The non-modern constitution of famines in Madagascar's spiny forests: “water-food” plants, cattle and Mahafale landscape praxis

Abstract

This essay draws on Bruno Latour's exegesis of modernity to explore modern and non-modern conceptions of famines and prickly pear cacti in the African island of Madagascar. Using Latour's concept of the “non-modern constitution,” I argue that Mahafale famine history highlights “cactus pastoralism” as a model of non-equilibrium landscapes and nature-society hybrids, adding to the shift away from the paradigm of “nature-tending-toward-equilibrium.” When considered not as occurrences of nature out of balance, famines serve to complicate and nuance recent discussions of human induced change to Madagascar's environments. Latour's framework assists in excavating various conceptions of famines and cacti, which in turn furthers the discussion on modernity by suggesting that cactus pastoralists make their own kind of modernity – an alternative modernity.

Keywords:

• Pastoralism
• cactus
• modernity
• hybridity
• Mahafale
• Madagascar

1. Introduction

In this essay, I focus on a group of hybrid pastoralists who confront recurrent drought and sporadic famine (kere, mosare, tane maike) with the help of prickly pear cactus. Several thousand Malagasy “cactus pastoralists” make a living in southern Madagascar maintaining their cattle herding way of life by cultivating cacti of the genus Opuntia (raketa in the Malagasy language).1 I contrast Mahafale landscape practices involving cactus with a modernist theory that misconstrues the plant as a contributing factor to famine. I illuminate modern (Western rationalization, state bureaucratization and technological intensification) and non-modern conceptions of famines and cacti that turn on different society-environment relationships. Bruno Latour's exegesis of modernity helps to clarify the contrasts and to frame the theoretical differences set to praxis.

The nub of the argument is as follows: (1) Mahafale herders co-produced an ecological coalescence with cacti plants, producing a cattle-amenable environment with the help of coactive plants2; (2) modern colonial officials misread the nature of famine and believed that transforming the landscape by eradicating an “invasive” species would weaken and perhaps eliminate famine from occurring in the arid south by making the land more “productive”; and (3) as a consequence, their stubborn modern conceptualization led to the evanescence of Malagasy cactus, which undermined the co-produced ecology and resulted in an aggravated famine.3 I unpack each of these premises in turn – the coalescence, the modernist praxis and the evanescence – after explaining the Latourian slant to the argument. I conclude by suggesting that Latour's insights help to recount alternative views toward cactus and famine, which in turn challenges Latour's position by motivating further an analysis of cactus pastoralists as having an “alternative modernity” (Gaonkar 2001).

In his book We Have Never Been Modern, Latour weds modernity to the concept of purity (Latour 1993). Modernists distinguish and separate from a world abounding with mixtures and mélanges. Latour argues metaphysical abstractions of pure and discrete categories such as science/politics, object/subject and nature/culture. “The practice of purification meticulously separates nature from culture, non-humans from humans, the objective from the subjective, pure natural forces from pure political forces, facts from values” (Tuchanska 1995). Modernists ignore the creolized nature of most things to guarantee a place for their abstracted purifications.

Attempts to purify things and events, to de-hybridize deforestation, for instance, or fire, or the ozone hole, or other hybrid “monsters” to a modern sensibility and see them in relation to purity – as pure objects of nature, pure subjects of human misfeasance and so on – results in creating more blended things, more hybrids, more quasi-objects and quasi-subjects.4 Modernists, in patrolling their pure categories by ignoring or treating most hybrids as invisible, create more of what they try to eliminate (Latour 1993). Modernists admit only mixtures and hybrids of equal “pure” parts, “as mixtures of pure forms in equal proportion” (Latour 1993). These are managed in modernist conceptions relevant to this essay such as equilibrium theory, the balance of nature, rain shadow effect and the carrying capacity of land.

The tidy modernist “modern constitution” that partitions out the purifications from an otherwise messy world “rests upon a divide between scientific power, meant to represent things as they are, and political power, meant to represent subjects as they wish to be” (Trouillot 2003). For Latour, the packaging of “Nature” and “Society” into separate discrete categories is at the centre of the modernist way of worldmaking conveyed as modernization – and not industrialization and its replacement of “traditional” social organization, worldview and skill sets. “If I am right in this outline of the Constitution, modernity has nothing to do with the invention of humanism, with the emergence of the sciences, with the secularization of society, or with the mechanization of the world” (Latour 1993). According to the modern constitution, nature is transcendent: objective universal laws of nature transcend human capacities. Likewise, according to the modern constitution, society is immanent: its existence results from human actions being free to construct their social realms. Latour mocks the asymmetry that results from the spectre of pulling apart nature and society into “pure” categories.

For Latour, we have never been modern because once social humans arrived on the scene with our ability to blend pieces of “pure” nature into our “hybrid” technologies mobilized for human purposes, nature and society have never been separate. Humans construct nature in their laboratories all the time: when nascent cultivators turned teosinte grass into maize, when Monsanto engineers made a bug-free potato, when Mahafale pastoralists fed cactus fodder to their stock. Latour called for a “non-modern constitution” that would give “full citizenship” to hybrids that would correct the asymmetrical modernist purifications aimed at relegating most hybrids to a secondary status of existential being. This constitution would guarantee hybrids a voice or, perhaps better, permit our understanding of them from multiple perspectives. He called this an exercise in “symmetrical anthropology”– the subtitle of his French original edition of the book (Latour 1991) – which demands debate in a “parliament of things” (Latour 1993).

