Forest and Labor in Madagascar

Genese Marie Sodikoff

Description

Conservation and development in Madagascar

Protecting the unique plants and animals that live on Madagascar while fueling economic growth has been a priority for the Malagasy state, international donors, and conservation NGOs since the late 1980s. Forest and Labor in Madagascar shows how poor rural workers who must make a living from the forest balance their needs with the desire of the state to earn foreign revenue from ecotourism and forest-based enterprises. Genese Marie Sodikoff examines how the appreciation and protection of Madagascar's biodiversity depend on manual labor. She exposes the moral dilemmas workers face as both conservation representatives and peasant farmers by pointing to the hidden costs of ecological conservation.

Acknowledgments
A Word on the Orthography and Pronunciation
1. Geographies of Borrowed Time
2. Overland on Foot, Aloft: An Anatomy of the Social Structure
3. Land and Languor: On What Makes Good Work
4. Toward a New Nature: Rank and Value in Conservation Bureaucracy
5. Contracting Space: Making Deals in a Global Hot Spot
6. How the Dead Matter: The Production of Heritage
7. Cooked Rice Wages: Internal Contradiction and Subjective Experience
Epilogue: Workers of the Vanishing World
Glossary of Malagasy Words
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Sujets

• African Studies
• Political Economy
• Environmental Science
• Social Science
• POLITICAL SCIENCE
• Sociologie, société et politique
• África
• Social sciences
• Politics
• Anthropology
• Africa
• Social
• Culture

Informations

• Publié par: Indiana University Press
• Date de parution: 17 octobre 2012
• Nombre de lectures: 1
• EAN13: 9780253005847
• Langue: English

Extrait

FOREST AND LABOR IN MADAGASCAR
FROM COLONIAL CONCESSION TO GLOBAL BIOSPHERE
GENESE MARIE SODIKOFF
Indiana University Press Bloomington & Indianapolis
This book is a publication of
Indiana University Press 601 North Morton Street Bloomington, Indiana 47404–3797 USA
iupress.indiana.edu
Telephone orders     800-842-6796 Fax orders     812-855-7931
© 2012 by Genese Marie Sodikoff All rights reserved
No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. The Association of American University Presses' Resolution on Permissions constitutes the only exception to this prohibition.
The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992.
Manufactured in the United States of America
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Sodikoff, Genese Marie, [date]     Forest and labor in Madagascar : from colonial concession to global biosphere / Genese Marie Sodikoff.         p. cm.     Includes bibliographical references and index.     ISBN 978-0-253-00309-6 (cloth : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-253-00577-9 (pbk. : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-253-00584-7 (electronic book) 1. Forest conservation—Madagascar. 2. Forest biodiversity conservation—Madagascar. 3. Forests and forestry—Economic aspects—Madagascar. 4. Rural poor—Madagascar. 5. Madagascar—Economic conditions. I. Title.     SD414.M28S63 2012     333.75′1609691—dc23                                                                                   2012010378
1  2  3  4  5    17  16  15  14  13  12
TO MY PARENTS, GARY AND EMILY ,       for all their worries and care,
TO HANK ,       for so much support,
TO OSCAR, VINNIE, AND SCARLETT ,       my little dreams come true,
AND IN MEMORY OF MY MOTHER, INEZ ,       with love
Arbres sur la colline où reposent nos morts dont l'histoire n'est plus, pour ma race oublieuse, que fable, et toi, vent né des zones soleilleuses qui ranimes leur sein d'ombre humide et le mords,
ce soir, je vous contemple et mon coeur vous écoute: votre rumeur me dit l'âme de mes aïeux tandis que l'horizon tragique et radieux     annonce d'un beau jour la gloire et la déroute.
Trees on the hill where our dead rest, whose history, for my forgetful race, is now but fable, and you, wind born of sunny zones, who revive and bite their chest of moist shadow,
tonight, I ponder you and my heart listens: your sound recounts the soul of my forefathers while the tragic and radiant horizon     announces with dawn glory and ruin.
— JEAN-JOSEPH RABEARIVELO , Volumes (translated from the French by Richard Serrano)
CONTENTS
Acknowledgments
A Word on the Orthography and Pronunciation
1.   Geographies of Borrowed Time
2.   Overland on Foot, Aloft:
An Anatomy of the Social Structure
3.   Land and Languor
On What Makes Good Work
4.   Toward a New Nature
Rank and Value in Conservation Bureaucracy
5.   Contracting Space
Making Deals in a Global Hot Spot
6.   How the Dead Matter
The Production of Heritage
7.   Cooked Rice Wages
Internal Contradiction and Subjective Experience
Epilogue: Workers of the Vanishing World
Glossary of Malagasy Words
Notes
Bibliography
Index
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.
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.
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 applied world of international development and toward academe. In 1996, I left for Baltimore to work with Gillian Feeley-Harnik in the doctoral program in anthropology at Johns Hopkins University.
Getting to know Gillian Feeley-Harnik made me realize how truly ignorant I was. Gillian's enthusiasm for ethnographic and historical detail and her ability to immerse herself in distant social-historical worlds must partly explain the origins of her special creativity. Conversations with Gillian intensify the w