doubting modernity for madagascar's cactus ...

DOUBTING MODERNITY FOR MADAGASCAR’S CACTUS PASTORALISTS JEFFREY C. KAUFMANN UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN MISSISSIPPI

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 Mon-

1See, for example, David Henige’s The Chronology of Oral Tradition: Quest for a Chimera (Oxford, 1974); David Henige, Oral Historiography (London, 1982); David Henige, Historical Evidence and Argument (Madison, 2005). 2Anatoly M. Khazanov critiques nostalgia in the pastoralist literature in his “Pastoralists in the ‘Age of Globalization:’ Challenges of the 21st Century,” in: Jörg Janzen, and Batboldyn Enkhtuvshin (eds.), Dialogue Between Cultures and Civilizations. Present State and Perspectives of Nomadism in a Globalizing World (Ulaanbaatar, 2004), 13–28. 3The allusion to the popular documentary film series Disappearing Worlds is intentional. 4Henige, Historical Evidence, 32.

History in Africa 38 (2011), 123–151

124

Jeffrey C. Kaufmann

taigne-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, 5Compare Michel de Montaigne, Essais, (Paris, 1937), Book 1, 252. 6Henige, Historical Evidence, 41. 7In my brief summary of this history here, I draw from my “The Non-Modern

Constitution of Famines in Madagascar’s Spiny Forests: ‘Water-Food’ Plants, Cattle and Mahafale Landscape Praxis,” Environmental Sciences 5 (2008), 73–89. 8Raymond Decary, “Epoques d’introduction des Opuntias monacantha dans le sud de Madagascar,” Revue de botanique appliquée et d’agriculture tropicale 27 (1947), 455–57.

Doubting Modernity for Madagascar’s Cactus Pastoralists

125

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 this plant was not anti-modernity, but, rather, like Clifford Geertz’s “anti anti-relativism,” it was “anti anti-modernity”?11 This meant that somehow I needed to show that prickly pear was key to an indigenous or vernacular modernity – a different way of being modern than, for example, the French model. I no longer think that “anti anti-modernity” may be used instead of modernity. It turned out that the “somehow” in the sentence above was harder to demonstrate than I anticipated. The problem was not a lack of examples in the literature to draw inspiration; plenty has been written about “alternative modernity.”12 The problem was the case at hand. After assem9There

are numerous sources for this view, but an influential statement for it is found in Henri Perrier de la Bâthie, “Les pestes végétales à Madagascar,” Revue de botanique appliquée et d’agriculture coloniale 8 (1928), 36–43, especially 37. Perrier argued that if the alluvial regions around the major fluvial systems in the southwest and south were free of prickly pear and planted in crops, the region could support a population ten times what it had at the time. A reasonable estimate of one hundred thousand Mahafale and Tandroy people living in the region at the time would grow the population, if Perrier’s plan were realized, to a million. With the southwest’s recurring droughts and famines, such an endeavor had disaster written all over it. 10See, for example, Andry Drouot, “‘Raketa mena’ ou la misère du Sud,” L’Express de Madagascar (22 February 2007), www.lexpressmada.com/display.php?p=display&id= 5493; O. Helisoa, G. Mahavoatsy, “Kere: état des lieux les potentialités culturales du sud malgache—résumé 2003,” www.heli-s-madagascar.fr.st; Hery Rasolo, “Raketa mena (cactus rouge),” Documentary film, (Madagascar, 2007), 52 min. 11Clifford Geertz, “Distinguished Lecture: Anti Anti-Relativism,” American Anthropologist 86 (1984), 263–78. 12Other than the views of James Ferguson and Michel-Rolph Trouillot, whose ideas will be discussed in developing the case at hand, a sampling: Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (Minneapolis, 1996); Arjun Appadurai, (ed.), Globalization (Durham, 2001); Heike Behrend, and Ute Luig (eds.), Spirit Possession, Modernity, and Power in Africa (Madison, 1999); Marshall Berman, All That Is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity (New York, 1982); Nicholas B. Dirks,

126

Jeffrey C. Kaufmann

bling the evidence into the best case that I could for a prickly pear kind of modernity, I could not answer a reviewer’s discerning question about my pursuit of “modernity:” “what is it that makes this such a compelling concept and of relevance to this case?”13 The convincing facts simply were not there for me.14 I failed to demonstrate that cactus pastoralists of Madagascar have used prickly pear cactus as a resource for making an indigenous modernity. Neither modernity nor anti anti-modernity seem to work in the case of Madagascar’s cactus pastoralists. The condition or state of mind of modernity, whether of a Western kind or one of their own fashioning, has, in this case, less relevance than “modernization,” which refers to a process of rationalization, of increased scale, and of new technology introductions. But all was not lost. Evaluating and doubting the evidence identifies not only shortfalls but also strengths.15 Marking off what does not work clarifies what does work. This is part of the dialectical rhythms or cycles that Henige noted results from a pyrrhonist skepticism. In my haste to say something “History as a Sign of the Modern,” Public Culture 2 (1990), 25–32; Donald L. Donham, Marxist Modern: An Ethnographic History of the Ethiopian Revolution (Berkeley, 1999); Donald L. Donham, “On Being Modern in a Capitalist World: Some Conceptual and Comparative Issues,” in: Bruce M. Knauft (ed.), Critically Modern: Alternatives, Alterities, Anthropologies (Bloomington, 2002), 241–57; S.N. Eisenstadt, (ed.), Daedalus (special issue on “Multiple Modernities”) 129 (2001); Harri Englund, and James Leach, “Ethnography and the Meta-Narratives of Modernity,” Current Anthropology 41 (2000), 225–48; Jonathan Friedman, “Modernity and Other Traditions,” in: Bruce M. Knauft (ed.), Critically Modern: Alternatives, Alterities, Anthropologies (Bloomington, 2002), 287–313; Dilip Parameshwar Gaonkar (ed.), Alternative Modernities (Durham, 2001); Peter Geschiere, The Modernity of Witchcraft: Politics and the Occult in Postcolonial Africa (Charlottesville, 1997); Anthony Giddens, The Consequences of Modernity (Stanford, 1990); Ivan Karp, “Development and Personhood: Tracing the Contours of a Moral Discourse,” in: Bruce M. Knauft (ed.), Critically Modern: Alternatives, Alterities, Anthropologies (Bloomington, 2002), 82–104; John D. Kelly, “Alternative Modernities or an Alternative to ‘Modernity:’ Getting Out of the Modernist Sublime,” in: Bruce M. Knauft (ed.), Critically Modern: Alternatives, Alterities, Anthropologies (Bloomington, 2002), 258–86; Bruce M. Knauft, “Critically Modern: An Introduction,” in: Bruce M. Knauft (ed.), Critically Modern: Alternatives, Alterities, Anthropologies (Bloomington, 2002), 1–54; Charles Piot, Remotely Global: Village Modernity in West Africa (Chicago, 1999); Immanuel Wallerstein, The Modern World-System (New York, 1976). 13In fact, all three anonymous reviewers were unconvinced by my attempt to attribute modernity to the case at hand. 14Perhaps somebody else will have more success than me. 15Anthropologists can learn from historians like Henige in the ways of using doubt to make our methods better. Compare H. Russell Bernard, Research Methods in Anthropology: Qualitative and Quantitative Approaches (Lanham MD, 2011).


127

new and perhaps mildly remarkable, I have not always been a good steward of the evidence.16 Perhaps I should have listened more closely to the Mahafale herders who tried to convince me that they were not modernists but traditionalists. I attributed their claims of traditionalism as a function of their own romantic notions of the past. Why does modernity not help very much in understanding pastoralists who have a remarkable relationship with cactus plants? The concept falls short on three counts in the cactus case. First, the materiality of modernity, its “common sense” conception, does not resonate in the case at hand. There is little to suggest that there is something to it in the field site I will describe below. Second, the rupture that came about from colonial intrusions did not have a lasting effect on the local cultures. The plant, in fact, helped the pastoralists stitch together their ruptured way of life and way of making a living. Third, expectations of modernity, of gaining a better quality of life, of using the plant to give cactus pastoralists more access to the globalization playing field, were not well pronounced. People themselves did not talk in terms of modernity.