My Latourian hypothesis, then, amounts to this: without denying the horror of famines and the fact that I too wish they would just go away from Madagascar, the more that modernists attempt to separate nature and culture in pure discrete categories, the more that famines defy modernist understanding. Famines are hybrids, they do not behave as purities. Rather than consider famines on the measuring stick of Western or North Atlantic modernity – as measurements of the distance between the “underdeveloped” lands and the “developed” lands, between the famished lands and the lands of milk and honey – I consider them as hybrids. Recognizing the non-modern constitution of famines improves the capacity for understanding how hybrids assist in the survival of a herding way of life in the Mahafale.

2 The coalescence

2.1 Background

Mahafale cactus pastoralists depend on cacti to assist them through the dry season, when grass and water are scarce. Rather than turning to nomadism, to the extensive mobile pursuit of water and pasture for their livestock, they have turned to prickly pear to help them confront the problem of keeping their stock alive in a high risk environment. Located in a rain shadow effect, the region receives less than 300 mm of rain per year around the mouth of the Linta river at Androka and approximately 750 mm of rainfall per year around the source of the Linta river just north of Ejeda (Kaufmann & Tsirahamba 2006). It is a region subject to changes in rainfall from year to year, a region prone to drought and even famine.

Xerophytic vegetation prevails in the southwest and south coasts inland approximately 100 km. Malagasy speakers described the zone as kirihitr'ala tsiloina, “spiny forests” or as ala tsy misy aloka, “forests without shade” (Bakke 1994). Cactus pastoralists referred to the region as tane maina, “dry land” or androy, “place of thorns.” Yet, the region was not incongruous with grass and pasture land. In fact, neighbouring Malagasy pastoralists delighted in opportunities to acquire a cow raised in the southwest's slight but famously healthy grass (Razafimanantsoa 1987, 1991). Again, the rain shadow effect influenced the growth of fine grass, ahitse, and coarse grass, bozaka, with the arid coast having less grass overall than inland.

Mahafale herders did not use the modernist concept of a “rain shadow effect” to describe the precarious climate. Mahafale drew on the idiom of taboos (fale) to help them interpret the unpredictable environment. Mahafale means “having the power to taboo,” which residents attributed above all to the land itself. A complicated array of proscriptions, many of which relate water and animals associated with water, structured their social lives and made sense of the difficulties they faced making a living (Ruud 1960; Decary 1964). Autochthonous residents, those who had lived in the area and had several generations of dead ancestors buried there, but not all new immigrants with a different ethnic identity, forbade the killing or eating of numerous endemic mammals and reptiles. Mahafale left in peace, for example, ring-tailed lemurs (Lemur catta) and radiated tortoises (Geochelone radiata).5 They linked their long history of survival in the region to their being aware and respectful of the land's special demands and the animals that, according to oral traditions, at one time or another led their ancestors to water and out of danger. The trope of “being shown the way” (toro lala), of learning how to survive in the Mahafale, merged in innumerable origin stories of various taboos involving animals (Kaufmann 2003). People interpreted taboos not as barriers to individual freedom but as guides to family survival in a land of difficulty where conditions fluctuated from year to year (Kaufmann 2004).

The fact that Mahafale pastoralists have eked out a living against the odds has endeared them to the land. Many have resisted emigrating to other areas where differences in climate, in humidity, in grass, in the wind, in the dust, in the smells and the sounds of a place, and, most importantly, in the ancestors confronted their senses of being. Mahafale considered their ancestors to impart a degree of sacredness to ancestral land. This was a pan-island belief among most autochthonous Malagasy people, with regional and ethnic differences in its expression (van Gennep 1904; Ruud 1960; Andriamampianina 1985; Ratsimbazafy et al. 2007). Ancestors created taboos and Mahafale inherited them patrilineally and affinally, applying them to in-coming wives through marriage. Observing taboos created connections between ancestors and descendants, between the living and their dead ancestors, and between nature and society and respect for ancestral land. All of these came together in the sacred groves that dotted the landscape as delimited thorned forests hiding ancestor's tombs that were off-limits to most people. Such tabooed places as sacred groves merged society onto the natural environment as an indigenous conservation ethic.

2.2 Cacti

Since its introduction to the island in 1769, various species of prickly pear belonging to the genus Opuntia have become living fencing not just around sacred tombs but around most social spaces frequented by cattle (for more on the French introduction of prickly pear to Madagascar and its consequences see Decary 1928; François 1938; Decary 1947; Deschamps 1960; Kaufmann 1998; Binggeli 2003; Kaufmann 2004). Finding tall cactus hedging around corrals, hamlets, villages, gardens and along trails reveals that cactus pastoralists have socialized an unsocial plant. Modern sensibilities consider more foe than friend the long needle-like thorns pin-cushioning the flat water storing cactus pads segmenting upwards 5 – 6 m. Yet to cactus pastoralists, spineless varieties make no sense as cactus enclosures (valandraketa), as it is necessary to have long thorns to repel browsers and unwanted humans alike (Kaufmann 2001). Prickly pear defines many Mahafale spaces, not because it is an out of control plant, an “invasive”, but because it offers protection to social spaces. Mahafale seek to grow, therefore, good tasting, good fruiting, tall and very thorny enclosures of spiny varieties of apparently O. ficus-indica (Binggeli 2003).6

The plant itself has changed from the interactions with humans. It became naturalized to Madagascar's spiny forest and its sandy soils. Raketa benefited from people assisting its rapid and wide dispersion, growing quickly from its cuttings that the cactus pastoralists planted. But sometime after its introduction in the south, it began to propagate itself from seeds; though it grew more slowly from seeds than from cuttings. The plant co-acted with its Malagasy partners: responding well to human involvement in its life cycle; adapting itself to the soils. Mahafale would consider the soils themselves another actor in this story, with the dust of a particular region able to act on the constitution of living things. From an archaeological perspective, raketa acts as a signature plant for human occupation sites in the region (Ramiandrisoa-Razafimisa 1991).7

