by nurturing and caring, the Tsimihety make vanilla productive and flourishing, as they do with the children, plants and animals that they nurture. However, the Tsimihety do not merely make foreign or strange processes their own; the people’s relationship to commodities is also an effect of political and ethnic classifications that result from more specific

109 historical contexts, such as the current, benign relationship of rubber to ‘indigeneity’ argued by Peluso (2012). In Madagascar, vanilla has influenced people’s being classified as ‘poor producers’ or ‘sustainable farmers’ by transnational development actors and vanilla buyers, but it has also helped the Tsimihety ‘harden’ their relationships, as people have used the income received from vanilla for socially valued practices, such as building houses and performing funerals, and marked their presence on the land by planting vanilla.

In this chapter I describe vanilla in four different situations where vanilla evokes a particular type of socially significant knowledge. In 14th-century Mesoamerica, vanilla was known by Aztec specialists for its aphrodisiac qualities and offered as a gift to the gods. As a gift, vanilla emerged in the dynamics and processes of the hierarchies of the Aztec state and its regional dynamics, relations with people, gods and flowers. After the Spanish conquest, vanilla was brought to Europe from what today is Mexico.

In Europe, vanilla was placed in taste hierarchies, and it became a consumed commodity that marked class differences. I point out how modern European science transformed from a hierarchical worldview based on a humoral understanding of bodies and plants into a modern dualist understanding of natural world that humans can observe and modify with their technologies. By reproducing similar contexts, a view of universalized nature has been stabilized and vanilla has been separated from its social relations, enabling imperialist projects.

In Île de Bourbon (known today as Reunion),38 the organization of space and people into plantations, imperialists and slaves allowed structural violence, domination and dispossession. However, despite European domination, knowledge production and innovations were not reserved for Europeans; discoveries were also made by those who were deprived (Arditti et al. 2009: 244–5).

In Madagascar, vanilla was cultivated first at plantations where, for example, the Tsimihety occasionally worked. However, the Tsimihety did not submit to the slavery on plantations (Deschamps 1960). By moving to forested areas of the northern inland of Madagascar, they managed to keep a distance from coercive powers (see also Scott 2009). Having learned of plants and their cultivation on plantations, the Tsimihety cultivated vanilla in their own

38 For the history of the name of the island, see Moriarty 1891: 269.

110 fields, which followed a mixed cropping and shifting cultivation system. In the Tsimihety socialities, vanilla marked their lands and autonomy reproduced through care and nurturing. However, at the same time that Madagascar’s vanilla is marketed as green or sustainable, it has reminded of relations in which the Tsimihety have been treated as slaves or people who could not know right ways of cultivation.

4.1 Gifts to Gods in Mesoamerica

According to historical and scientific narratives and analysis, the Totonac people39 inhabiting present-day Mexico were the first to cultivate vanilla. Vanilla was integrated into the swidden cultivation cycle of milpa maize fields (Kouri 2004: 106; Sauer 1993: 204). In their hierarchical society, fruits were offered as a sacrifice and gifts to the gods and not consumed by the common people (Rain et al. 2011: 252; Kouri et al. 2004: 20). In the popular narrative, vanilla sprouted in the place where a Totonac princess and commoner were sacrificed (Cameroon 2011: 14; for another version of the story, see Rain et al. 2011: 252). Fertility was a character of the autochthonous life originating from the land (Valeri 1985: 48).

In the 15th century, the Aztec state had enlarged itself by means of political and military strategies40 and occupied present-day Central Mexico, extending from the Pacific Ocean to the Gulf of Mexico (Smith 2001; Brumfiel 1983: 266). In order to attract followers and protection from the gods, the empire demonstrated its powers through magnificent and violent rituals involving human sacrifice.41 Vanilla was a tribute, a periodical payment made to an Aztec ruler by the Totonacs.

39 The Totonacs most likely migrated from central Mexico, Teotihuacán, to the Gulf Coast in the present-day Veracruz region, where they built their city-state El Tajín in honor of the deity Hurakan/Tlaloc, the god of storms (Rain 2004: 19–21). 40 Known as the “triple alliance,” it included the city-states of Mexico- Tenichtitlan, Texoco and Tlacopan. 41 The empire was reinforced further by law reformations, rewriting history and controlling the leaders of the subjugated city-states. The Aztecs developed military and fighting techniques (i.e., flower wars) aimed at capturing war captives (Isaac 1983; Hicks 1979).

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Among the Aztecs, vanilla was served only to nobles, merchants and warriors “for success with women.” According to historical narratives, Montezuma II, the ninth ruler of Tenochtitlan, drank 50 cups of Xocolatl every day from a golden vessel, often before going to his harem. It was said to have aphrodisiac powers and to give strength to the drinker (Few 2005: 676–7).

The violent sacrifices performed by the Aztec priests were not a punishment but necessary for the maintenance of the Aztec state. The Aztec gods required constant gifts of human sacrifices and victims were able to elevate their posthumous status by being sacrificed (Sahagun 1950–82; see also Valeri 1985: 66).

Dynamics in the Aztec empire can be regarded in terms of cosmological mobility. In archaic states, a system of cosmological rules whose transgression was expressed in sickness and natural catastrophe demonstrated that people were related to a larger cosmos. Among the Aztecs the equilibrium between astronomical events and human health was achieved by constant human sacrifices to the Sun (Francia and Stoibart 2015: 275–6). Different groups were organized into a larger hierarchical totality, where the conqueror was placed in a higher position in the cosmos and the local elite had to strive to be a member of a conquering group (Friedmann 1994: 30–3).42 This is one of the aspects why Europeans were able to conquer the Aztecs with a small military.

Today, the narrative of a Totonac princess and her sacrifice has been represented as a love story. The love story has placed vanilla again into new social relations and processes but, importantly, it has also separated vanilla from the times, places and relations of the 15th-and 16th-century Totonac and Aztec societies and dynamics—that were also violent—among and between the people.

42 An ecological point of view notes that the Aztec practice of sacrifice was a peculiar development of concrete subsistence problems distinctive to Mesoamerica and the valley of Mexico (Harner 1977).

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4.2 Making universalized nature and divisions of people

In 16th-century Europe, vanilla was identified in the social hierarchies as a luxury and marketed through a royal monopoly (Lucas 2010: 264). As a spice, vanilla was expensive and rare, and only European royalty and the higher classes were able to use it. Even the royalty had to accept rationing, as Europeans were unfamiliar with the curing and pollination processes of vanilla production (Rain 1992: 39; Gottesman 2005: 744). Vanilla was first used an additive for chocolate, but in the early 17th century it was separated into its own taste by Hugh Morgan, a creative apothecary in the employ of Queen Elizabeth. It was also used in medicine as a nerve stimulant and as an aphrodisiac, according to humoral logic focusing on the innate capacities of different herbs and medicines to influence the balance of the whole body (Jackson 2001: 487).

During late Renaissance politics, the focus shifted from a totality to observable forms. Along with the knowledge and experiences of the Black Death, voyages of discovery, increasing maritime trade and the Reformation, European philosophers wrote against hierarchical feudalism, in which power tended to be centralized among the lords who granted land to vassals in return for military services. The political philosopher Montesquieu (1689–1755) found that luxury essentially referred to inequality. The 17th-century sumptuary laws were created by aristocrats in order to secure their position against merchants and the bourgeoisie, who were able to travel and gain access to new material wealth (Ribeiro 2003: 12–16). According to Montesquieu, if the riches of a state were equally divided, there was no luxury, for it was founded merely on conveniences acquired by the labor of another. He suggested that a republican government was the best way to secure people’s equality and it was necessary to cultivate the taste and knowledge of the people about the principles of the republic— namely, the love of virtue—the willingness to put the interests of the community ahead of one’s private interests (Montesquieu 1823: 23, 92–5). In Montesquieu’s writings, “what is” and “what ought to be” started to separate.43 For example, nature was a God-given fact; however, social laws

43 A century earlier, Descartes (1596–1650) had presented a dualistic vision of mind and body, in which thinking was a proof of one’s existence. A century later, Kant developed transcendental idealism, privileging mind in shaping and structuring human experience.

113 could be understood when investigating different laws and forms of governments in their particular contexts (ibid: 224–7).

The 18th-century botanical gardens sought to display different plants and their relationships on a global scale and in the natural order by means of aesthetics, like exhibiting ornamental plants (Encyclopedia Britannica 2014; Allen 1986: 40–1). Differing from the medieval focus on the curative aspects of different plants, botanical gardens’ exhibitions were aimed at education and teaching an audience, ranging from academics and specialists to the general public. The idea of a universal human being started to emerge.

One aspect of this universality was based on the discovery of the enduring species form of plants, animals and minerals. Linnaeus (1707–1778), the creator of the modern biological classification system, highlighted that these enduring forms should be taken from the fruiting body form that only science of botany was able to reveal (Linnaeus 1737a). His interest in the sexual morphology of plants can be explained by his godly devotion; for him the greatest task of an organism was to reproduce (Paterlini 2007: 814–15).

Linneaus described a stable and hierarchical world-order created by God (Tsing 2005: 94; Atran 1990: 151). In Systema Naturae (1735), he presented a binomial system based on the combination of two Latin names denoting genus and species and described the great hierarchical chain of being learned from Aristotle. The Linnaean taxonomy has allowed biologists to group related species into genealogical trees representing the evolutionary lineage of organisms from common ancestors (Paterlini 2007: 813).

The character of generalized nature was experienced and witnessed by Alexander von Humboldt, a German geographer who invented the concept during his American expeditions (1799–1804). When trekking about 60 kilometers from Quito to Chimborazo in Ecuador, he passed through different vegetation zones and altitudes (see also Chapter 5 for similarities in Marojejy). As the clouds faded away when his expedition group was standing on the mountain, they found a huge crevasse in front of them (Wulf 2015: 88). In that moment, the new vision of universal nature became clarified (see Chapter 5 for more detailed discussion). Nature was not only an abstraction but also experienced and observed.

The global scale of botany separated those who extended the periphery of the known plant world by discovering and documenting “new” species (the collectores in Linnaeus’s classification of botanical authors) from those (the

114 methodici) who presided over the centers in which these species were accumulated and stored for purposes of research and education (Müller- Wille 2001: 36–7). For example, after Linneaus had received plant specimens from students participating in explorations on trade company boats, he investigated them in his home university of Uppsala or in the Netherlands, where he visited. In addition, botanical gardens were interrelated by networks of correspondence accompanied by the exchange of seeds and specimens, a network that served the methodici to further augment their collections by sharing the findings of others. It was thus vitally important for Linnaeus both to understand the system of specimen circulation among botanical gardens (as he very well did) and to take advantage of it by establishing strategic exchange relations with collectors who offered the best chances of sending him “new species”. He used the new species, by reproducing them in his own garden, to recruit new exchange partners by sending them duplicates, for instance. (Müller-Wille 2003: 159, 166.) This is how science and scientific knowledge accumulated in certain places with certain people (Latour 1987: 219–57). During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, alongside the expansion of colonial trade, this network of exchange reached a truly global scale, mapping and cataloguing the globe as a potential storehouse of wealth (Moore 2017: 605). The way knowledge was produced both made and maintained hierarchies and divisions that were Eurocentric.

New understanding of nature started to create civilization divides. Latin was the language of botanical science and used in the scientific communications on botany. Those who mastered Latin showed also that they were learned people and capable of scientific reasoning and study; this separated them from folk knowledge and the places where actual specimens were collected (Müller-Wille 2003: 164). In Linneaus’ classifications, for example, the genus name of vanilla came from Spanish vainilla, “a diminutive of ‘vaina’ from the Latin, describing a sheath, vagina or pod, perhaps motivated by the sheath-like shape of the fruit” (Lucas 2010: 262). However, the Nahuatl name tlilxuchitl was absent in his classification. Only a century earlier, the botanist Georg Ebenhard Rumphius had collected plants and plant knowledge of the Ambonese. His collections did not create a civilizational divide of “us and them,” but he used Malay categorizations in his work. The Ambonese were not represented as a particular case of people possessing a specific kind of knowledge. (Lowe 2006: 57–9.) The transfer from the place of data-gathering, where collaboration was necessary, to the centers of

115 investigation, such as universities and botanical gardens, allowed the erasure of folk knowledge and relations from scientific reports (Latour 1987: 232– 47; on the other hand, see Tsing 2005: 163 for modes of collaboration).

Linneaus was not only interested in classifying nature but he connected it with nation-building and subjective duty. “Oeconomia”—the science of natural products and their “use” by humans—should be included as a compulsory part of university teaching to provide a broad disciplinary basis for local assistants—parsons, physicians and engineers—to an administrative state machinery, furthering national prosperity by means of systematic resource allocation (Müller-Wille 2003: 155). By figuring out plants’ natural habitats and geographic distributions, Linneaus described their pharmaceutical and other economic uses, for example, for dyes, textiles, agriculture, mining and consumption (Müller-Wille and Charmatier 2012: 6).

Economic motivation encouraged the work of botanists. In the Liege botanical garden, after discovering the manual pollination method of vanilla in which pollinia are removed with a needle and inserted between the rostellum and stigma (Fouche and Jouvé 1999: 698), the botanist Charles Morren described how the “vanilla plant produces the long and fine pods of Commerce and the importance of science for improving every branch of industry.” In his scientific report, he described vanilla’s productive capacities in quantitative terms: “The first harvest that I did in Liege, one plant produced 54 ripe fruits” (Morren 1840: 2, 9).

As the European hegemony grew, European knowledge increasingly directed global programs. In contrast to the earlier period, European botanists wrote of the plants, not the people. Their texts emptied the landscapes they studied of human inhabitants, making them appropriate for European settlement and conquest (Tsing 2005: 94). In addition, with the help of technologies, scientific experiments tended to invent nature that was replicable in different contexts (Tsing 2005: 167; see also Chapter 3). For example, Morren made experiments with vanilla in order to “produce fruits in hot-houses, the same circumstance of the ambient atmosphere as those which exist under a Mexican sky” (Myers 2007: 292). However, vanilla did not produce fruits in European hot houses before 1836, and its pollination remained unknown to Europeans for over 400 years. Along with economic and imperial aims vanilla, traveled to Reunion from Europe.

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4.3. Slavery at Réunionese plantations

On the 26th of July in 1819, Commander Pierre-Henri Philibert, a marine born in Réunion and later a governor of his natal island, brought Vanilla pompona to Réunion from French Guyana (Fouché and Jouven 1999). A year later, Philibert brought a second lot of vanilla cuttings from Manila in the Philippines; it was known as “little vanilla,” compared to Pompona (Lucas 1990: 262, cit. Thomas 1828). In 1821, Mr. Marchant introduced Vanilla planifolia from the Paris Botanical Gardens to Réunion, where it grew successfully (Fouché and Jouven 1999: 691). These movements of vanilla show how it circulated between centers of accumulation and places of discovery; however, it was not only the crop or plants that moved but also people, freely or forced.

In the 18th century, tobacco and sugar plantations flourished in Réunion and Mauritius (Île de France) on the east and southeast coasts. The French brought most of the labor force from East Africa and Madagascar. In the first third of the 18th century, the population of Île de France was about 190 Europeans and 640 slaves (Larson 2001: 56).

The slave trade in the eastern Indian Ocean area was not only motivated by capitalism; it was multidirectional and changed over time. In the 19th century, there were two slave trading networks in Madagascar: one channeling slaves to the distant and regional markets of the western Indian Ocean and the other transporting Malagasy war captives and East African slaves to the markets of the Merina state expanding in the highlands (Campbell 2005: 57; 1981: 281). The growth of the Merina Kingdom44 resulted in increased demand for the work force, which conflicted with the requirements of the neighboring plantation islands. British and French merchants could not rely on the Imerina traders but had to find labor from the independent Sakalava chiefs, who had raided slaves among the Merina before Merina expansion (Campbell 1981: 211–12).

Even the abolishment of slavery—the British abolished slavery in Mauritius in 1835—did not end the use of cheap labor, as the British started to bring

44 In Madagascar, slaves were bought with silver coins or exchanged for silk, cotton, iron tools or weapons used in the expansion of the Merina Kingdom (Larson 2001: 61–2).

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Tamils from India to work on their plantations in Reunion and Mauritius as contractual workers (Talbot 2016: 56). The French did not have access to an Indian labor force, and they continued to trade slaves from Madagascar until 1848, when the French government abolished slavery.

Moore (2017) has pointed out that by defining nature as cheap and mobilizing the unpaid work and energy of humans—especially the enslaved, women and people of African descent—for the support of imperial power, capitalist rationality can transform landscapes with a singular purpose: the endless accumulation of capital. However, capitalist systems, especially as practiced historically in Africa, seek to maintain dual production systems in order to obtain a cheap supply of farm goods by having farmers feed themselves (Laney 2015: 813; Bernstein 1977: 60; see Chapter 3 about dual production).

However, enslaved people themselves established relations with vanilla. Although Morren developed vanilla pollination in Europe by using scissors to cut the plant’s rostellum, separating the stigma and anther in an intricate procedure, it was too difficult to use in plantations requiring a faster method (Ecott 2004: 115). According to a legend, the method used to pollinate vanilla today was invented in 1841 by a young slave, Edmund Albius, at the age of 12:

One day Edmund and his master, Bellier-Beaumont, a keen horticulturalist, were walking in the master’s garden and saw two fruits growing on their own in a solitary vine which had been sterile for 20 years. Edmund claimed that he had fertilized the vanilla. At first, Bellier-Beaumont dismissed Edmund’s claim as an idle boost but few days later he found again another flower showing signs of swelling ovaries. Again, Edmund claimed the credit. Bellier-Beaumont requested to see how he succeeded to pollinate vanilla. In his method a person uses a thin stick or blade of grass and a simple thumb gesture. With the stick or grass blade, field hands lift the rostellum, the flap that separates the male from the female stigma, and then, with their thumbs, smear the sticky pollen from the anther over the stigma. (Ecott 2004: 123)

Edmund’s method is used today in Madagascar. Papa ny Georges showed me also how pollination is done: “One uses a thin piece of branch, a kind of spine like a size of a big needle, and one has to carefully lift the ‘tongue’

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(lela) up just inside the first one and press it slowly,” he explained. This is evidence of continued practices of observing, copying, testing and learning (Dove 2011: 98; see Chapter 5).

The case of Edmund reveals how structures hinder or enable what people are able to do and how they and their actions are valued. In the hierarchical society of Reunion where land ownership was reserved for French or Creole plantation owners, available land was up in the mountains. In addition, his mother had died when giving birth, leaving few kin relations, if any, for Edmund; possibly he did not have relatives whom he could have sought. Slaves were outsiders with no local allies. As Kopytoff and Miers (1977: 17) have usefully pointed out regarding many African societies, to be free is not to be independent but to belong. Moreover, belonging entails both rights and obligations. Not only social identity but also physical survival are built upon one’s ability to draw on the commitments inherent in long-term relationships of interdependence. Likewise, in Madagascar, the “lost people” had no means of returning to their homelands and their webs of dependency. Therefore, to leave their masters was to risk being alone in the world. As long as their masters were providing for their needs, such a risk may have been too great to bear. (Brown 2004: 637.) Moreover, telling about the method could have opened new possibilities for Edmund, as he was able to solve the problem that Europeans were intrigued by.

Eventually, however, Edmund died in poverty and alone, despite being “free” after the French abolished slavery in 1848 (Ecott 2004: 145). These political-historical contexts were not free from violence and subordinating relations influencing the politics of their interpretation and representation (Peluso 2012: 80; Taussig 1980: xiii). In Réunion, vanilla was clearly a crop of the conquerors, yet it escaped to the swidden cultivators’ fields in Madagascar.

4.4 In Madagascar: vanilla markets and state relations

Although vanilla—or, more specifically, Vanilla planifolia—is not endemic to Madagascar, the country is one of the most important vanilla producers in the world along with Reunion and Indonesia. The plant was introduced along the east coast, from Vatomandry to Saint-Marie, where the most commercial firms from Réunion visited, and to Nosy-be on the western coast in the 1870s (Francois 1934: 39). Unlike in Réunion, where vanilla was produced by slaves, in Madagascar vanilla escaped to small holder fields, where most of

119 the production comes from today. During the first decades of the 20th century, the northeast had become the most prominent vanilla-producing regions in the world (Althabe 1968). Vanilla has been produced mainly for Europeans and North Americans, and it is not consumed by the Malagasy people.

In Madagascar, vanilla was a highly valuable crop, and French colonial officers sought to keep it under close watch. During the first decades of colonialism, the French instituted policies encouraging Malagasy people to work on French plantations in order to pay taxes (Cole 2001: 56; Feeley- Harnik 1991: 244–5; Sodikoff 2012: 69). The French also forbade small holders from growing vanilla on their fields. They conscripted Malagasy workers from the south of the island to work on the large vanilla plantations on the eastern coast. From the French perspective, the Malagasy did not have the necessary skills and therefore could harm the whole vanilla market. The imperial French state gave licenses for vanilla cultivators, but at first only a few prominent Malagasy cultivators were allowed to grow it. The fields of people who tried to cultivate vanilla without permission were burned. (Osterhaudt 2016: 269.)

When the Betsimisaraka or the Tsimihety returned from plantations, they usually took a few lianas and planted them in their fields (Osterhaudt 2016: 269; Laney 2002: 705). Those who cultivated vanilla considered themselves nobles (Molet 1959). Today also, on the east coast of Madagascar to be a vanilla farmer refers to a sense of pride (Osterhaudt 2016: 270). Among the Tsimihety, a good harvest signals success, wealth, money, knowledge and intense work.

Vanilla cultivation has been closely supervised by the Malagasy states. During the first decades of Madagascar’s independence, the Malagasy state controlled the coffee and vanilla sectors through a marketing board, CAVAGI (Caisse de Commercialisation et de Stablilisation des Prix du Café, de la Vanille et du Girofle), which set relatively low but steady farm- gate prices (Cadot et al. 2008: 403; Krivonos 2004: 35). The state also collaborated with Comoros and Réunion to create a vanilla cartel to keep exports low and international prices exceptionally high, garnering high taxes. In 1974, the cartel’s share exceeded 80% of the world market but dropped to 30% in the mid-1980s as Indonesia’s market share of the world’s exports climbed rapidly. The Ministry of Trade permitted licenses, valid for

120 three-year periods, for growing that were required for producers and processors (Cadot et al. 2008: 399–400). A stabilization fund (CAVAGI) stabilized the price received by producers and financed stocking costs with contributions taken from export proceeds, after payment of the export tax (de Melo 2000: 4). Purchase prices from producers were fixed and guaranteed for the entire crop, as the FOB45 price was about equally divided between growers, packers and the GOM/GAVAGI, and the farmers’ supply was strong and the quality maintained (Cadot et al. 2008: 399–400).

Ratsiraka’s government (1975–1993) replaced the tripartite decision process involving growers, packers-stockers and the government of Madagascar, which had been put in place after independence by the Ministry of Trade. In Madagascar, the export taxation became confiscatory, peaking at 82% of the pre-tax export price in the early 1990s with the fraction of the export price received by farmers squeezed to less than 8%. Attempts to overexploit monopoly rents led to the allocation of unused export quotas across exports from the Indian Ocean cartel. The increased prices resulted in the flourishing of illegal trade, encouraged Indonesia to enter the market and discouraged demand, leading to stocking becoming expensive. In 1993, three quarters of the stock of inventories—which by 1990 exceeded four years’ worth of exports in good times—were ultimately burned. From 1993 onwards, the vanilla market was 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. (Cadot et al. 2008: 400–2.)

The comparison between rubber and vanilla shows that the Malagasy state has had an important role in stabilizing vanilla production in Madagascar. In Madagascar in 1891 and 1914, forest rubber was one of the island’s principal export products, even though it occupied a minor place in the world market (Danthu 2016: 35). Like vanilla cultivation, rubber collection enabled people to pay the taxes demanded by the colonial government, thereby keeping the government away from their wealth, paddies and cattle herds (Danthu 2016: 35, cit. Vergely 1907). However, despite the colonial government being concerned about quality, it was never controlled by the intermediaries. This resulted in a vicious circle where a buyer paid the

45 Free on Board in international commercial law.

121 minimum price because he expected poor quality and a collector did not care about the quality because the price was low anyway (Danthu 2016: 35, cit. Vacher 1907). Finally, the imperial government’s agricultural advisers encouraged a focus on vanilla and coffee cultivation, which were already known in Madagascar. The risks in launching a new type of cultivation and the need for investment with only long-term returns must have discouraged the colonists. (Danthu 2016: 36–40.)

Ten years after liberating the vanilla market, a free market had not stabilized prices: there was a lack of cohesion between vanilla producers, collectors and exporters, a rise of vanilla bean thefts, and a general increase of violence (Cadot 2008: 403). Global competitors quickly entered the market and consumers switched to cheaper, artificial vanillin, causing prices to plunge again (Laney 2015: 813).

Indeed, vanilla prices have fluctuated in recent years. In 2013, one kilo of dried vanilla was about 20 USD in the four villages where I gathered the ethnographic data for this study. A few years later in 2015–2016, the price of vanilla rose near 200 USD per kilogram. In 2018, according to the Financial Times, vanilla was traded at 515 USD per kilogram. In 2017, the price peaked over 600 USD per kilogram. In 2017 and 2018, the price of vanilla was as much as silver.

price in US dollars/dried vanilla/kg 2017 $ 600 (the peak price) 2016 $200 2013 $30–3546 2012 $20 Table 4: Dried vanilla prices (C.D 2018).

The comparative experiences from Waynard district South India have shown how crops that prices tend to peak, like vanilla or ginger (mainly cultivated on leased land), manifests a moment of agrarian uncertainty and the neoliberalization of agriculture in South India coproduced by the properties of ginger. As a neoliberal boom crop, ginger exemplifies a regime of flexibilization of agrarian accumulation that has proved a profitable move

46 This is my estimation based on the prices that Tsimihety cultivators estimated dried vanilla would cost.

122 for some, but has brought financial ruin and debt traps for many others leading to suicides. At the same time, a class of newly rich people known as “ginger kings”—farmers or rural entrepreneurs who have become millionaires in the space of just a few years by cultivating ginger has emerged. Ginger is a response by smallholders to the “agrarian angst” (Turner and Caouette 2009) caused by environmental and economic uncertainty that has to be understood historically and related with a more general decline of Indian agriculture since the liberalization of the Indian economy in the early 1990s (Münster 2015:100-101, 112).

Among the Tsimihety, vanilla’s possibilities to make people rich had been noted and experienced in 2003 when vanilla prices peaked. People had built three store high brick buildings, although some of them were unfinished. Some had spent their money on gambling and women. Younger generation noted that now we [vanilla cultivators] know better and we will not spend our money on that kind of things.

Although vanilla was captured in the Tsimihety fields, through vanilla, the Tsimihety negoatite their state relations. Vanilla allowed the Malagasy state to document the Tsimihety. In vanilla business the Malagasy state and vanilla buying companies recognised the Tsimihety as producers. Every producer who wanted to sell vanilla in the state vanilla market had to have a farmer’s card. Willy told that he just had to buy it with 2000 Ar from the district office in Mayor’s bureau.

The structure of the vanilla market is that cultivators’ producer books (carnet) are gathered in the pile before weighting starts. Each cultivator has to have a producer card with one’s name, date of birth and place of living. The amount of vanilla kilos are marked in each farmer’s book. In every state market there were two writers and two or three controllers checking the quality and weighting the vanilla. After everybody who is willing to sell vanilla in the state market, village negotiators negotiate the price with buyers. Village negotiators used arguments of people who did not have money (tsy manana vola) and worked hard (miasa fatratra) in order to produce vanilla harvests. In villages where there people were selling big amounts of vanilla, the village leader had an advantage in negotiating as buyers who were known to have money (‘a big buyer’- mpividy-be)wanted to buy bigger amounts of vanilla at the same time. This way one of the villages negotiated that one of their elementary school’s roof would be

123 repaired by the vanilla buyer. Finally, village president gives the books back to the cultivators who go to the buyer to get their money.

1) Cultivators leaves the book and informs that he/she will sell vanilla in the state market 2) Quality checking 3) Weighting: When weighted, the writer writes down the kilos in the carnet of planteur and signs the kilos. After weighting, if the seller has had a vanilla contract, he will pay back the debt. If one seller has 100kg, one buyer buys it all so it is not divided among different buyers. 4) In some cases, when price negotiations continue, all vanilla is stored in a safe place, usually in communal house, school or in the house of a trusted elder

In 2013 in the first vanilla market negotiations were about to start on the 19th of June in one of the neighboring villages of Manantenina. “There are very few buyers” Willy, together with Lankany and Toby who worked in the Mayor’s office that had come to take their share of the tax (restorn), noted. In 2013 the tax was 200 Ar/kg of green vanilla. The few buyers who had come to hear the round of negotiations and get a sense of the harvest to be sold, sat in the shade of the few coconut tress next to the village square. Few drove around with their bicycles and motorbikes. Nobody sold vanilla during this first market day.

Selling one’s vanilla in the state market is a public event. Everybody can witness the amount of kilos one sells, how controllers treat people’s harvests and how the scale is adjusted before the weighting the vanilla. Once the controllers threw away the lower-quality beans of an elderly woman, causing Willy to tell them angrily: “She is not rich” (tsy manana vola). He meant that the controllers should not be so hard on the quality of her harvest and informed of care towards people whose harvests were not so lucrative than biggers producers. Although vanilla provided necessary monetary income, vanilla produced situations in which the state and also people could take an evaluating and commanding tone. State relations were constantly negotiated.

However, as far as I knew, in some villages people sold small amounts of vanilla in the state markets, such as 20 or 30 kilos. The tax (tambimbidy), is the money that goes to fokon’tany: 40 % of the money they get for the village, 60% goes for the commune. Graeber’s (2004: 20) interpretation of

124 rural highlanders’ relations with the Malagasy state, notes that as the state has the possibility for the use of violence (see Chapter 2), filling out forms, registering land, even paying taxes, might be considered the equivalents of sacrifice: little ritualized actions of propitiation by which one wins the autonomy to continue with one’s life. The Tsimihety participation with the state vanilla market showed their willingness to stay in good terms with the Malagasy state. For example, when police officers patrolled at the entrance of different towns and collected fees from the road users, people interpreted that people had to help the polive and give small money gifts (cadeau in French) because the state did not pay their salaries. This kind of relation with the state challenges the modern European understanding of state as monopoly for the use of violence in order to guarantee the state sovereignty (Weber 2008: 156-78) and securing people’s property (Hobbes 2005 [1651]). As I have discussed in Chapter 2, power is not only created by oppression and military actions but it can be developed through constant exchanges between the chief and his people (Clastres 1977: 29–31). This is the relation that the Tsimihety seek with the state.

The state market was not the only place where to sell one’s vanilla. During the vanilla marketing time, there are unofficial buyers and cultivators who do not have government’s producer liceneces. They can sell their vanilla to relatives or fellow villagers, also known as small buyers (commissionera mandinika), who walk around with their plastic bags and allure or ‘kiss’ (manoroka), as the Tsimihety used to say, people to sell vanilla to them. The small buyers sell vanilla further to bigger buyers. Collector pays the same price as in tsena but he has to give some extra to a small buyer.

People knew that one could get cheated if one sold to a small buyer because they could adjust their scales for their own advantage. From village official market’s point of view, there is another problem. If a buyer gets a lot of vanilla from unofficial routes, like through these small buyers, he is ‘full’ (voky) of vanilla and does not want to buy much in the official market and can negotiate price lower. Agroecologists have pointed out that because vanilla escaped to the swidden cultivators’ fields, it enabled them to be free and avoid salaried labor (on comparative notions of rubber, see Dove 1998: 24–5; Peluso 2012: 89–90). However, cash crop production is not only about being free but my material shows how people have to negotiate their relations with authorities.

