Forest and Labor in Madagascar: From Colonial Concession to Global Biosphere

Acknowledgments

acknowLedgMents This is an account of the evolving sensibilities of time, space, and nature in Madagascar that take shape through obdurate social hierarchies and ethnocentrisms, as well as through tactile encounters with land and wildlife. As a history of deforestation and underdevelopment, the book examines the entwinement of these processes and reflects my view that social structures based on degrading practices and belief systems— degrading of persons, societies, and ecologies—are not only unsound but also impoverish the experience and potential of earthly life for everyone. The exploitation of African land and labor has been more than a process of wealth-making by Western colonialists and development agents. It has also been integral to occidentalist perspectives of tropical nature, including ideas about the nature of poor people and postcolonial states upon whom so much blame is heaped for the vanishing of biodiversity. For someone who has been involved in the practical side of conservation and development during my two years of Peace Corps service in the Comoro Islands (1989–1991), in California with the San Francisco Conservation Corps (1992–1993), and in Madagascar (1994–1995), when I carried out masters thesis fieldwork that had an applied dimension, I take a risk in presenting a work that evaluates conservation interventions critically yet avoids practical recommendations. I hope this will not be taken as an indictment of the pursuit of conservation but instead as a reflection of my sense of the futility of practical recommendations in light of current political-economic realities. Yet I am hopeful about the prospect of revolutionary solutions when the time is ripe. xi xii Acknowledgments My interest in Madagascar began during my three years (1993–1996) at Clark University, in Worcester, Massachusetts, where I pursued the masters in international development and social change, having every intention to return to Africa to continue working in development and environmental protection. Dick Ford suggested I apply for an IIE Fulbright grant for Madagascar, where he was involved as a consultant for an Integrated Conservation and Development Project (ICDP). Thanks to his contacts and guidance, and to the generosity of IIE Fulbright, I was able to return to the Indian Ocean to assist in developing a grassroots , participatory method of monitoring and evaluating the ICDP of the Andasibe-Mantadia Protected Area. This tool was meant to enable villagers to have not only stakes in but also some control over project interventions, such as tracking their progress in ways that were meaningful and legible to them. I worked on this, while also organizing with Hajamanana (“Haja”) Rakotoniasy, my research assistant who ended up doing most of the work, a women’s cooperative for selling woven raffia crafts. Yet I was also interested in collecting oral histories and landscape narratives from villagers, inspired by a riveting seminar on social forestry with Dianne Rocheleau, my thesis advisor. A talk by Arturo Escobar at Clark University spurred my interest in the greening of capitalism with respect to rain forest conservation. I thank them both for their sparks of imagination. In Madagascar, I depended heavily on Malagasy friends and colleagues . I am especially indebted to Ndranto Razakamanarina and to my intrepid co-ethnographer, Haja, without whose friendship and support I would have been miserable. Haja and her family—her mother, Lalatiana, brothers Andry and Anjara, and sister Hoby—based in Moramanga , were truly my family away from home. As Haja and I would make the daylong trek back to the village of Volove after replenishing our provisions in town, we were routinely accompanied by two manual workers of the ICDP. Usually it was Theodore (“Bekapoaka”) and Simon who shouldered much of our heavy load. Our conversations with them and other conservation agents gave me my first insights into the significance of low-wage labor in Madagascar’s conservation effort, as well as into the implications of labor–management conflict. The experiences of the ICDP workers, particularly the event of a strike organized by the crew later, in 1996, sowed the seeds of this book. acknowledgments xiii On returning to Clark in 1994, Barbara Thomas-Slayter offered me invaluable opportunities in research, editing, and copublishing case studies on gender and development, and political ecology, for which I am in her debt. As I was writing my thesis, courses with Dick Peet on development and social theory and with Bob Vitalis on U.S. expansionism were probably most to blame for my turn away from the...