II

With common sense as a guide, there was not much evidence of modernity, in a material sense, at Androka, the small town in the heart of Madagascar’s “cactus region” where I lived in 1997. There were no investment firms, no stock exchanges, no stock brokers, no shares, no stock options, nor tax benefits, no consolidated financial statements, no fixed asset reports, no capital gains, nor interest statements. In sensible colonial style, the mayoral compound occupied the center of town, within a few minutes walk southwest to the Catholic compound and its church, school, and clinic, or the same distance northwest to the gendarme compound with its flagpole and national flag, assembly courtyard, and barracks, or to the north and east where dozens of Vezo and Mahafale families built their wood houses that resembled airy beach cottages only smaller. The single window and door of the mayor’s office opened onto the outdoor market place, where vendors and customers gathered every Satur16I

appreciate David’s numerous nudgings over the years for me to take as much care of the evidence as I do for the herders about whom I write. Like a cow chewing its cud, I have been staring off into space and have not until now gotten serious about his concerns.

128

Jeffrey C. Kaufmann

day to mingle and barter over prickly pear fruits, spare vegetables, bags of rice, cheap Chinese utensils, and livestock. Since there was no electricity in Androka, the mayor kept his door open during office hours, using the natural light to read his paperwork. Nor did the town have a sewer and water system or telephone service. Androka’s main link to the outside was by foot, by ox-cart, and by the weekly passenger truck that arrived in town every Friday night and departed again Saturday evening, taking two days on bumpy dirt roads back to Toliara on the southwest coast to begin the cycle again. Androka had not always been so landlocked. Before French colonial rule (1896–1960), which turned the direction of commerce inland and northward beginning with General Gallieni’s southern campaigns,17 Androka was located originally on the coast, serving as a port for sea trade with ships flying European and sometimes American flags.18 Livestock and rubber were favorite local products that the Mahafale magnates, who lived inland behind thorny enclosures protecting their massive herds, traded for guns, silver, and commodities.19 European traders built shops on Nosy Ve (not to be confused with Nosy Be or sometimes Nossi Be in the colonial literature, the large island off Madagascar’s northwest coast), a tiny island within sight of Androka when it was a coastal settlement, where they conducted their business with the mainland.20 The Androka that I came to know seemed buried even further in the hinterland than the Androka that Vice-president Campan dealt with in 1885 from his trading post on Nosy Ve a mile out to sea. Evidence of colonial investments still stood in the form of a large hospital complex, which the Malagasy state had abandoned due to a lack of resources and skilled medical practitioners to keep it open. An NGO had taken over that responsibility from the state. Catholic Relief Services and nuns trained as rural nurses attended to the medical needs of the surrounding countryside. The church had access, of sorts, to a vehicle, which visited infrequently from Ampanihy, the district headquarters 100 kilometers north, bringing stores of medicines and the occasional relief goods such as barrels of cooking oil from the United States. The only vehicle stationed at Androka was a forty year old 17Louis-Hubert Lyautey, Dans le sud de Madagascar: pénétration militaire, situation politique et économique, 1900–1902 (Paris, 1903). 18Etsiatorake, oral history of Androka, recorded 23 July 1997. 19Eugène Bastard, “Mission chez les Mahafalys,” Revue de Madagascar 2 (1900), 704. For a fuller account of Mahafale/European relations on the cusp of French colonization, see Jeffrey C. Kaufmann, “Faly aux vazaha: Eugène Bastard, Taboo, and Mahafale Autarky in Southwest Madagascar, 1899,” History in Africa 26 (1999), 129–55. 20Hubert Deschamps, Histoire de Madagascar (Paris, 1965), 196.


129

Range Rover riveted together with cunning and recklessness. Nobody wanted to ride in it except for the two young brothers who kept it going at breakneck speed, carrying fish to market and to their family’s hotel in Ampanihy. The home I stayed in, which was maintained by a grandmother of four, sometimes five, children in her care, had one of the few tin roofs in town. The children’s mother stayed at the tiny quarters of the garrison barracks with the father of her youngest child. Women laundered once a week, after girls hauled pails of water from the communal well and filled oil barrels recycled as water drums. Kitchens were located outside the main abode, where girls prepared the family meal over wood fires, sometimes over charcoal. As the day wore down, men and boys brought their zebu cattle back to their corrals to bed down for the night and give milk to the hungry calves left behind. The evening meal was the main meal of the day. Diets consisted mainly of corn, sweet potato, rice, fish, and cow’s milk stored as yogurt. Most Mahafale families gardened and herded cows for a living, while a few cropped maize and sold their harvest. Vezo families tended to be involved in the fish trade – buying from fishers on the coast and transporting the dried fish to markets further inland – and in farming.21 Night descended at Androka like a dark cloud hurrying people into their homes. With the last minute chores finished – livestock settled, gates secured, tools collected for safekeeping – the herders stepped into their homes for the first time since daybreak. During the night, it was customary to stay indoors, behind lock and key, to avoid any witches that might be roaming in search of victims. A next door neighbor fell prey to a witch, I was told, who turned him within earshot from a polite young man into a raving madman. My hosts feared he would harm me, the only vazaha (affluent stranger from abroad) in town. His mother took him to a Christian camp, run by a woman who was reputed to be a prophet and a powerful healer. Four months later he returned home cured, allegedly. He smiled a lot, no longer captive of a personal rage. The days seemed to begin not from a rising sun but from the enormous cactus plantations pulling themselves up out of the darkness by their own volition. Prickly pear cactus dominated the landscape around the town, a fact that drew me to Androka in the first place to learn how the herders kept their cattle alive with the plant.22 Cactus surrounded the town’s perimeter 21Rita

Astuti, People of the Sea: Identity and Descent among the Vezo of Madagascar (Cambridge, 1995). 22My research affiliate at the University of Antananarivo, the historian Dr. Manassé Esoavelomandroso, identified Androka as “the cactus center” in the Mahafale region.

130

Jeffrey C. Kaufmann

and cordoned off different areas of town. Large thick cactus fences enclosed the Catholic compound and the garrison, and cactus fencing functioned as a large corral southeast of the mayor’s office, which could have held easily six hundred head. Individual landowners also maintained massive cactus plantations from which they fed their cattle mainly during the dry season, and they fenced their gardens and fields with the thorny plant. Everywhere one looked – cactus. Being rich in cactus did not make people rich materially. My Malagasy contacts in and around Androka were poor by European standards, even by Malagasy standards of living. Mahafale were not as quick as Vezo to complain about their limited financial resources, but they recognized that their standards of living had declined with colonization and even more after independence. Male elders recounted a nostalgic era, before colonization but at the height of trade with Europe in the nineteenth century, when a few herders grew powerful and famous by amassing cattle herds numbering in the thousands.23 Women, more than men, tended to be content with their lives in the present because there were more commodities, more “things of value” (fisikina)24 as they called them, which improved their quality of life.25 Bridewealth has by now expanded beyond the traditional wet cow to include an array of domestic goods such as cloth and clothing, shoes, jewelry, beds, flatware and cooking utensils, and gardening tools.26 Most residents now made their humble living in agriculture, centered around – to those unfamiliar with living with it – a strange, seemingly primitive, even dangerous, plant. They believed in witchcraft and a cosmology populated with numerous spirits and supernatural beings besides the Christian God. Where, common sense asks, is the modernity in all of this? Common sense keeps conjuring, erroneously, an evolutionary picture of things, charting Madagascar as developmentally many years behind Europe or the United States and the cactus pastoralists even further back. Even one such as I who grew up in one of the least developed parts of the United States, on a cattle ranch in central Montana, did not have an answer to the 23Fieldnotes 24A typical

with Mampanadesamake at Androka Vaovao, 17 July 1997. list of examples included hospitals, doctors, automobiles, gold, durable clothes, shoes, and watches. 25Fieldnotes with Imene at Ankilimanitse, 12 August 1997. 26At the other end of life, in parting with a person at his or her funeral, a similar inflation has occurred. People complained of how expensive funerals had become recently. But they also met their social obligations, even if it took four or five years before the funeral could actually take place.