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I think these actions do not necessarily dismiss the authority of the state but we have to understand how the relations between different authorities have been organized (see also Roitman (2005: 19-20, 204). For example, although Madagascar has been regarded as the role model for environmental conservation, during the 2009 coup d’etat, a rare and conserved rosewood tree (Dalbergia maritima) was cut in national parks, for example in Marojejy and Masoala. In addition, the president at the time gave export permissions for the 13 exporting companies. According to publicly circulating documents and stories the coup d’etat of 2009 was funded with the money earned from the rosewood trade. Also President Hery Rajaonarimampianina (2014–18), chosen with democratic elections, facilitated rosewood trade. (Sharife and Maintikely 2018.) These notions show that Madagascar’s state administration, despite it is intensively interacting with environmental conservation projects, is related with rosewood trade that is against the values of environmental conservation protecting rare species. I think instead of asking whether some state is weak or strong we should pay attention to interactions and relations of different authorities. However, in the Tsimihety fields vanilla had to be nurtured.

4.5 Nurtured vanilla

Producing vanilla requires intensive work phases, from planting until preparation and selling, which are done manually by the Malagasy cultivators. Papa ny Georges, one of the biggest vanilla producers (with a crop of 500 kilograms of vanilla per year) in the vicinity of the Marojejy National Park, described his work: The vanilla stem should be planted during the rainy season (January– March) because then it grows (mitombo) and roots (mamaka) well. It takes three years for a new stem to grow and make fruits. If vanilla is taken care of (mikarakara) [this word is used also for nurturing children], it is good to clear the field from smaller vegetation during rainy season, as well as taking care of stems, for example, cutting the head of the stem and burying it in the ground to the roots.

“Why does it have to be cut?” I asked as I watched Papa ny Georges taking care of his stems. He took a moment to carefully inspect a plant before gently cutting a stem growing too high and then placing others on tutor branches that directed them back toward the ground. When he was finished he answered: “If one lets a stem grow, it grows but does not produce fruit.”

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As I have already mentioned, vanilla cultivation has been favored by environmental conservation. Vanilla has been mainly cultivated on hillside fallows, and “a greening” quality or vanilla as supporting reforestation has been implied in the narratives of vanilla buyers and environmental conservation programs. Vanilla also challenges the monocrop visions of plantations (see also Tsing 2015: 40 about matsutake). First, it needs a tutor tree on which it can grow. Vines are attached to the support with adventitious (or aerial) roots (Fouché and Jouvé 1999: 693). In addition, the plant requires mycorrhizal fungi for the germination of orchid seeds. It cannot pollinate itself but requires certain kinds of bees or small birds or human help in order to become fertilized (Porras-Alfaro 2007: 510). Because of its root qualities, vanilla is regarded as a rational option for anti-erosion practices (Randrianarijaona 1983: 311). Making a living from vanilla requires and encourages diversity, pointing to the inextricability of aesthetics and survival, unlike plantations (see also Tsing 2005: 167).

However, as the Tsimihety nurture vanilla throughout the year, vanilla cultivation settles the Tsimihety in particular places. Papa ny Georges continued his explanation: “During the end of the June until the end of August there is time for harvesting and drying vanilla. When harvesting, each pod is picked manually.” Papa ny Georges showed me: “One has to collect it with a handle (taho), or otherwise the sap (rano) inside will run away. The liquid 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 in the field because when the pods are collected, they start to lose their weight. Keeping vanilla moist benefits cultivators because it makes vanilla heavier and increases the price,” he concluded.

Once cultivators have gathered the vanilla pods they cover them inside a cloth (lamba). The cloth protects the fruits, mainly keeping them moist and protecting the skin. In addition, fruits in a cloth are out of sight of potential thieves. Cultivators store their vanilla in their houses and sleep in their fields when vanilla needs to be guarded, usually during May and June.

The theft of vanilla is a serious problem for producers. Rumors and doubts emerge and circulate as vanilla starts to mature and people seek to protect their harvests. In 2013 some people’s harvests were stolen, and even their kin were suspected of them. In this sense, vanilla does not contribute to the ancestral values of mutual love and respect.

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Indeed, anthropologists have noted how commodities tend to disrupt communal relationships (Parry and Bloch 1989: 8–12). Yet, it is not so straightforward how commodities challenge communal relations, and it is important to observe what people do with the money that they earn from their commodities. For example, Malagasy women do not generally see intertwined intimate care, love and money to be antithetical (Cole 2009). The Tsimihety who gained from the vanilla trade built houses, paid kin’s hospital and chilcdren’s school fees and visited tombs giving gifts and asking for blessing from the ancestors contributing to their ancestral order. Vanilla cultivation per se did not change the Tsimihety into individualist enterepreneurs.

Tsing (2015, 65-6; see also Bear et al. 2015) have encouraged to pay attention to economic diversity and look for the noncapitalist elements, for example salvage accumulation that capitalism depends on. In addition, gifts and commodities do not necessarily fall into neat categories of either or. For example, workers in the Mexican garment industry learn to weave at home. This skill is captured by capitalist processes that Tsing calls salvage accumulation. I fully endorse that we should be aware how capitalist processes capture, make and accumulate value but I want to remind that, for example, home or families are formed in relation to historical political, economic and capitalist processes (see also, e.g., Kalb 2015: 51; Moore 2016; Narotzky and Besnier 2014).

With all these acts, the Tsimihety vanilla cultivators seek to fulfill the quality demands of the vanilla market. According to cultivators, the best quality vanilla pod is long. They spread their thumb and middle finger to indicate its right length, which is 17 cm or more. The prime-quality bean is long and thick, showing that it is also full of grains. A bean of secondary quality could be thin at the ends but thick in the middle. The stalks of inferior quality (ketsa) were the smallest and thinnest ones. In general, the price of a kilo of uncured (also known as “green”) vanilla is five times less than that of cured vanilla.

Vanilla engaged the Tsimihety with world markets that are prone to economic fluctuations and where one does not have security that the revenues of one’s work will be paid for (see also Münster 2015). As Li (2013: 5–6) has pointed out people tend to have a solid understanding of profit and loss, and they tend to be attentive to the value of the labor they invested in producing crops for use or sale. Place of production and whether

128 the market for their products was local or global did not matter, so long as they made a reasonable return on their hard work. Li’s observations are significant for my work. If people knew that the price of vanilla would not be high, they did not put so much effort into caring for vanilla. Some let their vanilla fields grow with vegetation and they focused on other things, such as rice production, other cultivation plants, such as cloves, coffee or ginger, or collecting different plants in the forest. (see also in relation to ecotourism in Chapter 7.)

However, the care by the Tsimihety for flowers extended beyond sole economic gain. Once as we were returning from Willy’s vanilla fields, he rushed to one of his friend’s fields and sighed: “He has forgotten [to pollinate] some flowers.” It is possible that he wanted to maximize his friend’s economic gain but it is also possible that he cared for the plant, which was unable to produce fruit without human care. The attention to care underlines that good production is a result of intensive work, and it is not solely an economic question (see about care and nurture in Chapters 6 and 7). More generally, as Bear (2014b: 85) reminds us, capital is produced through these immanent acts of labour in the world.

In the beginning of the chapter, I asked, why the Tsimihety cultivators had to be taught that the vanilla comes from Mexico. According to the Tsimihety vanilla cultivators Mexican (pompona), looks different from Madagascar’s vanilla (planifolia), with its round leaves, thick stem and fewer grains in a fruit pod. For the Tsimihety, vanilla planifolia came from Madagascar because it produced because of productive and caring acts and work of the Malagasy cultivators. Why the information was necssary for ecotourism guides, I will point out in the coming chapters that origins of species is essential for the Euro-American knowledge production of nature (Chapter 5) and relevant for creating a proper nature experience for European and Northamerican tourists (Chapter 7).

4.6 Conclusions

Despite vanilla being a crop of conquerors and settlements, its movements and various situations open situated historical relations that cannot be reduced into one single universal narrative, for example, economic gain. I have used situated histories in the way Peluso (2012) has analyzed rubber in

129 different situations with various historical processes. In her analysis, rubber is a commodified nature that has been produced explicitly for the market. For example, in Peluso’s case, the latex alone has almost no use, and to give it any exchange value it requires processing. It is specifically through social relations constituting rubber’s production and trade in various rainforest and agro‐forestry environments that its value has been formed.

In this chapter, I have highlighted that although vanilla is marketed through a love story with sensual qualities or a greening story, emphasizing vanilla’s possibilities for supporting biodiversity protection and sustainable development goals, its history has involved a legacy of violence, slavery and erasing certain people from their landscapes or reducing them into cheap labor. However, situated histories call for an understanding of socio-cultural, political, economic and historical processes.

In the Aztec state, vanilla’s meaning has to be understood in relation to the cosmological worldview of the Aztecs, whose gods constantly demanded sacrifices in changing ecological conditions. By looking at vanilla in Europe of the 16th –18th centuries, it is possible to note how it was linked to ongoing socio-political, political and economic processes changing hierarchical feudal system and emerging imperialism supported by modern scientific knowledge production, allowing standardization and universalization and emphasizing relations between science and the economy. In Réunion, vanilla highlighted the consequences of imperial engagement in slavery, dispossession and accumulation. Although people created relationships with vanilla in different contexts, such as Edmund Albius and his hand pollination method, his narrative shows what kind of life imperial structures allowed him and people like him. Finally, vanilla entered Madagascar where the plantation economy, despite the efforts of the French, did not flourish; instead it became settled in small holder fields. In Madagascar, vanilla cultivation was in the interests of the French and, from the 1960s onwards, the Malagasy state, which saw it as a commodity bringing economic revenues for the government but also making livelihoods for its people. In this chapter I have shown that the narrative of vanilla originating from Mexico does not inform of producer and authority relations and how people negotiate these. I have argued that by selling at the state market and by paying taxes, the Tsimihety showed their willingness to collaborate with the state. For the Tsimihety, to maintain their autonomy was important. At the

130 same they highlighted their socioeconomic position and hard work they did with vanilla and that they should get decent return for their work.

Although the vanilla producers have emphasized their autonomy by cultivating vanilla on their own land and making vanilla’s production possible through constant work, care and nurturing, for the Tsimihety the value of vanilla has not been determined by markets where acts of demand and production set the price; the Tsimihety have experienced moments of control and submission. On the other hand, the history of vanilla in Madagascar shows that the Tsimihety have not only fled from state processes but that commodity production can be valuable if the return is decent. Although in environmental conservation efforts vanilla has been represented as a way to support Madagascar’s biodiversity by offering monetary income for Madagascar’s people, these histories must include observations about political and economic relations and structures that organise Madagascar into a country with resources and people without knowledge and technology (see Chapter 3). Moreover, I have shown that the mere political economic or economic understanding is not sufficient but to make sense vanilla markets, state relations and how people negotiate them, require attention to acts and work of care that anthropology and ethnography are useful.

Teaching that vanilla is from Mexico reduced vanilla into a species whose origins can be traced according to Euro-American epistemological principles and classifications that represent a universal natural order understood through species. However, knowing that vanilla comes from Mexico allowed the Tsimihety ecotourism guides to show that they know the same things as visitors, and thus they were able to create a proper experience for the visitors (see more in Chapter 7).

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5. Making Madagascar’s nature: “They come here to see something that they have never seen before”

“People come here to see something that they have never seen before,” stated Semy, a Tsimihety man who worked as an ecotourism porter at the Marojejy National Park. For several years he had carried tourists’ bags and their food up to the lodging camps in the Marojejy hills, following tourists taking pictures and admiring animals, plants and waterfalls in the park. At first, he had been wondering what visitors were doing there. After talking with ecotourism guides and other porters, he had come to the conclusion that people visited Madagascar because they were not able to see these kinds of animals and plants in the places they lived. Indeed, the Marojejy National Park has been defined as one of the most spectacular and marvelous places in Madagascar, with a high concentration of endemic species and flourishing biodiversity. Lemurs are one of the main reasons why researchers and tourists, mainly European and North American, travel to visit Madagascar and its forests. Lemurs have become the emblems of Madagascar’s environmental conservation and biodiversity, and they have been labeled the “Ambassadors for Madagascar” (Thalmann 2006: 6).

In this chapter, I discuss how scientific knowledge production and European and North American nature relations have influenced the construction of Marojejy National Park. I argue that the park has been made according to the expectations of nature held by European and North American researchers and tourists, which is not that natural but historically and socially produced (Descola 2005; Hastrup 2013; Starthern 1992). I point out that through certain scientific practices, such as calculations, listings, sorting and classifications, lemurs have become emblems of Madagascar’s nature. I also highlight that the uniqueness and originality of Madagascar’s species have been made possible by universal nature, allowing comparisons and informing of hierarchies of knowledge production.

Natural scientists and environmental conservationists have regarded Madagascar as a “hot spot” of environmental conservation because of its “megabiodiversity,” containing a high percentage of species that have been considered endemic and unique to Madagascar. In 1998, the 55,500-hectare Marojejy National Park was established through an initiative of the World Wildlife Foundation (WWF). The area of the park was defined by a scientific

132 inventory conducted by 25 WWF47 experts from Andapa and Antananarivo. The inventory was funded by the Kreditanstalt für Wiederaufbau (KfW), a German investment bank, and the Center for Biodiversity and Conservation of the American Museum of Natural History in the Marojejy and the Anjanaharibe-Sud reserves (Goodman 2000: viii–1). Based on the scientific inventory, the WWF and the Malagasy government enclosed the park area marking it under the Malagasy state authority. The process is also known as territorialization, which refers not only to defining the boundaries of a sovereign nation state but an internal territorialization of state power and its relation to the allocation and realization of resource access rights, usually created by mapping (Peluso and Vandergeest 1995: 387). In these kinds of processes, power and authority are used for including some people and leaving others out (Sikor and Lund 2009: 42; see also Chapter 7 about ecotourism).

Biodiversity informs of nature imagined thought through species. Biodiversity has emerged as an object of focus since the 1980s with the global rise of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) and “transnational advocacy networks” (Lowe 2006: 5). Scientifically, efforts have been supported by policy-oriented conservation biology, focusing on species extinction and combining advocacy, action and research (Tsing 2005: 158). Used as a resource for environmental politics, biodiversity discourse has provided a way of encompassing the local within the globe defined by European and North American nature relations and natural resource use practices (Tsing 2005: 93–4, 158; Sodikoff 2012: 88).

Importantly, biodiversity is not a natural phenomenon, as it has to be made and created (Lowe 2006: 33, 50–1). Anthropologists have reminded that practices protecting biodiversity should focus on the people living in the spaces and places of environmental conservation efforts, not only on endangered animals or plants (Chua et al. 2020; Harper 2002; Keller 2015). Furthermore, especially charismatic species—such as lemurs, in the case of Madagascar—have been used for policy practices seeking scientific legitimacy, as well as popular legacies modifying conservation (Lowe 2006: 4; Tsing 2005: 158).

47 The WWF presents itself as an international fundraising organization that works in collaboration with existing conservation groups in order to bring substantial financial support to the conservation movement on a global scale.

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Scientific practices and political economic interests come together in defining who has rights to use resources and in what ways. The establishment of Marojejy National Park was part of the Malagasy state’s environmental policies, which have intensified from the 1990s onwards and attracted millions of dollars and euros from development and environmental conservation agencies (Kull 2014: 147). In the 1980s, Madagascar followed structural adjustment programs planned by the World Bank, the IMF and the US Treasury Department, emphasizing free-market policies such as trade liberalization, privatization of state assets, outsourcing of state services, and the opening of markets. During the 1980s, Madagascar had become a model country in Africa for environmental conservation efforts, and during the 1990s the NEAPs (National Environmental Action Plans) were developed by the Malagasy government with strong technical guidance and financial support from the World Bank, the US and Swiss bilateral aid agencies, the WWF, the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) and UNESCO. The NEAPs had three phases with different focuses: 1991–1996 integrated conservation and development programs (ICDPs); 1997–2002 regional approaches, decentralization and joint conservation management; and 2003–2009 the protected areas system with a more assertive state and less room for local participation and efforts to achieve conservation through economic tools. (Kull 2014: 151–60; Corson 2016: 126–35.) During the 2000s, pure and pristine nature was harnessed for economic growth, promoting development (see Mölkänen 2019: 90; KWF 2011; also Duffy 2008: 329–30; Walsh 2012: 55).

European and North American scientific knowledge production, emphasizing universal nature working separately from human beings according to natural laws, has been central in creating species as objects of scientific interest. While Linnaeus sought to cover observable forms created by the God of Christianity, Humboldt based his analysis, for example, in the interconnectedness of vegetation and its environment. According to Humboldt, it was possible to reveal the unchanging law of nature through measurement and surveys of an extensive territory, or by collecting a mass of facts in which partial disturbances compensate for one another. Nature’s order and equilibrium emerged “gradually and progressively from laborious observing, averaging, and mapping over increasingly extended areas” (Jardine et al. 1996: 298). At the same time, folk knowledge has been regarded as ‘unscientific’ resulting not only into hierarchies of knowledge (Ellen and Harris 2003: 11) but also into classifications of people (Dove

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1983; in relation to Madagascar, see Jarosz 1993: 372; Kull 2004: 167; Pollini 2007). Science and technology studies have emphasized that analyzing scientific logic, the focus should be on scientific practices and not cognitive abilities (Latour 1987: 246–7; also Lowe 2006: 96–7). However, anthropologists have pointed out that scientific practices tend to be socially and culturally organized (Lowe 2006: 72) and they can result into differences (Keller 2015) and ironic situations informing of multiple perspectives (Carrithers 2014: 127) as I will discuss in this chapter.

In this chapter, I discuss how Euro-American scientific knowledge of nature has been used for making Marojejy National Park. I will discuss how scientific practices (sorting, measuring, calculating, listing and mapping) have made species the focus of natural science and the basis for environmental conservation by highlighting the uniqueness of certain areas with a concentration of biodiversity. Moreover, focus on lemurs shows how scientific debates and social and political economic aims have influenced the ways in which Madagascar’s lemurs have been classified at different times. For example, representing lemurs as a familiar species has created possibilities for making Madagascar a familiar place, where colonial control can be established. However, while scientific practices have created familiarity, they have also created otherness. I show that Euro-American knowledge practices have not only been used to organize Madagascar’s nature and make animals different from humans, but also to place Madagascar’s people into racial hierarchies, blaming swidden cultivation for forest destruction and the Malagasy as irrational because of their poor use of resources. Finally, I discuss how environmental conservation efforts demanding pure and pristine nature have resulted in ironic situations and relations, presenting that type of nature to ecotourists while the park has actually been built for their expectations. Thus, multiple interpretations are revealed.

5.1 Between inventories and calculations

Scientific practices have been used to define the Marojejy National Park area, and rare charismatic species have enabled environmental conservation efforts. The multidisciplinary scientific group that I mentioned in the beginning of the chapter carried out biological inventories, employing ascending series of altitudinal transect zones used by previous explorers and

135 scientists (for example, L.-J. Aragon, Humbert and the Missouri Botanical Garden team). The team used geographical positioning systems and various mapping techniques at different sites of investigation in five different altitudinal zones. According to the scientific report, elders and villagers were informed about the inventory and people were hired as porters. (Goodman 2000: 3–6; see more about ecotourism and labor in Chapter 7.)

Based on the inventory’s results about the number of species and their habitats, the natural scientists’ calculations established Madagascar as an environmental hotspot with the estimated content of

…at least 0.5% or 1,500 of the world’s 300,000 plant species as endemic. In fact, 15 of the 25 hotspots contain at least 2,500 endemic plant species, and 10 of them at least 5,000, where the classification is based on the two criteria: species endemism and degree endemicity. (Myers et al. 2000: 854)

As learned from science and technology studies (STS) researchers and economic anthropologists, “calculation is not an anthropological fiction” but it is concrete, and it demands critical attention as there are always “several ways of calculating values and reaching compromises” (Maurer 2006: 25–6 cit. Callon and Muniesa 2005: 1254). Indeed, although numbers are often referred to as accurate facts, they can actually hide more than inform (Guyer 2010: 123–4). For example, calculating how many lemur species live in a certain place depends on the way a category of lemur species has been defined and by whom. Indeed, numerical information has usually been provided with some material affecting the ways of governance (Li 2007: 17). Through the power of the state, calculations can be used for reducing forests of multiple species to forests of utilitarian rationality, highlighting knowledge that has been withdrawn from previous relational contexts, thereby translating certain elements into abstract standards (Scott 1998: 11– 12). This way calculations add a social distance between the calculator and object calculated (Mitchell 2002: 105). The dominant position of Euro- American science has allowed the displacing of other epistemologies in favor of universal standardization systems and their politics (Tsing 2005: 107).

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The notion of species has been crucial for the establishment of Marojejy National Park. The park area was bounded by the scientific inventory, which emphasized diverse sets of plants and animals that were further defined as native to Madagascar. According to the scientific report, this endemism was the result of a wide range of habitats found on the mountain slopes, comprising four different forest types which are extremely varied and unevenly distributed across topographies (see also UNESCO 2007; Marojejy 2019). According to Marojejy National Park (2013) webpages, one can find the following biodiversity richness there:

- 115 species of birds - 11 species of lemurs - 148 species of reptiles and amphibians, of which 16 are endemic to the mountain area - 260 species of ferns and 35 palm trees, of which seven are native to Marojejy - In addition to plants and animals, due to elevation zones the park includes five types of forest: lowland primary forest, lowland secondary forest, medium forest, cloudy forest and shrub land.

Calculations have been represented in the form of lists, which have been used further to systemize vast amounts of data by modern natural scientists. For example, Linnaeus used lists (numbered, alphabetical or random) throughout his works. In Manuscripta Medica, which Linnaeus entitled Bibliotheca Botanica, he compiled a bibliographical list of botanical publications that specified the author, title, year, place of publication, format, number of pages, number of illustrations and the price of each book. In the same manuscript there were eight lists concerning the names of species and genera, which later appeared in Linnaeus’s work, underlining the importance of their nomenclature. Lists and dichotomous diagrams (combined with tables, for example) allowed a researcher to review great quantities of data in a short amount of time. (Müller-Wille and Charmantier 2012: 6–7.) In general, lists are paradigmatic artifacts of modern knowledge production (Riles 2006: 2), and they have allowed people to imagine diversity in a systemic way. However, any list made by two or more people can be a negotiated, eclectic product requiring collaboration and drawing on multiple and fragmentary sources rather than a systematic study of ethnobiology (Tsing 2005: 162–3).

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The inventory of the Marojejy mountains has similarities with Humboldtian science, investigating a universal natural order that could be revealed by measurements and mapping in different environments. Humboldt’s Tableau physique des Andes (“Physical Profile of the Andes”), which was aimed at empirical recordings of elevation-specific data, offered detailed biodistribution information, mapping the specific distributions of flora and fauna at every elevation level on the mountain. According to Humboldt, natural scientists could reveal the natural order by measuring and calculating an average from a mass of data. Humboldtian science lay the foundation for an understanding of universal and global nature, and the facts inventoried were the localities informing about general natural order. (Dettelbach 1996: 296–99.) This is how universals were found in particularities (Tsing 2005: 89).

The Tsimihety people’s knowledge of their environments did not emerge through written lists. Instead, it was more practical and habitual, being based on intimate interaction with their landscapes, animals and plants (Mölkänen 2019: 97–9; Iskandar and Ellen 2000). The Tsimihety knew soils, water, heat, light and which plants grew together well, as well as which plants grew in fallow land after it had been burned, cultivated and harvested. This detailed knowledge was used for scientific explorations in these particular environments. For example, an elder sitting in front of his house in the village near the park entrance pointed out that a locally well-known person (mentioned also in Humbert’s 1955 documentation) used to guide researchers in the Marojejy mountains. Like their parents and grandparents, the Tsimihety knew pathways in Marojejy because they cultivated these places, hunting and collecting wood and plants there (see also Goodman 2000: 10–11). When I asked people what kinds of plants they knew, Willy organized a meeting with Christofan, a known guide from Mandena who had visited Marojejy before it had become a national park. As a child, Christofan had spent a lot of time in the forests with his father, mother and siblings, and thus he got to know different plants and the places they grew. He was dressed in a waterproof jacket, shorts and hiking boots, and a backpack with a brand- name48. I followed him to a steep hillside where a secondary forest had grown tall.

48 I have not written the brand name in my notes.

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This is tsiramiramy49. It is 65 years old and it does not grow fast on the hillside, unlike in the low land where the land is too good in general. The sap inside is yellowish and the wood can be used for making planks. The pulp of the fruit is eaten by lemurs.

Christofan explained this fluently, holding a tree branch with one hand with his other hand on his waist. We moved a few meters along the hillside and he pointed out again: “This is ravimbafotsy.50 It is a Malagasy specialty. We cook the leaves and make tea like our ancestors, who started this custom.” In an area on a steep hillside where I had sat down to write notes, Christofan talked about different plants and trees, one after another, like hazombato, voasirindrina, makanvia, hasina, tomenja, tafonana and so forth, and how they were used for human construction, if lemurs or other animals or humans ate them, or how people used them as medicine. While European scientists abstracted nature with calculations and distanced it from human beings, the Tsimihety looked for very material, practical and socially meaningful relationships with their environment, as I have discussed in Chapters 2 and 3. In Chapter 7, I show how this kind of intimate knowledge has been relevant for ecotourism practices.

Transnational actors, such as the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), inform and lobby governments and development funders about endangered species and their danger of extinction in order to aim actions toward environmental conservation (Corson 2016: 61, 190). Because of its lemurs, Madagascar has been third in the world on a list of primate species diversity, with five primate families and fourteen groups that are unique to the island. For example, in the Amazon there are no unique families and only two native groups out of sixteen. (Andersson 2018: 4; Mittermeier et al. 2009: 5–6.) In the Marojejy area, the most special one is the silky sifaka lemur (Propithecus candidus), one of five lemur species that have been included on the 25 Endangered Primates list since 2000 (Mittermeier et al. 2009: 6; Patel 2009: 23). Environmental conservation actors together with funders have used lists and calculations have used for defining what is valuable and where. Endangered species discourse have justified environmental conservation areas.

49 Micronychia tsiramiramy (Anacardiaceae)

50 Aphloia theiformis

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However, species require constant making and unmaking, and the way they have been categorized has to be understood in terms of their social their social and political contexts and scientific debates (Andersson 2018: 86–7; Hastrup 2013: 10–16; Lowe 2006: 24, 33). Because of the diversity and rarity of animals and plants, park should be protected, especially from the people living around the park. In order to gain public interest, environmental conservation efforts have had to focus on so-called charismatic species (see also Lowe 2006: 34).

5.2 Universal nature, unique lemurs and wild people

In this section, I discuss how European scientific debates have been formed in relation to ongoing social, environmental and political economic processes.

Madagascar’s special nature that is able to maintain lemurs have been documented in Europe from at least the 17th century onwards. Flacourt, named as a governor of Madagascar by the French East India Company in 1648, documented at least seven lemurs—including the ruffed lemur, the bamboo lemur, the sifaka, the ring-tailed lemur, the mouse lemur, the brown lemur and maybe the woolly lemur—in his Histoire de la grande isle de Madagascar (1658) (Andersson 2018: 22). In the 17th century, pirates, seafarers and colonists (the Dutch, the British and the French) were looking for new opportunities and fertile lands, and they had harbors in Madagascar or were keen to get a foothold to search for new fertile lands (Kay 2004: 251). Flacourt’s botanical51 writings emerged after he had failed in his aims as a colonial officer, due to hostile relations with the people in Madagascar and receiving no military help from France. On the other hand, the early explorers who brought stories of the island’s exotic natural beauty back to Europe contributed to the romantic myth of a wild Africa, which lay at the roots of the conservation movement (Kull 2014: 149).

A century later, in 1758 Linnaeus created the genus Lemur to include three species: Lemur tardigradus (the red slender lori), Lemur catta (the ring- tailed lemur) and Lemur volans (the Philippine flying lemur, now known as Cynocephalus volans). Combining the folk and scientific categories, Linnaeus chose the name ‘lemur,’ meaning ‘spirits of the dead,’ from the

51 Botany was a typical interest of the 18th-century European elite.

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Latin lemures, referring to the specters or ghosts that were exorcised during the Roman early spring time festival of Lemuria, described by the Roman poet Ovid (Dunkel et al. 2012: 65). The slow movements and nocturnal activities of the lemurs influenced Linnaeus’ classifications, which were based on an Aristotelian identification system emphasizing movement (Linnaeus 1754: 4). It has been speculated that Linnaeus was familiar with Malagasy legends about the relationship between lemurs and the souls of ancestors (Dunkel et al. 2012: 65, cit. Flower and Lydekker 1891) or Flacourt’s legends about travelers and pirates (DeFoe 1972: 417).

Linnaeus described an order created by the Christian God, and his empirical interest was in animal and plant bodies. Thus, the species he derived were regarded as fixed categories created by God. The Great Chain of Being (Scala naturae in Latin) learned from Aristotle (384–322 BC) was composed of a great number of hierarchical level from the most basic and foundational elements up to the very highest perfection: God (see, e.g., Lovejoy 1936; Guyer 2010: 127). However, in Linnaeus’ classification system, humans were placed in the same family of primates (Hominidae) and genus (Homo) as apes. Linnaeus did not find anatomical differences between humans and apes that could justify separate classifications, although according to Christian religion God created humans as his representatives (Frängsmyr 1983). However, as Aristotle defined different species by their locomotion—whether in the water, air or ground—Linnaeus focused on bodies and morphology. Aristotle’s analysis highlighted species’ ecological relations, while Linnaeus examined reproduction, the continuity of the same species, as created by God.

In 1775, the German natural and human scientist Johan Friedrich Blumenbach separated humans (in the order Bimana) from lemurs and other nonhuman primates (such as apes, lemurs and bats) because of their hands, which he placed in the order Quadrumana (‘four-handed’). Blumenbach argued for human distinctiveness in relation to apes, because of their two hands and erect position, as well as the perpendicular direction of their lower incisor teeth (Blumenbach 1825: 34–5). In addition, Blumenbach recognized human beings’ exclusive possession of reason and ability of speech (Lyell 2003 [1863]: 369). Blumenbach noted that chimpanzee and human hands have evolved in relation to available materials and ecological conditions, which have had an influence on different parts of the brain and hand anatomy. The development of human hands has been regarded as a key

141 requisite for performing other tasks than locomotion, such as using different kinds of tools).52 (Ambrose 2001: 1749–50.) Along this line of thought, emphasizing human mental faculties, humans became separated as a general category from other primates (Lyell 2003 [1863]: 369). The physical and psychological elements started to be separated as well, along with distinctions of what was and what ought to be (Hume 1985 [1739]), leading the way for ethical and moral questions about the relationship with nature and the use of natural resources relevant for 19th century oeconomy (see in Chapter 4 about vanilla in Europe).

By the late 19th century, Victorian science had dropped the notion of an unchanging order of nature in favor of continuing evolution. In On the Origin of Species (1859), Darwin argued that all species of life have descended over time from common ancestors but species evolved and changed constantly. Darwin replaced the assumption of constancy with a theory of descent and modification. Phylogeny, a diagrammatic hypothesis about the history of the evolutionary relationships of a group of organisms, became a new principle; “natural” classifications reflected not just similarities, but evolutionary relationships in a descent of organisms’ patterns (Strathern 1992: 91–2). In evolutionary relationships, common ancestry became the key, since distinct descendent lineages had a shared ancestral lineage and connected different species with the tree of life.

Different species were evaluated in an universal context perceived through imperial political economic interests (see Chapter 4 about oeconomia). Species were evaluated according to their success or function for or in the whole system. For an evolutionary theory that discussed adaptation and the survival of the fittest, Madagascar did not provide much new information. In the 1860s and 1870s, Madagascar and the surrounding islands were thought to be remnants of the lost continent Lemuria (Sclater 1864: 212–9). Some natural scientists argued that, since the island’s fauna had found refuge there instead of adapting, there was something “inferior” about Madagascar’s animal life (Grandidier 1902: 158–62). For them, Madagascar represented a biological dead-end; they considered that it was pointless to study Malagasy animals in terms of their environment (Anderson 2013: 99). Not only was Madagascar’s nature classified in a universal context, but

52 These notions require further knowledge about different intra- and inter- group dynamics and relations and how they may have influenced different types of tool use.