Mahafale have incorporated raketa into a contiguous network of hybrids that fall within the general mixed rubric of “forest-pastures” (Kaufmann & Tsirahamba 2006). Herders accompany their cattle on land bearing grass species such as Heteropogon contortus (Joelson 1991), endemic spiny trees used as supplemental browse such as Euphorbia stenoclada (Rabesandratana 1999; Kaufmann 2004), and trees under which cattle find shade such as the intermittent Tamarindus indicus and the frequent taller varieties related to Euphorbia tirucalli. Mahafale conceptions of landscape do not favour treeless grassland pastures (cf. Bloch 1995). The absence of shade exposes Mahafale cattle to the elements (Tsirahamba & Kaufmann 2007). Cactus pastoralists prefer having trees for forage and fodder reserve, for protection from the taxman and cattle rustlers, and relief from the sun. In the words of a renown herder who lived several kilometres east of Androka Vaovao,

My sons and I herd cattle everyday (miarak'andro tsiritse). Men who never became fathers (tsy vagno) or males who cannot work because they are lazy (tembo) will not have cattle to herd. One of my sons herds ten cattle, another son herds ten, and so on, day after day until the grass (ahitse), the cactus fodder (raketa), and the tree fodder (samata) become scarce. Then we move north to Beahitse after the rains start (Fieldnotes with Evelomatsimaito, 27 Oct. 1997).

Cactus, if handled correctly, does not harm the Mahafale's precious humped zebu cattle (aombe). Herdsboys, who accompany the cattle in their charge, prevent accidental browsing on thorned cacti. Ingested thorns lead to punctures and to bovine tuberculosis. Even a cow with thorns in its tongue would require immediate attention before it could eat again. In all of my months preparing cactus fodder with herders (mandotse raketa), I never came across a single zebu with any thorns in its body. The same did not hold for the Malagasy working the cacti into cattle fodder. Cowherds processed the thorned cacti into thornless fodder before offering it to their cattle. They first singed the cut cladodes, the “branches” consisting of several segmented pads, over a small but strong fire that consumed most thorns (fatike). Then they sliced the pads into cigar-sized portions, knocking off any remaining thorns or partially charred thorns with a large knife. Only then did they allow their cattle to consume the plant material that they had converted from a hazard to a safe food. A typical life for a newlywed couple began as follows:

After we were married, we lived in the forest-pastures and took care of cattle. There was a lot of work to do before the rainy season. Feeding cactus to cattle occupied all of our time during the months of October and November (roa vola, be asa mandotse raketa maro). For 30 head, it took three hours at daybreak to cut and stack enough raketa, then another three hours to burn off the thorns and slice it into piles for the cattle. The same routine was repeated for the evening feeding. It took all day. The mother of my son was living with me then. She helped with the work. She cut, burned, and sliced raketa, helping me with whatever I could not finish by myself. That made the job go quicker. If I was not feeling well and my asthma was acting up, she would have to do most of the work. She no longer lives with me. She divorced me and now lives in Toliara where she has found an easier life (Fieldnotes with Heremasy, 14 Oct. 1997).

Cactus pastoralists did not value all cactus varieties the same. Some were more suitable for consumption than others. Of the four types of raketa at Androka – nokotse, nosy, dambo, and mena– only raketa mena was considered useless except for its bright red juice from its pear to mark gunny sacks of local produce (vokatse: corn or dried fish, depending on whether the seller was Mahafale or Vezo). It grew in sparse solitary clumps and the Malagasy did not sow and tend it like the other spiny varieties. Raketa nokotse was the easiest to prepare as fodder, which accounted for the existence of countless cacti plants of that variety that pastoralists sowed, pruned and shaped into massive living fences, plantations, enclosures and even mazes of fences within fences around human places.

Late in the year, in November, before the rains, the earthen-colours around Androka turned bright yellow when raketa nokotse bloomed. Only the tall stands of nokotse, more than twice the height of the tall adult Mahafale men, had yellow blossoms. The junior plants growing below did not bloom or fruit. Under every bloom a prickly pear grew and there must have been millions of blossoms. The days were hot and windy, with the air being dry and light. It carried the sweet perfume of cacti in bloom, of growth before the rains, of sweet juicy fruits in a few months, of life carrying on (Fieldnotes, 3 Nov. 1997).

So pivotal was prickly pear in the diet that cactus pastoralists categorized it as sakafon-drano, as “water-food” (Kaufmann 2004). The water storing plant provided not just a source of water in a largely waterless region but protein and fibre to its cattle and pastoralist consumers. This water-food plant entered the diet of both cattle and humans in a gendered way. Women harvested cactus as a fruit crop for human consumption. They collected the prickly pear fruit – the cactus tuna – for their families to eat. They also sold surplus tuna as a cash crop in the local open market. Male herders worked cactus as a vegetable crop for cattle. It was a mainstay during the dry season, before the rains stimulated new growth of grasses.

This water-food plant served as stockpile of food and as a water reservoir. Its water-storing capabilities were profoundly important since water was the critical resource for animal husbandry in the semi-arid to arid climate. Working steers (konda) that pulled ox-carts and that ate only cacti never had to be watered. By comparison, range cattle were watered every other day in the wet season and every day in the dry season – except when they consumed the water-food plant. The range cattle can go 1, 2 or 3 months without watering as long as they fill up on sakafon-drano every day until depleting the stockpiles. Moreover, cactus hedging around gardens served not just as intruder protection but also as a “botanical pump” drawing water to garden crops such as melons, beans, maize and sweet potatoes. Some maize growers planted large stands of raketa among the corn, spacing out the cacti “clumps” to draw water into the corn plants (Fieldnotes with Jean Dedidé, 9 July 1997).