131

above commonly drawn comparison, heard from cattle camps in the spiny region to the grande ville of Antananarivo. Only my historical anthropology training helped me to challenge common sense and the ethnocentrism inherent in it, which, as a discipline, prepared me to look critically at common sense and to doubt essentialist conceptions of being human. Common sense can not help anthropologists discover different cultural meanings, which, according to Michael Herzfeld, fuels challenges to common sense and ethnocentrism by studying the different ways of being human to broaden our understanding of the human world.27 Anthropology becomes a critical method for doubting common sense and recognizing our own parochialism. On occasion, anthropology might win a battle with common sense, but I doubt it has much chance of winning the war. Common sense “craves final answers,” of which there are few.28 As Henige noted thirty five years ago about African history, the same can be said of African historical anthropology: “Finally, and perhaps most importantly, we deal with particularly refractory sources – living, changing informants; fragmentary, synthetic, ex parte traditions; odd collections of artifacts; linguistic data of unequal distribution and analytical value.”29 Common sense likes none of these.

III

Two elements in the ethnographic context described above invite closer looks beyond the generalizations of common sense. The first is the suggestion of “rupture” that Michel-Rolph Trouillot claims accompanied European colonization, and which was, to some degree, in evidence at Androka.30 The second, which James Ferguson proposes, builds upon common sense by using the evidence of underdevelopment to illustrate the vast inequities within globalization.31 27Michael Herzfeld, Anthropology: Theory in Practice (New York, 2001), xv. 28Henige, Historical Evidence, 241. 29David Henige, “Do African Historians Need to Fear the Slouching Beast

of Skepticism?,” The International Journal of African Historical Studies 8 (1975), 457–63, quotation from 462. 30Michel-Rolph Trouillot, “The Otherwise Modern: Caribbean Lessons from the Savage Slot,” in: Bruce M. Knauft (ed.), Critically Modern: Alternatives, Alterities, Anthropologies (Bloomington, 2002), 220–37, see especially, 223–25; Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Global Transformations: Anthropology and the Modern World (New York, 2003). 31James Ferguson, Expectations of Modernity: Myths and Meanings of Urban Life on the Zambian Copperbelt (Berkeley, 1999); James Ferguson, Global Shadows: Africa in the Neoliberal World Order (Durham, 2006).

132

Jeffrey C. Kaufmann

Trouillot contends that the historical ruptures caused by colonial contact and acculturation serve as universal markers of modernity. Colonialism realigned its colonized cultures into a western conception of time and the duration of the past, as well as a reorganization of space for political and economic exploitation.32 “[T]he Caribbean has been modern since its early incorporation in various North Atlantic empires. (…) Caribbean slaves were modern, having internalized ideals of individual betterment through work, ownership, and personal identification to particular commodities. It was a strained and harsh modernity, to be sure. Otherwise modern they were – yet still undoubtedly modern by that definition.”33 The rupture, for Trouillot, amounts to “the awareness of one’s position in history not just as an individual but as part of a group and against the background of a social system brought to consciousness” by colonial intrusions such as its modernization processes.34 Governor General Gallieni’s method of pacification in Madagascar was to rebuild and modernize villages with a market and a school and to make “roads passable at least by draft animals.”35 The town of Androka exhibited its stark colonial heritage through its design, its market compound, its school, and its hospital – with hygiene being the “sign of modernity” for Gallieni and the French moderns who saw themselves a step above other empire builders.36 But the town was not the only place that showed the effects of a rupture with the past brought about by colonial modernization efforts. The French sought to rupture the alliance between prickly pear and pastoralists, which they did in the “cactus war” of the 1920s. The majority of French colonial authors who wrote about prickly pear and its bearing on economy, ecology, and security in the “région cactée” tended to consider the plant as the raison d’être for their being the agents of change in southern Madagascar. The plant attracted the attention of French colonial writers, the majority of whom argued for its eradication. The naturalist Henri Perrier de la Bâthie led the way in collecting evidence to support the view that the thorny plant and its spiny fruit (cactus pear or tuna) was the antithesis of modernity, a barbaric plant that made the southern pas32Trouillot, “The Otherwise Modern,” 223–25. 33Trouillot, “The Otherwise Modern,” 228, 230. 34Trouillot, “The Otherwise Modern,” 232. 35Paul Rabinow, French Modern: Norms and Forms

go, 1989), 149. 36Rabinow, French Modern, 149.

of the Social Environment (Chica-


133

toralists into barbarians37 – a problem that he thought could be fixed by the elimination of the plant.38 A minority of authors focused on evidence in support of the argument that raketa (prickly pear cactus) assisted the local populations in their pursuit of a pastoralist way of life in the arid south. The administrator/botanist Raymond Decary attempted rather emic accounts of the importance of the water storing plant in the dry Androy country.39 He even went so far as to suggest that, for the herding system in the region, ‘‘pastoralism notably cannot be practiced without Opuntia.’’40 A few years later, Decary would walk among desiccated piles of fallen cacti, the casualties of biological warfare in the form of an introduced cactus parasite, a cochineal insect.41 Cattle and vulnerable people died in the ensuing killing famine, making Decary a better prophet than Perrier de la Bâthie of the effects of a landscape without cacti. With 64,370 km2 of land cleared of raketa gasy (O. monacantha),42 Perrier de la Bâthie’s call for French farmers to settle in the alluvial valleys never happened, nor did his wish for cactus pastoralists to move out of the dry south into the wetter prairies further north to become stock ranchers with pastures fenced with barbed wire.43 The evidence for the evanescence of the original, highly successful, species of Malagasy cactus consists of numerous published articles in peerreviewed scientific journals,44 of Decary’s large compendium volumes doc37Henri Perrier de la Bâthie, “Les prairies malgaches,” Bulletin économique de Madagascar et dépendances 17 (1920), 1–16, especially page 12. 38Perrier de la Bâthie, “Les pestes,” 37. 39Raymond Decary, “L’utilisation des Opuntias en Androy (extrême sud de Madagascar),” Revue de botanique appliquée et d’agriculture coloniale 5 (1925), 769–71. 40Decary, “L’utilisation des Opuntias,” 771. 41Henri Perrier de la Bâthie, “Introduction à Tananarive du “Coccus Cacti” ou cochenille du figuier d’Inde,” Bulletin économique de Madagascar et dépendances 21 (1924), 222. 42C. Frappa, “Sur Dactylopius tomentosus Lam. et son acclimatement à Madagascar,” Revue de pathologie végétale et d’entomologie agricole de France 19 (1932), 48–55. 43Perrier de la Bâthie, “Les prairies malgaches,” 12–13. 44Besides the citations above in Revue de botanique appliquée et d’agriculture coloniale, see Raymond Decary, “La question des raiketa dans l’extrême sud de Madagascar,” Bulletin économique de Madagascar et dépendances 24 (1927), 92–96; Raymond Decary, “La destruction des cactus par une cochenille à Madagascar: ses conséquences économiques et sociales,” Annales de société Linnéenne de Lyon 75 (1930), 101–17; Raymond Decary, “La conquête économique de l’extrême-sud de Madagascar,” La Géographie 64 (1935), 365–76; C. Frappa, “Au sujet de la cochenille des opuntia à Madagascar,” L’agronomie coloniale 172 (1932), 132; H. Perrier de la Bâthie, “Les famines du sud-ouest de Madagascar: causes et remèdes,” Revue de botanique appliquée et d’agriculture tropicale 14 (1934), 173–86; Georges Petit, “Introduction à Madagascar de la cochenille du figuier d’Inde (Dactylopius coccus Costa) et ses conséquences inat-