142 human beings were accorded great status in the hierarchical imperial ladder of civilization.

The imperial French state used Madagascar timber and land for its imperial commercial and nation-building in Europe. The French governance emphasized development and civilization “mise en valeur” (Sodikoff 2012: 13; Aldrich 2002). Ever since Darwin, a modern state had started to emphasize that those tribes in which individuals sacrificed themselves for the common good were successful and favored by natural selection (Ingold 1986: 52–3). The same moral orientation was seen in the colonial practices of France. For example, General Gallieni imposed a poll tax on people. In the words of the French administrator Lagriffoul:

The tax educates and moralizes natives [Betsimisaraka in this case]. They have never understood tasks and never done them voluntarily. Though paying a tax people contribute to their patrie and good services of administration and general prosperity. (Jacob 1987)

The modern European scientific rationality, emphasizing lack of choice and possibilities, was advanced also to Malagasy people and their technologies:

It’s not out of vandalism or a love of destruction, that the natives have always […] cut the lianas into logs [when searching for rubber], as generally claimed, but because they had practically no other means of harvesting. (Danthu et al. 2016: 33, cit. Louvel 1910)

Europeans regarded techniques that Malagasy used, whether it was for rubber collection or rice cultivation, as traditional and as the result of a lack of resources. In Tsing’s (2005: 59; 2003: 5100) use, “wild” is necessarily related to a frontier that is not yet mapped and regulated but a kind of Wild West scene of rapid and lawless resource extraction: quick profits and quick exits. In contrast to the logic of capitalist accumulation, savage thinking (or pensée sauvage) refers to untamed thought, which was not about the mind of savages or about primitive or archaic humanity, but rather mind in its untamed state. Instead of being determined by cultivated or domesticated structures for the purpose of yielding a return (Lévi-Strauss 1967: 291), individuals developed their state, society and institutions in their social and cultural ways (Sahlins 2005ab; see also Chapters 3, 7 and 8).

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European dominance was reinforced in research processes marking peripheries where data was collected and centers where data was analyzed further (see also the scientific experimentations of vanilla in Chapter 4). In 1871, after observing lemurs in the north of the Bay of Antongil, the French naturalist Alfred Grandidier first described Propithecus candidus (Propithecus being the genus of lemurs; candidus ‘white’) because of its soft white fur, differing from Verreaux’s sifaka, which has black fur on top of its head. Grandidier had received a specimen from a planter in Sambava in 1872, and after investigating it together with the French zoologist Milne- Edwards, who was located in Paris, they renamed the lemur Propithecus sericeus (sericeus ‘silky’) (Grandidier 1871: 231–2).

By the 20th century, the local or indigenous people had disappeared from the documentations of modern European scientists (Lowe 2006: 59–60). For example, Grandidier’s expeditions were aided by Malagasy knowledge of the forest, animals and plants, although he maintained a patronizing tone toward their intellectual abilities (Andersson 2018: 36). A British missionary James Sibree (1836–1929) wrote about Malagasy customs and what the people thought about animals and plants, defining Malagasy people’s ideas and practices as superstitious (Sibree 1879). For comparison, the 18th- century botanist Rumphius was interested in plants and how they operated in that particular place and with different beings. He was not interested in what Malay people believed about plants. (Lowe 2006: 57–9.) Contemporary efforts to describe plants around the world have continued to rely on this emptying out of nature; although they often depend on folk experts familiar with local flora, European experts tend to disavow collaboration, except among scientists (Tsing 2005: 94; see also Hayden 2003: 131).

According to the postcolonial critique, colonial subjects have been dehumanized and reduced to the state of an animal (Fanon 1963: 42), as “the very notion of the native belonged to the grammar of animality” (Mbembe 2001: 236). The irrepressible tendency toward animality in the colonized subject has taken different forms in different places. For example in India the colonial state protected nonhuman “game” from the beast-like savagery of the native (Govindrajana 2018: 11). Said (1978: 45) has reminded that divisions such as “us and them” are necessarily suffused with cultural self- conceit and expressions of hostility toward the Other. However, the postcolonial critique pointed to a symbolic construction of us and them that included moralities of repression but also appeal and admiration (Bashkow

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2006: 13; see also Chapter 4 for vanilla, Chapter 6 for strangers and Chapter 7 for ecotourism).

On the other hand, in the 19th-and 20th-centuries scientists looked for similarities between species, in order to incorporate local findings into a larger framework to construct connections between Madagascar and the wider world. This helped to establish a sense of scientific progress (Andersson 2013: 99, 110). However, creating emblem species was not only a question of calculations and making lists but also affection and sensing. According to Tsing (2005: 81), in the stories of Enlightenment sight and knowledge have been tied together. For example, the 20th-century Scottish naturalist John Muir envisioned people as cosmopolitan travelers exploring nature and its wonders (ibid: 95). Scientific arguments highlighting Madagascar’s connections to the rest of the world were further emphasized by sympathetic illustrations highlighting anthropomorphized qualities, such as smiles on the faces of lemurs looking at the viewer, as if to elicit sympathy (Andersson 2018: 77). During my fieldwork, US animal behaviorist interns in Marojejy anthropomorphized their experiences with lemurs by stating that their work of following the animals was like watching a soap opera with different characters, plots and new turns. The globalization of the fauna of Madagascar allowed scientists, decision makers, entrepreneurs and tourists to construct a narrative that portrayed Madagascar as a known and familiar land and lemurs close to the viewer—in other words, humanity. For example, tourists in Marojejy have reported that they came to see a primitive forest and silky sifaka lemurs, informing about interest toward Madagascar’s nature rather than toward its people (see also Harper 2002; Chapter 7). In addition, lists of plants and animals made these more familiar; Tsimihety guides working in ecotourism knew the scientific Latin names used to describe different plants and animals, creating a sense of expertise and familiarity. This is how Madagascar’s nature was normalized among the European natural scientists and botanists (Andersson 2013: 97). According to Andersson (2013: 116), however, familiarity laid the groundwork for scientific knowledge to be used for colonial control. Indeed, while Madagascar’s proliferating biodiversity has been celebrated by environmental conservation agencies and actions, its people have been managed, controlled and criticized.

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5.3 Proliferation of lemurs and intensifying environmental conservation efforts

The concerns of the French Colonial Forest service, European botanists and natural scientists about irresponsible forest use resulted in the establishment of the first environmental conservation areas in Madagascar. Henri Humbert, a French botanist and the director of the National History Museum in Paris, imagined Madagascar’s forests as undestroyed nature, and he was alarmed by the forest destruction caused by fire and natural resource use that he defined as irrational exploitation (Heim 1967; Humbert 1955 [1927]). However, Humbert did not solely blame swidden cultivators but also criticized imperial state’s timber exploitation and accused concession owners of destroying fragile forests and disrupting biological equilibrium (Kull 2004: 216–7, Sodikoff 2005: 415, 425; see also Scales 2014: 127– 252). These concerns resulted in the establishment of the first conservation areas in 1927 in remote areas of the island, reserved only for researchers and protected also because of their beauty (Virah-Samwy et al. 2014: 227). Administratively, these first ten nature reserves of 353,597 hectares of forest were placed under the control of the Natural History Museum of Paris (Sodikoff 2005: 415). During the French colonial period (1896–1960) a more systemic and intensive environmental legislation appeared although its implementation varied regionally (Scales 2014: 135–40; see also Jarosz 1993). These processes and practices inform how scientific knowledge has supported state territorialization and later on, also presence of transnational non-state institutions, such as projects and organizations in Madagascar (Peluso and Vendergeest 1995: 387; Corson 2011).

Humbert conducted five months of fieldwork in Marojejy between 1948 and 1950. He made notes about different species, elevation variations and collected plants that he dried (Garreau and Manantsara 2003: 1452). During the 1950s, Marojejy was listed as Integral Natural Reserves (RNI) of Madagascar, allowing only researchers to enter the park. Humbert influenced the establishment of the Marojejy National Park by describing it as a marvel of nature, because of the big size of the massif, the floral richness and the level of pristine nature. He was amazed by its exceptional biological diversity, compared with most of the reserves in the protected areas system of Madagascar. (Humbert 1955: 7.) Humbert highlighted Marojejy’s exceptionalism: for example, the propithèques (known as simpona for the

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Tsimihety), which he had found at an altitude of 1200–1500 meters, represented one of the world’s oldest known fauna, and they were found only in Madagascar.

Highlighting the importance of scientific knowledge production, Humbert accepted capturing lemurs for anatomical studies of scientific work, but to place them only behind a vitrine and show their skeletons was intolerable. Humbert thought that lemurs should not be hunted or captured, because that would lead to their extinction; that is why they were supposed to be strictly conserved by the international conventions. (Humbert 1955: 45.) Humbert recognized the local people as guides, carriers and resource providers, as natural scientists and environmental conservationists do today (see Chapter 7).

In 1966, with a second decree (no. 66-242), Marojejy became a strict nature reserve (Resérves Spéciales (Ratsimbazafy 2012: 390). At the time, two families were living within the park boundaries, which initially was permitted under the condition that they did not extend their cultivated land into the park or allow others to join them. The families were later expelled for violating these conditions (Goodman 2000: 10).

Despite Madagascar’s independence in the 1960s and Malgachization in the 1970s, transnational environmental conservation efforts intensified from the 1970s onwards, together with growing public interest toward environmental issues, leading in the US, for example, to establishment of the development agency USAID (see Kull 2014: 151–2; Corson 2016: 93). Combining the questions related with environmental conservation, development and agricultural production, in collaboration with the IUCN the Malagasy government hosted the International Conference on the Conservation of Nature and its Resources. The conference was co-sponsored and attended by the leaders of institutions such as the WWF, the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations, France’s overseas research office (Orstom), and the Paris Museum of Natural History. The conference was justified with reference to the island’s scientific importance and its species’ extinctions. (Kull 2014: 151–2.) For example, Calvin Tsiebo, Vice President of the Republic, highlighted in his opening speech how “our incomparable natural heritage” and “unique natural capital” were gravely “endangered,” as Madagascar would suffer from such “grand and rapid degradation” (IUCN 1972: 9).

At the same conference, however, Malagasy scientists with the voice of

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Etienne Rakotomaria, director of scientific research at the time, questioned the dominance of foreign scientists. Rakotomaria asked for a reciprocal relationship between the foreign scientists, donors and Malagasy people. (Kull 2014: 151–2; Lowe 2006: 44.) Rakotomaria’s words have marked a possible beginning of Malagasy-controlled environmental conservation (Haraway 1989: 270), which has still not been realized today.

Madagascar’s environmental conservation has been links to political economic relations and liberal economic policies. In the 1980s, the structural adjustment programs supported by the IMF, the World Bank and the U.S. Treasury Department promoted free market policies, such as trade liberalization, privatization of state assets, outsourcing of state services, and opening of markets and reorganizing of the social sector. Conservation practices were encouraged by debt relief and swaps. In the 1980s, transnational and bilateral conservation funding exploded. (Kull 2013: 154.)

Several agreements and action plans were developed according to the Integrated Conservation and Development (ICDP) model. In 1984, the National Strategy for Conservation and Development was implemented to build environmental awareness across the government (Corson 2016: 67–8). At the Conservation and Sustainable Development Conference in 1985, Prince Philip, the International President of the WWF, confronted President Ratsiraka with the statement, “Your nation is committing environmental suicide,” flipping the focus from scientific and environmental questions to social policies, leading to the development of World Bank directing the National Environmental Action Plans (NEAPs) (Corson 2016: 68; Kull 2014: 154).

The NEAPs joined economic development to conservation. Developed with an unusually long 15– 20-year vision with three five-year phases, this served as an umbrella for most conservation activity in the 1990s and 2000s (see more about different phases of NEAPs in Kull 2014: 151–61; Corson 2016: 75–7). In general, until the mid-1980s the environmental policies were mainly characterized as “fines and fences” policies, excluding people who actually lived in or near the conservation areas. The ICDPs have been seen as a radical shift away from the state’s role in environmental management, primarily in terms of exclusions and policies, as has been the case since colonial times (Scales 2014: 228; Freudenberger 2010: 7).

Established in 1991, the NEAPs joined sustainable and rural development with environmental conservation efforts through the ICDPs (see Kull 2014:

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151–61; Corson 2016: 121–48; Pollini 2011: 76). The ICDPs expected collaboration. Community-based natural resource management (CBNRM) emphasized the role of local people in the decision-making processes (Corson 2016: 160). In Madagascar, a joint legislation of GELOSE (Géstion Localisée Sécurisée), the law of co-management of natural resources was established in 1996; it provided a legal framework for the transfer of natural resources management rights to local communities (Pollini and Lassoie 2011: 814).

However, Contract-based Forest Management (Gestion Contractualisée des Forêts, or GCF), allowing direct contract with the community, the General Directorate of Water and Forests (Direction Générale des Eaux et Forêts, or DGEF), and GELOSE simply legalized limited access, giving communities official management but not ownership rights over resources. Through the DGEF, the state retained de jure ownership over all forests. The potential 3- and 10-year renewals allowed under GCF and GELOSE contracts were supposed to be approved by the government and advised on by technical aid organizations. In addition, the existing park legislation, the Code de Gestion des Aires Protégées (Code for Managing Protected Areas, or COAP) and associated decrees prohibited most human uses within the park boundaries and forbade commercial exploitation unless explicitly authorized as an exception by a management plan. Traditional noncommercial use was allowed. (Corson 2012: 344.)

Environmental and biodiversity conservation efforts have been supported by the number of species found in national park areas. Soon after the 1985 conference, several meetings with different conservation organizations, such as the WWF, donors (e.g., USAID) and Malagasy policymakers took place; these concerned the rarity of Madagascar’s species and how to raise lemurs in the wild and in zoos, revealing the keen interest toward zoos in the United States (Corson 2016: 69–70). Zoos also pointed to the commodification of nature through spectacle (Igoe 2010; Duffy 2008) or adventure and excitement deeply intertwined with European historical understandings of nature (Keller 2015: 62).

By 1982, there were 20 lemur species and 29 subspecies. Today, 70–100 lemur species and subspecies have been recognized in Madagascar, depending on how the concept ‘species’ has been defined. An increase in the number of species has mainly occurred when subspecies have been regarded as species. Recent changes in this regard are due to both improved genetic

149 analysis, uncovering evolutionary relationships among species based on similarities, and differences in their genetic codes. (Tattershall 2007: 12– 14.) Anthropologist have noted that new technologies open new questions and ways relating. A genetic relation, based on protein molecular structure of the targeted DNA, suggests of constantly more fragmented life (Franklin 2003: 71). Tattershall (2007: 21–2) has been doubtful about the number of species or whether these are actually subspecies. He has asked why Madagascar should be an island without intraspecific primate diversity.

Informing about the influence of non-state actors on resource use and management in Madagascar, in 1998 the WWF, together with Madagascar’s Water and Forest Department, authorized a private association to act as a special state agency called the National Association for the Management of Protected Areas in Madagascar (ANGAP)53 to manage national parks. ANGAP was renamed as Madagascar National Parks (MNP) in 2007. Taking over management from the state forest services, ANGAP was supposed to build local capacity to take over, according to the co-management schemes of Madagascar’s environmental action plans. These processes mapped new administrative boundaries and defined new rights, determining that acceptable resource uses were enforced (Corson and MacDonald 2011: 705). There were strict penalties for violations that were contradictory with prior rights granted in some GELOSE and GCF contracts to generate economic benefits through forest product use, such as small-scale commercial timber extraction (Corson 2012: 344). Power and authority have been used for including some people and leaving others out (Sikor and Lund 2009: 42; see also Chapter 7 about ecotourism).

However, collaboration with local people was highlighted. The Marojejy National Park was granted UNESCO world heritage status in 2007 because of its exceptional biodiversity, being part of the Rainforests of the Atsinanana, consisting of 13 specific areas in six national parks in eastern Madagascar (UNESCO 2007; MNP 2007: 8). Designating this as a site of world or global heritage effectively maintained production of one single global view, while the heritage status was believed to add to the attractiveness and fame of the park and to support conservation. West et al. (2006: 258) have argued that applying the same practices everywhere— reflecting, for example, that national parks have been built following the model of Yellowstone, the world’s oldest national park, which was instigated

53 In French, the Association Nationale de Gestion des Aires Protégées.

150 by American elites and designed to remain free of hostile indigenes, if needed, through the use of US Army personnel—has set a precedent “of native dispossession all over the world.” Since there is a well-known discourse of problems in park creation in Madagascar (Keller 2015) and elsewhere (West et al. 2006), highlighting the collaboration would be interpreted as an effort to take the people living near the national park into consideration in environmental conservation activities (Mölkänen 2019: 97).

As territorial entities, continuous corridors (for example, Betaolana between Marojejy and Anjanaharibe-Sud) were new. They were planned to allow needed habitat for forest-dependent species such as the silky sifaka, but also means for plants and animals to migrate, thus increasing genetic exchange between populations. (Marojejy 2004.) These corridors have been one of the latest responses to threats—such as hunting and swidden cultivation, which represent Malagasy people’s livelihoods and cause decline by habitat loss, fragmentation and alteration of protected areas—to Madagascar’s biodiversity and its lemur population (Schwitzer et al. 2014). Often these territorial arrangements were negotiated in international meetings and offices where rural peasants had not been invited, usually with very little or no information why these territories were being restricted (Corson 2011: 707, 715). In relation to the Marojejy National Park, some people informed that they had no clue why the park existed or what different researchers and visitors were doing there (see Chapter 7).

In the end, collaborative processes has assumed a reputation for being top- down and largely engineered by outsiders, and this has created skepticism and hostility that will be difficult to overcome (Freudenberger 2010: 47). These processes have also shown marginalization from decision-making processes, such as, for example, the authority to determine boundaries, resource rights and acceptable resource uses on traditional land, ultimately representing dispossession (Corson 2014: 208; 2011). In general, during the 21st century, environmental conservation efforts have been moving away from collaborative projects and to a resurgent focus on the protected areas system, to a more assertive state and less room for local participation, and to efforts to achieve conservation through economic tools (Kull 2014: 161; Chapter 7 for ecotourism). I will discuss how the Tsimihety perceived these efforts in Chapter 7.

Management practices were extended to visitors and tourists, too. For example, guidelines of the park specify that one can only walk and lodge in

151 the places reserved for those actions, that one should not litter and that one is not allowed to take any specimens from the park. In addition, one cannot feed lemurs with fruits that lemurs like to eat. Many fruits, such as mangos, oranges and apples, are not endemic to Madagascar, and lemurs have been the main agents in distributing seeds of various plants in the forest (Rabearivony 2015: 210). When nature could not be managed, the focus was shifted to humans. However, I lastly discuss that environmental conservation efforts have resulted in specific outcomes.

5.4 Experiencing nature and ironies of a national park

In present-day Marojejy, in order to sustain the park economically, ecotourism projects were introduced by environmental conservation efforts and international monetary institutions with an emphasis on pure pristine nature. To quote one of the main funders of Marojejy National Park, the German Investment Bank (KFW) had the following vision:

German Development Cooperation is promoting the protection of the environment while at the same time fighting poverty, because only an intact natural environment will attract tourists, who bring money and job opportunities. (KWF 2011)

According to the bank, “intact nature” created jobs, promoting development and saving forests. This is what McAfee (1999) has defined as the emerging trend involving “selling nature to save it.”

In order to successfully meet the sustainability goals introduced by the joint practices of international conservation organizations, investment banks and the Malagasy state, a new kind of nature experience had to be standardized. The park was built for the needs of the foreign tourists and according to a standardized national park model. The visitor information center in Marojejy was designed in a similar style as Yellowstone, where visitors can enter and look at the photographs of the plants and animals and read short descriptions of local customs, such as swidden agriculture and even taboos. The sign at the entrance welcomes people to the park near the forest line, after passing beside fields, fallows and streams. A path up to the summit of the Marojejy mountains was built from rocks and sand to facilitate tourists’ efforts to reach the primary forest. Three different camps along the path provide possibilities for cooking and sleeping. In the camp cottages one can find beds

152 and bedding, kitchen utensils for cooking and even a porcelain pot in the restroom of one of the camps. Between the first and second camps, a terrace was built, from which one could admire the primary forest and a waterfall named after Jean-Henri Humbert. As I observed during my fieldwork, tourists had the latest camping equipment, outdoor clothes, hiking boots and durable backpacks. In addition, practically everybody had a camera, and they took pictures of the plants and animals that their guides pointed out to them. In the park, tourists were fascinated by the lemurs that climbed in tall trees, ate leaves and jumped from one tree to another. The special moment was when a lemur gazed back at the tourist for the perfect photo (see also Andersson 2013: 113–14). Tourists called these animals “cute,” “marvelous” and “exciting,” and they pointed at them and took photographs that they enjoyed looking at (Mölkänen 2019: 100–2).

While tourists had a short-term experience with Marojejy, researchers had cultivated longer-term relations with lemurs. Usually a lemur researcher sat under the trees, watching lemurs in the overhead foliage. Because tourists and researchers have been following lemurs in the park for so many years, lemurs are no longer afraid of human beings and do not necessarily flee when they see people. This was not the case when ecotourism and research activities began. An animal behavior researcher from the US described how when he began his work in 2001, he had to walk around the forest just to see a glimpse of lemurs (Pieczenik 2009). This shows how in environmental conservation and ecotourism practices, the wild, pure and pristine nature that the funders and tourists imagine has been tamed. When animals became more familiar with people, it helped tourism, for it was easier to ensure that visitors would find the animals that they came to see. These interactions show that animals are not there just to be calculated, but they intentions, calling for more interactional analysis of human-animal relations (Govindrajan 2018: 6; see the next chapter for Tsimihety relations with animals and plants).

The environmental history and modern scientific knowledge production have shown that Madagascar’s nature has been classified, sorted, discussed, examined and observed. Its people have been the focus of various management practices, violence, domination, dismissals and so forth. Finally, the park that is imagined as purely natural and pristine is actually full of human actions and constructions. This is an ironic situation for the researcher [me].

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According to Carrithers (2014: 127) irony requires a multiplicity of prescriptions and understandings. Furthermore, “Irony can be expected in situations of unequal power when discourses, interests, or cultures clash” (Fernandez 2004: 4). Irony includes a paradox, for example, in the case of Marojejy, where wild nature is not wild but actually built and constructed; it provokes seeing another perspective or context in which it would or might be true (Huber 2001: 190). Noticing irony in actions—whether in environmental conservation efforts, development or anthropological knowledge production—maintains the multiplicity and existence of other possibilities and interpretations (Carrithers 2014: 127) and alternatives (Huber 2001: 205). However, it is also possible that redescription as irony humiliates (Rorty 2004: 4). My aim is not to demean practices and actions of ecotourists or environmental conservation projects but to go beyond a standard narrative of pure pristine wild nature and perhaps find places for joint knowledge production and collaboration (Tsing 2005: 93; Lowe 2006: 71–4). In Chapter 7 I discuss how the Tsimihety make sense of these scientific and conservation activities.

5.5 Conclusion

In this chapter, I have pointed out that despite for example natural scientific knowledge represents itself as separated from society, scientific debates are culturally and socially reproduced and made.

I have discussed how Euro-American understandings of universal nature have been constructed by various practices of calculating, listing, sorting, inventing, researching and classifying. Euro-American scientists have defined nature that worked on its own by means of natural laws. By classifying species in terms of endemism and rarity, natural scientists have been able to place Madagascar’s nature on a global commensurable scale, making comparisons possible and identifying rare and unique places of biodiversity concentration. These methods have allowed the management of huge amounts of data, from the Age of Discovery to today. At the same time, not only nature but different people have been classified according to Euro- American understandings of how their reproduction and function has fitted with political economic interests of colonialization and capitalism. In these processes, Malagasy were reduced to animality, being not civilized human beings but wild irrational others. Nevertheless, nature was not only made by organizing facts but appealing also to emotions and experiences as

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Humbert’s concerns and researchers in Marojejy have revealed. However, scientific knowledge production and environmental conservation efforts have not been possible without the Tsimihety, who know how different animals and plants taste and what they can be used for, including what grows well together and in what kinds of places.

The division between humans and nature has been most evident in the creation of the Marojejy National Park that was inventoried, delimited and built by natural scientists and environmental conservationists. The environmental history reveals that the colonial French state defined Madagascar’s nature as resources for imperial economic growth. In these processes, Madagascar’s nature has been classified for farming and forestry, as well as for environmental conservation. From the 1980s onwards, environmental conservation efforts have intensified and embraced joint projects with development. The collaborative efforts of the 1990s planned by European scientists, environmental conservationists and development and economic experts changed into fortress conservation, bounding conservation areas into national parks where only people with entrance tickets or workers could enter. The Tsimihety and their knowledge has been harnessed for economic development and to create a proper experience for tourists in the pristine primary forests. These processes expected that the Tsimihety would become people with utilitarian rationality who use natural resources in order to improve and develop their lives, a process that transnational funders have defined as development promoting economic growth and technological advancement.

For me as a researcher, the situation seems ironical since the park has been built for a certain kind of nature experience and the pristine nature that tourists experience is not so wild. Even lemurs have become more tamed, as they have become used to the researchers following them for longer periods and visitors taking photos of them. This kind of situation calls for a focus and an understanding of different perspectives and alternatives, which can be revealed, for example, by ethnography.

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6. “My mother is a grandchild of a crocodile”: making kins and strangers and maintaining human boundaries

“My mother is a granddaughter (zafindravoay ‘grandchild’) of a crocodile (voay, mamba),” Willy started his story in my room, where he was waiting so that we could to leave to the forest and his vanilla fields. I had been asking questions about kinship relations and specific terminology during the past days. As a conscious guide trying to figure out what might be interesting to me, he pointed out the kinship relation with a crocodile. When I showed interest and asked what he meant, he continued:

The ancestors went to the river where there was a big crocodile. The crocodile told that there is a lot of gold in the rock. “I can extract it for you,” she said. After having the gold, the ancestors said: “If anyone in my family eats crocodile, they cannot have what they want.” If we see a dead crocodile we have to cover it with cloths.” “Why?” I inquired. “It is respect. Crocodiles do not attack people, only ducks, geese, goats…,” Willy replied.

How can we make sense of this story? How can a crocodile be a kin who seems to live peacefully with human beings?

In this chapter, I argue that the Tsimihety do not regard animals and plants as different species—as naturalist categorizations based on separation of humans from nature and relations established through species—but instead understand humanity as constantly maintained and performed through specific acts, like commensality, taboos, joking and avoidance. These observations lead to the question, how are Tsimihety relations with different animals and plants? This can help to explain why environmental conservation efforts highlighting biodiversity and relations with certain species, such as lemurs, puzzled the Tsimihety (Chapter 7).

In Willy’s story of the relationship between humans and crocodiles, there is an exchange relation. Anthropologists have noted that exchange informs of separation and difference. According to Lévi-Strauss (1949), by means of generalized reciprocity people may try to overcome differences and create alliances between different groups. Indeed, the Tsimihety expected exchange: for example, children were supposed to take care of their parents

156 when they were old and crocodiles should let people cross rivers without attacking them if people feed them. However, reciprocity was not the main concern when parents or children fell ill, traveled to faraway places or sat together at a dinner table. In those moments, people were emotionally and morally tied to each other’s existence. Reciprocal recognition springs from consanguinity, affinity and contiguity that contrasts with those of asymmetrical recognition (Gregory 1997: 7–8).

However, kinship also involves mutuality, an intrinsic participation in each other’s existence, as “relatives live emotionally and symbolically each other's lives and die each other's deaths” (Sahlins 2013: preface). Following Lévy-Bruhl, Sahlins has highlighted that through participation in relations, beings exist—not that beings have been given beforehand and afterwards participate in this or that relationship (ibid.: 33–4). In kinship relations, the difference between kin positions have been internalized or resolved in the mutuality of their being. For example, among the Ankave in Papua, New Guinea, being a maternal uncle is the status that is the most valued in men’s lives; this depends, of course, on their sisters becoming mothers (Bonnemère 2015: 129). Among the Tsimihety, whenever a major clan sacrifice occurred, the mother’s brother was able to demand any food or drink from his nephew (Wilson 1967: 149; Lévi-Strauss 1992: 85). Today in the circumcision ritual of a Tsimihety boy, the mother’s brother drinks sugar-cane liquor with a piece of his nephew’s skin. This is how his reproductive capacities are on one hand blessed but also captured by his clan.

Indeed, kinship is not natural unless it is constructed. Kinship categories are not representations or metaphorical extensions of birth relations; if anything, birth is a metaphor of kinship relations. Kinship is processual and relationships are not stable; they vary, depending on the life processes and how relationships are maintained (Carsten 1995: 227), swinging between thickness and thinness instead of speaking of homogenous mutuality (Carsten 2016; see Chapter 3 for life processes from youth to marriage and possibly being an ancestor). Finally, very personal and intimate experiences of loss, grief and joy can refer to a larger story embedded in a long history and multiple temporalities of different ideas and practices, as well as the hierarchies and exclusions that are part of what kinship enables (Carsten 2013: 250).

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Recent anthropological discussion has revived the structuralist interest in animism as one of several ontologies or schemes for differentiating humanity from the material world (Descola 2013 [2005]; Viveiros de Castro 1998) and emphasizing form (Årheim 2015: 12). In general, animism as ontology is a reversal of Euro-American natural ontology, in which human beings constantly alienate themselves from other species classified in relation to nature that works on its own with physical laws and without human interference (Descola 2013: 172–3; Årheim 2016). According to Harvey (2006: xi), animists “recognize that the world is full of persons, only some of whom are human, and life is always lived in relationship with others.” The “animistic mode” is characteristic of societies in which animals are the strategic focus of the objectification of nature and of its socialization. Indeed, a crocodile informs of places and histories of a certain clan. Following Lévi-Strauss (1962: 24–5, 62–9), savage or “untamed thinking” (pensée sauvage) used natural species for establishing a system of differentiation in human society, which has been named “totemism.” Treating plants and animals as symbols, people created order. Symbolism produced an order in a set of sensible elements, an order which is intelligible because of the homologies, oppositions, inversions and symmetries that it brings to light, interconnects with or sometimes institutes. Among the Tsimihety, animals and plants had a symbolic quality for humans; people marked their relations through animal and plant taboos, usually referring to rules the ancestors had imposed because of some event or experience with a specific animal or plant. People also used animals to describe their relations with different people. For example, the Betsimisaraka workers in Special Reserve Andasibe described a bossy and harassing director as a crocodile, whom the workers did not consider sociable (Sodikoff 2007: 22). These views inform of different types of relationships: while for some Tsimihety relations with crocodiles meant living in the same environment, for certain Betsimisaraka the crocodile was a symbol for power relations.

Valeri (2001: 24) has reminded that taboos are not mainly concerned about differences between human beings but between the spirit and material worlds. Among the Huaulu, those spirits who have separated from their bodies at the time of death tend to prey on the living. For the Tsimihety, too, the distinction between the living and the dead is a significant one. Ancestors who had been treated well by their descendant did not make demands or cause misfortunes (Chapters 3 and 8).

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However, multispecies thinking has highlighted that animals and plants are not here only to be thought about but to live with (Haraway 2003), challenging the ethnocentric view of human dominance. Animals and plants are connected with and have an influence on human beings. Multispecies ethnography reminds that relations with different species are not merely symbols for human representations, but people and animals engage deeply in different ways (for example, through eating and sharing living spaces and landscapes) (Govindarajan 2019: 6; see Tsing 2015 for “mushroom entanglements”). In general, recent discussion on multispecies has reminded anthropologists of “anthropology of life,” reflecting “an anthropology that is not just confined to the human but is concerned with the effects of our entanglements with other kinds of living selves” (Kohn 2007: 4). Animals are not only waiting for human reactions; they can actively tease out certain kinds of behavior from human beings.

Indeed, for the Tsimihety, certain animals and plants require intensive care, attention and engagement. The Tsimihety make distinctions between animals that can be eaten, like chickens, lemurs and cows. Those animals that should be left alone, such as crocodiles or a green pigeon, depend on one’s taboos. Since lemurs have become an intensive focus of environmental conservation activities, the Tsimihety have been deeply puzzled about what foreign tourists see in lemurs, which they have been used to hunting and eating (see Chapter 7).