In summary, a plant-human synergy made a semi-arid land appear less arid in the sense of providing a “water-food” plant for cattle and humans. It served as a water reservoir that also stockpiled food. When the highly touted raketa gasy or “Malagasy cactus” (O. monacantha) was plentiful into the 1920s, whose story I will outline shortly, it “raised the water table so that the wells, the springs and even the rivers flowed all the year round” (Stratton 1964). After raketa gasy had been eradicated and inferior species of cacti introduced into the south, cactus pastoralists considered their land as “wetter” with the replacement cacti than without. In this way cactus enclosures were perceived as making the Mahafale drylands a little more like wetlands (Woodhouse et al. 2000).8

3 The modernist praxis

Madagascar's “cactus war” of the 1920s, when French scientists and colonialists waged biological warfare against “Malagasy cactus” (raketa gasy, O. monacantha) with a cochineal cactus parasite (pondy foty, Dactylopius tomentosus), has received some attention of late (Kaufmann 1998, 2000, 2001; Middleton 1999; Binggeli 2003). Here I briefly return to it to highlight that colonial officials who were fervently against prickly pear cactus welcomed the occasion to operate a “modernist laboratory” aimed at advancing cactus pastoralists into the modern age. Cactus was the issue in a colonialist debate about the economic potential of southern Madagascar. One side emphasized the disadvantages of cacti in the herding system, and the other side accentuated its advantages. In the interest of space, I will sketch only a brief outline of the positions of the main opponents on the issues of prickly pear being a “danger” to cattle, as an “invasive” plant and as an “impurity” to pastures.

3.1 Cacti

3.1.1 A danger to cattle

The French had long been aware of the harm done to cattle if they ingested the cactus, spines and all. Raymond Decary, a colonial administrator who was stationed in the “cactus region” for many years, noted that thorns pincushioned some cattle's tongues, making tongue a harmful dish for humans (Decary 1925). He further pointed out that some cattle had apparently died from ingesting thorns, which had perforated the stomachs and intestines and lead to tuberculosis infections (Decary 1925). Yet he saw plenty of healthy cattle raised with the help of raketa, from which he concluded that cacti were necessary for pastoralists to live in the region. Prickly pear provided famine relief for local Malagasy and their livestock.

Decary's adversary during and immediately following the “cactus war,” the naturalist Henri Perrier de la Bâthie, branded thorned cacti, singed or unsinged, as unhealthy fodder for zebu. The plant was the “main cause of bovine tuberculosis… all the more to fear since these animals, lacking nourishment, are always in a state of physiological misery” (Perrier de la Bâthie 1928). The evidence upon which he based this last claim is unclear; perhaps it was hearsay or the fact that the pastoralists' offtake for the colonial market tended to be damaged goods. At any rate, the botanist Georges Petit continued Bâthie's line of argument by suggesting that cactus pastoralists were likewise “fashioned for physiological misery” (Petit 1929a). Raketa, he continued, had kept these people in a state of “perpetual half-famine” or under nourishment. The ultimate in famine relief was, therefore, not more raketa, but less. Prickly pear cactus could not possibly provide relief to famines, he and Perrier de la Bâthie reasoned, nor could it prevent famines, since it contributed to their occurrence. Only by eliminating cactus pastoralism could famines be prevented in southern Madagascar. Petit saw the cactus war, not as a disaster, but as an act of “kindness” (see also François 1930; Chevalier 1947; Humbert 1947; Montagnac 1961).

Moreover, Perrier de la Bâthie argued that thornless cactus (O. inermis) provided a better famine food than the dangerous thorned varieties.

Therefore, even for stock raising, the disappearance of spiny Raquette can only result in a great good. O. inermis will provide to cattle a more aqueous, abundant, less harmful forage by no longer causing bovine tuberculosis that decimates these herds. Then there are other forage that can come into the dry lands. Finally, and above all, there exists in Madagascar immense unoccupied surfaces, covered with high grass, where Mahafaly and Antandroy would be established perfectly, if our Administration would allow them and facilitate their settlement in these new areas (Perrier de la Bâthie 1928:39).

3.1.2 Invasive plant

Decary noted the densest cactus formations, where invasive prickly pear had replaced apparently all (100%) native shrubs and trees, in a relatively small area south of Beloha near the coast in the deep south (Decary 1930a). Rather than stressing the plant's invasive tendencies, however, he associated the spread of raketa in the south with the later migrations, since the 18th century, into the region. He argued that there was a “growth relationship” between humans and prickly pear cactus.

The newcomers had in [raketa], from the beginning, both a food reserve, a secondary zone, one could say, and a means of defence against possible enemies. Replanted in a land with a very favourable climate, it has multiplied with exceptional facility, and its accrued planting is a measure of the movements of people who transported it everywhere, proportionally creating new cultivated land around which it was put in the ground as enclosures (Decary 1927:93).

Decary recognized a symbiosis: humans helped cactus and cactus helped humans. The human factor in the cactus realm – in the dissemination of this plant – was related to how cactus factored in the human realm (economic shelter as food and water, political shelter as defence against intruders). Cactus had not only become an integral part of the region's botanical landscape, it had become, in Decary's words, “incorporated into the ‘human landscape’ as well.” According to Decary a local proverb, “Tandroy [the people of the thorns] and raketa are kin,” conveyed this reciprocal relationship (Decary 1927). This sums up nicely his position, and also the line of attack from his opponents. If these people were at the level of a “noxious weed,” they must be in great need of the colonial “civilizing mission.”