134

Jeffrey C. Kaufmann

umenting the changes to nature and culture in the Androy region during the middle colonial period,45 and of photographs, letters, and reports in various archives.46 Determining the person or persons responsible for importing the deadly biological agents has turned out to be much more difficult. Karen Middleton recounts an interesting exchange of letters between Perrier de la Bâthie and Decary that suggests, ironically, the latter had a hand in transferring the insects to the island.47 So far as I can discover, a South African entomologist offered in a letter to bring packages of the insects into the country and oversee their dispersal on cacti cladodes.48 If rupture or discontinuity marks modernity, as Trouillot claims, then the demise of raketa gasy and the shock it sent through the pastoralist economies in the region should be a logical way to investigate a pastoralist modernity. An abundance of evidence seems to point in that direction.49 But there is one important area where the evidence remains silent: the people themselves have not taken to playing the role of victims. They do not highlight “the years of white poison” (ty taon’ pondy foty), between 1924 and 1930, when their beloved cacti were infested with cochineal eggs in white cottony nests.50 Several elders recalled for me watching raketa gasy die but tendues,” Revue d’histoire naturelle 10 (1929), 160–73; Georges Petit, “Sur l’introduction à Madagascar du ‘Dactylopius coccus Costa’ parasite de l’Opuntia vulgaris Mill.,” Comptes-rendus des séances de l’académie d’agriculture de France 15 (1929), 410–16; Georges Petit, “La disparition des Opuntia et les famines périodiques dans le sud de Madagascar,” Bulletin de l’association de géographes Français 75 (1934), 37–39. 45Raymond Decary, L’Androy (extrême sud de Madagascar). Essai de monographie régionale. I. Géographie physique et humaine (Paris, 1930); Raymond Decary, L’Androy (extrême sud de Madagascar). Essai de monographie régionale. II. Histoire. Civilisation. Colonisation (Paris, 1933). 46Documentary evidence is housed in, for example, COAM, various French natural history archives, the Malagasy National Archives, and regional Malagasy archives. Most of the evidence appears to be in France. 47Karen Middleton, “Who Killed ‘Malagasy Cactus’? Science, Environment and Colonialism in Southern Madagascar (1924–1930),” Journal of Southern African Studies 25 (1999), 215–48. 48Until more conclusive evidence is found, I choose to withhold his identity. Research in South African archives may turn up additional evidence. 49I have explored some of this evidence in various publications, see in particular, “The Non-Modern Constitution of Famines,” 73–89. 50Jeffrey C. Kaufmann, “La question des raketa: Colonial Struggles with Prickly Pear Cactus in Southern Madagascar, 1900–1923,” Ethnohistory 48 (2001), 87–121; Jeffrey C. Kaufmann, “Prickly Pear Cactus and Pastoralism in Southwest Madagascar,” Ethnology 43 (2004), 345–61; Jeffrey C. Kaufmann, and Sylvestre Tsirahamba, “Forests and Thorns: Conditions of Change Affecting Mahafale Pastoralists in Southwestern Madagascar,” Conservation and Society 4 (2006), 231–61 (also available from: www.conservationandsociety.org).


135

none described the events that followed as catastrophic or even transformative. I suspect that what is going on is deeper than what Jennifer Cole has said about the Malagasy tendency to forget tragic events.51 The key, I think, is that the colonial “rupture” ends with this plant. The French had a hand in planning cantons (the rural administrative centers like Androka), in tapping the peasant labor pool to work on spice plantations, in felling and marketing hardwoods, in developing a road system, and in subjecting many Malagasy to a European conception of time, but they failed to rid Madagascar of its cactus. With a killing famine on their hands they were forced to import new species from abroad, thereby reviving cactus pastoralism.52 The story, then, does not end with the silences, no matter how alluring it is to fill the gaps with an in vogue categorical answer that reads the meaning of this silence as victimhood, period.

IV

The killing of raketa gasy and the ensuing economic troubles it brought to the region are comparable to Ferguson’s analysis of the expectations of modernity by mineworkers in a declining economy in the Zambian Copperbelt. Ferguson discovered that his mineworker consultants often latched onto the material side of modernity, which proved to be what mattered about modernity to Copperbelt miners. Ferguson’s ethnography demonstrates that modernity has to do with improving standards of living and acquiring more of the goods that make life a little easier for the Copperbelt mineworkers who followed either a “cosmopolitan” or a “localist” style of modernity, and who had surprisingly demonstrable expectations of modernity in the context of a declining economy.53 The French who favored the eradication campaigns had similar expectations of modernity in a declining pastoralist economy in southern Madagascar. They expected that, with the cactus out of the way, the condition of modernity would be opened to Malagasy living in the south. Eradicating raketa, they reasoned, would be like lifting a thick veil from the poor Malagasy pastoralists’ eyes. With the land cleared of prickly pear, the herders 51Jennifer

Cole, Forget Colonialism? Sacrifice and the Art of Memory in Madagascar (Berkeley, 2001). 52Decary, “Epoques d’introduction des Opuntias monacantha,” 457. 53Ferguson, Expectations of Modernity, 91–92.

136

Jeffrey C. Kaufmann

would see the benefits of life without cactus, of seeking ways of making a living outside of a region so short of water that people were “reduced” to feeding cactus to their cattle for many months out of the year, of being freed – perhaps “saved” is the correct word to describe the French intentions – from their thorny dependence on such a “substandard” feed as prickly pear.54 But the French expectations of modernity did not transfer to the local people. Cactus pastoralists did not seek the condition of being free of the thorns. They incorporated quickly the new imports of cacti and rebuilt their cactus pastoralism out of less propitious but still viable varieties of prickly pear. Cactus, then, was both the target of colonial rupture and the eventual suture mending the rupture. It also ended the expectations of modernity, if such ideas ever had any traction among local herders. In my ethnographic work with cactus pastoralists, they never suggested that they sought a better solution to the problem of keeping their animals alive in the dry environment. They seemed satisfied with their thorny plant. Nor did I discover evidence of dissatisfaction with the plant in the colonial library among anybody but the French colonialists. Ferguson’s informants ranked their status far behind the western standard of modernity, not out of embarrassment but out of a “claim of equity” as members having “civilized status” in a “global society” concerned about improving their ranking.55 Though they were not of the core, they had been closer to it after independence from their colonial rulers. But their standard of living had slowly eroded away, as if, following Berman, Nietzsche, and Marx, “all that is solid melts into air.”56 Ferguson accepts the hierarchical ranking of societies, not as a capitalist looking to embellish the core at the expense of the periphery but as a citizen concerned about the exploitative and unjust nature of the relationship.57 Pointing out Africa’s shortcomings in modern material conditions, which is what his Zambian informants did regularly, confronts the

54Henri

Humbert, “Changements survenus dans la végétation du sud de Madagascar,” Revue de botanique appliquée et d’agriculture tropicale, 27 (1947), 441–44. 55Ferguson, Global Shadows, 161. 56Marshall Berman, All That Is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity (New York, 1982). 57See also Herzfeld, Anthropology, 90, who agrees that anthropologists should help in identifying the gaps in our globalized world.