Animism is not based on stabilized similarity, as otherness can be internal. An experience of strangeness, referred also as “uncanny” in modern psychology (Freud 1963), refers to the ethics of personal intersubjectivity, namely, the recognition that

what makes the Other other is not his or her spatial exteriority with respect to my being but the fact that he or she is strange, is a stranger, and not only to me but also to him- or herself, is the bearer of an internal alterity… (Stasch 2009: 11; Santner 2001: 9)

Among the Tsimihety it is not similarity and intimacy that dominate person’s identification but precisely differentiation (see also Stasch 2009: 12 in a different ethnographic context). In Madagascar, for example, a newborn child is not regarded as a fully human being but described as soft, needing to be protected from malicious spirits (Astuti 2009: 218); his or her humanity

159 had to be guarded and supported. In addition, as observed by Lévi-Strauss (1949), the exogamous logic required that people could only marry those who were different from them. Differentiation was relevant for the reproduction of human sociality. Living outside human sociality and in certain kinds of places (for example, alone near the water or forest) suggested that one was perhaps not a full human being but had become an animal, as seen in the narrative of the woman who had metamorphosed into a crocodile.

Valeri’s (2001: 381) notions about the Huaulu, hunter-gatherers in the Moluccas, are relevant also in understanding Tsimihety relations with animals and among themselves. For the Huaulu, the proscriptions of taboos are central to how the Huaulu understand themselves. Having and performing taboos refers to two processes: First, they bring the subject into existence, in the sense of the knowing and embodied self, the “person.” Secondly, taboos create the system of power by which their lives and subjectivities are ruled.

According to Valeri (2000: 383), the human world includes the most complete and fully realized subjects, but the natural world includes beings that are also partially realized subjects, which participate in their own nonhuman society (see also perspectivism in Amazonia de Castro 1998). Through these gradations of subjecthood, the natural world becomes permeated with morality and meaning, which in turn doubles back on itself to validate and universalize the ethical principles defining Huaulu subjecthood (Lansing 2003: 375). The main concern among the Huaulu is to maintain humanity, mainly through various moral acts; this is also relevant for the Tsimihety (see Lambek 1992: 246, 253 for a comparison with the Sakalava). The Tsimihety guard their humanity by means of commensality, daily life and work, making divisions between kin and strangers, the living and the dead, and humans and animals and spirits.

These observations note that questions of differentiation are not only related to power or wealth but more generally in relation to questions of one’s humanity. My discussion shows that strangers, such as the vanilla plant, could be made kin, according to bilateral relationship-building and historically territorially expansive logic.

In this chapter, I pay attention specifically to those practices that make and maintain kinship, and at the same time, the distinction between kin and the strangers. Tsimihety kinship is created through the transmission of blood,

160 but also by commensality. People who ate rice together shared the same substances and became kin, usually living in the same places. Eating the same kind of food established possibilities for relations, as with the crocodile that ate the same kind of food (meat) as humans. However, eating did not create a relationship with an ancestral tomb; ideally people should be buried in the same tomb as their fathers. Those who did not eat together or live in the same spaces were strangers, people who should be aware of each other and exist in an ambiguous but potentially lucrative relationship. Thus, kinship and strangeness do not depend on the species status but the ways in which different beings related with each other (for example, exchanging food for friendship or the other way around).

For the Tsimihety, however, humanity is not a stable state; it has to be supported and maintained. According to popular narratives, there is always a possibility that people can transform into animals. I show that taboos, avoidance and joking were the continual practices by means of which relations with different people and beings were maintained and people’s humanity was guarded. Yet, I argue that although there are novel ways of understanding and living together with certain species, we have not fully escaped from human centrism. Communication about relations with different beings occurs mainly through human language, and interpretations are done through human sociality that is deeply cultural.

6.1 Tsimihety kin relations: Containing and substances

Sitting in her kitchen floor on a handwoven bamboo mattress, Dady, Willy’s mother who was herself a grandmother, told a story as she smashed some chili in a mortar:

The great-grandparents had an important relationship with crocodiles. They gave food to crocodiles and crocodiles never attacked them. One day crocodiles went closer to peoples’ houses to ask for food [meat]. After a while, crocodiles looked very sociable with them. During that time, people in the family felt that crocodiles had stayed in the area before us and then the chief of the family gathered people and told them: “From now on, it is supposed that crocodiles are our relatives (havana).” That is why they [crocodiles] have very good social lives with us and people had safety with them.

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Despite its predatory nature and the possibility of attacking people, Dady described the relationship with a crocodile as relations of exchange, mutual care, respect and safety. The same words were used by the people in northeastern Madagascar to refer to kin relations.

In Madagascar, havana refers to people who share the same ancestry. Like many other groups in Madagascar, the Tsimihety trace their genealogy bilaterally from the mother’s and father’s side (see, for example, Astuti 1995: 90, 104; Brown 2004: 621; Feeley-Harnik 1991: 170–1). Dady had seven children, four in the village and three in another village, where she had been living when she was younger, before meeting Willy’s father. The Tsimihety mark the difference between brothers and sisters who are from the same mother and father, from a different father and the same mother, or the same father and a different mother. These distinctions are relevant in terms of land and tombs (discussed in more detail in Chapters 3 and 8). In addition, because of the rule of exogamy, knowledge of one’s ancestors matters when people are considering who they could and would marry. A great misfortune for a human being was to marry someone with whom one had an incestous relationship (for example, brothers, sisters, parents or cousins). Cousins’ children were also not marriageable, as an example of Willy’s and his cousin’s daughter’s joking relationship revealed (see p. 163 this chapter).

The metaphor of a single womb highlights the kin relations as containing and belonging. Anthropologists have pointed out that among the Sakalava, descendants are seen as coming from one womb (kibo araiky) and this metaphor refers to people being born from the same mother (Feeley-Harnik 1991: 170–1). Among the Temanambondro, the mother’s womb was called the “child’s house” (trahon-daza) (Thomas 1996: 64). A metaphor like “one blood,” similar to “one womb,” can be imagined as “a containment” rather than linear transmission of substance. For example, comparative evidence from Papua New Guinea has shown that until a circumcision ritual is completed, a young boy is contained by his mother (Bamford 1998: 164). In order to emphasise patrilineal ancestral lineage, the Tsimihety circumcise boy children. As anthropologists have pointed out, kinship is not determined by biology but by cultural and social processes and dynamics, which are communicated through metaphorical conceptions and symbolic substances (Sahlins 2013). As I have explained in Chapter 3, during their lives Tsimihety are expected to move toward harder relationships and eventually

162 become ancestors buried in the patrilineal ancestral tomb,54 signaling the ultimate hardness. This has meant that during one’s life, in order to become an ancestor, one should do things that are considered as belonging more to the male sphere, like cutting the forest for fields, building houses, representing one’s family and clan outside immediate kin spheres, extending social relations and establishing new ones, knowing family histories, giving speeches at public occasions, organizing rituals, and guiding and advising clan members. However, kinship is politically relevant, and in order to implement certain rituals one had to be able to claim one’s kin and land relations (Chapter 3 and 8).

Ancestors are important in forming kinship relations among the Tsimihety: “We come from the same ancestor (razana iraiky).” Historical evidence from the Tsimihety in the region of Androna has shown that kin used to form villages that were considered as one (havana araiky) and were possible to trace genealogically (Wilson 1992: 104). According to one of the clan elders in Manantenina, kinsmen or havana are those who understand very well where their relations are (“mifankafatatra tsara any fiavian-jare”) (see also Astuti 1995: 80). However, ancestors and places could not be separated. As one of the Tsimihety elders explained:

It is not about color or race. The main importance is the origins of one’s ancestors and where the ancestors are really from.

The elder’s statement shows the importance of place and relations to land (see Chapter 3).

Ancestors in Madagascar are the source of blessings that give life to future generations (Bloch 1986: 41–6; Bloch 1985: 634). Thus, Malagasy kinship is “cumulative” in the sense that kinship and descent status are achieved gradually and progressively throughout life, and even after death, rather than ascribed and fixed definitively at birth (Southall 1986: 417). Ancestors are the “trunk” (vatana, which refers also to the body) and people are the “branches” (rantsana), as illustrated in a picture that Willy drew in my notebook in order to characterize Tsimihety kinship. Such metaphors have been observed throughout the Austronesian world (Fox 1987: 174). These

54 Of course, in reality the logic does not work in all situations; this is the ideal situation.

163 processes indicate that kinship is a temporally unfolding process (Thomas 1996: 62).

One morning in June, there was a young girl with a small baby outside Willy and Angelina’s house. The young girl had come to visit Angelina. She explained that the baby was Angelina’s brother’s child, who lived in one of the coastal towns. Angelina was surprised. She talked with the girl and asked when she had met her brother. Among other things, she looked at the baby’s hands, face and hair. Angelina stroked the baby’s hair and commented several times that the hairline looked the same as her brother’s. After holding the baby for a while, Angelina shook her head and said: “I don’t know.” She could not tell for sure if this was her brother’s child. The importance of this knowledge lay in the fact that recognizing the child as belonging to Angelina’s brother would oblige his family to take care of the baby and its mother, and to provide them with clothes and food.

In Madagascar, the child in utero is thought to be susceptible to a variety of environmental influences. Tsimihety women protect the fetus in their uterus by not talking too much about their pregnancy (see also Thomas 1996: 66). In the beginning of my fieldwork, being ignorant of this Tsimihety practice, I used to ask one of the shop owners how she was and how she felt about the imminent birth of her baby, which was expected in a few months, since her pregnancy was already visible. She usually replied “well” (tsara) or just ignored my initiatives and did not engage in a vivid talk, as she would whenever conversation turned to such things as where the evening movie was being shown, what her children were doing, or what kind of petrol mix one should use in a generator or motorbike. Likewise, Angelina, was very taciturn when she was pregnant with her third child, and she continued her tasks as usual, such as carrying water, washing plates, cooking and taking care of the children.

Ethnographic evidence among the Vezo in southwest Madagascar has pointed out that those who actually raised the child had an influence on the child’s character (Astuti 2007: 3). According to European and Northamerican logic, gender is culturally constructed, whereas sex is biologically intractable (Butler 1990: 6). The Vezo of Madagascar make a distinction between what makes a person “intractable” and that which is negotiable. An intractable feature of babies is the sexed body they receive at birth (Astuti 1998: 30–1). This is valid for the Tsimihety, too. When Angelina gave birth to her third child, her sisters and other women from the

164 neighborhood sat chatting in the same room. The newborn’s sex was marked immediately. The following day, a larger number of family and friends visited Angelina and the newborn child. Mama ny Rocco entered the house, stamping the floor with her right foot and shouting: “Lehilahy! Yayayaya!” (“A boy! Yayaya!”) Sex marked a difference and the different responsibilities and expectations related to it.

In general, unborn children required protection because of their softness. The pan-Malagasy term describing babies’ phenomenal plasticity has been “water babies” (zaza-rano), meaning wobbly, bendable or boneless. Because of their soft substance, babies are seen to be prone to malevolent wandering spirits or dissatisfied ancestors, who could take hold of it and change its physiognomy—erasing the traces left by previous human relationships and transforming healthy babies into bony and sickly ones. (Astuti 2009: 218.) “Liquid” children are not considered proper people, who are supposed to be buried in an ancestral tomb. In order to highlight the distinction between full, hard human beings and watery ones, the Tsimihety used to leave dead babies who did not yet have teeth on the branches of trees on the northern base of a hillside that emerged out of otherwise flat surroundings. A new human life required constant acts that supported its becoming human.

One week after the visit of the young mother, we visited Angelina’s own mother in the neighboring village. Angelina and her mother discussed about the child and they both said that her features reminded of Angelina’s brother, but they could not be sure. “Do not declare him as yours now—wait for a while,” Willy advised. He suggested waiting until the baby grew older and its appearance became more recognizable. In the end, a few months later, Angelina’s brother’s family regocnised the child.

By raising the child, Angelina’s brother’s relatives would eventually include the child in his family and clan and, on the other hand, create new relations with the newborn’s mother and her clan. Seen from this perspective, the child could gain new relations and wealth (see also Guyer and Belinda 1995: 93–4). On the other hand, as the child started to look more clearly like Angelina’s brother, it was also Angelina’s brother’s moral responsibility to take care of the baby and the mother. As a child grows, his or her personal character becomes visible. At the same time, a child’s appearance is an iconic sign of the sameness of the social group in relation to strangers. The child produces kinship by growing up, but it requires that people gradually

165 recognize their personality and identity (Kaartinen, personal communication, May 20, 2020). Ultimately, ancestral customs (fombany- razana) signal group relations.

6.2 Commensality, kin and strangers

Commensality, the action of eating together, is one of the most powerful operators in the social process of creating kin relations and closeness or, on the other hand, marked distance or enmity (Bloch 1999: 133). In general, the Tsimihety expect that cooked rice would be shared with family and friends. “Karibo, atsika mihinana.” (“Welcome, we are eating!”) Angelina used to invite kin, friends and neighbors passing by when eating. Usually people declined politely, saying “Masotoa” referring to diligency of the matter and adding, “I have just eaten.”

In Madagascar, rice is served three times a day. The women of the household cook the rice and the sauce, rô, which usually made from boiled water with plant leaves, beans, small fish or crab, and very rarely with meat. As I learned during my fieldwork, a proper Malagasy person cannot be full (voky) if he or she has not eaten rice. For example, Mama ny Evan and Angelina sometimes boiled cassava or yam for a snack after coming home from the fields a few hours before dinner. Men and children ate several pieces of the cassava and complained that they could not eat more. However, after a while the same people did not have any problem eating full portions of rice.

In August, a few days before I was supposed to finish the fieldwork in the village, Angelina gave birth to a son. The house was suddenly bustling with visitors—mainly relatives, neighbors, friends, and fellow villagers—and Angelina’s mother and sisters had arrived to help the household with cooking, cleaning and washing. Angelina’s mother, together with Ulrica and Theresa, cooked a special dish of soft rice (ahandro sarona) for Angelina. They covered it with banana leaves and told that they could also use wild ginger leaves. “It is Malagasy custom to give this kind of rice to women who have given birth,” Angelina’s mother explained as I sat in the kitchen and observed what she was doing. “People are not supposed to be separated from the forest and leaves, because our ancestors lived in the forest. This way the newborn has a good relationship with leaves (ravina). Our ancestors used

166 leaves as medicine,” she continued. It was expected that the newborn should become connected with the ancestral ways.

The Tsimihety consider rice as a heavy (mavesatra) food, in contrast to fruits (except for bananas), cakes and bread, which are usually eaten as snacks and thought of by the Tsimihety as light (maivana) foods. If someone had a stomach ache, it was best to offer him or her some heavy food, such as bananas, which grew from the ground. Heavy foods thus indicate rootedness and relations with the land; as one eats heavy food, one will grow roots into the land and into one’s clan (see Chapter 3 and comparative notions in Bashkow 2006: 178). Foods related to the land, especially rice, were generally considered close to the ancestors (Bloch 1985: 634–5). The special relationship with the land became evident when I wanted to protect my daughter’s feet from getting wounds from walking barefoot. I regularly put sandals on her feet, only to find when I came back from the fields in the afternoon that they had been removed. Willy and Angelina emphasized that it is good for the minerals (mineraly) in the earth to enter into the child’s body.

Eating itself can be regarded as metaphorical: (1) different generations should act in the same way, because in the end they will be the same; and (2) different generations are consubstantial, meaning that the body of one generation is the source of life and substance for the next (Bloch 1985: 633). This understanding is evidenced, for example, in funerary rituals where the dried bodies of deceased people were gathered together in an ancestral tomb in the process of reburial in order to turn them into an impersonal amalgam of descent, a substance unmarked by the individuality which once incarnated it (see Bloch 1971; 1985: 635–9; Graeber 2007: 54; Keller 2008; Astuti 1995: 80; Chapter 8). In a secondary burial (famadihana), the human spirit (fanahy) is separated from the body with great effort by the living kin, turning the deceased person into a razana, or ancestor (Ratzimbazafy 2008: 302–3). Those people whose souls are not buried properly become wandering spirits or ghosts (angatra). People used to report how they were afraid of passing by the cemetery in the middle of the night because of ghosts appearing to them and instructing them about the correct ways of life. Among the Betsimisaraka, ancestors could appear in dreams to ask their descendants to move their tombs or give them lavish sacrifices (Cole 2001: 120–6).

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Among the Tsimihety, by sharing daily meals cooked in the same house, those who live together in one house come to have substance in common (Carsten 1997: 127; Bloch 1999: 137). In general, cooked rice was eaten by the conjugal couple and their children, descendants and dependents. Lévi- Strauss (1967: 155) considered the relationship of the conjugal couple living in the same house as a solution for antagonisms and emphasizing alliances. The sharing of food established a bodily link that was almost as strong as the sharing of the substance that comes about in sexual union or the birth of a child. Indeed, the process of the maturation of the child in the womb is explicitly represented as the parallel of the transformation of food from a foreign, raw substance into something that will sustain the family and ensure its continuity through time. However, despite marriage and eating and living together uniting different people, the spouses did not become the same; in the end, people were expected to be buried in their own fathers’ tombs (see also Astuti 1995: 84–5). Bloch (1992: 86–90) has also noted that during their lives, due to their “wet” and lively element, people tend to become dispersed and establish diverse relations, but death finally gathers people according to patrilineal logic into the same ancestral tomb (see also Chapters 3 and 8).

By sharing substances, good friends (usually males) were able to seal their relationships by a blood-exchange ritual called fatidra (see also Feeley- Harnik 1991: 89; Ramaroson 1997). The Tsimihety also practiced fatidra by making a small cut on their hands and mixing their blood. Those who already had the same mother and father had no need to mix blood because they already shared a common ancestry. However, because of the awareness of HIV/AIDS, exchanging blood has changed into a symbolic and performative commitment made by speaking about blood-brotherhood. Despite their blood bond, however, good friends (like spouses) did not become the same and were expected to be buried in their respective fathers’ tombs.

“To share the same bones” was a metaphor for closeness; the bones of one’s body were part of a greater undifferentiated totality. The individual body was not experienced as final but continuous with parts of the bodies of the people related to it. The clearest example was, for example, boys’ circumcision ritual, in which the boy’s body was cut from his matrilineality and by eating a pice of nephew’s penis’ skin, patrilineal continuity was ensured. This implies that what happens to other members of your household is, to a certain extent, also happening to you (Mosko 1992: 75). This is the mutuality of kin that is always processual (Carsten 2016; Sahlins 2013: 9).

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Kinship among the Tsimihety, as with different people in Madagascar (Bloch 1999: 136–8) and elsewhere (Carsten 1997), is a continual dual process of bodily mergings and divisions.

The Tsimihety expressed mutuality through the term fihavanana. In semi- structured interviews, few people defined its meaning. They noted, for example, “The meaning of fihavanana comes from the ancestors and refers to relationship between relatives” and “Fihavanana are the group of people who are of one ancestry, olo razana araiky (the group of people sharing the same ancestral roots).” Fihavanana encompasses the native concepts of kinship, friendship and goodwill between beings, both physical and spiritual, living and dead. Fihavanana epitomizes the intimate relationship between the members of a family, extends to a deeper friendship between people of the same place of living (fokontany), and lastly summarizes people of the same land (Fritz-Vietta et al. 2011: 215; see Chapters 3 and 8).

Ideally the principle of fihavanana expects that the love (fitiviana) between kin should be as solid as a rock. To mark the solidarity and mutual love between clan members, Willy’s clan called their extended family “on the rock fence” (any ‘on’; koro ‘fence’; vato ‘rock’). For example, the clan’s joint stock of rice referred to the strong commitment that they had for each other and the mutual help they were willing to provide in case of sickness or other life struggles.

Focus on mutuality and care tends to dominate studies of relatedness. However, interest in the positive aspects of relatedness obfuscates how kinship has been shaped by and enables “differentiation, hierarchy, exclusion, and abuse” (Carsten 2013: 246; see also Keane 2005b: 224 on intimacy as an epistemological question). For example, I encountered a situation in which a spouse and a man’s mother had antagonistic relationship, as the mother required concrete monetary help from her son and the son’s spouse wanted those resources to be used for their household (for example, for new mattresses and kitchen utensils).

The dualistic symbolic approach has noted a division between things that have been created through human work (in other words, by cooking) and things that grow by themselves (for example, in a forest). For example, rice is accompanied with rô sauce, which is usually made out of water and different leaves (ravina) considered to be wild, which “grew by themselves,” such as anamarongo. These divisions also applied to people. Among the

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Merina, every person had the vital, strong and wild (mahery) element associated with nonhuman force, vigor and creativity (Bloch 1985: 640). The Merina “cleaned” the boys of this element in order to become closer to the “dry” ancestors in the tomb and further from the “wet” matrilineality (Bloch 1989: 70).

The dualism of genders in the formation of the household is essential among the Tsimihety. Janowski (1995: 97–8) has pointed out that marriage and the formation of the household is not only about alliance, as Lévi-Strauss argued, but about difference. At the heart of these institutions was exchange, which, according to Strathern (1988: 191, 199), severs and detaches people from each other. Exchange is essential for the process of personification and separation, since it enables people to be seen as producing new relationships (see Chapter 3 about men’s and women’s work and personal efforts, and Chapter 8 about funerals and patrilineal logic).

This raises the important question of what kinds of relationships these kinds of division make possible and, on the other hand, erase (Janowski 1995: 97– 8). One’s status as an adult or child depends on one’s possibility for fulfilling exchange obligations and the needs of others, defining adulthood (see also Chapter 3). Cole (2010: 52–3) has observed among the Betsimisaraka that adults have been positioned at the center of—and, hence, can command—a socially valued network of material and affective resources. A person’s growing ability to exchange marks the progress of social maturation in the endless give and take of “making others live” (Mauss 1990 [1950]; Bourdieu 1977). Recognizing others’ human worth means seeing the generative potential or potency (hasina) thought to be intrinsic to them.

The distance and closeness between people was relevant at times of eating. If people did not have enough sauce (rô) for their rice or had not had time to prepare it, they went and asked for some from their kin and neighbors. If Willy did not like the sauce at home, he was able to go to his mother’s house to eat. Angelina, on the other hand, kept distance and ate in her own kitchen. Consumption (here eating) is no simple matter of self-replacement, but the recognition and monitoring of relationships (Strathern 1988: 294).

A person who was not kin (havana) was vahiny or vazaha, a stranger (see Cole 2001: 162–4; Graeber 2007: 14; Stoebenau 2010: 2). People usually referred to white-skinned people with the word vazaha. It seemed that white-

170 skinned Europeans could not get rid of the vazaha label. For example, a French man working in the ecotourism business was married to a Malagasy woman, had lived for 13 years in Madagascar’s highlands and spoke Malagasy fluently, yet he was referred to as vazaha by the Tsimihety.

Vazaha marked difference as well as inequality (Sodikoff 2012: 33, 36). Tsimihety were very aware that vazaha knew many things (mahay maro raha) that the Tsimihety were ambivalent about; on the other hand they admired all the knowledge and things that vazaha had, with their latest technologies, or how vazaha were able to make money. But then they were also puzzled about how all this was possible (Chapter 7).

Sharing substances with strangers put always people into vulnerable positions. In April, stories from the small neighboring village circulated, as several unexpected deaths had occurred there. One of the stories went like this:

There is a place near the neighboring village where people often give a spell (mosavy). It is possible that there is not only one person who gives a spell but there can be several, so it is difficult for the government to know and go and arrest them. Usually the spell is given through betsabetsa or exhumation food. Since the food given is community food, it is difficult to know who gave the spell. In general, it is good to eat. Just recently there was a dead body and people were drinking betsabetsa together. Only ten minutes after drinking, he felt very strange and he could not move anything. The wife called other people to look but perhaps one of them was the spellcaster.

Eating in the wrong company could lead to illness or even death. Bloch (1999: 144) has noted that among the Zafimaniry, whenever one went away to a foreign village, to a feast or to visit a more distant relative, it was advisable to take a magical antidote to poisoning. There was always a possibility that the closeness created by the commensality was simply a means of getting at you. There was always a moral ambiguity related with the food given in village rituals, such as funerals.

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According to Graeber (2007: 68), witchcraft is the ultimate act of anti- sociality. As people were able to imagine themselves in other people’s shoes, sympathy could easily reverse and become destructive envy (miavona). Envy led to the desire to accumulate and to establish hierarchies that threatened to break egalitarian communities apart. Among the Tsimihety, when a young girl died, the father of the girl was sure that his neighbor had caused her death. I never got to know what made him think that, but this shows that people’s social lives are filled with tensions (see Chapter 8 for the tension between sociability and individual success). For Graeber (2007: 68, 86), envy was really the underside of communal solidarity, and witchcraft an inevitable perversion of communal love. This applies to the Tsimihety, too, and how they perceived witchcraft. However, Hughes et al. (2019: 3–4) have reminded that ugly emotions, such as envy or greed, have to be related with politics, and they become relevant in political economic structures that are not usually mentioned. In addition, these feelings have to be understood in relations to people’s moral and ethical dilemmas informing of questions of values.

The distance between people was marked by absence and non- communication. On a November midday, we—Mama ny Rocco, some of her children, Mama ny Rocco’s sister and her youngest child, Willy, three female neighbors and I—were returning from Mama ny Rocco’s rice fields. Living in the south of the village, Mama ny Simon had hurried to us, urging us to come quickly to her house. There was a young man surrounded by neighbors and kin women in her house. The young man had come to visit (mamangky) his relatives and he explained how he was related to Mama ny Simon. Older women were nodding when he went through his kin relations, which I did not hear properly because I was standing at the doorway, as I could not fit into the room of the small house. Being able to point out one’s ancestors was important, since it made possible one’s access to land and showed one’s ritual responsibilities (see Chapter 3 and 8). In addition, when one knew his or her kin, it was possible to avoid the incest taboo and not marry them. Willy did not like the newcomer. He left abruptly after listening to him for a while and told me angrily: “I don’t like that a person does not keep in touch for several years. He has not visited us, only once when he was a young boy. Ever since he has not visited.” Willy’s comments referred to the value that one has to maintain relationships with one’s kin. He highlighted how he had visited his father’s family several times in the village where his father had been born.

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In addition to commensality, visiting maintained and created people’s social relations. The Tsimihety marked clearly when someone visited another person’s house, usually by welcoming “Karibo!” Or guests noted their arrival by greeting with a French term “Madam-ooo” or “Patron,” marking the ownership of the people living in the house. To enter into one’s house without saying anything could have been considered that someone came there to steal. A typical notification among the Tsimihety was “You do not visit” (anao tsy mamangky) when they unexpectedly met kin or a friend they had not met for a while. Ethnography among the egalitarian Korowai in Papua, New Guinea has shown that people take reciprocity of visiting as a measure of the quality of a relative’s bonds. Through reciprocal visiting, people alternate their roles as powerful owners and vulnerable guests, who enter into a space where they do not belong (Stasch 2009: 50, 54). Mutual visits highlighted their equality, a willingness to put oneself into a vulnerable position and, on the other hand, not take advantage of one’s more powerful position as a host.

Visiting marked people’s status and their ancestral lands. In certain life situations, people were expected to enter into strange places and relate with strangers. In northeastern Madagascar, searching (mitady) was expected, especially from young males (see about searching in Chapter 2) needing to achieve fully adult status (see the case of Papa ny Mirama in Chapter 3). Furthermore, searching allowed people to also recreate their social relations and get rid of their low-ranking status. In the Madagascar highlands, free people visited each other and migrants sent money home. However, people who were slaves (andevo) did not visit their families, because they were ashamed that they had not made money or had been unable to get married. If people broke these codes, free people’s ancestors were expected to punish them. (Evers 1999: 279.)

In some cases, however, people were not able to become full adults but depended on others’ care. Tsinjo, a middle-aged man working as cattle herder, explained how he had moved from one spot to another before he found a good place in Manantenina, where he ended up living with a family and herding their cows:

I left Antalaha because my child, the child of my eldest child and my wife died. I was so full of sadness and I left the place in 2001. First I went to dig sapphires in Anjiamazava [in the

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west of Madagascar]. Then I stayed in Andilandrano, very close to Ambontsylahy. From there I left to Andapa and from Andapa I went to Belaoko Lokoho. When I left Belaoko I was thinking of going back to where I left, near Antalaha, but I passed by here and it might be that this place is my destiny (vintana) to live in. I stayed with Robert first and then Vincent took me to work in his vanilla field in Antsahabehasina. After I finished that work, Ramy took me to work with him and his brother. I decided to stay with him for a long term. If I die here, I will be buried here.

Tsinjo’s narrative reveals how in the case of misfortune and loss, people sought to find another place to stay, in order to establish new relations in places that they did not know. Tsinjo had ended up working for different people, and at the moment he felt his life with Ramy was good for him. By following the taboos of Ramy and working for him, Tsinjo maintained a respectful relationship with Ramy, even though he was in a dependent position. In Tsinjo’s case, he would be buried in Ramy’s family tomb, expressing the nature of their friendly relations (see also Brown 2004: 629- 32; for differences between land owners and those who do not own land, see Chapter 3). Brown (2004: 636) has pointed out that a slave’s compliance could also result from the achievement of a kind of patron-client relationship between masters and slaves, in which masters were expected to provide for their slaves’ needs in return for the slaves’ provision of labor and loyalty (Brown 2004: 636; on lohateny, see p. 164 this chapter). Tsinjo was not a slave, howeve; according to his narratives, he was able to return to the place he had left after experiencing misfortunes.

When people traveled and met strangers, they were in constant danger of forgetting their relatives. When kin, friends or spouses were separated and they lived in different places, people highlighted their relationships by missing them. To miss (ngoma) is a sentiment highlighting relations with those who are away, reflecting the corporeal connection that one feels in one’s body (see also Stasch 2009: 160–1). The Tsimihety considered that missing make a person quiet, someone who does not speak too much and lives in his or her thoughts.

However, the Tsimihety valued traveling. Traveling allows a person to expand their name and reputation. For example, when one long-term research assistant in one of the US environmental conservation projects was

174 paid to travel to the US to present his experiences of ecotourism practices, the people in the villages admired him, and some ecotourism guides hope to have a similar kind of experience. In addition, people considered that important people were able to travel and were busy (maresaka) (see Chapter 2 about valuing “busy places” and “busy people”).

Practices of sharing substances, commensality, visiting and traveling refer to the fact that the Tsimihety, being animists in Sahlins’ (2014) sense, are human-centric, because understandings of kin and strangers are shared with socially understandable categories, and only in this way can they be repeated and recognized by other people (Keane 2008: 114). All these socially shared ideas, understandings and practices are based on generalized cultural values (see Turner 2009: 33), not on perspective (Kaartinen 2015: 228).

6.3 “Some species are more suitable than others”

For the Tsimihety, animals could be kin. The Zafindravoay clan (Dady’s clan) accorded to crocodiles the same funeral rites they did to humans. Historical records have noted that crocodiles would not harm the Zafindravoay, and the people gave them the lungs of their slaughtered cattle (Campbell 2012: 472–3, cit. Sibree 1879). Folk narratives have documented that rather than killing crocodiles, the Malagasy attempted to ward them off with ody mamba (crocodile medicine) or a talisman against crocodiles, or propitiate them with offerings or acknowledgements that they were the masters of the water (Ruud 1960: 103). Different animals were hierarchically organized. According to historical evidence, the Antankarana, located in the north of Madagascar, believed that the spirits of their chiefs passed into crocodiles and those of inferior people into other animals (Campbell 2012: 472, cit. Sibree 1879). It is important to note that these were relations between a specific group of people and crocodiles, as the Zafindravoay clan’s funeral rites for crocodiles have shown (ibid: 472–3).