“Plant pests,” according to Perrier de la Bâthie, were introduced plants that had a “fantastic growth” after the native vegetation had been destroyed. These plants tended to constrict farmers, limiting cultivation to the point sometimes of forcing them “to abandon entire territories” (Perrier de la Bâthie 1928). Madagascar, he argued, was particularly susceptible to some of these transfers. Its disturbed flora, the result of ruinous bush fires, provided the perfect conditions for colonizing plants to take over.

The pest at the top of Perrier de la Bâthie's list was raketa gasy. This “savage” plant, he continued, was the central cause of the south's economic “backwardness” as large tracts of fertile alluvial land around the Manambovo, Menarandra, Linta and Onilahy rivers, the best farmland, had been, he claimed, abandoned to cacti.

But these plains are most often uncultivated, abandoned, covered only by Raquette. What can, in fact, a native – an apathetic and enemy of all effort – going without shoes, do in the presence of this plant covered in thorns, whose every piece forms a new plant and which must be singed fragment by fragment for some reason? He goes elsewhere to live miserably on savage roots or even, pushed by starvation, on Raquette stems that he roasts over embers. A land invaded by Raquette becomes almost unusable and the French colonists at Tuléar do not arrive to clear, at great pain and great expense, these lands – hard work that natives often refuse to do (Perrier de la Bâthie 1928:37).

3.1.3 Impure pastures

Perrier de la Bâthie but not Decary viewed the south as infested with spiny cacti “weeds.” If Decary was correct in that pastoralism in southern Madagascar was entangled with cactus, then getting rid of the cactus would also liberate the pastoralists from a “weedy,” undignified, life of suffering. Whereas the “cactus-pastoralist” relationship signified a remarkable alliance for Decary, it implied a modernizing leverage for Perrier de la Bâthie. Destroying this relationship would finally “stop nomadism” in the “région cactée”– in which herders disappeared with their cattle into the mazes of cacti stands when a taxman approached – a project that Perrier de la Bâthie had supported in 1921. The idea that people and cactus were the same in some respect, that they shared a common bond and were interdependent, offended his sense of a moral economy. Allowing people to live in such a primitive state as subsisting on cactus – of all things! – was not a kindness but a curse on them. They needed not to singe cactus but to modernize. Eradicating cactus, therefore, would introduce a social experiment in modernizing cactus pastoralists.

[O]ne does not feed a man with Cactus! If the destruction of this plant illuminates this real fact, Alas! that the men of Madagascar who are forced to be content with such nourishment, it will be the cause of an immense progress, because one can hope that this will insure a less precarious existence to these natives, measures that have been required for a long time, that is to say those that we have recommended since 1912 and that consist in preparing and irrigating the southwestern plains, so as to give these natives the earth that can feed them (Perrier de la Bâthie 1928:38).

Finally, the cactus region, for Perrier de la Bâthie, was “not a true region of pastoralism” (Perrier de la Bâthie 1920). “Real” forage meant grass and “real” cattle herding occurred in grasslands, such as the Bongolava region in the island's western savannah, where he envisioned pasture fencing and grazing cattle in successive pens akin to ranching would replace extensive pastoralism with an intensive form (Perrier de la Bâthie 1920). The cactus war would do a service to people who were, in the author's view, barely living in this “hard-up”[pauvres], famine-prone, land. Perrier de la Bâthie saw the south, the cactus region, the cacti and the people who relied on it, in discrete modernist categories, desperately in need of liberation.

The goals of the 1920s cactus eradication campaign in Madagascar were a bit too complicated to fit neatly into Latour's framework. Yet nature purification seemed to be one motivating factor for the campaign. The land needed to be liberated of a dangerous pest that had entrapped colonized herders and held them back from progressing as intensive farmers or intensive ranchers. Purifying nature by eliminating an impurity, namely prickly pear cactus, would reveal the pure farmlands and make the impure pasturelands – the hybrid “forest-pastures” that I discussed earlier – unsuitable for pastoralism.

4 The evanescence

As a cactus parasite,9 the cochineal insect (Dactylopius tomentosus), began to be disseminated on O. monacantha around Toliara (Tuléar) on the southwest coast in 1924. Bâthie wrote that “This intruding plant has become a real bane” for three reasons: it covered most fertile earth, rendered inaccessible the good farmland and its clearing by conventional methods, such as sawing and burning, would require great expense (Perrier de la Bâthie 1924). All of that would change in a mere 5 years, with humans serving in the role of intermediary agents.10 French scientists and colonialists and conquered Malagasy themselves threw cladodes of raketa infested with cochineal larvae onto cactus plantations.

But the role played by man … explains the contamination of Opuntia existing [not in plantations where the females could move and lay eggs in adjoining plants] but in the extremities of unharmed zones [in fragmented or clumped cacti stands]. It was man, in large part, who joined the invaded zones. The natives, in effect, voluntarily transported infested articles very far from the point where they had been picked and threw them into healthy thickets (Petit 1929a:167).

The campaign ended in Ambovombe in 1929. It wiped clean the “infested” lands, opened the rich alluvial soils for cultivation and aggravated a famine that erupted in 1930 by undermining the co-produced hybrid ecology.

