Doubting Modernity for Madagascar’s Cactus Pastoralists

I

Doubt persists in pastoralist studies, but not the kind that David Henige champions in his explorations of historical methods.¹ Nostalgia for past glories, when pastoral nomads were mighty and fierce or healthy and wise, throws doubt on today’s mobile livestock herders surviving for much longer in modern times.² Scholars of this sort direct their skepticism not at how they came to such a conclusion, which Henige would urge them to do, but at how “traditional” herding ways of life can possibly survive vis-à-vis “modernity.” In such a “disappearing worlds” approach to change, where students of pastoralist cultures confront their subjects through their approaching demise, documenting the ways of life of pastoralist peoples before they disappear has deeply romantic overtones.³

Henige’s pyrrhonist skepticism aids in exposing the assumptions behind such a romantic scholarly endeavor. “Pyrrhonists demand,” Henige reminds us, “that, to be successful, all inquiry must be characterized by rhythms of searching, examining, and doubting, with each sequence generating and influencing the next in a continuously dialectical fashion.”⁴ In his Montaigne-like essayistic book, Historical Evidence and Argument, doubting does not end inquiry like a one-man scorched-earth policy, but sets David on a journey with many twists and turns and no end in sight.⁵ Along the way, the implicit has a chance to become more explicit. Methods – the ways that we search for, examine, and doubt our evidence and eventual arguments – are thus revealed more effectively when made a subject of critical reasoning and their revelatory powers questioned.

Frankly, I doubt that this paper will get very far toward rendering explicit the concept of “modernity,” since it rests on a conceit that I find difficult to fathom. But observing the concept’s obtuse nature is clarification of a sort. In addition, my attention in this article will not be so much directed at the work of others who have contributed their research findings to pastoralist studies as at my own paltry contributions. I do so not for any postmodernist attraction to subjectivity as a goal of writing, for Henige is no postmodernist,⁶ but to practice upon myself his way of badgering untested assumptions and cornering unsupported claims. Henige instructed his readers, throughout his thirty-six years at the helm of History in Africa, in the art of assessing the historical evidence for arguments, even if that meant eroding some prized claims.

Mine too. For several years I have been intrigued with the idea that prickly pear cactus did more than provide food and water for zebu cattle in Madagascar’s arid south. This plant’s environmental history,⁷ especially surrounding the dramatic event in the 1920s of its epidemical demise, plumbed the depths to which human and plant interactions could go. After a Frenchman shipped the plant to Fort Dauphin in 1769,⁸ Malagasy herders co-produced an ecological coalescence with prickly pear cactus, producing a cattle-amenable environment with the help of this coactive plant. By 1920, several influential French colonialists regarded the plant a pest that blocked vast tracts of land from potential development by French settlers or Malagasy farmers. In 1924, they thus introduced “accidentally” into the “spiny region” a cactus parasite, a cochineal insect species, that led to the evanescence – the disappearance – of the original species of Malagasy cactus, which undermined the co-produced ecology and resulted in an aggravated famine in the 1930s.

Central to this calamitous story, which cost several hundred Malagasy lives and many more of their cattle, was the assumption that cactus was anti-modernity – that the plant held back the pastoralists who had become dependent on it and had blocked their potential as human beings.⁹ It seemed to me that such an ethnocentric view of this plant, which remains unfortunately the predominate way that people who are not familiarized with the plant perceive prickly pear in Madagascar,¹⁰ needed to be challenged. Detailing the specific plant and human relationships would counter such a weak and sweeping conclusion based on knowing nothing about the relationships, let alone the dependencies. So I reasoned: what if...