137

well-meaning anthropological urge to treat modernity as a cultural formation whose different versions may be understood as both coeval and of equal value[, which] ends up looking like an evasion of the demands of those who instead see modernity as a privileged and desired socioeconomic condition that is actively contrasted with their own radically unequal way of life.58

Cactus pastoralists also ranked themselves “behind” western standards, as I mentioned earlier. But they did not elaborate on the inequities, as Ferguson’s contacts did. They seemed too busy trying to make it from day to day to reflect long and hard on their place in world history or their expectations of modernity in the near future. Their silence nevertheless points to a need to seek improvements in their standards of living, which highlights inequalities and the “serious gaps” in our “understandings of cultural diversity and global order.”59 Africans without clean water, for example, do not claim to inhabit a site that is “as privileged as any other,” despite the urgings of cultural relativism.60

V

Perhaps the meaning of the silences in the case of Madagascar’s cactus pastoralists amounts to the fact that they have little to tell us about modernity, and, conversely, that modernity has little to tell us about them. Henige cautions against inventing value for sources beyond their limits,61 when “the past has not been benevolent in preserving itself for the present.”62 Modernity is a vexatious concept, which may be part of its allure. Its usefulness seems to grow, not out of any convincing semantic content or incontrovertible evidence, but from the amount of inadequacy it creates in others charged with lacking its properties or qualities. Societies either have modernity or they do not, it is claimed, and, even if they do have it, they may be in need of more of the features that count towards modernity. Cactus pastoralists, in my experience, seemed content to not be modern, to be different in that way from their Merina adversaries in Antananarivo, who, in the time of Merina expansionism and slave trading, brutalized ethnic groups in the 58Ferguson, Global Shadows, 33. 59Ferguson, Global Shadows, 18, 20, 167. 60Ferguson, Global Shadows, 168. 61Henige, “Do African Historians,” 461. 62Henige, Historical Evidence, 175.

138

Jeffrey C. Kaufmann

southeast, many of whom were friendly to the Mahafale in the southwest, even sending them kin.63 The character of Merina modernity represented in those events has become a part of Mahafale oral history. Henige’s discussion of “feedback” – how literacy impacts oral histories – is helpful in summarizing what the “cactus war” instructs us about modernity.64 “Modernizing” is akin to “literizing,” not in the specific manner that written sources get into oral accounts of the past, but in the general ways that people recognize and use as tools the printed word, or, in this case, the concept of modernity, for their own purposes. Henige observes that “[a]ll societies contain competing elements and these will grasp at every opportunity to canonize in writing supporting traditions – traditions which in the past have proved too malleable to be reliable for these purposes.”65 Likewise, modernity has a feedback effect in local societies. That the concept originated in the core does not mean that after acculturation by other societies it has retained its original meaning. It is not known beforehand just how a particular local structure will articulate with the global system and conceptualize modernity: whether it amounts to a rupture they succumb to or they react against, or if it stands as a model worthy of emulation or, in some cases, of disrepute. Moreover, that the feedback does not have the same strength the world over – it may be weak in one place and strong in another – helps to make Ferguson’s point that the feedback of modernity gives us a basis from which we can critique the inequities in the world system. But other than that, there is little feedback in the case at hand: cactus pastoralists did not, in general, apply the concept to themselves.

VI

There may be a better way to bring out how Mahafale people connect to the wider world than with the modernity concept. There seems to be no reason to put the modernity label on their rational system of using a plant for pastoralist purposes. I use Bruno Latour’s intuitive notion of “crossovers” to 63Raymond Decary, and Rémy Castel, Études démographiques. Modalités et conséquences des migrations intérieures récents des populations Malagaches (Tananarive, 1941); Hubert Deschamps, Les migrations intérieures passées et présentes à Madagascar (Paris, 1959). 64Henige, Chronology, 97–103; Henige, Historical Evidence, 110–12. Compare Jack Goody (ed.), Literacy in Traditional Societies (Cambridge, 1968). 65Henige, Chronology, 100.


139

trace, in outline form, the local logics that link prickly pear cactus, zebu cattle, and herders through the exchange of properties. Crossovers provide a way to explore how human and nonhuman actants swap properties to socialize the environment and to naturalize a local society.66 They illuminate how nature and culture interact through property exchanges that link human and non-human elements in a landscape formed by interdependent partners. Crossovers generate “new, completely unexpected effects,”67 but they are not obviously the usual sources of historical arguments. Thus I am departing from familiar historiography in my excavation of the property exchanges, what I call the “ecoexchanges,” out of which cactus pastoralism emerged. The goal is to engage new ways of thinking about pastoralism by throwing a different light on everyday practices of raising cattle on cactus in a dry land. New values may emerge, including a way that avoids classifying pastoralism in discrete categories.68 By focusing on local properties and their logic, I am attempting not to impose my own categories on them but to use the categories of thought that various cactus pastoralists taught to me. I turn now to four properties of cactus pastoralism that cross over between humans and nonhumans in Madagascar’s cactus region. The first exchange occurred between the “tabooing land” (tane mahafale) and its human pioneers. The land taught people to respect dryness, for which the people imposed prohibitions to show their respect for the land. Second, they transferred respect back to cattle, which gave them a prized economic and social value, for which the people exchanged with mobility. Third, the herders reintroduced value back to the nonhuman realm by valuing a tree species that provided protection for cattle, for which Mahafale swapped with intensification. Finally, they concatenated protection back into the nonhuman side by focusing on a thorny plant that presented water and food in a single resource, for which the cactus pastoralists exchanged some of their mobility to become more sedentary. 66Bruno Latour, “Pragmatogonies: a Mythical Account of How Humans and Nonhumans Swap Properties,” American Behavioral Scientist 37 (1994), 791–808, see especially 795 and 807, note 6. This section draws on some ideas published in Jeffrey C. Kaufmann, “Agency in a Mahafale Pastoralist Landscape,” in: Jeffrey C. Kaufmann (ed.), Greening the Great Red Island: Madagascar in Nature and Culture (Pretoria, 2008), 197–217. 67Latour, “Pragmatogonies,” 798. 68I bring up this problem, and in particular the colonial invention of the nomadism category, in my “The Sediment of Nomadism,” History in Africa 36 (2009), 235–64, especially 239, 241, 258.

140

Jeffrey C. Kaufmann

Mahafale 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 (“the tabooing land”), merged in innumerable creation stories of various taboos that relate water and animals associated with water. 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.69 Taboos structured their social lives and made sense of the difficulties they faced making a living.70 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.71 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 thorny 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. Respect, in the form of taboos, mediates humans and nonhumans, and is the first crossover to consider. Mahafale socialized the land by being cognizant of its commanding dryness, which they interpreted as its tabooing property. In turn, the dry land naturalized Mahafale society that incorporated taboos into the social lives of its members. Taboos helped the Mahafale to survive and endure in a dry land that suggested its own rules for inhabitants. 69Kaufmann, “Prickly Pear Cactus and Pastoralism,” 349. 70For longer discussions of Malagasy taboos, see Raymond

Decary, Contes et légendes du sud-ouest de Madagascar (Paris, 1964); J. Ruud, Taboo: a Study of Malagasy Customs and Beliefs (Oslo, Norway, 1960), 76–110. 71J. Andriamampianina, “Traditional Land-use and Nature Conservation in Madagascar,” in: J.A. McNeely, and D. Pitt (eds.), Culture and Conservation: the Human Dimension in Environmental Planning (London, 1985), 81–9; Jonah Ratsimbazafy, Lala Jean Rakotoniaina, and Joanna Durbin, “Cultural Anthropologists and Conservationists: Can We Learn from Each Other to Conserve the Diversity of Malagasy Species and Cultures?” in: Jeffrey C. Kaufmann (ed.), Greening the Great Red Island: Madagascar in Nature and Culture (Pretoria, 2008), 301-15.