The Tsimihety had different relations with animals, such as pets, domesticated animals and animals that lived in the wild in forests and rivers. People kept chickens, geese, pigs and fish that could be eaten. “I have chickens. Even if I do not have any to sell but I have some that I can eat, I

175 feel happy then.55 I have 50 chickens, may–eeh?” Papa ny Remy, one of the village elders, went on explaining. Chickens were found in the village, scratching the ground near small kitchens and places where women had thrown, for example, cooked rice water and fruit and vegetable peels. People usually enclosed them in small houses overnight to protect them from potential thieves or cats and dogs. It was also possible to leave chickens to wander around in the forest. Chickens caused several quarrels between cultivators whose fields were next to each other, because they dug up the roots of cultivated plants, such as vanilla. While chickens were able to live in either the forest or the village, pigs lived close to human dwellings.

Mama ny Soahina, who had four big pigs tied to her fenced yard, explained:

Pigs and humans can have the same diseases. For example, if a pig has a rat disease it can transmit it to human beings.56 The illness can kill it—it causes a cough, weakness and vomiting for a long time. In the hospital they know how to take care of it.

In addition, like human waste, pigs’ waste had to be kept separate from humans. The local law known as dina explained not to keep pigs near the riverside, because they could pollute the water with their excrement. Mama ny Soahina continued:

We must give water from the special plates (lokaloka) made out of wood. The zebo (cow), on the other hand, can go to the water. It eats grass [and finds its own food], unlike the pig that has to be fed.

Food and ways of eating were significant for Tsimihety animal relations and categorizations. As pigs ate the same kind of food as human beings, their excrement was as polluting as human excrement. However, cows ate the grasses growing in the forest and did not pollute water, because their food was similar to water that was wild. In addition to cattle, the Tsimihety sacrificed chicken in rituals because they found their food from the land. Pigs ate similar “hot food” (sakafo mafana) as humans, for instance, cooked rice and vegetables. In general, animals that ate things growing in forests

55 “Zaho na tsy manana ny hanidy fo zaho koa efa voky efa tiako… , ary zaho, iezaka te-hanao maro fo sarotra.” 56 See also Sharp 2011: 13.

176 and on the ground—such as grass or insects, in the case of chickens—were used for ritual purposes.

Animals with whom it was easy and compatible (mety) to live with involved a special relationship. According to Dady’s narratives, crocodiles ate the same food (meat) as human beings. For Valeri (2000: 275–7), this is the main division between human beings and the crocodile, the inversion of a hierarchy in which humans are usually predators and animals are prey, highlighting a fundamental logic of exchange. If one eats fish, one has to accept the fact that one can be eaten by fish, or the fish deity. Avoiding crocodile meat is to avoid being eaten by the animal. Indeed, the Tsimihety knew how to hunt crocodiles and people knew how the animal lived. Crocodiles lived in the rivers that people needed to cross when reaching their fields or when they went fishing or swimming. Clearly, friendly relations and knowledge of each other’s movements and ways of life helped moving around in the shared environment.

Lemurs, the emblems of Madagascar’s environmental conservation, used to be hunted and eaten by the Tsimihety. The Tsimihety regarded lemurs (simpona) as similar to human beings. A Tsimihety porter described the animal as follows:

When I have a look, it looks like a human being because, according to the story, they are the same family as human beings. They have two hands and two legs and big brain (betro), so, big head. They live in the forest and their fur is white. It moves around by jumping, it can reach a tree from a distance, and it crawls and sits like a human being. People say that it is a very smart animal and hunters say that its meat is delicious. Now it is strictly endangered. In addition, it doesn’t do evil, but it mates outside the group of a different mother. People can hunt it with guns (basy) and traps (fandrika).

An elderly Tsimihety farmer narrated:

It knows how to jump. When we collected trees and bilahy (the bark of the tree used for fermenting the sugar cane liquor), we used to see simpona… The simpona is a kind of human being but it lives in a forest, as our grandfather said. The simpona

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and babakoto (indri) existed already when human beings were formed.

In these descriptions Euro-American knowledge that refers lemurs similar to human beings because of their two hands and legs (Chapter 5) and Tsimihety knowledge of ways lemurs tend to move and copulate, have been mixed. In seeking similarities and differences between humans and animals, the Tsimihety used human beings as the reference point for classifications, and the human body was the model for describing different animals (see also Ellen 2006: 100; Howell 2014). In addition, the Tsimihety perceived animals through cultural categories and practices. For example, in the porter’s description, lemurs did not do evil, like human beings but they searched for their partners outside their immediate family.

The main distinction between lemurs and people were the places they lived: lemurs in the forest and human beings in villages, where they could cultivate land. In publicly known stories, once upon a time lemurs and humans were regarded as brothers living in the same places. However, one of the brothers started cultivating the land and choose to live outside the woods while the other one refused to come along and stayed in the forest; he became the indri. In folk narratives, the melancholic cry of the indri marked that he was still sad about losing his brother (on lemurs adopting humans, see Ruud 1960: 99). In another narrative, two kin groups lived by means of farming land and collecting wood in the forest, but when the groups started to fight, the fighting group became human and the tree-dwellers became the indri.

In these narratives, the separation of humans and lemurs occurred because of a quarrel or because some wanted to live a different kind of life in a different place. This reflects how different ethnic groups or clans have identified themselves: the Tsimihety did not want to cut their hair while the Sakalava did, or Zafimaniry practiced swidden while the Betsileo living next to them cultivated irrigated rice. These relations with different animals have been understood and framed by culturally shared ideas of what the human body is, and where and how different beings eat, move and live. Living with animals require affective and attentive ways of being. These relations are also political. A relationship with a crocodile is defined by belonging to the place where crocodiles also dwell.

The Tsimihety views remind also of sensibilisation, the constant education done by environmental conservation projects in Madagascar. One catching

178 argument used in Masoala National Park has been that ‘to kill lemurs is to kill one’s descendants’ (Keller 2015: 163). As the male porter’s account notes, the narrative that he refers to is a sensibilisation narrative that has highlighted the evolutionary connections and similarities between humans and lemurs (see e.g Tattersall 2015: Jolly and Kinne 1980). However, as I have discussed here, the Tsimihety relate and classify their relations with lemurs differently from environmental conservationists who tend to emphasise static equilibrium between the species present on Earth that Keller calls ‘conservation ethos’ (Keller 2008: 651; Chapter 5).

In Madagascar, the cow or ox (zebo,57 also known as omby in Malagasy) is a special animal. In 2012–2013, there were only few cattle in the village. People claimed that they did not have enough money to buy cattle. In 2016, however, when cultivators had gotten a high price from vanilla, there were more cows in the village. Willy had bought two cows, so that he could use them for working, for example, smoothing his rice fields. This way he was not dependent on other people’s animals (see Chapter 3). One of his neighbors looked after his cows, changed their place and took them to the water to drink. In return, this man was able to use the cows in his own field and work with them in other people’s fields and earn money that way. However, it was unimaginable or strange to have sex with animals (see also Cole 2001: 82).

Cattle and cows have been regarded as wealth (harena) in Madagascar. According to Wilson (1992: 73–7) the Tsimihety did not value the cattle for their meat but rather for aesthetic reasons. The Tsimihety especially valued cows with white coloring, which people regarded as a sign of clear (mazava) and light thoughts (see also Thomas 1996: 77; see further discussion of mazava p. 84 this thesis). Among the Merina, cattle have been sought by all aspiring to become men, and cattle were the clearest sign of an individual’s success. In addition, cattle, especially oxen, were admired for their strength and difficulty to control, virtues which were much sought after by Merina men and associated with notions of virility (Bloch 1985: 638). In Manantenina, as a cow was given as a prize in a football tournament between villages, the young men of the winning team ran along the village road back and forth with the zebo, showing off their prize and its speed and strength,

57 Bos primigenius indicus, Bos indicus or Bos taurus indicus (Pérez-Pardal 2018).

179 but also showing off their own strength before killing the animal and sharing its meat. People jumped off the road when the running zebo passed them. Indeed, the Tsimihety’s cherishing of cows was mixed with feelings of respect and fear. When a cow passed along the road, even when it was tied or someone looked after it with a stick in their hand, people moved to the side of the road, stopping and standing silently, waiting for the animal to pass by (see also Graeber 2007: 26). My present material does not answer to my note that perhaps these cultural understandings of masculinity have informed why some people abandoned ecotourism requiring service skills and taking orders.

In Madagascar, cattle have been important in rituals as a substitute for people (Bloch 1985; Cole 2001: 175–6). According to a legend, a large number of cattle can be substituted for the remains of a rich man’s dead son. People ate the beef instead of the corpse and this meat was called henaratsy (bad meat). Campbell (2013a) has distinguished between two kinds of cannibalism: exo- and endocannibalism. According to Campbell, exocannibalism is an extension of enmity toward outsiders, who are killed and consumed in a disrespectful, hostile manner. In contrast, endocannibalism involves the eating of near kin in rituals intended to honor and respect the dead, and assist in their passage to the world of the ancestors.

Bloch (1985: 633) has pointed out that the historical evidence on the Merina should be understood metaphorically, since eating human flesh has been usually indicated in kabary, a metaphorical oral performance. Reference to eating, according to Bloch, has highlighted the connection between generations through the same substance.

The substitution for human flesh with beef has also been understood in relation to the political and economic situation. In Madagascar, beef was only eaten on ritual occasions; however, a Mascarene plantation economy requested beef from Madagascar, increasing demand. From the late 18th century onwards, as the Merina state expanded more intensively and due to their military expansion, the Merina elite engaged in cattle-raising, which had also been a chief occupation, for example, among the Bara, Antandroy and Sakalava. (Campbell 2013a: 69–70.)

Cattle sacrifice has been central in the articulation of hierarchical relations between descendants and ancestors. In cattle sacrifices, political aims and configurations of memory and social relations have been reworked (Cole 2001: 172, 178–9, 274–6). When the MNP organized a ceremony at the

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Marojejy visitor center in order to thank the people in the villages for their collaboration, a cow was slaughtered and it was shared in the joint meal. Village elders were invited as special guests and the MNP administration gave them gifts. The MNP was fully aware that without recognizing the elders, some of the villagers would not have regarded the MNP’s actions as valid and legitimate. The Tsimihety held as significant that institutional or foreign actors respected their rituals and hierarchies. For example, people shared that it was good and respectful that the representatives of the German company that bought their vanilla attended the funerals of the prominent persons of the villages in which the company operated (see Chapter 7 and 8 about rituals and politics).

In Euro-American logic, intentions are reserved for human beings. For example, natural scientists have classified crocodiles as reactive: Crocodiles are most likely to attack ‘out of the blue,’” with a combination of “stealth, surprise, and a sudden final burst of speed. The main reasons for crocodiles to attack humans are defending their territory (especially salt-water crocodiles), hunting (as they can also mistake humans for an accompanying animal, such as a dog), defending their nest or young ones, and self-defense. (Caldicott et al. 2005.)

In contrast, the Tsimihety did not reserve intentionality only for human beings. “We are never sure what that animal is thinking (mieritieritra),” Willy said, referring to the intellectual capacities of animals. “Sometimes zebos kill their owners,” he pointed out to me when we were waiting one time for a zebo to pass by on the village road. “Once there was a man who went to fetch his zebo, which attacked him. The man got killed. The zebo struck him with its horns,” he continued. Willy’s way of thinking revealed that if an animal, such as a zebo, killed someone, it was not just reacting to something, since animals’ acts were based on conscious decisions. When we discussed the possible illnesses that a pig can have, Mama ny Soahita explained: “Sometimes the pig gets weak (rakalemy). Maybe it has some taboos (fady) that we do not know about.” The belief that an animal might have taboos suggested that animals were moral beings, which did not just react to different stimuli.

In spite of the generalized cultural understandings of humanity and animality, the Tsimihety knew that people could become animals. While driving from the village to a town on the coast, where I was heading to do the obligatory phone calls to home, Deacon told me a story about a woman

181 who transformed into a crocodile in Vohemar, a town further up north from Sambava on the Indian Ocean coast:

I don’t know whether it is true but people in Vohemar tell the story that there was a lady who went to wash herself. She disappeared but soon villagers saw a big crocodile. “She is Mbatu,” people said. And although kids swam in the lake, the crocodile did not eat the children.

The idea of metamorphosis implies that animals or humans can take each other’s bodies. In the South American context, mainly in myths, a human can be embodied as an animal or a plant, an animal can adopt the form of another animal, or a plant or an animal can shed its outward appearance and reveal its objectivized soul with the body of a human being (Descola 2013: 135). De Castro (1998: 470) calls this “perspectivism,” in which different beings see each other from their own cultural perspectives. This is in contrast to naturalism, in which nature is unified and social lives differ. Perspectivism is a particular form of animism and cannot be applied to all animist societies. In “standard animism,” beings are related through symmetric intersubjectivity between ontologically equivalent beings, and they differ in terms of their bodies (Descola 2013; Årheim 2015: 25).

In Madagascar, people tend to focus on the body. For example, among the Sakalava spirit possession worked through the body and not the mind. During possession, the Sakalava male medium changed his body into that of a French sailor speaking fluent French and drinking rum from a glass. This was unimaginable to the older Sakalava spirits, who chewed tobacco and drank rum from the bottle (Lambek 1998; Nielssen 2011: 106). Importantly, bodies have minds, not that minds are embodied (Lambek 1998; Howell 2016: 59; Toren 1993: 462), meaning that a possible transformation starts with the body, not with mind, as in naturalist logic.

In one instance, a widow whose husband had died fainted on the morning of the funeral. People brought her cold things, such as yogurt and cold water, and they fanned her and yelled her name. Someone took a leaf full of rice and spilled it over her head. Finally, the woman’s brother came and told everybody to move away, because she needed air. A doctor came, and people carried her to the hospital where she was given medicine that made her sleep. Layla, a member of the US Peace Corps who had witnessed the situation, stated: “As if people were calling her to come back from wherever she

182 went…” Indeed, the Tsimihety thought that one’s soul could travel away from the body.

A “metamorphic potential” is more prominent in certain spaces. As shown by the narratives in this chapter, the forest and bodies of water are potential places where one can lose his or her humanity. These are areas where different spirits, such as kalanoro or lantany, and dwarfs also live. Among the Tsimihety, people started to be suspicious if someone spent too long in the forest alone, wondering what they were doing there. Although the forest was a place where people felt healthy, it was also where one could encounter powers that one did not expect (see also Valeri 2001: 30). For example, Willy had had an experience that his father—after his death—approached him in the forest. One day Willy had been walking in the forest when a branch fell down, and the next day he got a message that his father had died. According to Willy, the branch that fell was his father, telling him that he was dead. The difference between humans, animals and spirits had to be made and maintained, and taboos were central in these practices (Valeri 2000: 180).

6.4 On human boundaries: Joking, avoidance and taboos

Avoidance, joking and taboos were some of the practices by means of which the Tsimihety maintained their humanity. “You are my wife,” shouted Willy to Sandra, his cousin’s 14-year-old daughter, who was visiting Willy and Angelina’s house. Willy jokingly asked for a kiss from Sandra. She ran away, laughing. In anthropology, joking relations have implied taboo relations. For Lévi-Strauss, the incest taboo was at the heart of his alliance theory, according to which the universal prohibitions of incest pushed human groups toward exogamy. The basic idea of the theory was to explain why different groups of people start to communicate with each other (Lévi- Strauss 1967: 60; see also Turner 2009: 9). The Tsimihety highlighted exogamous relations, and to have sex with a close relative was problematic. Joking between them highlighted that they were not preferred marriage partners.

A reciprocal relationship between two ethnic groups or clans that involved joking was known as lohateny (Brown 2004: 629).58 On a clear November

58 loha ‘head’; teny ‘word.’

183 morning, Willy and I were walking along the paved road in order to do interviews in one of the neighboring villages. There was a man carrying baskets with a bamboo stick on his shoulders. Willy shouted to him: “How is my slave?” (Akore kongnaha?)59 The man gave us lychees that he had in his basket. As we took some fruit, Willy continued: “Take more fruit.” and jokingly to the man: “You won’t have anything more than rice to eat.”

As Willy and I continued walking, I asked what had just happened. Willy explained:

The man was Antandroy, and I am Antanosy from my mother’s side. We are very opposite and opposition requires respect. We joke. Joking is something very strange (hafahafa) and the purpose of it is to bring something good to life. I am very afraid of making something bad to my lohateny… The lohateny practice was set up a long, long time ago. When one meets lohateny, one does something deviant or strange. One can say, for example, he [the person in the lohateny] is like a slave or he is not important. This means just the opposite. For example, if I see my lohateny, I can say: “If you go to Sambava, the car will flip and only you will be dead.” This means that you will arrive in Sambava very well, without trouble.

The lohateny relationship appears to be more structured between people who identify with particular ethnic groups or clans (Feeley-Harnik 1991: 271– 77; Lambek 2002: 115–20). It is a reciprocal relationship in which requests for money, aid, curing illness and so forth may be made by either party. Previous studies have suggested that lohateny may have been a means to maintain peaceful and practical relationships while masking power inequalities (Brown 2004: 634). Overall, lohateny refers to the sort of unquestioning trust that descent group alliance partners in northern Madagascar are meant to share (Walsh 2006: 7).

In addition to joking, the Tsimihety practiced avoidance with those people who should be respected, such as one’s father- or mother-in-law, for

59 kongona ‘bedbug, cattle tick.’

184 example, by not staring at them in the eyes and by not sitting or standing right in front of them. According to Radcliffe-Brown (1940: 194–6), the avoidance relation combines friendliness and antagonism. In fact, joking and avoidance relations seem in many ways to be logical inversions of each other. Where joking relations tend to be mutual, an equal exchange of abuse emphasizing an equality of status, avoidance is generally hierarchical, with one party clearly inferior and obliged to pay respect (Graeber 1997: 696). These relations played out in the elder-junior hierarchy, in which elders were supposed to morally guide junior people, who were supposed to respect their elders and follow their advice.

Joking and avoidance were body-focused. Jokes were usually related to taboo subjects like sex and functions because they tended to obscure the division between self and other, the body and the external world (Leach 1964: 40). While joking, bodies were equivalent; in avoidance they were hierarchical, because the person was imagined to represent something higher or on a more abstract level. According to Graeber (1997: 697–700), joking highlighted an equivalency between the people involved with joking, who considered it a reciprocal relationship. In joking, it was specifically the body that was regarded as continuous with the surrounding world. Avoidance, on the other hand, expected that the body was closed, all orifices shut and nullified, with nothing flowing either in or out. The avoided body was constituted as a perfect, abstract and self-sufficient thing unto itself. There was no need for exchange with other bodies or the world. Avoidance was ultimately hierarchical and constructed of relations of avoidance (for example, with one’s father-in-law or an elder).

Taboos (fady)60 referred to something that was supposed to be “set apart” or “not to be touched.” A Tsimihety woman in her 50s shared:

I am fady of eating chicken when I work in my field. My grandfather was polygamous and one day his wives went to work in their fields. They called people to help them. Then the first wife brought betsabetsa (sugarcane liquor) and the second wife brought chicken to be eaten during the work day. The first wife had many people in the field working for her, but the second wife did not have anyone and she ate the chicken by herself. She was so sad and said: “All of my generations, if

60 The word has Indonesian origins (Ruud 1960: 1).

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they bring chicken to be eaten in their fields, they won’t have what they want.” That is why I am fady of it, because I am a sibling of the second wife. We can eat when we don’t work in the field. If we take the chicken to the field and eat it there, it can harm our lives and turn the harvest into a bad one.

Taboos involved avoidance relations and practices. However, taboos also extended to animals. For example, a chameleon, amboa lava (long dog) or karondro (literally, ‘the animal that came from the clouds’) should be left alone and not played with. As I passed by a big tree next to the river embankment, under which Vincent and his brothers and sisters used to sit, we found a chameleon on the ground. As an elder, Vincent told me a story of how to be with the animal:

A chameleon used to be like a bird. It was flying and it flew on God’s head. God got angry and decided that the chameleon could not fly anymore. In addition, God made it mute and deaf. So if people kill a chameleon, even accidentally, it is a serious matter, because it cannot hear if one apologizes.

During my fieldwork, a child died in one of the villages. People gossiped that someone had seen children playing with a chameleon. As one cannot talk ritually to a chameleon, one should not mess with the animal in the first place. In general, the Tsimihety talked kabary when they visited someone whom they did not meet on a daily basis or someone who was hierarchically higher than them. Moreover, when visiting ancestors at tombs, people would start their speeches with a kabary.

The boundary of humanity was not supported by the dualism of mind and body but through avoidance of the numerous substances, objects, actions, words and events that threatened their subjective integration (Kaartinen 2015: 235; see also Valeri 2000: 187). Practicing taboos also reestablished ancestral order, because, in general, taboos were received from ancestors. A Betsimisaraka woman in her fifties explained:

We are fady of eating fossa (jabaoly) and bat (fanihy). I don’t know why we are fady of them but that is from my father. From my mother, I don’t have any fady. My son ate cat and he got

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wounds everywhere on his feet. I touched them and my hands started to shake.

Taboos vary between clans, families and persons. Children are supposed to observe both of their parents’ taboos, while spouses can choose whether they respect and follow each other’s taboos. A person could acquire new taboos during his or her lifetime. Ethnographic literature has highlighted that in the presence of new relations, objects and practices, new taboos can appear or existing taboos can encompass those new relations and practices (Valeri 2000: 359–60). In addition, people living in the same places could share some taboos. In Manantenina, for example, it was not allowed to work on Tuesdays and Sundays (see Walsh 2002: 457).

Lambek (1992: 253) as pointed out that taboos are less facts than acts and a particular taboo is “a performative act in the sense that it brings into being, maintains – embodies – a particular moral state.” For example, when Adventists do not use alcohol, they make statement to themselves and others about who they are and who they are not (Keller 2005: 197). Similarly, when a person ate cooked banana, it was a statement of who he or she was. Nevertheless, one was always relational. As people have so many taboos and people get more taboos during their lives (and perhaps also get rid of some), I cannot confirm that taboos follow schismogenesis, a competition of contradictions, as each side organizes itself as the inverse of the other (Sahlins 2004: 69; Bateson 1958 [1936]). However, taboos were always related with politics and social relations; since the immediate family had almost the same taboos, extending relations was done by means of knowledge rather than ancestry (Graeber 2007: 151–2).

The notion of taboos tends to develop as one of the most important axioms of culture, especially when there is no political authority capable of enforcing them (Valeri 1992: 151). As I have shown in relation to commensality, the Tsimihety held a specific attitude: “As people decide to hold others accountable, and as they allow the same principles to extend universally, even to apply to themselves, they set up a particular kind of moral environment for each other” (Douglas 1980: 71). Breaking a taboo signifies breaking away from moral relations. In general, taboos for the Tsimihety represented a means for constituting and marking signiﬁcant relationships. That is, they were essential for various reckonings of status. However, taboos were not only essential and internalized as objectiﬁed rule[s] but they were also embodied perception[s]. (Lambek 1992: 20, 23.)

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Imposing taboos is “one of the most basic ways of demonstrating authority”’ (Graeber 1995: 265). The closer one is to the political center of Antankarana, the more carefully one has to follow the taboos related to the political center in question (Lambek 1992). In that transgressions of imposed taboos are acts of “answering” imposing authorities, they may be seen as threatening the integrity of the structures that support these authorities (Walsh 2002: 456).

Taboos have been translated into the service of environmental conservation efforts. There have been suggestions on how to harness people’s relations and ways of life for the conservation strategies. For example, people referred to the lemurs in the park as taboo. However, this taboo, imposed by environmental conservation agencies, did have the same consequences as taboos imposed by ancestors. For example, as people continued to hunt lemurs and people told that if hey were cought, they could be fined or put in jail by the MNP authorities.

Researchers have considered why some Malagasy fail to respect their folk conservation principles and choose to degrade common resources. Explanations have varied from a “tragedy of the commons,” highlighting that each individual fights for survival rather than cooperating in sustainable use of the dwindling natural resources, to a lack of mutual understanding between observers and community collaborators from different backgrounds (Ratzinbazafy 2008: 302–3).

Between the Malagasy and transnational environmental conservation projects there are differences in what should be protected and why. For example, the focus on “sacred forests” (ala fady) tends to be problematic, since to cut the vegetation in such a place is not because of the vegetation itself but because it is taboo to disturb the ancestors that reside inside the ala fady (Keller 2009: 82). One should be wary of thinking of Malagasy ancestors in terms of “sacredness” in the European sense. Rather than being seen as “supernatural” beings or subjects of religious veneration, ancestors of people in Madagascar are thought of in ways that are strongly connected to how they think of elders (Bloch 2002). Finally, Dady’s kin relation with crocodiles highlighted her clan places and can be regarded as a political statement emphasising the clan’s autonomy in these particular sites.

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6.5 Conclusions

In this chapter, I have discussed the Tsimihety relations with human beings, animals and plants. I have highlighted that the main division between human beings is between kin and strangers. While kin are those whose lives are woven together through shared substances, acts of commensality, living in joint spaces, working together, visiting and remembering, people outside of kin status are strangers, people whose actions one can never be sure of. Nevertheless, relations with strangers can become lucrative (see Chapters 4 and 8). Furthermore, not only human beings are kin, as people can have kin relations with certain animals, as Dady’s stories about the relationship with a crocodile pointed out. By knowing about and respecting each other’s ways of life, different beings can live together in the same places.

However, humanity for the Tsimihety is not prescribed by human-nature dualism. One is always in danger of losing one’s humanity if he or she ate in the wrong company or moved in an unknown environment or to new places. However, humanity also requires strangeness or wild powers. Teaching children to eat leaves or walk barefoot taught them to be connected with the vitality of these strange or wild powers. The Tsimihety world is onstituted by forces that human beings were not able to control; however, they could be lived with or avoided. While the Euro-American relationship with nature based on human-nature division and imagination of static equilibrium of species, also relevant in environmental conservation efforts, quite often results in human domination and practices of management of nature, the Tsimihety were very attentive to behavior as well as substances and the bodies of different beings. Yet, among the Tsimihety there is always a possibility for metamorphosis, becoming “other,” like an animal or spirit; the possibility for metamorphosis thus resulted in practices to guard one’s humanness.

Relations between different beings were managed by means of different practices, such as avoidance and joking. While by joking people sought to create equal and mutual relations, hierarchical relations enforced respect ideally existing in elder-junior relations. Taboos tended to be inherited from ancestors. Ancestors usually expressed taboos by negative formulations that ultimately highlighted the Tsimihety values relevant for a meaningful and good human life. The Tsimihety, like different groups in Madagascar, found

189 commanding relations to annoying, unbearable and against the ways in which people should seek to act toward each other. Finally, differences in the ways people related to people, animals and plants became evident in environmental conservation efforts and ecotourism practices that is in the focus on the next chapter.

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7. “Ecotourism does not make us rich”: Hierarchies of labor, inequalities, differences and values

“Ecotourism does not make us rich,” stated a Tsimihety cultivator61 who had worked several years as a guide at the Marojejy National Park. After observing foreign researchers and tourists, he noted that the money Tsimihety guides received from ecotourism practices was not enough to enable the Tsimihety to build big houses or buy motorbikes or cars—let alone travel by airplane. In addition, the park visitors usually stayed in the Marojejy National Park for a few days before continuing on to other destinations, making the Tsimihety realize that the tourists were not there to establish the type of long-term relations they had looked for.

In this chapter, I discuss that in the joint processes of ecotourism, the ability to move in the humid, tropical forests of northeastern Madagascar has become a focus of visitors and the Tsimihety. However, these evaluations have led to different kinds of results. While by emphasizing walking the Tsimihety highlighted their their connection to these places, for some visitors it emphasized the notion of the noble savage living happily in relation to nature without modern technologies and infrastructure. I argue that ecotourism cannot be treated only as an economical solution that brings money, as it also raises existential and ethical questions for the Tsimihety. The Tsimihety perceived ecotourism through the lens of their cultural categories, such as taking care (mikarakara) and exchange (see also West 2006).

Ecotourism has been a means for transnational funding organizations to maintain the economic sustainability of the park. For example, according to the World Bank: “Ecotourism offers a beneficial impact on the economic lives of local populations by creating jobs and providing additional sources of income and wealth creation” (Christie and Crompton 2003: 3). The strategy was also framed in the Madagascar Action Plan (2007 9; see also Scales 2014: 1):

61 While this is a vague description by an informant, in this particular instance it is preferable, lest the observations cause the person in question to lose his possibility of working in ecotourism.

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We will become a ‘green island’ again… The world looks to us to manage our biodiversity wisely and responsibly – and we will. Local communities will be active participants in environmental conservation under the guidance of bold national policies… we will develop industries around the environment such as eco-tourisms, aiming to turn Madagascar into.

In this greening project, local communities were considered as active participants under national environmental policies. From the point of view of environmental conservation agencies, ecotourism was supposed to bring the income necessary for the people living in the vicinity of the park and reduce their dependence on the forest and forest resources. (Scales 2014: 258.) Indeed, ecotourism projects presumed that the Tsimihety would provide a labor pool, meaning that they would start selling their labor time in return for a salary. Sodikoff (2007) has shown that in Eastern Madagascar, in these processes Malagasy labor has actually been devaluated and ecotourism has not relieved pressure from forests and swiddens, and groundwork for forest-based capitalism has been laid. Moreover, conservation efforts can lead people just waiting passively for the next government action (Keller 2009). Moreover, Walsh (2005: 657) has reminded that the majority of people living around protected areas in Madagascar do not have the skills, inclinations or connections necessary to profit from nature tourism. Given the large gap between costs and benefits, it is not surprising that national parks and tourism have led to considerable tension and conflict with rural households (Keller 2015; 2008; Walsh 2005: 658). Rearrangements of space and people can seem puzzling from the Tsimihety perspective (see, e.g., Mölkänen 2019: 92). Moreover, Bear (2014b: 72-3) has highlighted that generating income in markets, instead of analysing it as a technical problem of knowledge, should be analysed as a visceral experience of labour, an act of mediation in both markets and places of production.

In joint environmental conservation efforts can actually emphasize differences between different actors (Keller 2015). An ethnography from the Antankarana National Park in Northwest Madagascar reveals how some people in Antankarana realized that foreign researchers and tourists have a different way of looking at things than Malagasy people (Walsh 2005). In Marojejy, Tsimihety have observed what tourists and researchers were doing

192 when they looked at lemurs and took photos of them. The Tsimihety came to the conclusion that it was specifically because of lemurs that visitors came to Marojejy, not because of its people. Walking in the same places teased out new potentialities. Indeed, tourism is not merely an industry; it constitutes as a reflexive inquiry into globalization itself (Stasch 2014), teasing out the possibilities and exclusions of different people. I continue by discussing that after participating in ecotourism practices, the Tsimihety concluded that ecotourism did not make them rich. Despite their caring work as guides, cooks and porters, relationships with the visitors did not result in longer- term relations, and it seemed that vanilla cultivation, if market prices were good, brought better income to the people. These decisions notify that the Tsimihety have not become environmental subjects that conservation practices require (Agrawal 2005). Finally, as I visit the ways in which the Tsimihety have been used to prospering, I point out that ecotourism is not merely an economic question for the Tsimihety but also an ethical and existential as well as social one.

7.1 Labor hierarchies: Becoming aware of differences

On a Friday morning in the end of July 2013, a couple in their 50s and their guide Vincent headed to the park. As they liked to hike on their home island of Réunion, the couple had visited other national parks in Madagascar, mainly in central areas that were easier to access by plane and move around in via paved roads. According to them, the Marojejy National Park seemed an interesting place to visit because it was located in a remote zone. When walking from the nearest village to the park entrance, Vincent, an experienced guide who had worked in ecotourism almost from the beginning of such activities, explained in French about what was found in the landscape: different animals, trees and plants, such as chameleons and vanilla, and what people were doing in their fields, which could be seen from the path on the way to the park. When Vincent found a chameleon, he carefully lifted the leaves hiding the branch on which the animal stood, so that the visitors were able to see it and, in most cases, take a picture of it. The way to the first and second camps of Marojejy includes large changes in elevation. The man had difficulties climbing the steep rocky stairs built into the pathway. Vincent stopped in order to allow him to take a breath and rest from the walk that had tired him. Finally, Vincent said that he could carry the man’s small backpack, which contained a water bottle and some

193 snacks. While Vincent and the couple were ascending to the park, two porters descended from the first camp, where the couple was supposed to stay overnight. The porters had already carried the visitors’ bags there. By paying attention to the visitors’ abilities and interests, the guides, cooks and porters took care of them.