Perrier de la Bâthie (1924, 1928, 1932) and Petit (1929a,b) envisioned a significant modernist experiment coming about through this insect. It gave colonialists the chance to sedentarise, relocate and re-educate groups of pastoralists living in a remote part of the island more than a third the size of France. Disrupting their pastoralist ways of life would also move people into the Malagasy labour pool. Other colonialists, such as the veterinarian Geoffroy (1929a,b), the entomologist Frappa (1932a,b) and Decary (1928, 1930b), criticized the campaign and its risky modernist experiment to tear asunder the pastoralists' socio-economic institutions as the cause of the famine. Decary was the most incisive critic of the campaign against cactus, arguing that since raketa was an important “economic plant”– a “water-food” plant – in the largely waterless south, its eradication unleashed disastrous consequences upon the pastoralist economies that relied on it.

Petit defended the cactus eradication campaign as an unlikely trigger of famine. The area lacked modernist technology, such as irrigation works, and modern farming techniques.

Has raketa ever been able to prevent famines in south Madagascar? —No. Will its disappearance prevent future famines? No, again. But its eradication has liberated vast tracts of land, especially the alluvial river basins (Linto [sic], Menarandra, Mandraré], extending across approximately 40,000 hectares; it has transformed this country that seemed to have a vow with hunger and thirst and permits a glimpse of its beautiful future, from a cultural point of view…[T]he south of Madagascar possesses vast landscapes that are among the most fertile in Madagascar, why then have famines raged there over time? One can summarize the reasons as follows: primitive cultivation methods; keeping fertile land around grouped villages for defensive purposes that are no longer necessary; and finally, the total absence or irregularity of rains…[This last problem] requires a remedy… namely a vast irrigation project in the fertile lands in the south of the great island (Petit 1934:38 – 39).

Perrier de la Bâthie argued that prickly pear, rather than providing a “remedy” for famine, was itself the principal cause of famines in the deep south and southwest.

In summary, the spiny Raquette is a disastrous plant. It prevents the cultivation of SW land, which would be capable of feeding the population. As a result it is the principal cause of famines, not a remedy… Finally, if it is true that cattle and even men have to be content with this wretched food, adopting measures recommended 15 years ago would cause this suffering to disappear, because with or without the Raquette, the famine recurs in these ill-favoured lands. To choose by sheer habit, by lack of initiative and decision, to preserve such a state of affairs would be a crime and besides a whole other story, which has nothing to do with Raquette (Perrier de la Bâthie 1928:37 – 38).

He was right in insisting that famines recurred with or without cacti famine relief. There had been one in 1903, others in 1910 and 1913, one in 1916, another in 1921, still another would come along in 1930, after the eradication of raketa gasy (Decary 1933, for additional sources see Kaufmann 2000). The worst one occurred in 1943, killing livestock in the tens of thousands and hundreds of the poorest cactus pastoralists. As recent as 2002, severe famine again struck the region (Helisoa 2003; Helisoa & Mahavoatsy 2003; Rabeherifara 2003; Ravoavy 2003). But who said that cacti was “a remedy,” a way of stopping famines from occurring? Not Decary. Perrier de la Bâthie concluded that instead of providing relief during famine, prickly pear cactus was a source of suffering. The moral economy to counter famine was for Bâthie a farming economy that could develop on productive land freed of the cacti pests and open to crops. He advocated for developing the south with wells and hydraulic irrigation projects (Perrier de la Bâthie 1934).

The 1930 famine caught Bâthie and Petit by surprise. How could it not? They were modernists. The modern constitution, Latour argued, takes pains to ignore hybrids, to render invisible products of both human and non-human actors. Modernists could not understand raketa, nor the famine that ravaged in its stead, because their constitution appreciated only pure forms not hybrids.

According to Henri Deschamps (1959) the cacti had formed a barrier that had made in effect the cactus region into “an island in an island, a world apart.” Few would consider leaving it before the 1930 famine. Deschamps pointed out that in earlier periods of scarcity, dying silently in ones' home was considered the more dignified response to hunger than leaving that place. “Hunger was an ancestral custom; a hard country had modelled men to its image; they did not think nor desire to escape it” (Deschamps 1959).

This famine, as all famines do in the spiny region, hit hardest the elderly and poor who lacked sufficient numbers of cattle to recover with breeding stock. By my reckoning, it killed less than a thousand people and approximately 10,000 cattle (Kaufmann 2000). Hybridity has hierarchy, not equity (Narayan 1993). Not every cactus pastoralist had the same set of options in equal measure to get through the famine.

Increased herd migration was an option for people rich in family, kin and long-term allies, ziva. The important ziva to cactus pastoralists were not other cactus pastoralists but herders and farmers who lived in a different but complementary ecological zone. These ziva were located to the north, outside of the decimated cactus region. Another option was to cut down all sorts of browse for the cattle that had not gone to the long-term allies. This amounted to “destroying the land” (mamono ty tane). The cochineal, in Mahafale called pondy foty, unleashed grave abuses upon the landscape. Raketa had been a buffer that had until the cactus war absorbed the most damaging practices to the pastoralist environment. Before the cochineal had been introduced, prickly pear had always recovered quickly after the thin months. It even thrived on degraded land. But without their cactus the pastoralists could not afford to be good stewards of the land. Migrant work offered yet another response to the famine. But the land did not begin to recover until new cacti was introduced to the island in the wake of the 1943 famine. “The role of raketa is very great, it is in our opinion the easiest problem to solve and also one of the most urgent” (Bérard 1951).