141

As long as Mahafale can remember, cattle have been central to their life in the south. With rainfall averages below the minimum required for agriculture, the heat-resistant humped zebu gave them an edge in the dry conditions. Cattle opened new opportunities for people beyond fishing, hunting and gathering, and limited gardening. They provided a living for their human caretakers by converting energy stored in grass and browse into milk and meat. Moreover, cattle moved by their own power across the landscape in search of water and food. Mahafale reintroduced respect back to cattle, which they emphasized in their origin myths of cattle. The myths, which were told in the voice of the founding bull and cow, listed the proper ways to treat and respect their kind, emphasizing in particular specific ways to kill and to sacrifice them for the ancestors (prohibiting death by strangulation). In return for respect, the cattle gave the herders a prized economic and social value, for which the people exchanged with mobility. Value is the second crossover between humans and nonhumans. Mahafale socialized cattle by safekeeping them during their movements and investing them with socio-economic values. Mahafale considered cattle their most prized possessions: as walking vaults or banks of resources. They extracted resources from the vault when the need arose. In return, cattle naturalized mobility in Mahafale society by storing value not just laterally across space, but vertically in social space. They provided a medium for upward mobility. Mobility deepened the relationship between Mahafale and their aombe (zebu) beyond survival, to a way to articulate identity. Mahafale next reincorporated value into the nonhuman side by valuing an endemic tree species that their cattle could browse. Samata (Euphorbia stenoclada) looked like trees with bad hair. In place of leaves, they grow a medusa-like entanglement of spikes laden with juicy latex. Their silvery grey color, mass of branches atop the trunk, and relatively short stature of around three to four meters high made them stand out in the pastoralist forest-pasture landscape. From afar, the aluminum-like bulbous tops of samata contrasted sharply with the green and brown vegetation, making it appear to be the only feature in sight. Samata speckled much of the coastal plain from Ampalaza near the mouth of the Menarandra River to Itampolo, 90 kilometers north. The landscape resembled an expansive nursery of E. stenoclada trees evenly spaced across the spiny thicket. This landscape was widespread along the Mahafale coastal plain.72

72R.N. Rabesandratana, “Evaluation de la biomasse d’Euphorbia stenoclada Baill. (euphorbiacée) dans la région de Tuléar (sud-ouest de Madagascar),” Sécheresse 10 (1999), 55–61.

142

Jeffrey C. Kaufmann

Herders have turned the coastal plain into a samata forest-pasture, in which most other trees have been thinned, giving this useful succulent more space to grow into the main tree in sight. The samata were shaped into bushy-topped trees, a result of cutting the lower branches for their stock and slicing them into pieces at the feet of their cattle or, in the case of young trees, letting cattle and goats pull the lower branches off themselves. The herders fed it as supplemental fodder after the grass season was over and before the rainy season began. Other trees and plants in the area included thick growths of toxic euphorbes, didierea and aloes, short bushes and prickly pear cactus plantations. Protection, then, is the third crossover that was exchanged between nature and culture. Mahafale socialized the forest by opening areas around one tree species in particular.73 They favored the samata tree because their livestock were able to eat the non-toxic coral-like xerophyte with its succulent, somewhat spiny, pencil-shaped branch segments. The samata tree naturalized keeping cattle in the forest because it linked together in one form the properties of water and food and protection and shade for cattle. Mahafale reported that their people have used it as cattle browse and grass supplement for hundreds of years. The hybrid forest-pastures in turn naturalized a more intensive form of pastoralism. Protection, in the form of intensification, was then reintroduced at the next level, the level of cactus fodder. Not unlike the apple, the potato, marijuana, and the tulip, all of which cultivate properties of human desire like sweetness, nourishment, narcotic, and beauty, prickly pear had an uncanny ability to enlist human friends by appealing to a human desire.74 The thorns themselves were part of the attraction for herders. Mahafale lined trails with imposing walls of cactus thickets and wrapped their corrals and villages in labyrinths of thorns to repel unwanted intruders. During the French colonial campaigns in the south, cactus proved to be a bewildering foe to the French and a powerful ally to Mahafale pastoralists who knew its defensive strengths. Mahafale accepted only the wild form of cactus, with its long spines and intimidations, and never tried to change it into a more domesticated “spineless” form. 73In

other Mahafale locations it was called samata foty and famata foty (I.H. Charles, B. Rakotoaritsima, J.F.R. Randriamanarina, A. Rasija, and G. Romain, “L’organisation territoriale Tevondroñe-Temahaleotse du littoral nord-Mahafale,” Aombe 3 (1991), 79–95, especially 94. In Tandroy country to the east, it has the name arahaka (J. Decorse, “Modification des pièces travaillantes dans les charrues indigènes,” Revue des cultures coloniales 9 (1901), 105–10, especially 106). 74Michael Pollan, The Botany of Desire (New York, 2001).


143

The plant gives more than its thorns to humans. It holds a treasure of sorts inside its protective barbed skin. Thirst finds raketa desirable. The key to this plant’s persuasive power is its ability to expand on the property learned from samata: to give both water and food for people and cattle in a thirsty land. The water storing plant provided not just a source of water in a largely waterless region but protein and fiber to its cattle and pastoralist consumers. Raketa alone – not samata or any other water holding plant among the xerophytes – earned the name sakafondrano, water-food plant, in the Mahafale dialect. One gains a different perspective on the plant when a parched mouth tastes its sweet juice. I understood why cattle waited transfixed, eyeing piles of singed pads with their thorns seared off in a fire, waiting for their caretakers to say “dig in.” To people who open a tap in their kitchen and get running water, cactus does not entice their interests. But to people in short supply of water, cactus paid its way by providing a source of both water and food. Cuttings set in the ground produced fodder for cattle after just two years. The plants responded to pruning, growing thicker or taller depending on how they were pruned. They rimmed their tops with fruits, like soldiers on the horizon lined up for battle against drought. In turn, their reservoir of water lured people to become more sedentary by planting their homes with cactus. Intensification, then, is the fourth and last crossover. Mahafale socialized raketa by growing it as living fencing around their spaces they wished to demarcate and enclose. They found in prickly pear a source of food and water for their cattle and for themselves, and at the same time a form of protective fencing around their trails, corrals, gardens, and villages. Raketa naturalized a more sedentary pattern of keeping cattle closer to wetness, closer to the massive plantations of water-food plants. Herd mobility still occurred but it took shape mainly around a seasonal transhumance timed around cactus and the rainy season. Moving the cattle to the Ankara forest-pasture further north gave cactus a respite from harvesting and a chance for regrowth. The rainy season’s new grass enlarged the zebu humps and made more milk. As a fodder plant, prickly pear raised the carrying capacity of the land, perhaps by a factor of two, by helping store moisture in plants edible to cattle.75 It made a semi-arid land appear less arid in the sense of providing a 75David Griffiths, Prickly Pear as Stock Feed, Farmers’ Bulletin 1072 (Washington DC, 1928); A. Monjauze, and H.N. le Houérou, “Le rôle des Opuntia dans l’économie agricole Nord Africaine,” Bulletin de l’Ecole Nationale Supérieure d’Agriculture de Tunis 8–9 (1965), 85–164.

144

Jeffrey C. Kaufmann

water-food plant for cattle and humans. It was as if the climate had shifted toward the moister side of the semi-arid scale, more toward the 750 mm of rain per year, without there actually being an increase in rainfall. In this way the cactus enclosures made the landscape more like wetlands.76 The crossovers between Mahafale and their plant and animal partners help to clarify the form of herding life I call cactus pastoralism. This hybrid emerged from pastoralists and prickly pear cactus swapping properties to make something new and unexpected. The plant gave wetness and received in return human helpers who cultivated the plant over a wide expanse of southern Madagascar. The cultivators cared for the plant and received tons of water-food. The practice of swapping properties with nature, of making human and nonhuman crossovers, was not a novelty that arrived with cactus: crossovers came from respecting the land itself, from raising cattle as property, and from protecting an endemic tree. But the crossover with cactus transformed the landscape and how people lived in the mahafale coastal plain. Cactus gave a people involved with raising cattle the precious property of wetness in one of the most arid parts of the island. People committed to cactus with a more sedentary lifestyle, one that included taking care of not just cattle but this extraordinary water-food plant. The pre-cactus crossovers supported mobile pastoralism. The crossover with cactus explains how sedentism occurred unexpectedly in a place, with its low rainfall totals, better suited to mobile pastoralism. 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” was plentiful up to the 1920s, Arthur Stratton, an American diplomat, commented that it “raised the water table so that the wells, the springs, and even the rivers flowed all the year round.”77 Stratton’s hyperbole played up the French victimization of the Malagasy. After the original cactus species had been eradicated and inferior species of cacti introduced into the south, cactus pastoralists considered their land as still “wetter” with the replacement cacti than without. Another consequence was the reduction in mobility among the cattle raisers. Cactus has become a condition affecting both increased sedentarization and the timing of transhumance migration.78 76Philip Woodhouse, Henry Bernstein, and David Hulme, African Enclosures? The Social Dynamics of Wetlands in Drylands (Oxford, 2000). 77Arthur Stratton, The Great Red Island (New York, 1964), 307. 78Kaufmann, and Tsirahamba, “Forests and Thorns,” 246.