Despite the fact that the Tsimihety have been educated in and sensitized to environmental conservation efforts, their intimate knowledge has been put into the service of ecotourism. To gain a proper experience of wilderness, tourists require local guides to show them what they have come to find. Guides act as their “eyes” and as translators of biodiversity, but they are also more general caretakers for the tourists. They explain about local plants and animals, like helmet vanga (Euryceros prevostii), medicinal plants such as aspidium, or trees used for building houses, such as palissandre (Dalbergia). Tsimihety guides used their knowledge of Latin names of species supported by scientific authority, as I have pointe dout in Chapter 5, to perform in the way that made sense to the tourists. Guides point out animals and plants that tourists are not used to seeing, such as chameleons hiding in the vegetation. In addition, guides constantly observe whether tourists are able to walk the steep paths.

A lot of effort has been made to fulfill tourists’ expectations. Some cultivators have worked as special lemur guides, whom tourists can hire in order to be sure that they definitely find lemurs in the park. Such a guide will go to the park some days beforehand, depending on the tourists’ preference, to track down a lemur group. As tourists arrive in the park, their standard guide calls for the lemur guide, using a specific howl call, and the lemur guide replies with a double howl. In this way, able to approach lemurs tracked by the lemur guide, tourists can catch what they came to see: a spectacle of pristine nature. (Mölkänen 2019: 113–14.)

“We have to take good care (mikarakara) of them [tourists],” Vincent pointed out to me. This includes looking after the tourists, waiting for them, explaining things that tourists are expected to want to see, carrying their pack bags, helping them to walk by giving support and so forth. As I have discussed earlier, the Tsimihety regard care as one of the practices that make and maintain the kin and ancestral relations essential for one’s existence, status and well-being (Mölkänen 2019; Chapters 4 and 6). In addition, exchange is essential in the Tsimihety processes of caring and nurturing:

194 parents look after their children and, in the end, children look after their parents. A comparative ethnography of the Gimi in Papua, New Guinea has shown that they expect various returns, such as money, friendship or knowledge, from ecotourism practices (West 2006: 46).

The main vision of ecotourism was to provide people with necessary income and to implement developmental visions that aimed to transform Madagascar into a new kind of society, focusing more on efficient use of natural resources (see also Deininger and Byerlee 2011). These visions were also embraced during colonialism. Historically, the French administrators thought that the creation of proper villages, which provided centers around which people could gather, would enhance the social evolution of the Betsimisaraka in a way that allowed the creation of markets (Cole 2001: 55, cit. Gallieni 1899). Once markets were created, the indigenes could not help but to covet the “new” and “the unknown,” and after that they would begin to seek work. The French assumed that the irresistible attraction of novelty, combined with the need to provide money for taxes and new patterns of settlement, would naturally strengthen social bonds and lead the Malagasy to adopt a monetary economy (Cole 2001: 55–6; Chapter 3 for creating markets).

Working in ecotourism came with expectations of certain kinds of skills and performance. Planning and administration were reserved for people working in the capital or in the offices of the funders or development programs, either in Europe or in Madagascar. Planners and administrators were usually people who had language skills and a university education and were able to use expert terms and concepts. Manual labor was reserved for the Malagasy. Porters had to be able to carry heavy backpacks and food items back and forth across the mountains, as well as cook with different ingredients, stirring and tasting the food. This kind of manual labor and care work is specific to countries like Madagascar (Sodikoff 2012; Cole 2010).

Labor hierarchies have been created through historical processes. Ethnographical observations from the eastern coast of Madagascar have revealed how the Betsimisaraka were used as palanquin carriers for the colonial French officials. From the French perspective, the barefoot Betsimisaraka were suitable for this particular work and moving around in the thick vegetation, while at the same time the Europeans were able to

195 cogitate, see the scenery and document their experiences, marking down destinations and natural facts (Sodikoff 2009: 35–7).

The Euro-American dualisms of nature and culture and body and mind have resulted in different activities, practices and understandings in relation to the body, senses and movement. In colonial Madagascar, the type of shoe that was worn or a certain posture or gesture when walking or being carried were valued differently by the Malagasy and the French. The correspondence between the anatomical symbolism and wilderness epistemology was related to person’s social position and how that determined his or her position to travel. Indeed, labor hierarchies in environmental conservation projects in Madagascar mirror dualistic schema deeply rooted in European thought. (Sodikoff 2005: 113.) Imaginations and expectations of proper work exist also today in Madagascar (see Chapter 5 for historical knowledge). In the eastern parts of Madagascar, the Merina settlers in the early 2000s noted that the Betsimisaraka “don’t know how to work” (tsy mahay miasa), listing their faults: Betsimisaraka came late to the job, quit without notice, absented themselves for days after being paid, took no pride in their tasks, and were lazy, vulgar and learned slowly (Sodikoff 2005: 367). In Marojejy, I did not document these kinds of perceptions. While that does not mean that they did not exist, according to the answers I received questionnaires, tourists appreciated their guides’ knowledge, performance and friendliness. Some tourists thanked guides, cooks and porters for their help. The Tsimihety guides knew that if tourists were satisfied, they might give an extra gift, such as money, shoes, a camera, sleeping bags or old camping clothes in addition to the regular salary. One guide had acquired four pairs of shoes, at least two hiking coats and one camera, which tourists had sent him from France. The tourists had even paid his trip to the capital to pick it up, so that he would be able to take pictures of species in the park and learn more about them at a local library.

In joint ecotourism practices, people’s bodies and movements have become the focus of observations and discourse. Where people moved in the same environments, the visitors had started to value Tsimihety bodies and their ways of moving. Among the forty interviews that I conducted with park visitors—together with a student from the ESSA institute, Mieja Razafindrakoto—a German female in her 40s wearing hiking clothes and boots had answered the question “What impressed you most in the park?”

196 by saying, “It’s how easily guides walk!” In addition, a Finnish friend of mine, who visited us in the beginning of our stay in September 2012, noted after a one-day visit to the park during: “I dragged myself to the second camp using the last drop of my strength, and this guy [pointing at Willy] was running downhill when we came back!” Extra emphasis was put on the fact that Willy had run downhill without shoes. According to Willy it was easier to walk with sandals or barefoot.

Walking gained the Tsimihety attention. After Willy came out of the park with Mieja, the first thing Angelina asked was: “Mahay mandeha?”(“Does she know how to walk?”). In general, when I arrived in the village, everybody was interested whether I was able to walk, and I do not even know how many times Willy and Angelina had to reply to that question. The Tsimihety also evaluated the ways in which tourists walked. “The man has difficulties in walking,” a Tsimihety ecotourism guide commented when a visitor had to pause while climbing uphill to the first camp. The visitor proceeded slowly, needing to rest occasionally and relax his knee, which was obviously hurting.

The Tsimihety had different bodily techniques for moving around in their local environment. One time after a rain we were heading to the fields, and Willy and Angelina saw how I was slipping on a steep slope. They advised: “Grab with your toes!” They showed me how to do it. They clung with their toes to the mud and were able to proceed. The other technique, when descending, was to speed down the hilly slopes, especially if one was carrying something heavy. Angelina used to run down the muddy slopes as she carried a basket full of rice on her head. To move around was valued by the Tsimihety. In general, for the Tsimihety, moving around informed about good and multiple social relations, places to visit, the ability to work and one’s health. Willy reminded me several times that we were not supposed to stay in the village during the day: “It is good that people see us walking. It means that we work. It is not good to stay in the village the whole day.” Walking and moving around showed that people were busy (maresaka). Interestingly, moving around has been related with youthfulness and powerlessness, while being still has been regarded as a sign of having power (Cole 2005: 893). Among the Tsimihety, however, it was morally suspect to stay in the village for the whole day unless one was sick, old or taking care of domestic tasks reserved for women, such as

197 cooking. As I have shown in Chapter 3, work was not only about production but about people’s moral obligations and their respect and care for others. This is the value produced through actions and perceived in the same symbolic system (Munn 1992: 3-7). Value making actions are rendered sensible in a framework of values, a meaningful in a common system of intelligibility that is historically produced. However, values are prone to change as people put cultural categories at risk when acting, intentionally or not, highlighting that people are not subsumed by a semiotic virtual system of meaning. (Sahlins 2004: 155-7; 1994: 386; 1985:145-151.)

The Tsimihety used the valued ability to move to argue their presence in particular places. “We Tsimihety know how to jump from rock to rock,” Willy highlighted. He and three girls were waiting for me after they had literally jumped from one big rock to another and left me climbing slowly and in some cases sliding down a hill. The girls were carrying sugarcane liquor buckets on their heads, delivering them from the forest to the village. I argue as a place-focused people the Tsimihety highlight their relations to place made through different kinds of movements, especially in the context of intensifying presence of foreigners (see also Chapter 8 for moving ancestors’ bodies).

For the Tsimihety it is normal to focus on bodies as I have discussed in Chapter 6 but park visitors had started to value movement differently when moving in the same places as the Tsimihety. Colonial administrators who did not move in Madagascar’s environments observed Malagasy from a distance, in towns or on a palanquin (Sodikoff 2012: 38). In ecotourism practices, however, where people move in the same environments, people have become aware of their different skills. Theoretically, the important notion is that the romantic ecological relationship evident in ecotourism efforts—for example, that people should walk and be in nature—actually caused people’s differences to become visible. This observation joins with notions that processes of globalization make differences visible rather than creating homogeneity (Keller 2015; Walsh 2005).

However, observations of joint efforts could result to different outcomes. A German retired woman who had visited the Marojejy National Park several times told me how the Tsimihety children are happy and they laugh a lot, in spite of not having clothes or shoes. These kinds of statements inform about

198 the romantic notion of the “noble savage,” who lives close to nature and is happy with what they have, without modern technology or infrastructural improvements. In the worst way, these kinds of imaginations can lead to the conclusion that the Tsimihety do not need new technology, money, cars or infrastructure because they are already satisfied with the way they live (on industrial agriculture, see also Dove 2006: 193–4).

According to Bourdieu, the ways in which people move, work or hold their glasses or spoons inform about their habitus, a subjective but not individual system of internalized disposition, structures, schemes of perception, conception and action common to all members of the same group or class (Mauss 1973; Bourdieu 1977: 86). The valorized properties within the habitus come to constitute cultural capital, the possession of which affects how social and cultural relations are made and remade and, importantly, by whom and for whom. According to Bourdieu, the same processes that reproduce the habitus and its subjects entail the production of a self-perpetuating system of unequal power relations because of institutions. (see also Gillespie 2019.) Indeed, the Tsimihety ability to walk in nature has not improved their socioeconomic position. However, I note that the Tsimihety did not evaluate their socio-economic position according to European class lines but they made observations and conclusion based on their cultural categories and historical experiences.

7.2 Inequalities of ecotourism

According to the ecotourism chief of the MNP, a young university-educated man from one of the towns in Northern Madagascar, who was responsible for marketing, managing and analyzing the data related to ecotourism, the main benefit from ecotourism for local communities is economic. In 2013, a local guide earned 18,000 Ar (about six euros) per day. Usually a tourist group spent about two to four days in the park. The amount that one was able to earn in a day was a lot, especially when compared to the work in some other person’s field, where someone could earn between 1000–3000 Ar (between 30 cents and one euro) per day. According to my calculations, based on the Marojejy National Park’s visitor’s book of 2012, the biggest salary for a guide could be around 900 €/year. The most that a porter could earn was about 100 €/year, the same amount as a cook.

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Local women’s associations—ten altogether, formed in order to be able to cooperate with foreign and national NGOs and companies—were involved with park activities, too. These associations took care of, for example, the cleaning of the camping areas and washing the bedding (MNP 2007: 13). According to the information of one of these associations, the MNP paid the workers per day 100,000 Ar (about 34€).62 Even though the number of visitors has risen from 155 in 1999 to 1,175 in 2012 (MNP 2012; see also appendix 4: 243), there were not enough visitors for all the guides to work full-time. In 2013 there were 13 guides employed and 15 guides in 2016.

Political shifts have also had a direct effect on tourism. In 2009, when the leader of a transitional government took power with the support of the army, the number of tourists dropped to almost to half of what it had been the previous year. Before the 2009 political crisis, tourism was the second-most important source of foreign exchange ($400 million in 2008), after shrimp exports (Freudenberg 2010: 70). In 2013, when elections were first to expected to take place on July 24, the number of visitors in Marojejy was again half of what it had been in July the year before. Tourist operators complained that they did not have enough reservations that year.

The Tsimihety became aware of economic differences in ecotourism practices. They were puzzled how it is possible for the vazaha to have so much money that they could afford plane tickets and own the latest technology, like mobile phones, GPS devices and computers, as well as lots of different things, such as hiking boots, watches and rain jackets (see also Mölkänen 2019). Similar kinds of observations have been pointed out in the northwest of Madagascar (Walsh 2004; 2005) and in Papua, New Guinea (Stasch 2014). On this basis, as guides remembered the beginning of the ecotourism activities, the Tsimihety concluded that the Malagasy state was not rich compared to environmental conservation NGOs, such as the WWF, which had “nice cars, jackets and watches.”

Colonial memories and experiences have influenced people’s perceptions. Indeed, a male Tsimihety rice cultivator in his 50s pointed out: “Clever people abroad, they know how to take advantage of Madagascar’s forests.” In Tsimihety grandparents’ stories, the French had looked down on the Malagasy. They had even urinated on the Tsimihety when they were

62 All of these calculations are based on 2013 exchange rates. When I visited the fieldwork site again in 2016, the salaries of the guides, cooks and porters had been raised (see Marojejy 2017).

200 carrying Europeans on a palanquin on their shoulders (see also Sodikoff 2009: 35–7; Cole 2001: 165). Another time an elder working for the Frachophone library at the district office asked me, what different people were doing with the plants and animals they looked for in the park and did they use them for medicine. Accoridng to his views, if they used plants for medicine, he considered it a good practice as it would help people. To use plants for medicine is a traditional Malagasy custom (Harper 2002). However, I add that in order to get help from medicine that the elder was referring to means that these medicines should be available for the people in places like Madagascar and not only in places they have been developed.

In Madagascar, people were aware that someone was gaining, but they did not know how (see also Walsh 2011: 236). Anthropologists have observed that people tend to make sense of invisible or hidden mechanisms of political economy by means of cultural tropes, referring to the magic of economies (Taussig 1987; Comaroff 1999; see also Chapter 8). Mere fresh air, water and rain “given” by the park, as environmental conservationists had emphasized to the people living in its vicinity, did not match to the Tsimihety requests for electricity, clean water and salaries. The Tsimihety asked why they could not have the same socioeconomic possibilities as the vazaha, who traveled with airplanes and four-wheeled cars, wore good- quality clothes and enjoyed the latest technologies.

Büscher and Fletcher (2017) have argued that tourism creates two socioeconomically unequal experiences, as one person’s leisure is another’s work and these relations are not reciprocal. Indeed, experiences of exchange expectations have not been realized in environmental and ecotourism efforts (West 2006: 46–8). In certain instances, people working in tourism have a chance to be tourists, while those they have served work and earn money in order to facilitate their leisure travel. This is not the case with the Tsimihety, who are not able to travel, for example, to Europe or North America, where the most of the tourists come from. Tourism reveals inequalities on a global scale, as well as hierarchies on a civilizational scale (Fletcher 2014). Importantly, social scientists have noted that in some cases, tourists can refuse to let some people fight for their freedom and dignity, which would interfere their “rights” to enjoy their tourism bubble; this informs about spaces of exception and the structural violence created, for example, through branding (Büscher and Fletcher 2017: 658–9, 661).

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Ecotourism efforts by environmental conservation agents and developmental projects have been often framed as a win-win solution for the environment and local communities (Arsel and Büscher 2012: 66–7). However, as political ecologists and anthropologists, among others, have highlighted, ecotourism does not bring benefits to all but has actually created reflections and understandings of inequalities, differences and disappointments (e.g., Keller 2015; Gezon 2014; West 2006). Ratzinbazafy (2008: 302–4) has highlighted that the Malagasy feel that those working in conservation, and even in development, are not really acting in the interests of the local people.

Indeed, the Tsimihety observed that the park visitors tend to be more interested in lemurs than the local people. In the Marojejy National Park, tourists stopped and started to gaze upon tall tropical trees. People started to talk vividly with each other, point out upon trees and take photos of white silky sifaka lemurs, one of the rarest lemurs in the world and critically endangered, jumped from one branch to another. While European tourists were fascinated about the lemurs, the Tsimihety who were working as guides in the Marojejy National Park ecotourism project stared at the tourists. “It looks like adoption but I know that it is not” one of the guides told me once out of the blue on our way to the Marojejy visitors’ center. This is one of the ethnographical vignettes of the joint efforts of environmental conservations and ecotourism practices where the Tsimihety, the ethnographic focus group of the study, make sense what is going (Mölkänen 2019). They were puzzled why tourists were so enthusiastic about animals that they and their parents had been hunting and eating for generations.

However, because of the new relationships between tourists and lemurs, the Tsimihety became aware of the different potentialities of lemurs. It was because of these animals that tourists came to visit their landscapes, at the same providing through ecotourism a necessary income. For the discussion of values these observations confirm that despite tourists and Tsimihety meet in the same sphere of environmental conservations and ecotourism, they tend to relate with it through their nature relations that are culturally organized (see Chapters 5 and 6).

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7.3 Political, ethical and existential questions

The Tsimihety actively sought different kinds of solutions in order to gain monetary income. In 2016, as the vanilla prices were exceptionally high, Tsimihety had concentrated on vanilla cultivation instead of ecotourism. Willy spent most of his working time in his vanilla field, not in the rice fields, for which he had made a halfing contract. He explained, “People used to ask me, What do you do alone in the forest?” However, when they saw my vanilla harvests, they said that they want to do the same thing.” He had made good money from his vanilla when the price started to skyrocket from 2016 until 2018.

In 2013, one of the research assistants in the environmental conservation efforts, Nelson, decided to stop working for the project that provided him with a decent monthly salary. His explanation was that “he had gotten tired” and he wanted to do guiding only occasionally. His father had been concerned that he should work also in his rice field and not be in the forest all the time. These accounts show that despite of strong emphasis on economic gain, other things and relations were important, such as one’s relations to the land and one’s kin (Chapter 3). In addition, I suspect that Nelson’s decision also highlighted whose authority he was willing to support. When working in the forest for foreigners, there was a danger that he would drift away from the ancestral ways (see Chapters 3 and 6). By doing occasional guiding, he showed moral respect toward his ancestors and the way of life they had established. However, I argue that ecotourism is not only about political and economic structures and socioeconomic inequalities; there are also political, ethical and existential questions related with ecotourism.

Despite these examples, ecotourism has continued be appealing, especially for the younger generation dreaming about the possibilities of modernity, not working in rice fields but finding employment in town in shops, administration or business. For example, Walsh (2003) has reminded how young men involved with mining in Northwest Madagascar use their income for immediate consumer goods, such as liquor or gambling, reflecting their own agency instead of adherence to the ancestral ways. Cole’s (1997: 577) ethnography from a port town on Madagascar’s eastern coast has shown that younger generations desire consumer goods and life enabled by work in management, industry or service sectors; however, political economic

203 dynamics and structures have actually supported the formation of an informal sector with unpredictable working possibilities.

However, when the Tsimihety wanted success, they asked for blessings (mijoro) from their ancestors or from spirits in certain sacred places, like at a big rock in the village near the Lokoho River or at a big tree located in a deep, curved slope along the paved highway. When I asked Rakoto, one of the elders of a small village, about its history and establishment, he told me about the big tree:

Tony [a sacred place] was established before a woman went there. She was hit by a stone on the road and she had to stay at home. She was too tired to stay at home and she went to the place and said: “If I am healed, I will kill a chicken.” Only a week after her request, she became healthy again. This happened a long time ago.

Rakoto added that recently eight women had made such promises (voahady) at the tree and they all had gone to France. A similar kind of narrative is related to the big rock located by the river in front of the village. Willy told me: “Three years ago when the football team from our village was in the finals, we went with zafintany [the original settler of the place] to the sacred rock and we asked for a blessing. We won.” Being prosperous and successful was thus never solely a matter of individual rational choice. Other powers and relations were also part of allowing success (Cole 2001: 138–9; see also Mölkänen 2019).

The Tsimihety also had ethical and existential questions concerning ecotourism. Tourists could be demanding and behave unexpectedly, such as when one tourist group had visited the Marojejy National Park. When I visited Manantenina in 2016, Rocco wanted to share certain news with me as quickly as possible. “Something terrible happened,” he started:

There was a young man who was naughty (maditry)in that group. He did not respect the park rules, did not stay on the pathway as expected and walked here and there by himself and did not listen to the guide’s orders. When the group arrived at the camp, the rest of the group did not see him. After a while, a cook went to look after him and found him crashed on the rocks below the waterfall. Rocco continued the narrative:

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A tangalamena (an elder), a gendarme, the MNP, a doctor and the mayor were called to the park. The elder spoke (mijoro ‘apologized’) to the spirits in the forest. After the apology, it rained andthebloodwaswashedawayfromtherocks because spirits do not like blood on the rocks. The purifying rain meant that the forest was sacred again. Despite the apologizing, the guides, cooks and porters were afraid that something bad would happen and something like this might occur again.

It was clear that the Tsimihety were disturbed at what had happened.

For the Tsimihety, proper behavior is determined by the relationship of different beings, and improper behavior, intentional or not, can cause severe misfortunes, illness or even death. For the Tsimihety, the problem of ecotourism is that one could never know who suffered the consequences of the maltreatment of the spirits (see also Sodikoff 2004: 388).

Ecotourism was not only a question of income and development but it involved also existential and ethical dilemmas about how to live with different beings or how to ensure a good and prosperous life (see Chapters 3 and 6). However, by paying respect to the spirits living in the forests of the Marojejy, the Tsimihety not only highlighted the kind of life they found valuable. I argue that it also represents a political statement: as the Tsimihety got along with the spirits on these mountains and in these forests and were used to living with them, it meant that these were Tsimihety places.

Tambiah (1985: 166) has reminded that rituals are dynamic and in rituals people can work for example semantic components or rituals can be obtained by authorities and serve for their pragmatic interests. In the ends, rituals can reorient political actions, especially in the contexts with different authorities present (Kelly and Kaplan 2001: 124 -125). Historical narratives from Madagascar have highlighted that for the Malagasy it is significant whose ancestors are recognized and respected as I have discussed in Chapter 2.

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7.4 Conclusions

In this chapter, I have highlighted that ecotourism was offered as a sustainable economic solution to conserve Madagascar’s precious environment by transnational development and fundinig organsiations and environmental conservation agencies. The ideology of ecotourism was that nature could be harnessed for economic profit-making and the Tsimihety, in this case, could become labor that would reduce pressure on the forests. However, in the practices of creating a monetary economy, the Malagasy people have been placed in hierarchies of labor informed by Euro-American dualisms of mind and body and humans and nature. From a Euro-American perspective, the Malagasy, who were used to moving around humid tropical forests and on slippery muddy ground with thick vegetation, were considered suitable for manual work, such as carrying things. In ecotourism, mere manual work was not sufficient but the Tsimihety guides, for example, have used different languages, social skills and environmental knowledge to get along with tourists and organise them a pleasant and intriguing experience.

In these joint ecotourism practices, people became aware of differences and inequalities. Although the Tsimihety had become aware that their ability to move was valued by the visitors, I have argued that it can be also interpreted as a statement of belonging to these particular environments and places, in other words, noting that these are Tsimihety places.

Yet, because the ability to walk has not improved the Tsimihety socioeconomic position, the Tsimihety concluded that ecotourism does not make them rich, referring to the fact that they were unable to travel like the park visitors or afford the same kinds of clothes and items as them. Some started to focus on vanilla cultivation, which could be more lucrative if market prices were decent. In addition, I have argued that shifting away from ecotourism informed of respect toward the ancestral ways that the Tsimihety find valuable and as a means of establishing authority.

As the tourists were keen to see and photograph lemurs, the Tsimihety understood that it was because of these animals that visitors came to the Marojejy National Park. The Tsimihety had been used to hunting and eating lemurs. This observation is connected to the discussion of values. Some Tsimihety have started to value lemurs in a new way but only because they

206 attract visitors. Nature relations that tend to be culturally organized mediated new potentialities of lemurs.

Finally, I have shown that ecotourism not only raises economical and developmental questions for the Tsimihety but that they are concerned with ethical and existential questions, too. As tourists can act badly and not respect the park rules, the Tsimihety have shown concerns of who would suffer the consequences if the spirits were angered by improper behavior. For the Tsimihety, to live a good life requires that people get along with different beings (see also Chapter 6). I suggest that when the Tsimihety highlighted their good relations with spirits in the Marojejy forests, they highlighted the Tsimihety presence in these places. This comprises a political statement about the Tsimihety way of life and a claim for the places the Tsimihety have cultivated and built over generations.

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8. Ritual, gifts and debts and social differentiation

“It looks busy (maresaka). This is a great funeral,” Willy said, looking around enthusiastically at the hundreds of people who had gathered in the neighboring village on an October morning for the funeral of his cousin’s deceased (olo maty)63 husband. The official call for the funeral had come two days earlier, and kin, friends and neighbors from near and far had gathered in the village after making Boky Mena contributions. A few years later, Willy told me on the phone that they had actually increased the Boky Mena contributions and now people were participating more in Boky Mena. I was puzzled: How to understand that people participated more in funeral gift giving, when they had to give more?

In Madagascar rituals were eventually about power and authority (Cole and Middleton 2001: 5). Rituals maintained and reorganised social order in which living people were expected to become the same in their ancestral tombs (Bloch 1971). Bloch (1986) has pointed out that traditional authority established itself without contestation by means of rituals. However, Metcalf (2010) and Kapferer (1997) have noted that rituals are historically changing and rituals are events for negotiations, contestations and creating new relationships that can remake social order (Metcalf 2010; Kapferer 1997). Metcalf’s (2010: 221) observations from Borneo pointed out, longhouse communities’ rituals were events in which people with diverse ethnicities and backgrounds confirmed consensus, as people were placed in the social relations according to cosmological hierarchical order. There was a cosmological hierarchy among the Tsimihety: God, either customary God Zanahary or Christian God Andriamanitra on top, then ancestors and below them people who were divided into elders and juniors. Below people there were animals and spirits, like vazimba. In addition, reaching consensus required a wise leader who was able to choose a good living place and negotiate with people (Chapter 2). A leader’s acts and practices were, of course, related with ongoing political and economic dynamics. Indeed, the Malagasy have been famed for their memorializing rituals, which they have often altered in order to retain their historical identity in the face of change (Cole 2001: 9). In this chapter I discuss how the Tsimihety modified the

63 Usually people did not talk about a funeral but that there is a dead person (misy olo maty).

208 fueneral gifts when the prices of gift got more expensive. I argue that by maintaining the ritual gifts, the Tsimihety reproduced and maintained the Tsimihety social values, such as egalitarianism, autonomy and mutual help.

Graeber (1995) has also noted that secondary burials informed people’s ambiguous relations with authority, which on the other hand enabled life and, on the other, were violent. Anthropologists have noted that states have marginalized certain people and privileged others (Trouillot 1990). In Madagascar, people have reacted to these policies by fleeing from the state or avoiding it, as I have shown in Chapter 2 (see also Scott 2010; 1998). Such historical experiences show the type of constant dynamics between customs and the state, which have to be understood as co-existing powers (Kapferer 1997: 273–5).

However, the Tsimihety created also debt relations that placed people into hierarchical positions. Anthropologists have noted that gifts bind different people into a continuous cycle through giving, receiving and obligations of reciprocity. However, gifts and debts also create hierarchies. Malinowski’s (2002 [1922]) ethnography of kula ring highlighted that “handing over of wealth is the expression of the superiority of the giver over the recipient” (Malinowski 1922).

I approach gifts and debts as related and morally binding in a dyadic way (Peebles 2010: 228–9). A person’s social distance affected the modality of exchange (Gregory 1982; Sahlins 1965). Roughly speaking, gifts are embedded in society; this highlights the origins of the gift, while commodities alienate people from the original producer (Gregory 1982). Robbins and Akin (1999:9) have noted that the role of the relations between transactors determines which kinds of exchanges are morally neutral and which are morally fraught. To assume a debt to a relative or institutional lender required different kinds of knowledge, recognition, negotiations and possibilities for temporalities than if one borrowed from kin or a fellow villager. However, recent studies have shown that the dualistic division between gifts and commodities is not very accurate because, for example, nationwide and global market crises highlight the lack of alienation between people and things in commoditized credit/debt relations (Peebles 2010: 229). Anthropologists and political economists have reminded how capitalism uses gifts for its own gain by defining value, for example, as cheap nature or

209 labor (Moore 2016) or in the processes of salvage, in which the producer does not control the conditions of production but uses conversion to capture the processes and dynamics of the learned skills and knowledge without a capitalist aim (Tsing 2015: 63–4). Bear (2015: 8) has reminded that national debt is not merely a financial and technical issue but a political and ethical one

Moral contestations show the presence of multiple values (Robbins 2004: 315-16). According to Graeber (2001: 88), ultimately politics is about the struggle to define value (see also Li 1996). I argue that by means of funeral practices, the Tsimihety place themselves into the places they have lived and cultivated, thereby pointing out that these are their places. Funeral contributions show the Tsimihety values of egalitarianism, work, and respect and care for others that differed from historical experiences with the Merina and French states, which placed people into forced labor and slavery. In the context of the intensifying presence of foreigners in environmental conservation, development practices and vanilla-buying, I argue that at funerals the Tsimihety continue to put themselves into the places they have lived and worked.

In this chapter, I first discuss Tsimihety funerals at which people were placed into a social order that was by no means ahistorical or historically invariable. I also argue that at funerals, the Tsimihety argue for their authority in the specific places where they have lived and worked and where they have built their tombs. The Tsimihety have continued the practice even though the costs of funerals, along with rice and basic consumption goods, have risen. Although the Tsimihety embrace egalitarianism and mutual care, they also create hierarchies through gifts and debts. People or companies who have money are able to give loans to people in need. However, some people, like Mama ny Rocco, used the possibility to take debt to buy more land. I show that there is cultural logic of debt that constrasts, for example, with human rights based on individualism. Finally, I show that while the Tsimihety pondered of the fine line between egoism and sociality.

8.1 Rituals and social order

Although funeral interrupted the everyday rhythm of cultivation (see Chapter 3), at funeral rituals the Tsimihety confirmed their social order.

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Angelina and I were standing on a small village pathway behind the house of the deceased under the soaring midday sun together with our daughters. Right in front of us, young men and women cooked the sauce (rô) and rice in big pots given by villagers (fokon-olona) for the funeral. Young people had spread out a plastic sheet on which they put plastic plates, on which the food was placed after it was cooked. Places under the few tall lychee trees near the house were full of people seeking escape from the hot sun while waiting for the call to come eat. Because this was her natal village, Angelina greeted every other person who passed by us. There were constantly people going in and coming out of the house where the deceased body had been wrapped in white cloths and placed in a coffin in the middle of one of the rooms.64 The family had decorated the room with flowers, and they had set a picture of the deceased on a table near their head. In the room, the closer family members (parents, siblings and clan elders) were supposed to sit nearer to the head of the deceased, while visitors and fellow villagers or neighbors who were not intimate friends sat near the feet. In addition, within the family, males were supposed to sit nearer to the head, but junior males were supposed sit closer to the feet than elderly women.

Before the funeral, the room (and the house) where the deceased one was placed was never supposed to be left without people. Family, friends and neighbors spent time in the house, talking, drinking tea or coffee together, and playing cards. If the deceased one was a devoted Christian, as in this case, people sang hymns, candles were continuously lit, and pastors from the village and nearby town could come and make a ceremony.