For Petit and Bâthie, the “easiest” solution to the problem of water and food in the south was certainly not in the form of a “water-food” plant. That would be too simple, too primitive, too impure for their modernist sensibilities. The eradication campaign had promised to solve the problem of opening Opuntia landscapes to farming. Yet few settlers accepted farming concessions in the alluvial areas “freed” of cacti since water did not flow year round in most rivers in southern Madagascar (Perrier de la Bâthie 1934). Nor did Malagasy farmers intensify their farming activities (Decary 1935). The problem of water required more modernity, more purity in the form of a technological development that never saw the light of day. Enforcing the modern constitution has always been difficult because with it comes hybrids such as machines that run on air and fuel to pump water into irrigation canals.

5 The non-modern constitution of famine

The 1930 famine undermined the synergistic landscape, the cattle-amenable forest-pastures strengthened with water-food plants. This famine defied modernist understanding because cactus defied modernist understanding. The cactus and pastoralist hybrid made the famine more hybrid, more in defiance of modern understanding in pure categories. Raketa was misunderstood by Bâthie and Petit as an “enabler” of famine on the basis that famine had occurred during its tenure. Conceptualizing famine in southern Madagascar as a non-modern one improves the systemic capacity for survival, meaning that hybridity not purity makes cattle husbandry more viable in the region. What is needed is a different understanding of famine than what the modern constitution offers.11 Listening to local pastoralists is a good start. I turn now to some Mahafale views of famine.

5.1 Mahafale famine

Mahafale considered famines as integral to the landscape. They blended hunger and famine with the dry land they called home. Mahafale conceived famines not as discrete events of an ecosystem out of equilibrium, of nature tipped out of balance, but as contiguous events – always nearby – as part of nature. In contrast, Mahafale theorized fire as a discrete social category not part of dry land that sometimes changed into desiccated land (tane maike). The region's many succulent xerophytes were so protective of moisture that they resisted bush and forest fires (doro tanety) (for some Malagasy fire practices see Kull 2004). As Mahafale explained, “We have no wildfires because most vegetation in the Mahafale does not burn.”

However, they did have “kere” as a contiguous part of dry land. Its nearness, its inevitability, was wound into the word itself. “Kere” functioned as both a substantive and an adjective in the Mahafale dialect, denoting a famine event and also describing the state of being in a famine, famished, or, less drastically, in a state of wanting, lacking and in need. The same went for mosare, or mosary and mosarèna in the Merina dialect (Richardson 1885).

I first learned of the nearness of famines to life in the Mahafale from a brother of one of my key consultants. As I began walking alone from Besely-sud towards Androka Vaovao on the other side of the Linta river he joined me. We talked about kere the entire way.

I learned that day, then many times afterwards, that each year there was a certain amount of famine around Androka Vaovao. When supplies were short from January to March or until new crops were harvested, rice and corn and manioc tripled in price.12 In any year, many people could not afford prices for staples and went without certain produce (vokatse). Locusts (valala) were a recurring problem, though the severity of damage to crops fluctuated. During my year at Androka, they took all the early corn and some of the manioc. During the rainy season, he said, people always suffer (mijaly). If the rains do not come, then the severe shortages add to the already high price of food. People then have to depend on famine relief, on help from overseas NGO's like CARE, who distribute food through Ampanihy.

Efforts to modernize famines by purification alone guarantees that famines have never been modern. Famine events seem always to defy modern understanding (de Waal 1989). The modern constitution considers them as anomalies. We take the first step towards understanding famines as non-modern events by, first, asking as Latour instructs us, “Are they human? Human because they are our work. Are they natural? Natural because they are not our doing” (Latour 1993). And, second, by answering neither (Robbins 2001). Hybrids are more than the sum of their parts. “Famine is simultaneously a biological and a social experience,” as Michael Watts noted in his study of famines in Nigeria (Watts 1983). Respecting the non-modern constitution of famine helps to dampen the affects of famines in Madagascar's spiny forest, and on their impact on both nature and society. Prickly pear can not transform the land to be free of famines. But it helps cactus pastoralists negotiate their ways through it, on to the next occurrence.

6 Conclusion

My Latourian hypothesis – the more that modernists attempt to separate nature and culture in pure discrete categories, the more that famines defy modernist understanding – has held. It helps, therefore, to begin understanding famines as hybrids. The synergism between cactus pastoralists and cacti, between both human and non-human actors, also demonstrated Latour's point about hybridity.13 Yet hybridity is not everyone's project (Thomas 1996; cf. Kohn 2007). I want to close by trying to further the discussion about modernity and outline another direction for study.

It is not so much that Latour was incorrect in his formulation of modernity, as that he was not anthropological enough in his questioning the concept of modernity. Anthropologists are well positioned to get in “step with the locals on the meaning of modernity” (Ferguson 2006). The concept and project of modernity seems not to be as homogeneous as Latour assumed. Other people in other cultures may conceive it as not just a matter of purity; they may have their own notions and standards of modernity and their own ways of being modern. For example, the kings and queens of Imerina, in Madagascar's central highlands, kept up with French and English royal fashions not because they were non-modern, hybrid practices, but because they wanted to be modern. They did not aspire to be carbon copies of European icons, but they worked at presenting themselves as modern royal rulers to their subjects (Larson 2000; Campbell 2005; Laidler 2005).

Cactus pastoralism may likewise be a kind of modernity that developed out of culture contact. It is a creolization weighted heavily on Malagasy creativity and adaptations, not on colonial agents who never saw in prickly pear the capacity to remake a pastoralist way of life. But some of the evidence stated above suggests that cactus pastoralism may be an alternative modernity. Planting cacti produced an intensification of resources. Cactus pastoralists created a food stockpile and a water reservoir with its own hydraulics that intersects with how Mahafale society organizes and utilizes its water resources. Planting cacti hedging around gardens was said to draw water to the area. This suggests subterranean irrigation as an indigenous conception of irrigation. Further study is needed into competition among Mahafale to increase their power with water; not centrally controlled as public works irrigation projects lend themselves to, but more egalitarian in that anyone can graft raketa to the soils that favoured them by simply planting them and shaping them into living fencing.