VII

145

Crossovers are far from being incontrovertible evidence for a pastoralist modernity. They do not move the local economy out of the periphery, closer to the industrial core. Nor do they cause pastoralists to purchase significant amounts of commodity items or any luxury items. Nor do they prompt much of a desire to mimic a western materialism. But what they do tell us, I think, is that we can come to a fairly good understanding of Madagascar’s cactus pastoralists without spiriting the concept of modernity into the material. Because of its function, the pastoralists introduced a new cactus into their herding system after their original raketa gasy died. At the same time, they experienced this reintroduction in terms of continuity rather than rupture. The importance of prickly pear cactus and this “continuity” explain why the catastrophies of the 1920s have not been “conserved” in memory, but have been in written records. Prickly pear did not have the same function to the French, who wrote most of the history of this plant. The new cacti introductions strengthened the cactus pastoralists’ “tradition” in their way of thinking, and, at the same time, led them to make choices towards modernization that most French colonialists did not expect.79 The categories of respect, prohibition, value, mobility, protection, and intensification form the basis of cactus pastoralism in Madagascar. Prickly pear increased the “carrying capacity” of the land, a function of the intensification that exists in cactus pastoralism. The plant has been a key part of an indigenous modernization process, but not, as far as I can tell, part of the condition of modernity in this agricultural context. My consultants did not talk in these terms but rather with idioms familiar to themselves. One day a friend and I were walking next to a fence of cactus and talking somewhat philosophically about how the plant was central to life around Androka. Suddenly he stopped, went up to a plant, and pointed excitedly to a thick stemmed thorn. He likened the spikes to herders, who stand guard for the herd, which in turn he represented as the flat “water-food” pad. He then said that with cactus comes more cattle, and with cattle comes herders. It was his way of talking about increased carrying capacity and to pastoralist intensification.80 79I thank a reviewer for raising this point. 80Fieldnotes with Heremasy at Androka Vaovao,

7 July, 1997.

146

Jeffrey C. Kaufmann

I am not suggesting that the case I have outlined leads to a pastoralist exceptionalism when it comes to a plant being socialized and a society of pastoralists being naturalized through their interactions with raketa. I hope, rather, that some of David Henige’s joy in finding reasons to question evidence and arguments has rubbed off on the case at hand. One day in his office in Memorial Library, with a wry smile and a twinkle in his eyes, he told me that it is always better to leave a reader with questions and an interest to inquire further into a subject, than to pretend to have found final answers. In my attempt to follow the new editors’ call for papers to elaborate upon David’s tireless work into the “epistemological bases of historical inquiry and the construction of arguments about the past,”81 I have shown that the linkage between Madagascar’s cactus pastoralists and a plant can be made through the concept of “crossovers,” but not with “modernity.” Following David’s mission, I have shown that, given the available primary and secondary sources, the often used concept of “modernity” is tempting, but epistemologically impossible to use in narrating the historical relationships between Madagascar’s cactus pastoralists and their prickly pear cactus.

References

Andriamampianina, J., “Traditional Land-use and Nature Conservation in Madagascar,” in: J.A. McNeely, and D. Pitt (eds.), Culture and Conservation: the Human Dimension in Environmental Planning (London, 1985), 81–89. Appadurai, Arjun, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (Minneapolis, 1996). — (ed.), Globalization (Durham, 2001). Astuti, Rita, People of the Sea: Identity and Descent among the Vezo of Madagascar (Cambridge, 1995). Bastard, Eugène, “Mission chez les Mahafalys,” Revue de Madagascar 2 (1900), 697–711. Behrend, Heike, and Ute Luig (eds.), Spirit Possession, Modernity, and Power in Africa (Madison, 1999). Berman, Marshall, All That Is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity (New York, 1982). 81Michel R. Doortmont, John H. Hanson, Jan Jansen, and Dmitri van den Bersselaar, “The Next Step for a Journal of Method,” History in Africa, 37 (2010), 1–5, especially 2. 82Ulf Hannerz, “World in Creolisation,” Africa 57 (1987), 546–59.


147

Bernard, H. Russell, Research Methods in Anthropology: Qualitative and Quantitative Approaches (Lanham MD, 2011). Charles, I.H., B. Rakotoaritsima, J.F.R. Randriamanarina, A. Rasija, and G. Romain, “L’organisation territoriale Tevondroñe-Temahaleotse du littoral nord-Mahafale,” Aombe 3 (1991), 79–95. Cole, Jennifer, Forget Colonialism? Sacrifice and the Art of Memory in Madagascar (Berkeley, 2001). Decary, Raymond, “L’utilisation des Opuntias en Androy (extrême sud de Madagascar),” Revue de botanique appliquée et d’agriculture coloniale 5 (1925), 769–71. —, “La question des raiketa dans l’extrême sud de Madagascar,” Bulletin économique de Madagascar et dépendances 24 (1927), 92–96. —, “La destruction des cactus par une cochenille à Madagascar: ses conséquences économiques et sociales,” Annales de société Linnéenne de Lyon 75 (1930), 101–17. —, L’Androy (extrême sud de Madagascar). Essai de monographie régionale. I. Géographie physique et humaine (Paris, 1930). —, L’Androy (extrême sud de Madagascar). Essai de monographie régionale. II. Histoire. Civilisation. Colonisation (Paris, 1933). —, “La conquête économique de l’extrême-sud de Madagascar,” La Géographie 64 (1935), 365–76. —, “Epoques d’introduction des Opuntias monacantha dans le sud de Madagascar,” Revue de botanique appliquée et d’agriculture tropicale 27 (1947), 455–57. —, Contes et légendes du sud-ouest de Madagascar (Paris, 1964). —, and Rémy Castel, Études démographiques. Modalités et conséquences des migrations intérieures récents des populations Malagaches (Tananarive, 1941). Decorse, J., “Modification des pièces travaillantes dans les charrues indigènes,” Revue des cultures coloniales 9 (1901), 105–10. Deschamps, Hubert, Les migrations intérieures passées et présentes à Madagascar (Paris, 1959). —, Histoire de Madagascar (Paris, 1965). Dirks, Nicholas B., “History as a Sign of the Modern,” Public Culture 2 (1990), 25–32. Doortmont, Michel R., John H. Hanson, Jan Jansen, and Dmitri van den Bersselaar, “The Next Step for a Journal of Method,” History in Africa 37 (2010), 1–5. Donham, Donald L., Marxist Modern: An Ethnographic History of the Ethiopian Revolution (Berkeley, 1999).