At the funeral, when the food was ready, the members of each town or village were called separately to eat, starting with the one located furthest away. In addition, important people such as village elders were invited to eat first. After this, the people themselves took the initiative and spread the bowls of rice and sauce around, and gathered to eat together with friends. As this was my first Tsimihety funeral, Angelina kindly guided me to sit at one of the sauce plates to eat with three other people (all men) whom I did not know. My daughter was somewhere with Willy and Angelina’s daughters, while Angelina and Willy were busy chatting with kin who had arrived from other villages. We ate quietly. Each had a full plate of rice, and rô was placed

64 I do not know who had wrapped the body in this particular case, but usually there is a gender division. For example, if the deceased is a woman, close women relatives will wrap her.

211 on the plate in the middle so that every person could take the sauce and increase the family feeling, or “eat each other’s spit” (mifamihihinana ranivy), as Willy called it. After eating, young people washed the plates.

After eating, the elders of the family of the deceased gave a kabary, a formal public speech performed, for example, at different rituals or marking a special visit, where they apologized for speaking and then thanked all the people for coming, helping and cooking, comforting and contributing. Elders reminded that it was fine that not everyone had been able to come to the funeral, because the person had died suddenly and people had not had time to prepare in advance, even though the family of the deceased had sent out invitations as soon as possible.

Before the kabary, a purple cross was laid on the coffin and people lit some candles on top of it. After the family’s speech, the representative of the village, a local teacher, responded:

“There is no need to thank because we are one. We are sad together and we hope that next time we will meet is not because of a funeral but for a wedding or another happy occasion.”

After the kabary, the funeral contributions made by different clans were read out. I do not have exact notes of the funeral contributions in this particular situation because when they were being read, I had to wash my daughter’s cloth diapers in the river. This was the first funeral I attended, and I neither understood the funeral structure nor inquired from Willy or someone else to record their understanding of it. In addition, because I only began focusing on Boky Mena practices later, in this case I did not check later the contributions from the Boky Mena of the village. As a point of comparison, however, at one child’s funeral the Boky Mena contributions were totaled 66 400 Ar, out of which there were zanakampielezana 18,000 Ar and adidy 14,200 Ar. The family of the dead child gave 37 cupfuls and one daba of rice and 69,500 Ar. In addition, people gave 507 rice cupfuls. In another occasion, in a funeral of an older woman, Boky Mena contribution was 196,000 Ar and 800 cupfuls of rice. All together the money was 439,000 Ar in that funeral.

At this particular funeral, after the ritual speeches one of the elders announced that the young people who visiting from town (meaning that they had moved to town to study or work but were now in the village) had to meet at four in the afternoon to discuss the unfinished soccer game. After the

212 announcement, the deceased person’s biography was read. The biography contained the important events, social relations and activities of his life, such as when and where he had been born, when he was baptized and that he was a devoted Catholic.

Before taking the deceased body to the cemetery, the body was carried in places that had been important for the person during his lifetime. For comparison, at another funeral, a man who loved to play and watch soccer was carried around the village soccer pitch in his coffin. According to the people present at his funeral, it was necessary to visit the place one last time in order to prevent that particular place from having any trouble with the dead person in the future.

At the funeral I attended, since the person had been active in the Catholic Church, the pastor from the town led a ceremony at the church where only “religious people” went. People gave small gifts, such as small coins, piece of cloth and tobacco, to the deceased person.

The local scouts’65 organization actively participated in organizing the funeral. Papa ny Kristin, an active member in Catholic Church, explained that the scouts were involved with religious education but they were not church representatives, like priests, for example.

The scouts had adorned the deceased body with a piece of liana, ginger leaves and flowers. According to Papa ny Kristin, the liana was the sign of scouts, which signified that they lived closely with nature and cared for it. After coming from the church, the scouts gathered in the yard in a circle around the coffin. According to Papa ny Kristin, this allowed people to see each other for the last time. The scouts walked around the coffin in the circle, and then they stopped and held each other’s hands. After this final step, the deceased was carried to the car that was supposed to drive him to Andapa, 40 kilometers away from the village. People commented that because the person had been living in his wife’s place, he was now transported to his father’s land. After a while, however, we heard news that the car had broken down just eight kilometers away from the village. The deceased did not reach his tomb on the day it was expected. At least in Willy’s family, they were not too worried about this, as they were sure that someone would come

65 For short historical notes about scouts in Madagascar, see https://www.histclo.com/youth/youth/org/sco/country/afr/mad/sco- mad.htm.

213 and repair the car. When we returned home from the funeral, Willy and Angelina advised me to go and wash myself in the river and change clothes, since the water cleans the dust related with death.

In Madagascar, death was present in people’s everyday lives. Death could occur as a surprise, due to an accident (for example, a traffic accident or drowning) or illness. People thought that often one death led to another, and one could hear stories of how several deaths had occurred in the same place (see also Graeber 1995: 260).

The division between being alive (velona) and dead (maty) was also present in the everyday lives of the people. At the village library, Papa ny Soahina and a few others working as porters in ecotourism projects were preparing green soap, known as a more environmentally friendly option for cooking than dried wood gathered from the forest. When a person passed by and did not say a word to the soap makers, Papa ny Soahina commented laughingly: “Like a dead person (olo maty).” By this he referred to the silence and not talking, which the Tsimihety regarded as very unsocial in everyday life.

The division between being dead and alive was highlighted at funerals (see also Metcalf and Huntington 1991: 2). In Madagascar, people hope that they will be buried twice, reflecting a practice familiar elsewhere in the world as well. The first death rites had a fearful quality, because as long as the body was decaying the spirit was in a miserable condition, being excluded from the worlds of both the living and the dead. As the bones became dry, the danger went away, and the famadihana (“turning the bones”) was a joyful celebration, even though it was also charged with the potential that something could anger the ancestors and spirits, resulting in misfortune, sickness and, in the worst case, death ( see also Metcalf 2010: 216; Hertz 1960 [1970]; Bloch 1982: 211–15).

However, funerals were not focused only on death. Especially the second feast was a celebration of life (Graeber 1995: 260). In Metcalf’s example of a Long Teru funeral, when preparing people put on their best clothes and the atmosphere was full of excitement, not sad or grieving at all. Funerals provided people an opportunity to meet old friends and make new ones. (Metcalf 2012: 216–17.) As I have described, even the first funeral was a happy occasion: people ate with family and friends, exchanged news and were happy to see people who lived further away.

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The first burial, which involved getting rid of the soft parts of the body, was the responsibility of the household and the intimate family. As people were expected to search and look for (mitady) their prosperous relations during their lifetime, their personal relations were highlighted during the funeral in the biography. In addition, the deceased person’s teacher colleagues, people from the Catholic Church and scouts celebrated and remembered the deceased person and comforted his family. At the same time, funerals confirmed the social order, as those that one had lived his or her intimate daily lives with were different from those that he or she was expected to end up together with in tombs (Bloch 1971). Collectivities—such as a household or clan, juniors and elders, women and men, strangers and kin, and so forth—were recognized when eating and engaging in various tasks related to the funeral. Through the ritual, social order was both produced and maintained. I was not aware of any significant conflict at the funeral I attended. I heard negotiations, whether the deceased person should be buried to the near-by cemetery or right away to the place where the main ancestral tomb lied, but these kinds of negotiations did not touch upon the funeral structure.

Ritual consensus requires cosmological understanding. Metcalf (2010: 218– 22) has highlighted that ethnically diverse and mobile longhouse communities in Borneo required ritual consensus in order to function. Different groups of people organized their death rituals in approximately similar ways, even though some had developed particularities, depending on the historical circumstances that had led people with distinct backgrounds to gather together. (Metcalf 2010: 232–3.) Looking through a totemic operator—a combinatory schema introduced by Lévi-Strauss (1967: 151; see also Friedman 2003: 4–5; Metcalf 2010: 232) that divides the cosmos into distinctive species, subspecies and body parts and then recombines them at the lower end to form specific individuals, informs of the social universe. In the Tsimihety funeral, different groups of people, such as juniors and elders, men and women, living and dead, people living far-away-places and those who lived in the same village with the deceased one, to mention few. Accoridng to Graeber (2007: 62), this kind of ritual community is also a political one. He has pointed out that a political community of equals can be formed under a transcendental image of ancestors. Indeed, at the funeral the Tsimihety highlighted the equality of people: every member of Boky Mena was supposed to give the same amount of money and rice for the funeral.

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The funeral not only revealed people’s social relations but also their relations to the land. Willy and his brothers and sisters from the same father (the sibling set) had together inherited two parcels of land from him. The siblings called the inherited land lova-be, a “great inheritance” (my translation). It was expected that the sibling set would manage the lova-be together. For example, if someone needed extra land for cultivation, this person could cultivate the land if everyone in the sibling set agreed. While the lova-be required joint efforts and management, which in the best case strengthened the love and respect of the sibling set, the lova-be also referred to people’s belonging to a certain place and the patrilineal clan, which was ultimately united in the patrilineal tomb. Through inheritance and burying people in ancestral tombs, the Tsimihety stabilized otherwise dynamic people and groups and their relations. Engel (2008: 18–19) has reminded that lova-be practices have to be understood in relation to frontier dynamics, due to which people spread around in the available land and forest.

Anthropologists have shown that an inalienable possession acts as a stabilizing force against change because its presence authenticates cosmological origins, kinship and political histories. These possessions are then the most potent force in the effort to subvert change, while at the same time they represent the corpus of change (Weiner 1992: 9–11; see also Chou 2009). The ability to keep inalienable possessions outside of exchange is a source of difference, and hence it brings high status. However, such possessions require cosmological authentication (Weiner 1992: 101–2), which in the case of the Tsimihety, like other people in Madagascar, was hasina (see Chapter 3).

The Tsimihety elders, like elders throughout Madagascar, were able mediate and navigate between ancestral powers (see Chapters 2 and 3). Good elders directed their powers toward communal prosperity. Metcalf (2020: 252) has argued that the consensus that people in rituals aimed at was one of the key elements for communal prosperity. According to Metcalf, ritual is a place for contestation but it also offers a possibility for showing off political leadership. At the teacher’s funeral, Papa ny Kirstin organized the scouts and the event at the Catholic church. Although he was not an elder, he had a prestigious position in the village because of his lucrative land and vanilla businesses, among others. Historical experiences have shown that in the right political conditions, rituals seeking ancestral order could be used for military expansion and aggression (Bloch 1989; Cole 2001: 37–8).

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The secondary burial was important to guide the spirit into the company of the ancestors and become razana. In the secondary burial (famadihana), the bones of the deceased person are exhumed, wrapped in cloths and reburied in the clan tomb (see also Bloch 1971: 145; Graeber 2007b: 183–4). This could only happen with great effort and at the expense of living kin (Ratzimbazafy 2008, 302–3). If ancestors were not taken care of, they would become disturbed spirits (Cole 2001: 138; Graeber 1999: 331). Indeed, as Willy started to plan the secondary burial for his aunt, from whom he had inherited land (see Chapter 3).

The secondary burial confirmed the relations between different groups of people, ancestors-elders and juniors, and those people who had the same ancestors and belonged to the ancestral land. As Willy started to prepare the secondary burial of his aunt, he consulted his brothers and sisters about whether they were able to organize the feast. After the siblings had agreed on this, they had informed the elders of the clan. Willy highlighted, “The feast is not for us but for the whole clan (lakoro).” I did not witness the famadihana organized by Willy’s sibling set but according to Graeber (2007b: 185), in the ceremony itself people are organized into those who live in the original ancestral land and those who have moved away (see also Bloch 1971: 150; Feeley-Harnik 1991: 266; Graeber 1995: 266).

Indeed, the Malagasy rituals around ancestors remain key sites for contemporary local and translocal struggles over power and autonomy. Through rituals, ancestors are reenergized by incorporating vazaha, such as scouts and Catholicism, at the teacher’s funeral.

Ethnographical examples from the Betsimisaraka and the Karembola have shown how people have used signs and symbols of vazaha power to constitute and regenerate the power of the ancestors, even as they used ancestors to signify and oppose the centralizing tendencies of colonial and postcolonial state regimes (Cole and Middleton 2001: 28). As I have discussed in Chapter 3 and in this chapter, the Tsimihety have used the whole range of funeral practices—including different rituals, social events and Boky Mena markings—to highlight their political authority.

Paradoxically, in order to free themselves of vazaha, the people had to become more like them. Middleton and Cole (2001: 20) have pointed out that on the 2nd of November, during the fêtes des morts celebration practiced by French Catholics, the Betsimisaraka give small gifts, such as rum and cigarettes, to their ancestors. It was specifically rum that was used by the

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French and Réunion settlers to alienate Betsimisaraka land; inebriation became iconic in colonial representations of Betsimisaraka, and it was common at the coffee plantations where the Betsimisaraka served as corvée. However, if these symbols and practices of colonialism alienated, they also empowered, as the Betsimisaraka also made money by producing rum and coffee. Middleton and Cole have pointed out that, as coffee was historically lucrative, the Betsimisaraka were able to emancipate themselves from the need to work for vazaha. I have shown in Chapter 7 that some Tsimihety were ready to abandon steady monetary income in ecotourism if they felt that certain practices did not support their values and authority.

8.2 Life is becoming more expensive

“Life is becoming more expensive (lafo),” Willy pointed out in April 2013 when some people with bad harvests were worried about how much they ate and how they could get some rice. The price of rice rose constantly, and people like Mama ny Nadia, who did not have possibilities to cultivate her field because of the four children that she took care of by herself, lived day to day. She worked irregularly in other people’s fields in order to get daily pay, but buying rice became more and more difficult.

According to economic theory, life becomes more expensive because of inflation, which is a general increase in prices and a fall in the purchasing value of money (Oxford Dictionary 2018). The price of money is less when there is more money available (Wicksell et al. 1936). According to the World Bank, inflation in Madagascar continued to rise through 2017 because of higher food prices, such as more expensive gas, utilities and housing. In particular, the price of rice was affected by harvest failures, for example, due to weather conditions, a severe drought in the central and northern regions of the country where nearly 80 percent of Madagascar’s rice is grown, and Cyclone Enawo (Category 4), which resulted in flooding in the north and northeast in March 2017. In addition, Madagascar imports part of its domestic rice consumption. Madagascar has received food aid (for example, 60,000 tons of rice from Thailand). From the point of view of transnational organizations, Madagascar’s central government has neglected the farmers’ land tenure and infrastructure, and there is a problem of national capacity to ensure adequate nutrition for the poorer segments of the population. (World Bank Group 2018: 9–10; The Economist 2017.) This can be read politically,

218 as in Chapter 3 I have shown that transnational monetary institutions have encouraged large-scale land leases as a solution for improving agricultural infrastructure.

In 2016–2018, vanilla—one of the main export products of Madagascar, in addition to cloves, nickel, gold and knit sweaters—was very expensive (OECD 2018, see p. 110-1 this thesis). The significantly higher prices of vanilla boosted export earnings in 2017, which in turn allowed the Madagascar Central Bank to accumulate more foreign exchange reserves than expected (World Bank 2018: 7).

The Tsimihety remarked that life was expensive, as the prices of regular consumer goods, such as rice, tomatoes, salt, cooking oil and petrol, rose. People were very aware of how much rice cost if one bought it from the market (tsena). For example, in the fall of 2012, villagers paid 200–250 Ar/cupful. However, less than a year later, people noted that the market price of the rice was 350–400 Ar/cupful. There was a 75–200% increase in the market price (see also World Bank Report 2018: 9). The comparative ethnography among the Lauje in Southern Sulawesi has revealed that the ratio between the price of cacao and the price of rice became crucial in determining whether some farmers could survive. In Sulawesi, people had planted cacao trees, and planters were given long-term user rights to land that used to be in communal use. During the ten years between 1998 and 2009, inequalities in the highlands had increased: some highlanders did not have access to land at all. At the same time, fewer people grew enough rice for subsistence. (Li 2013: 120.)

In northeastern Madagascar, as there was no more forest to be cleared for fields, especially people whose harvests had failed on the hillsides and who did not have clan relations that enabled, for example, the use of more productive land or joint rice storage, were in trouble (see also Chapter 3). Those who had money and were able to give loans transformed their hillsides into vanilla fields. However, as life became more expensive, funerals also cost more.

8.3 Increasing gifts and debts: solidarity and inequality

When I called Willy in 2019 to ask how the family was doing, he mentioned that the villagers had decided to increase Boky Mena contributions. He explained:

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In 2013, we [Willy and Angelina’s household] had to contribute to Boky Mena 200 Ar and one cupful of rice. In the year 2015, we [referring to different clans in the village] decided that the Boky Mena contribution would be 4,000 Ar nd half a daba of rice per member. This is paid once a year in order to avoid people having to pay between the hunger season [in April] and the vanilla market. In 2018 we changed it to 8,000 ariary and a half daba for cooks [the young adults who usually cook at the funeral] but 10,000 ariary and a half daba of rice for those who are not cooks. Life has become more expensive; that is why we give to the sad family.

2018 10,000 Ar and a half daba given once a year 2015 4,000 Ar and a half daba given once a year 2013 200 Ar and one cupful of rice for each funeral Table 5: Boky Mena contributions in 2013–2018

In 2015, different clans had taken the initiative to increase the Boky Mena contributions, because living expenses—and, at the same time, funeral expenses—had become more expensive. The clans in the village had regulated the timing of the Boky Mena contributions so that people did not have to give when their rice harvests were not ready or they had not received money from their vanilla. According to Willy, “the change was done in order to facilitate people to participate and not to lose time on the funeral day either, since it was important to help the sad family and prevent them from becoming indebted.” The logic was that death confronted everyone, and that is why everyone should participate in its expenses. In 2013, people had been worried why there were so many people who did not contribute to Boky Mena. According to Willy, the change of the timing for Boky Mena contributions was welcomed and people were now more willing to participate in Boky Mena practices. Negotiations over Boky Mena contributions is village and clan politics and shows how people overcome and live with multiple values.

Among the Tsimihety, funeral contributions were framed as acts related to the ancestral ways and reciprocal exchange, as I have shown in Chapter 3. I argue that by this kind of framing the Tsimihety highlight their autonomy and relations to clan places and lands (see also Narotzky and Besner 2014: s4). Maintaining the ancestral order required proper funerals, which placed individuals and groups in relation to different people and land. Through these exchanges, the Tsimihety have been bound together into a moral

220 community expecting the ancestral ways to be followed, such as cultivating rice fields (Chapter 3), participating in and organizing rituals (Chapter 8), and practicing everyday sociability through commensality, visiting and observing taboos (Chapter 6), to mention a few.

According to Willy, funerals had been problematic for some people when they had neither rice nor money. These people tended to end up in debt relations, as the moral obligation to contribute for funerals was binding and contributions were carefully marked as Boky Mena.

At the same time, as the Tsimihety increased the amount of funeral gifts, they also gave loans and assumed debts. In northeastern Madagascar, I became familiar with two kinds of debt (trosa): kontra da vanio (vanilla contract) and kontra da vary (rice contract). People confronted with a sudden need for money, such as in the case of death, illness or a bad harvest, had to ask for a loan. Examples were when people did not have enough land to produce rice or they were confronted with another difficulty, such as sickness, and they had to cover hospital expenses; someone stole their vanilla harvest; the rice harvests on their hillsides failed because of a lack of rain (as in 2013); or some other misfortune befell them, such as a relative being imprisoned.

Loans were not only taken because of misfortune but also for future investments. For example, Mama ny Rocco took a loan because she wanted to buy some land when a suitable plot became available before the vanilla was sold. The lender was a man who “was not her relative, but they knew each well because they had been living in the same village all their lives”. When Mama ny Rocco got her vanilla harvest, she paid the loan back publicly in the state vanilla market (Chapter 4).

These debts were paid back in either rice or vanilla, depending on the agreement. For example, if one borrowed 3,000 Ar, one had to pay back one kilogram of green (undried) vanilla at harvest time. In 2012, the price of green/kg was 5,000 Ar, yielding the creditor a profit of 2,000 Ar.

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Person A takes a loan of 3,000 Ar from Person B and they agree that Person B gives one kg of green vanilla to Person A at the time of the vanilla markets Person A pays back one kg of vanilla to Person B in June/July when green vanilla price is 5,000 Ar/kg Person B gets 2000 ariary extra Table 6: Example of a vanilla debt

To provide an example: a person borrows 90,000 Ar and promises to pay back 30 kg of vanilla during the vanilla market. If the price of the green vanilla is 5,000 Ar/kg, the lender gets 150,000 Ar by selling the vanilla, making a profit of 60,000 Ar. If the lender dried vanilla himself, he could get fivefold the price. One more example follows, but with of rice debt: if someone lends 5,000 Ar to a sad person (olo malahelo), as people tended to describe the people taking loans, that person has to pay back one daba of rice (about 30 cupfuls). If one cupful is 350 Ar, he will get 10,500 Ar; thus, the borrower can double his money.

Generally it was thought that the lender and borrower should have a respectful and caring relationship (trust = fahamarinanana). The Tsimihety used to make a small paper about their debt, in order to mark what both of them agreed and that everything was clear (mazava). The paper should state the date when the debt was taken, the names of the lender and borrower, the amount of debt and the amount of the return, and the date when the debt is supposed to be paid.

However, people who gave loans noted that there is usually a problem when collecting. Ideally, the debt should be returned during the vanilla market. Indeed, Mama ny Rocco’s and her debtor’s contract was read aloud at the vanilla market, and Mama ny Rocco handed over the amount of vanilla stated in the contract. This was an ideal example of credit-debt relations: both parties performed their roles with a clear agreement.

A rice debt was usually taken in March and April when people were waiting for their next rice harvests. Sarina, a five-year-old girl living next to the river, on the other side of the village road by Willy and Angelina’s house, used to come with a small leather bag and Angelina would pour five or six cups of rice into it. Sometimes Sarina gave money for the rice, but sometimes she did not. As Papa ny Sarina was not able to pay his rice debt back in rice, Willy and Papa ny Sarina made a deal that he would work in Willy’s rice fields and they would halve (misasaka) the harvest. This way the person

222 taking the loan would not lose his land permanently, as could happen with a bank if his repayment failed, but only for a certain period (Gregory 1982: 228).

Another case involved a woman who did not pay her 20 kg of vanilla to a man who had lent her money with a 20,000 Ar/kg contract. When the man went to ask for his share of her vanilla, the woman had replied that she did not have any. The man was angry and disappointed, and he said that he would get her house yard and the woman agreed. They went to the fokontany president and made a paper about this agreement. People shared that consequences from breaking contracts can be severe, and one can even be put in jail.

Gregory (1982: 231) has shown that it is important to understand what the money lender and borrower can do. While the money lender postponed his possibilities for using that money, the borrower could use the money right away. Usually the creditor was interested in getting his or her money back, while the debtor tried to pay it back as slowly as possible. According to the Tsimihety, if one borrowed from a relative or from a fellow-villager, it was more secure and one could negotiate if needed. Some creditors reported that it would be really difficult to put a relative in a hard situation, for example, to make them lose their house or land. Some reported, however, that they would take the matter to the village president. In addition, I knew of cases where people continuously gave small amounts of money to their relatives and the relatives were always unable to pay it back. It seemed that their credit-debt relationship had become a kind of patron-client relationship, meaning that the person who was continuously giving was superior to the one who was receiving.

Despite the mutual reciprocity of such practices, gifts and loans created types of social differentiation and hierarchies. For example, a hierarchy was established if the debt was not repaid. The failure to make a return could end a relationship between equals, although symmetrical reciprocity, in which people exchanged directly customary equivalents, also allowed for ending the debt the relationship at the time of settling (Sahlins 1972: 133, 222–3.) Indeed, a gift occurs when relations of exchange threaten to break down into hierarchy.

The Tsimihety preferred to borrow from their relatives, rather than, for example, the microcredit bank OTIV (Ombona Tahiry Ifambisambonara Vola). A young cultivator explained to me that kinsmen will show

223 consideration for a cultivator whose harvest is destroyed in a bad year. The bank does not help its debtors to manage such risks. One of the villagers had taken a loan from the OTIV, but when he failed to pay it back (for reasons that remained unknown to me), the microcredit bank had obtained the land where his house was (for comparative notions from India of a failed money- lending project by the World Bank, see Gregory 1982: 219–20). The lesson learned by the people is that one does not negotiate with banks or other state or foreign institutions. This is the violent side of the market: the imprecise, informal and community-building indebtedness of “human economies” is only replaced by mathematically precise, firmly enforced debts through the introduction of violence, usually state-sponsored violence through some form of military or police (Graeber 2011: 14).

Typically, creditors had long-term and stable positions in the villages where they lived and worked. In one of the neighboring villages, Papa ny Kirstin, a well-known and respected person, was a local English teacher, a business man, an important member of the local Catholic church, and a village representative and cooperator in development projects. He had moved to the village to follow his wife, who had a wealthy property there. This kind of man was called a jaloko (“toy boy”), who had not been able to gain access to land and build his own house but instead lived at his wife’s place. Since he was found to be a responsible man who took care of his communal tasks, he could work as a representative of the village (see similar observations in Gregory 1982, 233–4).

8.4 A company building relations

A German vanilla-buying company, operating among the vanilla producers in rural northeastern Madagascar, used gifts and debt to create a relationship with vanilla cultivators. In the company system in 2013, borrowers were asked to pay the rice debt usually taken in April with vanilla that matured in June. By means of this practice, the company wanted to make sure that people would sell their vanilla to them. In addition, the company paid 1,000 Ar/kg more for vanilla than market price, and it gave benefits such as school supplies to children, established tree nurseries in the villages where their cultivators worked, and promised to pay their members’ visits to the communal hospital. The company’s logic was the following: the company gave rice to the cultivators with the expectation that they were supposed to

224 give their vanilla back to the company. In this way, the company did not ignore the existing social relations and value systems.

Despite the clear benefits, however, the biggest vanilla producer in the village did not sell his green vanilla to the company. His explanation was that he did not like that the company had promised to help with rice during the period of famine but, in the end, according to his calculations, the company made a profit. He had calculated that the rice the company had loaned as debt was more expensive than in the market (tsena) (400 Ar/cupful, compared to 350 Ar/cup in the market). Yet, these actions were also political. The person did not belong to the clan whose member the company had chosen as a representative. I would argue that the cultivator’s choice to sell his vanilla elsewhere was a protest against the actions of the company that he found suspicious, but it also reflected a political statement that he did not respect the representative, who had a reputation of using the company’s money for his own ends. It was whispered that the motorbike the representative drove had been bought with company money, which should have been used for collective ends. It is possible that these rumors were accurate, because when I visited the villages again in 2016, the company had replaced the representative.

Some people gained from the company’s presence. Papa ny Kirstin’s position as the company representative also made it possible for him to gain additional personal profit. The company gave some money to him before the actual vanilla market, so that he could give some loans to vanilla cultivators if they were in need of money. However, since Papa ny Kirstin was not only a company representative but his family also gave loans, he used the money received from the company to advance his own debt networks. Since the company did not require any interest but only wanted that the person taking the debt would sell their vanilla to the company, Papa ny Kirstin ollected the interest himself. Gift relations are not an alternative to the “harsh logic of the market” (Rajak 2011, 238), but the two are complementary. The power and authority derived from gift-giving, on one hand, and capitalist profit and value, on the other, work together.

Although the company had to navigate Tsimihety social relations and value systems, they also used the Malagasy army’s support to advance their aims, namely, to buy vanilla. Willy told me a story on the phone in 2018. According to him, the company representatives had come to one of the

225 villages to collect their debts. Most of the people had paid their debts, but a few had not. When the company representatives went to those people who did not pay, they said that they did not have money. The company had ended the collaboration with the villagers, causing social pressures because those villagers who had paid their debts wanted to continue the collaboration. Finally, a wealthy man from the village had promised to pay the debts but he wanted to get the names of those who did not pay. He had called some army officers to support him, and he visited these people who had not paid. According to the narrative, incidents of violence against these people were related to business.

8.5 Moral concerns and contested values

One of the problems for the German vanilla-buying company was the Tsimihety debt interest. The company’s European representative estimated that it was sheer robbery that the borrower had to pay interest, in some cases as much a fivefold. However, in Euro-American logics inherited, for example, from World Bank practices, lending with competitive interest has been found as progressive and a means of alleviating poverty: financing is usually offered as a solution for the development of productive forces while village money-lending is seen as bad, because of the high interest that allows the usurer to accumulate assets (Gregory 1997: 217). As I have already pointed out, money and debts are not only a financial and technical issue but a political and ethical one (Bear 2015: 8).

According to an international labor organization, the debt deals were known to be generally disadvantageous for farmers, particularly if vanilla prices rose. In addition, investigative journalists have pointed out that some farmers have ransomed their children as a debt payment. Problems arise when these children are not treated well and for example girls are forced to have abortions and these abortions are performed under dangerous conditions. Another problem is that people can get “locked” into the debt system, meaning that they are never able to pay their debts. (Hansen et al. 2016; Guardian 2018.) These arguments approach the topic as a human rights issue, highlighting the equal value of every person. However, as Kopytoff and Miers (1977: 17) have pointed out, in many African societies people primarily belong to their clans or ancestries, and belonging entails both rights and obligations. Not only social identity but also physical

226 survival are built upon one’s ability to draw on the commitments inherent in long-term relationships of interdependence. (see also Brown 2004 in northeastern Madagascar.)

However, the Tsimihety emphasized household and clan autonomy, their ability to move, work and make decisions (see Wilson 1992; Chapters 2 and 3). Although the decision to give one’s child to a debtor depended on socioeconomic inequalities and political economic structures and relations, such as poverty, the solutions that people end up with are socially built and culturally informed. The whole Malagasy nation is swapping their national debt in return for envrironmental conservation (Moye and Paddack 2003). These aspects require further research, which I am not able to provide here with my material.

Finally, discourses on morality were constantly present in exchange practices and credit/debt and gift relations. Sodikoff’s (2008: 451) information from Mananara-Nord has told that the villagers used the term “greediness” (ti-hina˜na), which means “to be hungry,” for those people who had acquired extra cash from a lucrative clove or vanilla harvest. People with wealth tended to deny themselves comforts by hiding their wealth. There were suspicions, however, and neighbors whispered behind their backs. In other cases, people flaunted their wealth (mitera manambola, literally “to show one has money”) in public acts of excessive generosity, such as buying food and drink for large crowds at village celebrations. Among the Tsimihety, there was always suspicion related with lavish wealth. For example, the biggest vanilla producers in the village were suspected of stealing people’s vanilla, and if people spent too long time in the forest alone in their vanilla fields, people were not sure whether they really worked there.

Robbins (2004: 315–16) has pointed out that moral concerns are raised in situations where people become aware of different values or possibilities. The Tsimihety’s lives were organized between two values: egoism (fitiavantena), which that allowed one to gain wealth without worrying or concerning their relatives or ancestral relations, and sociality or solidarity (firesankina), which emphasized one’s caring for others, as well as being cared for, too. Despite intensified land use, changing climatic conditions and concentrated world wealth, the Tsimihety have continued to observe and discuss these values. The Tsimihety have recognized the shifting reality in less productive rice harvests, more expensive consumer products and

227 changes in space, as the Marojejy National Park took possession of the available land and forest. Whether to organize lives according to economic logic and markets or through funerals, gifts and debts involves political questions, such as what kind of life is made and maintained and for whom? Importantly, Li (2013) has reminded that we have to be aware of what kinds of situations people make decisions about and what the conditions are that people can choose. Until so far, the Tsimihety have continued to embrace egalitarianism, autonomy and social relations, all aspects that are visible in funerals.

On a national level, Madagascar’s presidents have been changing during the past years. On one level, the power competition has been between those who support the values embraced by international developers, environmental conservation actors and the financial agents, such as democratic governance, markets, the transparency and development of national solidarity through infrastructure, agriculture, health, the economy and the environment and those who emphasise Malagasy sovereignty and political leadership. Questions about what kind of life will be possible and for whom, as well as whether life in Madagascar will be determined by foreigners or by the Malagasy themselves, definitely continues to be discussed, negotiated and contested.

