Forest and Labor in Madagascar: from colonial concession to global biosphere by Genese Marie Sodikoff (review)

This book is an environmental ethnography of the impacts that a large biosphere reserve has had on the lives of mainly Malagasy conservation agents in northeastern Madagascar. It should serve to inspire further ethnographies in Madagascar as well as in other locations where conservation and its incumbent ideologies and bureaucracies have reshaped – and will continue to have a role in the undoing of – how local people live with the land.

Sodikoff states her central thesis at the outset and develops it with clarity and force. She starts from the position that Betsimisaraka conservation labourers are caught in contradiction: they get paid to follow the conservation aim of stopping swidden horticulture (tavy) in the biologically diverse eastern tropical rainforests, yet their pay is so low that they find themselves needing to practise tavy to live and to keep their families from starving. She then traces the outlines of a phenomenology of walking within the colonial context of employing Malagasy men to carry burdens (mainly colonial passengers) by palanquin. This set the stage for a literature that undervalued manual labour and overvalued the foreigners’ gaze and ‘slow-motion translation of nature into text’ (p. 30). She ties this to contemporary conservation perspectives on labour by introducing the readers to several walking guides/conservation agents in Mananara-Nord who resurface at various times in the book as her thesis develops. Sodikoff then considers the contributions of forest concessions and timber labour to ‘acquiescence and moments of compromise’ that have led to forest reductions (p. 52). In the middle sections of the book, she considers how the conservation bureaucracy projects its own rank and value structure among Betsimisaraka peasants. This is followed by ethnographic fieldwork that describes the poor performance of that scheme in the hands of smallholders in cash-crop production who find themselves at a disadvantage on an uneven playing field controlled by corrupt politicians. In the later stages of the book, Sodikoff argues that Malagasy conceptions of heritage function to create, among other things, bonds between people and the land of their ancestors (p. 149). Most Malagasy consider status based not on how much money and power one has but on one’s position in the family order of ascendants and descendants. This creates a completely different value system to the one that has come to them through acculturation – another hand of cards stacked against them. She then finishes with an ethnographic déguerpissement of her own, by carefully sweeping a path for the reader through the contradictions and dual loyalties with which the conservation agents must live. She takes no prisoners.

There is much to recommend in this book. Sodikoff walks in the footprints of her mentor, Gillian Feeley-Harnik, who, in A Green Estate (1991), has written one of the great historical ethnographies of Madagascar. Yet the author of Forest and Labor in Madagascar has her own contributions to make to the anthropological literature. She takes her readers on a wonderful tour along the underbelly of conservation work in order to give them a clear understanding of how labour plays out in a political economy ruled mainly by conservation stakeholders. Sodikoff uses theory to guide the empirical results of her field studies, rather than as an engine hammering down points. For example, she uses Marx’s materialist theory as a touchstone to help her derive insights about the contradictions of conservation, thereby avoiding the reduction of history, societal relations, and labour into a flattened Marxist space of victims and victimizers. Instead she brings the lives of Malagasy, with their limited choices, closer to her readers. Sodikoff has a clear sense of her audience, nurturing our interest in their lives by changing the pace and tenor of the narrative, integrating masterful descriptions of on-the-ground experiences with ethnohistorical scholarship and ethnographic findings.

There are few faults worth noting. She...