The land of no taboo: agrarian politics of neglect and care in Madagascar

ABSTRACT

In considering the complex relationships between taboo, culture and landscapes, it is productive to examine not only how people bestow taboos onto places, but also how they take them away. In this contribution, I use as a case study a 35-hectare parcel of agricultural land in Madagascar, where members of an extended family are debating whether or not to continue to follow their ancestral taboos while farming. Analyzing the debate, alternative historical, cultural and political narratives of land relationships emerge, including a fraught colonial history, ongoing battles over land tenure, shifting community demographics, and intergenerational conflicts. Overall, this stretch of land illustrates that agricultural landscapes may be rendered without taboo not because they lack meaning, but because they contain an excess of overlapping – and highly contentious – meanings.

KEYWORDS:

• Taboo
• memory
• political ecology
• colonialism
• sharecropping
• Madagascar

Acknowledgements

I thank the communities of Mananara Nord for their longstanding support of my research, and for sharing their time and their knowledge with me. This work was originally presented in a panel at the American Ethnological Society’s 2015 spring meeting, and I am grateful to the panel members and conference participants for their suggestions on the paper, including Akhil Gupta, Genese Sodikoff, and Andrew Walsh. I also thank the two anonymous reviewers of the manuscript for their thoughtful and instructive comments.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 All names of places, individuals and lineages have been changed.

2 As Cole and Middleton note, vazaha is a complex concept in Madagascar, and its meaning shifts depending on the social context and historical era. Vazaha generally denotes a ‘powerful outsider’ – usually though not necessarily foreign – who brings the potential for both benefit and harm (2001).

3 Some of these fady are considered especially mafy, or strict, such as not defiling burial grounds. These fady are generally shared between all members of a community. There are also less strong fady that relate only to particular family lineages or individuals.

4 Madagascar was a French colony from 1896 until 1960.

5 The people sharecropping the land largely agreed with Collette’s summary of farming arrangements, though two individuals noted that at certain times of the year they are asked weekly to work on her fields, instead of monthly.

6 Gavian and Fafchamps note that in Africa ownership is not the only factor influencing whether or not smallholder farmers adopt long-term agricultural practices (1996).

7 I deliberately refer to ownership security and not to formalized land tenure, as throughout Madagascar individuals draw from a variety of customary institutions to make ownership claims in addition to (or in opposition to) legal land titles (Barrows and Roth 1990).

8 However, sharecroppers are expected to follow any fady associated with the landscape where they are working (Bellemare 2009).

9 Lova and her family are therefore part of a wider African community of smallholder farmers disposed from their ancestral land holdings due to a flurry of land registration policies enacted by colonial governments (Barrows and Roth 1990; Haugerud 1983).

10 Although anthropologists often contrast ancestral and colonial forms of power, Cole and Middleton point out that these two paradigms have similarities, as both are entities with the capacity for surveillance and punishment, as well as the potential to bestow riches and reward (Cole and Middleton 2001).

11 Working in Malaysia, Amity Doolittle notes a parallel case of individuals pushing back against questionable state land titles by emphasizing customary – and not statutory – mechanisms to validate land claims (2007).

12 It is likely that this landscape also encourages different types of ecologies compared to the more managed rice and agroforestry fields, though systematically examining this type of diversity is beyond the scope of this paper.

13 Katz describes social capital as ‘networks of social relationships that can be drawn upon to improve individual and collective well-being’ (2000, 76).

14 While Keller discusses the impact of park policies in removing people from their ancestral lands, the effect of colonial actions present many parallels, as Keller notes elsewhere (i.e. Keller 2015).

Additional information

Funding

This work received support from the Wenner Gren Foundation, the Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Abroad program, the Lewis B. Cullman Foundation, the Yale Program in Agrarian Studies, the MacMillan Center for International Research, and from an Indiana University Women in Science Provost Travel Grant.

Notes on contributors

Sarah R. Osterhoudt

Sarah R. Osterhoudt is an assistant professor of anthropology at Indiana University. She is an environmental anthropologist and political ecologist whose research examines the relationships between culture, trade and the environment within agricultural and agroforestry landscapes. Her first book, Vanilla landscapes: meaning, memory and the cultivation of place in Madagascar, was published in 2017 as part of the Advances in Economic Botany Series, New York Botanical Garden Press.