8.6 Conclusions

In this chapter, I have highlighted how the Tsimihety construct their social worlds and order through funeral rituals. I have shown that through funeral rituals, different people are organized in groups and placed in their respective positions, such as juniors and elders or household and clan, according to the cosmologically perceived social order. While one’s individual relations and preferences are marked in the first funeral ritual, in the secondary burial ancestral authority and relations with the clan and its land are constructed and maintained. Funeral rituals not only mark Tsimihety values, such as egalitarianism and mutual care, but also their political authority. However, I have also noted that rituals are historically changing and have to be analyzed in relation to political, economic and social contexts and situations. When the Tsimihety noted that life had become more expensive, they had modified the funeral contributions so they were able to continue the custom. As there was no more land to be cleared for fields and not everyone had enough land to produce their subsistence,

228 starker social differences had started to emerge, as, for example, the price of rice had become higher.

Despite emphasizing Tsimihety values, people were willing to collaborate with foreign organizations and development programs. The German vanilla- buying company formed relations with the Tsimihety through debts. Although in general people found relations with the company to be respectful and lucrative, some people did not like the company’s ways of binding people through debts. As I have noted, relations with the company were connected with village political relations, informing about important values of the Tsimihety. Some people used the company’s debt system for their own ends, like Papa ny Kirsten, who was not living on his ancestral land and who received money from the company in order to buy vanilla but used it to expand his own debt relations.

Among the Tsimihety, those who had access to money had a possibility to give loans or buy more land. In a situation where there was no more land to be developed, people with money were able to buy or rent from those who had encountered some misfortune. However, loans could be taken and paid in rice and vanilla, too; people whose ancestors had been successful in occupying large areas of cultivable land and who were able to organize their work in such a way that they got good rice harvests had advantages.

Finally, I have highlighted that loans and money, although embraced by transnational money-lending organizations, are not only financial or technological solutions but require ethical and political attention.

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9. Conclusions

In this research, I have asked how the Tsimihety perceive and respond to the intensifying environmental conservation efforts taking place in the valleys and mountains that they have settled and modified into “good places” on the margins of different states. By focusing on the intersection of different livelihoods, subsistence rice cultivation supporting Tsimihety ancestral order, international environmental conservation efforts emphasizing scientific laws, and vanilla cultivation and ecotourism underpinning individual efforts, I have argued that as a place-oriented people the Tsimihety respond to transnational models and schemes by emphasizing their relations to places they have made.

Through an ethnography of these issues, I have sought to understand how globally circulating social forms, such as vanilla cultivation, and environmental conservation schemes and forms of knowledge, such as biodiversity of species, have affected Tsimihety life, and the ways in which they have been incorporated in the reproductive and place-making practices of the Tsimihety themselves. The Tsimihety are highly mobile people who have actively transformed their environment and made claims to it by cultivating land, building houses and establishing tombs (Chapter 3), maintaining good social relations with different beings living in the same environments (Chapter 6), and burying their ancestors in ancestral places (Chapters 3 and 8).

Boky Mena is the Tsimihety documentation of Tsimihety land relations and values. Established by Ratsiraka’s socialist state, which emphasized the role of peasants in Malagasy state-building, the Tsimihety have used Boky Mena for documenting their funeral gifts. The book is also a Tsimihety documentation of their land relations. I would argue that, as the state tends to document people and their property, the Tsimihety have transformed Boky Mena into a form of documentation that responds to their values of egalitarianism, autonomy and exchange relations. I interpret Boky Mena also as a political argument, by means of which the Tsimihety notify about the places they live, the lands they use and the values they cherish.

The Tsimihety have established intimate relations with foreign beings, such as vanilla, by cultural means (nurturing) but also by adopting new

230 knowledge and technologies. Although vanilla places the Tsimihety in relation to international markets through changing producer prices, it also attaches people to their land, as vanilla is mainly cultivated in former swiddens. The Tsimihety tended to use the money received from vanilla according to ancestral ways, building houses or making ancestral rituals, while development actors expected people to make investments, like buying a pig that could reproduce, making more profit or consumption possible. I have highlighted that as there is no more forest to be cleared for fields, money has become the main means of accumulating land and establishing hierarchies among the Tsimihety (Chapter 8). I have argued that by these practices, the Tsimihety do not subject themselves to territorialization driven by conservation, state-building and commercial agriculture; each of these external forces translates into relationships that the Tsimihety identify as part of the social order.

Tsimihety place-making

In the first chapter, I discussed places and Tsimihety place-making practices in terms of what the Tsimihety define as a good place (tsara banja). I have used political ecology’s approach, which recognizes that places are relational in the sense that dynamics in a certain place occur in relation to other places that do not necessarily fall into categorizations of global, regional, national or local. Conceptualizations or experiences of what and where is a Tsimihety place are organized in relation to different states in Madagascar, ethnical relations produced by imperial order, historical processes of capitalism and development, subsistence cultivation and the making of ancestral lands, and relations with European and North American tourists mediated by nature relations. These various elements intersect in Tsimihety places. Tsimihety place-making and understandings of good places in forested areas of inland northeastern Madagascar are related with historical experiences with violent and dominating Merina and French states in the 19th and 20th centuries. I have combined the political ecology approach with anthropological discussions on place-making, enabling inquiry into what kinds of places people find to be good. Following Thomas (1997), Fox (2006) and Stasch (2013), I have argued that the Tsimihety are place- oriented people, meaning that people orient to their world and make their social order through spatial formations, such as villages, fields, forests and tombs. I have used the concept of poetic density to describe how places tend

231 to gather multiple dynamics and processes of various scales, making places (such as villages) that people have found appealing (Chapter 2).

A good place is defined by how the Tsimihety value a good life: Manantenina is a good place because of two confluent rivers, good harvests, prosperous social relations and a good leader able to negotiate with different people and spirits. The place allows for making and maintaining of ancestral lands, a territory defined by ancestral tombs gathering life force, hasina. A Tsimihety good place is structured by hierarchical ancestral order, highlighting ancestors above living humans and elders staying “above” the younger generations. Places also define what kinds of people live there: modern people live in villages while traditional people live in the forest. However, these categorizations can be conflicting. Although a busy village marked a possibility for a successful modern life and development, one had to be able to navigate a daily social texture that people did not find easy. In the forest, it was believed that one could live a peaceful and healthy life.

However, the Tsimihety places are not stable. They tend to change according to historical and life processes. I have argued that the Tsimihety were aware that places were not stable but changed constantly, for example, according to the seasons. They also discussed that the ecology of the places could no longer support people living there. Along with life, a place had become Manantenina, “a place with tenina plants.” Tenina (imperata cylindrica) plants tended to appear in the swidden fallows when people had cultivated the place intensively. As Manantenina has started to show signs of decaying, people have started to move to other villages or near the forest. This was nothing new for the Tsimihety, who as swidden cultivators were used to cultivating different fields in different places. Some people, like Willy, had started to prepare for moving years earlier by negotiating the purchase of a piece of land.

In Chapter 3, I focused more specifically on ancestral customs and practices, such as rice cultivation. Rice cultivation is the main means of subsistence production and has created the general texture of Tsimihety everyday life. Different temporalities—such as seasons, growing periods, cultivation tasks, fruiting periods and harvests—were related with people’s work; on the other hand, they were organized according to their work tasks, showing that people not only objectified time by observing different signs and processes but that their time-telling operated in relation to experiences that were

232 meaningful in their cultural context. Moreover, I have pointed out that the rice cultivation temporalities were organized according to different value systems: one defined by ancestral ways, emphasizing joint work in rice fields, and the French system, emphasizing productivity and the quantity of harvests.

In addition to temporalities, work (asa)—ranging from caring for children to labor in the rice fields or in ecotourism practices—made and maintained social and land relations. Organizing collective work in rice fields perpetuated people’s social relations with their relatives, neighbors and friends and showed their morality and engagement with ancestral customs. Households were expected to take care of their subsistence practices, and different genders took care of different tasks: men were responsible for hard work (asa mavesatra), while women did the soft work (asa malemy). These divisions described the qualities of the materials or things that people worked with. The Tsimihety men worked with soil, which required physical strength, and they were also responsible for making money, which was usually possible by working for someone else, reminding of harsh histories of slavery. Women, on the other hand, were good at pollinating vanilla flowers or caring for children needing a sensitive touch. Different kinds of work and metaphors of hard and soft were important for making ancestral lands, an ideal totalization of people’s lives during which they should form relations with strangers, have more children, cultivate land and build houses, and finally return to their patrilineal tomb. The bones that younger generations buried in the ancestral tomb were the ultimate hardening of one’s ancestors. In this moral community, ancestral powers blessed people to have prosperous lives. However, ancestors could also be demanding, signaling the ambivalent relations the Tsimihety had with their ancestors and, more generally, with power. Following Graeber (2007), I have argued that the Tsimihety also approached state power with this ambivalent logic (Chapter 4).

Tsimihety land use and ownership differ from the viewpoints of transnational funding organizations such as the World Bank and the Malagasy state, which have defined Madagascar’s land as a resource. Through the land law reform of 2005, the Malagasy state encouraged people to privatize their lands. However, considering the multiple social relations related with land and the ambivalent relations with the Malagasy state, most Tsimihety have not registered their holdings.

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I have argued that the Tsimihety actually claim their presence in the places of rural northeastern Madagascar through Boky Mena. Boky Mena was a Malagasy socialist state initiative in the 1970s, which comprised the state leader’s Commander Ratsiraka’s visions and speeches. Ratsiraka’s vision was to build a modern country without imperial constraints or commands, in which the rural people would have a significant position. Due to political and economic failures, the Malagasy state abandoned Boky Mena, but the Tsimihety have continued to maintain it. Among the Tsimihety, Boky Mena marks people’s egalitarianism and mutual care, as adult villagers are expected to contribute a set amount of money and rice to a fellow villager’s funeral. Other forms of contributions—such as zanakampielezana, made by those who were born in the village where a funeral was but lived somewhere else—traced people’s relations to their clan and land. Boky Mena is a documentation of Tsimihety society and their land relations. It is also a political document with which the Tsimihety claim their presence in places they have built, cultivated and lived.

Hierarchies of knowledge

In addition to place-making practices, I have focused on the knowledge involved in the making of the Marojejy National Park. Joining discussions of political ecology has allowed recognition of power relations in knowledge production and relations between places of collecting data and analyzing and human ecologists’ and anthropologists’ approaches pointing out how people relate, categorize and work with different plants, animals and materials, such as land or rocks.

In the joint efforts of ecotourism, the tourism sector taught the Tsimihety guides that vanilla comes from Mexico. This kind of knowledge was based on the universal understanding of nature working with its own laws and consisting of species. For the Tsimihety, however, the vanilla that they produced came from Madagascar, from their plots and because of their work through the year (Chapter 4). I have pointed out that, even though natural scientific knowledge presents itself as separated from society, scientific debates are culturally and socially informed.

The scientific nature used for the creation of the Marojejy National Park was based on the 19th-century Humboldtian understanding of nature, in which

234 one could find global forms, such as climate zones, in particular places. However, scientific debates cannot be separated from what is going on in the world and in different societies. Linnaeus worked intensively with botany in order to support national economies and Morren searched for a method of vanilla pollination that could support imperial economic aims (Chapter 4). Moreover, Darwin’s evolutionary theory generated a scientific debate about Madagascar and whether its lemurs had fought for their place or they had found refuge on the island, highlighting the social debate about the survival of the fittest (Chapter 5).

With a closer look at the classifications of lemurs, in Chapter 5 I have highlighted how the division between folk and scientific knowledge has been created from the 17th century to the 20th century by the scientific practices of naming and classifying. As I highlighted in relation to vanilla, during the 18th century European people started to separate from nature but not from God. The classification of lemurs reveals how in the late 18th century, Linnaeus used folk classifications in his systematic study of nature: humans and lemurs were defined as belonging to the same order of primates. A few years later, Blumenbach separated lemurs and humans into different orders because of the physical aspects of their hands. The idea of human privilege started to emerge. By the 20th century, the lemur classification proliferated because of new technologies enabling DNA studies, which related with fragmented relations and disappearing wholes of modern European societies.

Scientific classifications have been used for classifying people, too. These hierarchical understandings could be found in the imperial policies of the French, who reduced different people in Madagascar to the category of the uncivilized, underlining their closeness to nature and animality. Ethnocentrically, the French imperial government found swidden cultivators to be irrational people without proper technologies, education or other resources. However, swidden cultivation makes sense in these particular environments, kinds of work and social relations (Chapter 3).

With the focus on situated knowledge, paying attention to social relations and their dynamics and histories in a particular situation, I have highlighted that nature is constructed through the aforementioned dynamics, and it also becomes valued in those situations (Chapter 4). Situated knowledge

235 challenges hegemonic narratives of vanilla as a species originating from Mexico or capitalism creating wealth.

In Chapter 5, I explored how modern Euro-American scientific knowledge production practices have had an influence, along with political and economic restructuring processes, in the creation of Madagascar as a hotspot of environmental conservation. Lists and calculations of species and their rarity have been used in politics to support environmental conservation efforts. They have also been used for attracting visitors for the national park.

Political ecologists and anthropologists have noted the ever intensifying relationship between capitalism, markets and environmental conservation, which does not bring wealth for all but creates inequalities and exclusions. By exploring the environmental history of the Marojejy National Park, I have emphasized that environmental conservation efforts cannot be separated from political and economic processes. The indebted Malagasy state has been subjected to structural adjustment programs, resulting in NEAPs aimed at making Madagascar a green island. In these NEAPs, nature has mainly been defined as a resource. In order to make the Marojejy National Park economically sustainable, the Malagasy state, together with the WWF, introduced ecotourism efforts to the Malagasy, whose knowledge could be used for political and economic ends. Despite these political and economic questions, people’s relations with nature have affected how the Marojejy National Park was built. I have concluded that environmental conservation efforts have resulted in ironic situations that inform of new possibilities or new relations.

As the Tsimihety have lived in the environment of the Marojejy National Park for generations, they were puzzled about what all the researchers and tourists were doing there. The Tsimihety do not differentiate between humans and nature, as they regard certain animals and plants as kin. By emphasizing the structuralist way of categorizing animals, I have explored some central ways in which the Tsimihety have related to their kin, through substances, commensality and visiting, to mention a few; strangers are those with whom one does not eat, for example, or with whom one lives in the same spaces. For the Tsimihety, humanity is not self-evident but requires constant moral acts of caring and relating. However, the Tsimihety use their sense of humanity and human bodies as a reference point: pigs eat the same food as humans, so pig’s excrement cannot go in the river, while that of a

236 cow that eats grass can. Taboos and jokes maintain boundaries between humans and animals and kin and strangers. The Tsimihety relations with nature have highlighted that ecotourism practices do not merely involve a question of earning income, as the Tsimihety are also concerned with ethical ways of how to be and live with different beings. (Chapter 6.)

Political economic schemes, work and value

Lastly, I focused on large-scale, global political and economic schemes and models that seek to organize Madagascar according to its natural resources, such as land availability and productivity, the quantity of vanilla production, and biodiversity. I have pointed out that these schemes tend to simplify Madagascar, its environments and the people who actually live in these places into technical questions that can be solved by improving infrastructure, technology and education. By classifying Malagasy cultivators as smallholders, their land use and farming practices have been recognized by transnational development and funding organizations. As recent governing structures have been organized more and more to facilitate markets, developmental schemes have expected the Malagasy to become individual entrepreneurs. The Tsimihety work in rice fields challenges the schemes’ rationality, however, as Tsimihety land cannot be separated from one’s social and kin relations. By clearing forest for fields and cultivating land, the Tsimihety have marked their presence in the landscape. As they have continued to live in the same place and they have built houses, had children and established tombs, they have become more settled (Chapters 2 and 3). Work was not an economic matter, but it showed people’s moral orientations.

I have used the concept of value, something that people find valuable, desirable or meaningful, in order to determine how Tsimihety live with different value systems: the customary type emphasizing egalitarianism, autonomy and solidarity toward one’s kin and fellow villagers, and vanilla cultivation and ecotourism requiring individual efforts and dependence on monetary markets. These different values can be mutually contributing or in contradiction. For example, if people used the money received from vanilla or ecotourism for longer-term socially reproductive practices and things, such as building houses or organizing rituals, they supported ancestral ways. However, as there was not forest and new land to be cleared, those who had access to money were able to buy or rent land from people who were

237 confronted with misfortune, such as sickness. On the other hand, working alone in one’s vanilla fields increased suspicions toward one’s kin and fellow villagers.

In the joint efforts of environmental conservation, the Tsimihety (and tourists) became aware of differences. On the other hand, the Tsimihety themselves concluded that “ecotourism does not make us rich.” The Tsimihety realized that although the salary received from ecotourism was decent compared to what one could earn by working in someone’s rice field, some regarded that it was better to concentrate on vanilla cultivation. Ecotourism required spending a lot of time in the forest, and guides and cooks were not necessarily able to work in their rice fields, creating concerns for some parents that young people did not respect ancestral customs. Moreover, tourists could be demanding, reminding guides of colonial experiences of the French giving orders. In these processes, the Tsimihety have become very aware that different projects come and go but the Malagasy state remains; in this sense, the Tsimihety have learned that they should develop long-term relations with the Malagasy state. Moreover, the Tsimihety also became aware of socioeconomic differences between them and foreign visitors. The Tsimihety were sure that someone gained; they just did not know how. Ecotourism was not only an economic question for the Tsimihety, as there were ethical questions involved: for example, how to live well with the spirits in the same environments. (Chapter 7.)

On the other hand, the Tsimihety became aware of new potentialities, such as lemurs as objects of consumption or the Tsimihety ability to walk easily in the terrain of the Marojejy National Park. In European logic, the Tsimihety ability to walk barefoot translated into the notion of a noble savage who lived happily in forests without modern technology or infrastructure. As place-oriented people, the Tsimihety used their ability to walk to underline that they knew how to move in these environments because they had lived there, and that these were Tsimihety places.

The Tsimihety have not subjected themselves to a new kind of political order; instead, they have maintained and negotiated their way of life between ancestral ways emphasizing egalitarianism, solidarity toward one’s kin, and egoism when one did not want to participate in and contribute to social events. When the Tsimihety noted that living expenses were increasing, they modified Boky Mena practices so that people willing to contribute were able

238 to do that. Despite their egalitarian tendencies, the Tsimihety created hierarchies by giving loans or taking debts. These hierarchies do not necessarily follow the ancestral hierarchies between juniors and elders but between those who have money and who do not. As there is no more new land or forest to be cleared for fields, people who did not have enough land, whose harvests had failed or had been confronted with some other misfortune had to go into debt. Some of them found that they were not able to contribute to Boky Mena fund either. (Chapter 8.)

Finally, one of the major concerns is that Madagascar’s livable biosphere faces challenges. I have answered the research questions of this thesis by combining political ecology and political economy, providing an understanding of power structures and relations; human ecology, discussing the ways people inhabit, use and modify their environments, and recent environmental anthropology, focusing on how people live with animals, plants and different materials; and anthropology, enabling a focus on cultural practices, social relations and values, including differences and similarities as well as continuities and changes. Joining these different theoretical discussions, how life should be lived for the Tsimihety in Madagascar and in the vicinities of the Marojejy National Park comprise not only material, economic and technological questions but also political, social and ethical ones. Ethnography allows descriptions of diverse people and their practices and dynamics, situations and processes, which can challenge and negotiate with the hegemonic narratives telling how good life on Earth should be lived.

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Appendix 1: The interview guide for the 40 structured interviews.

The guide was for my own use and I have not checked the language with an official proofreader. Willy and me did the interview questions together.

Misy firy are tokantrano araiky ary firy taona zoky indrindra?= How many are you in the household and how old is the eldest?

1. Aiza are mipetraka? = Where do you live? - Ino dikan’ny Manatenina zeny? = where do you live in M6? 2. Ny razambenay avy Androna any faritra Andrefana? Faritra taiza are no mipetraka? Fantatranao ny nahatonga are teto?= Where are your ancestors from?

3. Aiza andevenana are raha maty? = Where are you buried when you are dead? 4. Mbo fantatrana mô ny tantaran’ny M6 tany voalohany? = Do you know the stroy of M6? 5. Azonao vinavinaina firy vokatra aminare eto anaty taona araiky, ohatra, vary, lavanio? = Can you estimate your vanilla and rice harvest? 6. Manankory ataonare manao asanare , mikaramasa? How do you work, do you pay for the wage? 7. Ataonare akory ny vokatra are raha ohatra mandafo? = What do you do with your harvest, sell it? 8. Mbo manana zaridaina are? = Do you have a garden? 9. Manakory zary nazahoanare tany nivelomanare io? Nomen’ny ray-amandreny (lova) ny tranokay? = What did you do to have the lands you live on? How about the house? 10. Manakory ny mieritieritranare amin’io parky io? = What do you think of the park? 11. Mbo ino Mô fikarohana azo atao amy parky any? = What do researchers do in the park? 12. Mbô manana fady are toy? Ino antony? = Do you practice fady? Why? 13. Misy toerana masina eto M6 eto? = Is there a sacred place in M6?

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14. Ary ino karazam-parky azo iombonan’ny fokonolona? = Are there common fadys in Manatenina? 15. Ino zeny tena olana sarobahana amy Tanananare toy?= What is the greatest problem you have here? 16. Ino zeny no ilantsika fo ny parky tokony voaaro? = What do you need that the park is well protected? 17. Io zeny no tera tsy itovian’ny fombandrazana sy ny finoana kristiana? =What are the differences between Malagasy custom and Christian religion? 18. Aiza no angalantsika akakzo raha hanao trano?= Where do people collect wood to make houses? 19. Ino zeny tera fototsakafonare eto M6? = What is your basic food in M6? 20. Io aby fombandrazana Malagasy mbo hainao? = What Malagasy customs do you know? 21. Mbola mapiasa fanafody avy anatiala mô isika amigao? = Do people use plants and plant medicals now? 22. Manakory zeny ny fiainan’olo amizao raha ampitahaina tamy taloha? =How was the life of the people before?

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Appendix 2: Ecotourism questionnaires

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Appendix 3: Manantenina village drawn by Willy.

For a clarification: Numbered spots in the map are houses and rounded letters (S, N and W) refer to the compass points.

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Appendix 4: Monthly visitors in the park 1999-2007 and 2006-2010 (MNP 2011).

Année Année Année Année Année Année Année Année Année 1999 2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 Total Malagasy 61 266 395 44 844 589 735 247 458 3639 etrangers 66 118 154 190 221 242 294 310 433 2028 Total 127 384 549 234 1065 831 1029 557 891 5667

ANNEE JANV FEV MARS AVRIL MAI JUIN JUL AOÜT SEPT OCT NOV DEC Année 2006 6 14 17 53 10 21 23 107 112 115 157 20 Année 2007 9 19 21 44 50 34 79 198 105 132 175 39 Année 2008 40 16 36 138 83 50 100 117 146 195 121 66 Année 2009 31 7 2 6 34 20 75 131 74 89 70 76 Année 2010 42 24 19 34 54 19 101 174 151 164 105 144

ANNÉE TOTAL Nationaux Etrangers Année 2006 656 337 319 Année 2007 905 470 435 Année 2008 1108 523 585 Année 2009 615 321 294 Année 2010 1031 470 561

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C.D., Why there is a worldwide shortage of vanilla, Economist, March 28, 2018, https://www.economist.com/the-economist-explains/2018/03/28/why- there-is-a-worldwide-shortage-of-vanilla Retrieved on 28.5.2018.

David Pilling, The real price of Madagascar’s vanilla boom, Financial Times, June 5, 2018, https://www.ft.com/content/02042190-65bc-11e8- 90c2-9563a0613e56 Retrieved on 22.9.2018

GEF project brief on a proposed grant from The Global Environment Facility Trust Fund in the amount of US$ 8 million and proposed credit in the amount of US$ 55 million to The Republic of Madagascar for an irrigation and watershed management project, The World Bank, June 24, 2015, http://documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/992501467998503451/pdf/ICR 3487-ICR-P074086-and-P088887-box385353B-PUBLIC.pdf Retrieved on 30.11.2017.

Hjerl Hansen, Julie; Lykke Lind, Peter; et al. “The Hidden Cost of Vanilla: Child Labour and Debt Spirals.” 2016. Danwatch. https://www.danwatch.dk/en/undersogelse/thehiddencostofvanilla/. Retrieved on 12.5.2020.

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IUCN Evaluation Report 2007: Rainforests of the Antsinanana, Madagascar. http://www.marojejy.com/Pdf/UNESCO%20World%20Heritage%20Mada gascar.pdf. Retrieved on 15.9.2013

Mitchell, Brigitta, and Xavier Rakotonirina 1977. The impact of the Andapa - Sambava road: a socio-economic study of the Andapa Basin : Main report (English). Ministry to the Presidency in charge of Finance and Planning, Madagascar, Washington, DC: World Bank, http://documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/774851468773372945/Main- report Retrieved on 14.9. 2014.

Moye, Melissa, and Jean-Paul Paddack 2003. Madagascar’s experience with swapping debt for the environment: debt-for-nature swaps and Heavily Indebted Poor Country (HIPC) debt relief. Background Paper for the Vth World Parks Congress, Durban, South Africa. https://www.cbd.int/financial/debtnature/madagascar-debtdev.pdf Retrieved on 25.2.2017.

Peter Lykke Lind, Madagascar's £152m vanilla industry soured by child labour and poverty, Guardian, December 8, 2016, https://www.theguardian.com/global- development/2016/dec/08/madagascar-152m-vanilla-industry-soured- child-labour-poverty Retrieved 3.5.2019

Project Bassin Versants –Perimetres Irrigues et amenagemnet durable du sol. Evaluation Environnemental et Sociale Régionale. Site de Andapa. Rapport Final Adapté, E1364, Vol 5, Repoblikan ‘I Madagasikara 2006. Ministère de l’Agriculture et de l’Elevage et de la Pêche, http://documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/255881468271249122/pdf/E13 650VOL-05.pdf Retrieved on 30.11.2017.

Tattershall, Ian 2015: What Can Lemurs Teach Us About Human Evolution. Science Friday. https://www.sciencefriday.com/articles/what-lemurs-can- teach-us-about-human-evolution/ Retrieved on 22 January 2021.

Symrise is Germany's most sustainable large-scale enterprise 2019, developPPP.de, December 12, 2018, https://www.developpp.de/en/footernavigation/news-the-latest-on-projects- in-the-developppde-programme/symrise-is-germany-s-most-sustainable- large-scale-enterprise-2019/ Retrieved on 27.6.2019.

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Vanilla flower contract traps farmers in debt spirals, Danwatch, 2018, https://old.danwatch.dk/en/undersogelseskapitel/vaniljeblomst-kontrakt- fanger-boender-i-bundloes-gaeld/ Retrieved on 18.12.2018.

WWF 2000: WWF welcomes the establishment of Marojejy National Park, in north-eastern Madagascar. http://wwf.panda.org/wwf_news/?2021/New- national-park-inaugurated-in-Madagascar 4.6.2000. Retrieved on 26.7.2018.

4. Lectures

Carsten, Janet 2016: The Stuff on Kinship. Social and Cultural Anthropology. The University of Helsinki. Public lecture 29.3.2016.

5. Internet pages:

Encyclopedia Britannica 2014: Botanical garden. http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/75020/botanical-garden Retrieved on 22.6.2014.

Ethnologue 2020: Languages of the World. https://www.ethnologue.com/language/xmw?ip_login_no_cache=%A7eK %A4H%29UM&cache Retrieved on 20.10.2020.

Francois, Edmond 1934: Ile Rouge. Revue de Madagascar 5. http://www.ilerouge.org/spip/spip.php?article30&var_recherche=edmond Retrieved on 9.9.2014.

Gillespie, Lian 2019: Bourdieu: Habitus. Critical Legal Thinking. https://criticallegalthinking.com/2019/08/06/pierre-bourdieu- habitus/#:~:text=In%20Bourdieu's%20words%2C%20habitus%20refers,gr oup%20or%20class%E2%80%9D%20(p.&text=Even%20at%20the%20se emingly%20intimate,posits%20and%20bestows%20specific%20properties Retrieved 4.9.2020.

GIZ 2019: Madagascar. https://www.giz.de/en/worldwide/322.html Retrieved on 27.6.2019.

IUCN 1972: Comptes rendus de la Conférence internationale sur la Conservation de la Nature et de ses Ressources à Madagascar, Tananarive

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7–11 Octobre, 1970, International Union for Conservation of Nature, Gland, Switzerland. https://portals.iucn.org/library/sites/library/files/documents/NS-SP-036.pdf Retrieved 2.2.2014

KEW Science: World Checklist of Selected Plant Families (WCSP). http://wcsp.science.kew.org/namedetail.do?name_id=304732 Retrieved on 19.8.2019.

KFW 2011: Entwicklungsbank. https://www.kfw-entwicklungsbank.de/International-financing/KfW- Development-Bank/Local-presence/Subsahara-Africa/Madagascar/ Retrieved on 10.5.2020.

Malagasy word 2018: http://malagasyword.org/bins/teny2/rirana Retrieved 22.4.2018.

Millennium Challenge Corporation 2020: https://www.mcc.gov/about Retrieved 20.5.2020.

Marojejy 2004: http://www.marojejy.com/Pdf/BrochureLemursEn.pdf Retrieved 17.9.2015.

Marojey National Park 2013: The Biodiversity. http://www.marojejy.com/Biodiv_e.htm Retrieved on 30.08.2013.

OECD 2018: Madagascar. https://oec.world/en/profile/country/mdg/ Retrieved 1.12.2020.

Oxford Dictionaries, 2018: Inflation. https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/inflation Retrieved 20.9.2019

Sharife and Maintikely 2018: The Fate of Madagascar’s Endangered Rosewoods. https://www.occrp.org/en/investigations/8480-the-fate-of- madagascar-s-endangered-rosewoods Retrieved 7.11.2019

Skipper, Andrew and Mizner, Andrew 2018. Special Report on Investment in Africa. Country chapter for Madagascar 2018. https://iclg.com/alb/special-report/madagascar. Retrieved 29.11.2019.

SRI-RICE 2015: Origin of the system of rice intensification (SRI). http://sri.ciifad.cornell.edu/aboutsri/origin/index.html Retrieved on 22.5. 2015.

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USAID 2010: USAID COUNTRY PROFILE. PROPERTY RIGHTS AND RESOURCE GOVERNANCE. MADAGASCAR. http://admin.theiguides.org/Media/Documents/USAID_Land_Tenure_Mad agascar_Profile.pdf Retrieved 20.11.2015.

World Bank Group 2018: Madagascar Economic Update. Fostering Financial Inclusion. http://documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/789051532448517077/pdf/128 782-REPLACEmENT-Digital-MEU-Fostering-Financial-Inclusion.pdf Retrieved on 18.12.2018.

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Index ancestors 45-55, 86-87, 93-94, 162-163, 165-167, 169-170, 180, 186, 203- 205, 217

Boky Mena 99-106, 219-220 ecotourism 89, 94, 108, 129, 132-133, 145, 152-153, 175, 191-205 environmental conservation 108, 126-127, 132-135, 146-148, 151-154, 192 knowledge 49, 52, 78-80, 113, 115-116, 134-139, 153-154, 171, 194-196 money 43, 47, 49, 65, 70, 85-87, 123-126, 179, 195-196, 218-227 nature relation 132-133, 202 place 35-41, 45-56, 64-65, 163, 173-176, 197-198, 210-211, 213-216, 220 relatives (havana) 161-163, 169-170 rice 72-77, 82-90, 99-101, 167-169, 211-212, 218-227 ritual 51-52, 55-56, 81, 87, 92-94, 125, 166-167, 175-176,179-180, 205, 208, 210, 212 tanindrazana (ancestral land) 71, 94-95, 99

Tsimihety 42-44, 47-60, 95, 104-105, see Chapter 6, 192-194, 197-199, 201- 205, 215-216, 226 vanilla 75-77, see Chapter 4, 181, 203, 219-227 value 49, 64, 81, 95, 101, 104-105, 196-198, 206, 225-228 work 71-90, 95, 126, 128-129, 169-171, 191-205

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