The Anthropology of Extinction: Essays on Culture and Species Death

3. TOTEM AND TABOO RECONSIDERED

67 INTRODUCTION A SPECIES APART 3.TOTEM AND TABOO RECONSIDERED ENDANGERED SPECIES AND MORAL PRACTICE IN MADAGASCAR Genese Marie Sodikoff It is midday, hot, and we are squeezed haunch to haunch on wooden benches in the open flatbed pickup. Our bush taxi nears the bustling roadside village of Sandrakatsy, lying along the Mananara River of northeast Madagascar. We spy something in the ditch beside the road: a white owl bound to a cross made of tree branches, wings extended and downy head slung forward on its breast. I wonder what it means, but since no one in the taxi speaks, I dare not ask. Later that day, I interrogate Navony, an authority on traditional matters, about the crucified owl. She is a woman in her mid-sixties and the wife of the tangalamena of Varary. This is a village that sits a few miles off-road near the boundary of a temperate rain forest that forms the nucleus of the MananaraNord Biosphere Reserve. (I conducted research in this region on conservation and low-wage labor for fourteen months between 2000 and 2002 [Sodikoff 2009].) “Tangalamena” (literally “red baton”) is the title given to elder spiritual leaders of Betsimisaraka villages. Betsimisaraka form the dominant ethnic population of eastern Madagascar. The tangalamena of Varary, Navony’s husband , presides over rituals, keeps the oral history of the village in his memory, and communicates with dead ancestors. He and Navony have a son who works for the conservation project overseeing the Mananara-Nord Biosphere Reserve . Navony explains to me that people fear and hate white owls. “Vorondolo [spirit birds],” she calls them, “the playthings of sorcerers.” Sorcerers (mpamosavy ) in Madagascar are known to dabble in black magic, and it always seemed GENESE MARIE SODIKOFF 68 JANET CHERNELA TRACEY HEATHERINGTON GENESE MARIE SODIKOFF GENESE MARIE SODIKOFF Figure 3.1. Map of the Mananara-Nord Biosphere Reserve. The inset shows the names of several stands of primary rain forest that form the national park of the reserve. Created by Rutgers Cartography Services, 2009. 69 INTRODUCTION A SPECIES APART FROM ECOCIDE TO GENETIC RESCUE TOTEM AND TABOO RECONSIDERED to me that any villager who had the good fortune to reach ripe old age was inevitably accused of being a sorcerer. She adds that it is taboo (fady or faly) around those parts to eat white owls, but it is good to kill them because doing so foils their evil commissions. Fady, as any scholar of Madagascar will attest, form an integral part of Malagasy social life, regardless of class, locality, or ethnic identification (Van Gennep 1904; Frazer 2000; Ruud 1959). Fady are prohibitions established by dead ancestors who wield great power over the living, and whose wishes are upheld by elders, the next in line to ancestorhood. The proscription of an object —be it plant, animal, landscape feature, day of the week, cigarette, word, gesture, transaction, or whatever—ascribes sacredness and danger to the object . Animal fady, a category of taboo, impose bodily and linguistic constraints; they prohibit the killing of the animal and sometimes require that one avert one’s gaze from it, use euphemisms for it, or avoid particular land features or resources tied to it (Bodin et al. 2006). Until recent times, according to Navony, people had obeyed the fady against eating the white owl. Nowadays, however, “some young people dare to eat it.” Navony feared that the transgression not only angered dead ancestors but also, in the grander scheme of things, threatened the historical identity of her people. In the early 2000s, the town and surrounding countryside of Mananara-Nord was already undergoing a quick-paced social transformation prompted in large part by the boom in international prices for cloves and vanilla. People were streaming into the region to make their fortunes in cash cropping. The Mananara-Nord Biosphere Reserve had also become fully operational as a tourist destination and scientific research site, which meant that people’s actions within the reserve would at times be monitored and penalized .1 Betsimisaraka villagers experienced these changes with unease and sometimes fear. The influx of outsiders tended to increase nonviolent crimes, like the theft of vanilla plants and bags of harvested cloves, as well as raucous behavior in town. Elders did not like seeing ancestral customs, such as fady obedience, disrespected. In this chapter, I examine the meanings of animal taboos and taboo animals in a context of expansive conservation interventions since the...