148

Jeffrey C. Kaufmann

—, “On Being Modern in a Capitalist World: Some Conceptual and Comparative Issues,” in: Bruce M. Knauft (ed.), Critically Modern: Alternatives, Alterities, Anthropologies (Bloomington, 2002), 241–57. Drouot, Andry, “‘Raketa mena’ ou la misère du Sud,” L’Express de Madagascar Feb 22 (2007), www.lexpressmada.com/display.php?p=display& id=5493. Eisenstadt, S.N. (ed.), Daedalus (Special issue on “Multiple Modernities”) 129 (2001). Englund, Harri, and James Leach, “Ethnography and the Meta-Narratives of Modernity,” Current Anthropology 41 (2000), 225–48. Ferguson, James, Expectations of Modernity: Myths and Meanings of Urban Life on the Zambian Copperbelt (Berkeley, 1999). —, Global Shadows: Africa in the Neoliberal World Order (Durham NC, 2006). Frappa, C., “Sur Dactylopius tomentosus Lam. et son acclimatement à Madagascar,” Revue de pathologie végétale et d’entomologie agricole de France 19 (1932), 48–55. —, “Au sujet de la cochenille des opuntia à Madagascar,” L’agronomie coloniale 172 (1932), 132. Friedman, Jonathan, “Modernity and Other Traditions,” in: Bruce M. Knauft (ed.), Critically Modern: Alternatives, Alterities, Anthropologies (Bloomington, 2002), 287–313. Gaonkar, Dilip Parameshwar (ed.), Alternative Modernities (Durham, 2001). Geertz, Clifford, “Distinguished Lecture: Anti Anti-Relativism,” American Anthropologist 86 (1984), 263–78. Geschiere, Peter, The Modernity of Witchcraft: Politics and the Occult in Postcolonial Africa (Charlottesville, 1997). Giddens, Anthony, The Consequences of Modernity (Stanford, 1990). Goody, Jack (ed.), Literacy in Traditional Societies (Cambridge, 1968). Griffiths, David, Prickly Pear as Stock Feed, Farmers’ Bulletin 1072 (Washington DC, 1928). Helisoa, O., G. Mahavoatsy, “Kere: état des lieux les potentialites culturales du sud malgache—résumé 2003,” www.heli-s-madagascar.fr.st. Henige, David, The Chronology of Oral Tradition: Quest for a Chimera (Oxford, 1974). —, “Do African Historians Need to Fear the Slouching Beast of Skepticism?,” The International Journal of African Historical Studies 8 (1975), 457–63. —, Oral Historiography (London, 1982). —, Historical Evidence and Argument (Madison, 2005).


149

Herzfeld, Michael, Anthropology: Theory in Practice (New York, 2001). Humbert, Henri, “Changements survenus dans la végétation du sud de Madagascar,” Revue de botanique appliquée et d’agriculture tropicale, 27 (1947), 441–44. Karp, Ivan, “Development and Personhood: Tracing the Contours of a Moral Discourse,” in: Bruce M. Knauft (ed.), Critically Modern: Alternatives, Alterities, Anthropologies (Bloomington, 2002), 82–104. Kaufmann, Jeffrey C., “Faly aux vazaha: Eugène Bastard, Taboo, and Mahafale Autarky in Southwest Madagascar, 1899,” History in Africa 26 (1999), 129–55. —, “La question des raketa: Colonial Struggles with Prickly Pear Cactus in Southern Madagascar, 1900–1923,” Ethnohistory 48 (2001), 87–121. —, “Prickly Pear Cactus and Pastoralism in Southwest Madagascar,” Ethnology 43 (2004), 345–61. —, “Agency in a Mahafale Pastoralist Landscape,” in: Jeffrey C. Kaufmann (ed.), Greening the Great Red Island: Madagascar in Nature and Culture (Pretoria, 2008), 197–217. —, “The Non-Modern Constitution of Famines in Madagascar’s Spiny Forests: ‘Water-Food’ Plants, Cattle and Mahafale Landscape Praxis,” Environmental Sciences 5 (2008), 73–89. —, “The Sediment of Nomadism,” History in Africa 36 (2009), 235–64. —, and Sylvestre Tsirahamba, “Forests and Thorns: Conditions of Change Affecting Mahafale Pastoralists in Southwestern Madagascar,” Conservation and Society 4 (2006), 231–61 (also available at www.conservationandsociety.org). Kelly, John D., “Alternative Modernities or an Alternative to ‘Modernity:’ Getting Out of the Modernist Sublime,” in: Bruce M. Knauft (ed.), Critically Modern: Alternatives, Alterities, Anthropologies (Bloomington, 2002), 258–86. Khazanov, Anatoly M., “Pastoralists in the ‘Age of Globalization:’ Challenges of the 21st Century,” in: Jörg Janzen, and Batboldyn Enkhtuvshin (eds.), Dialogue Between Cultures and Civilizations. Present State and Perspectives of Nomadism in a Globalizing World (Ulaanbaatar, 2004), 13–28. Knauft, Bruce M., “Critically Modern: An Introduction,” in: Bruce M. Knauft (ed.), Critically Modern: Alternatives, Alterities, Anthropologies (Bloomington, 2002), 1–54. Lyautey, Louis-Hubert, Dans le sud de Madagascar: pénétration militaire, situation politique et économique, 1900–1902 (Paris, 1903).

150

Jeffrey C. Kaufmann

Middleton, Karen, “Who Killed ‘Malagasy Cactus’? Science, Environment and Colonialism in Southern Madagascar (1924–1930),” Journal of Southern African Studies 25 (1999), 215–48. Monjauze, A., and H.N. le Houérou, “Le rôle des Opuntia dans l’économie agricole Nord Africaine,” Bulletin de l’Ecole Nationale Supérieure d’Agriculture de Tunis 8–9 (1965), 85–164. Montaigne, Michel de, Essais (Paris, 1937). Perrier de la Bâthie, Henri, “Les prairies malgaches,” Bulletin économique de Madagascar et dépendances 17 (1920), 1–16. —, “Introduction à Tananarive du “Coccus Cacti” ou cochenille du figuier d’Inde,” Bulletin économique de Madagascar et dépendances 21 (1924), 222. —, “Les pestes végétales à Madagascar,” Revue de botanique appliquée et d’agriculture coloniale 8 (1928), 36–43. —, “Les famines du sud-ouest de Madagascar: causes et remèdes,” Revue de botanique appliquée et d’agriculture tropicale 14 (1934), 173–86. Petit, Georges, “Introduction à Madagascar de la cochenille du figuier d’Inde (Dactylopius coccus Costa) et ses conséquences inattendues,” Revue d’histoire naturelle 10 (1929), 160–73. —, “Sur l’introduction à Madagascar du ‘Dactylopius coccus Costa’ parasite de l’‘Opuntia vulgaris Mill.’,” Comptes-rendus des séances de l’académie d’agriculture de France 15 (1929), 410–16. —, “La disparition des Opuntia et les famines périodiques dans le sud de Madagascar,” Bulletin de l’association de géographes Français 75 (1934), 37–39. Piot, Charles, Remotely Global: Village Modernity in West Africa (Chicago, 1999). Pollan, Michael, The Botany of Desire (New York, 2001). Rabinow, Paul, French Modern: Norms and Forms of the Social Environment (Chicago, 1989). Rabesandratana, R.N., “Evaluation de la biomasse d’Euphorbia stenoclada Baill. (euphorbiacée) dans la région de Tuléar (sud-ouest de Madagascar),” Sécheresse 10 (1999), 55–61. Rasolo, Hery, “Raketa mena (cactus rouge),” Documentary film, (Madagascar, 2007), 52 min. Ratsimbazafy, Jonah, Lala Jean Rakotoniaina, and Joanna Durbin, “Cultural Anthropologists and Conservationists: Can We Learn from Each Other to Conserve the Diversity of Malagasy Species and Cultures?” in: Jeffrey C. Kaufmann (ed.), Greening the Great Red Island: Madagascar in Nature and Culture (Pretoria, 2008), 301–15.


151

Ruud, J., Taboo: a Study of Malagasy Customs and Beliefs (Oslo, Norway, 1960). Stratton, Arthur, The Great Red Island (New York, 1964). Trouillot, Michel-Rolph, “The Otherwise Modern: Caribbean Lessons from the Savage Slot,” in: Bruce M. Knauft (ed.), Critically Modern: Alternatives, Alterities, Anthropologies (Bloomington, 2002), 220–37. —, Global Transformations: Anthropology and the Modern World (New York, 2003). Wallerstein, Immanuel, The Modern World-System (New York, 1976). Woodhouse, Philip, Henry Bernstein, and David Hulme, African Enclosures? The Social Dynamics of Wetlands in Drylands (Oxford, 2000).