Mahafale pastoralists described the economics of raising cattle with a banking analogy. Their zebu were like money deposited in a bank and the forest-pastures represented a sort of banking infrastructure (cf. Clutton-Brock 1989). Whenever a situation requiring money presented itself, the stockowner could choose to sell an animal at an open-air market. The sale of zebu permitted stockbreeders to solve some of life's problems such as buying the iron frame for an ox-cart, school fees and supplies for children, medicines, and pots and pans. The forest-pastures were resources linked to their cattle. Pastures, grass and trees all provided resources for livestock. Moreover, the forest provided cover in which to hide their cattle. If they planned to sell an animal, they could assure its safety before taking it to market by hiding it in the forest. They also hid cattle in the forest at tax-assessment time and when cattle rustlers were active in the area. Pastoralists also likened drawing resources from the forest reserve to foreigners' withdrawing money from their bank accounts. Yet, the ideal rule was not to withdraw all of their savings (Tsirahamba & Kaufmann 2007). The tragedy of the 1930 killing famine might be akin to the 1929 crash of the stock market. The economics of cactus pastoralism might manage risk like investing wisely on Wall Street.

Acknowledgements

My first thanks, as always, must go to the people along the lower Linta river, who made me first think of how they viewed famines. Special thanks to Dedidé, Ependa, Etikovohatse, Etsiatorake, Etoemare, Evarinane, Evelomatsimaito, Ezoepanana, Heremasy, Imene, Injarasoa, Izoene, Mampanadesamake, Raboba, Tatienne, Todisoa and Tosiny. The essay was improved by the insights and critiques of the journal's three anonymous reviewers. Any errors remaining are my own. Adrian Martin was gracious, encouraging and patient throughout the process. An early draft of this paper was given at the session “Malagasy Culture and the Environment”, 30 – 31 March 2007 International Symposium “Society, Natural Resources and Development in Madagascar, Recent Contributions by the Research Community” hosted by the Sainsbury Research Unit and the School of Development Studies, University of East Anglia, Norwich, UK. I thank Barry Ferguson for his efforts in organizing the symposium and bringing many scholars together. This essay would not have been written if not for the financial support from the University of Southern Mississippi, in particular the College of Arts and Letters, the British Studies program, the Office of the Vice President for Research and Economic Development, and the Provost's Office.

Notes

1. “Raketa” is a Malagasy rendering of the French “raquette,” which refers to the racket shaped flat water storing pads of the various prickly pear species that the French introduced to the island.

2. I prefer “coactive species” over “invasive species” to emphasize a synergetic landscape, a coalescence, a cultural grafting of a plant to make an enriched landscape, and to avoid the subversive agency implied in the notion of “invasive.”

3. My thanks to an anonymous reviewer for helping to summarize the argument in this way.

4. For a summary of Madagascar's environmental crisis in terms of “explicit” and “implicit” purity, see Kaufmann 2006:185 – 188.

5. Once, while gathering firewood, I stumbled upon a “killing field” of hundreds of radiated tortoise carcasses. My companions explained that while radiated tortoise (sokatse) was indeed taboo to Mahafale, some of the local gendarmes of the Betsileo ethnic group stopped there on their regular rounds every month to feast on tortoise they had picked up on their rounds.

6. The taxonomic status of the prickly pear species and varieties currently in Madagascar has yet to be completed.

7. The cattle may have changed too, though I lack the blood tests and can only speculate at this time. I observed pampered steers refusing to eat grass with the herd in the quasi-pastures. They quietly broke off from the herd and ran back home, where we found them waiting next to a cactus plantation for their next feeding. I suspect an enzyme change has occurred in their stomachs that breaks down cactus but makes digesting grass more difficult. This suspicion may be supported with evidence from related cases elsewhere, as an anonymous reviewer pointed out.

8. Another consequence was the reduction in mobility among the cattle raisers. Cactus has become a condition affecting both increased sedentarisation and the timing of transhumance migration (Kaufmann 2004).

9. The cochineal insect is monophagous: it feeds on one particular cactus species, but dies on a different host species.

10. Some authors claimed that the wind was the responsible agent. But it was not; the prevailing winds blew in the opposite direction of the movement of the desiccating cacti and, more importantly, the female cochineal, which lays the larvae that consumes the cactus, are sedentary and require some form of transportation to spread, in just five years, throughout the cactus region that spanned several hundred kilomtres south-eastward from Toliara.

11. A Malagasy filmmaker, Hery Rasolo, produced a 52 min documentary on the effects of raketa mena (red cactus) on famine in southern Madagascar (Rasolo 2007). He took a modernist perspective, reminiscent of Perrier de la Bâthie's arguments, equating the pastoralists' state of suffering with insipid cactus pears that cause constipation. I thank Barry Ferguson for e-mailing me the film review of this documentary that appeared in Madagascar Express, (see Drouot 2007).

12. Rice went for 1000 – 1500 fmg/kapoake (Nestlè condensed milk can), cassava or manioc (balahazo) fetched 1000/kg and so on.

13. “Cactus pastoralism” is something of an anomaly in the pastoralist literature. Western scholars of pastoralist societies rely on a typology or terminology that defines the form of pastoralism in relation to whether they are close or far from pure nomadism. Pastoralist studies have flirted with the modern constitution. As Latour (1993) wrote, “hybrids are indeed accepted, but solely as mixtures of pure forms in equal proportion.”