Contrasting Visions of Nature and Landscapes

The Malagasy practice of using trees to make history informs their attitudes toward nature and plays an important role in how rural households relate to and use forests. I am not referring to the process of turning trees into paper and writing down their stories of things past in books. While Madagascar has produced some excellent academic historians who have written remarkable histories of the island (see, for example, Esoavelomandroso, 1979; Rakoto, 1997; Rakotoarisoa, 1998; Ramarolahy, 1972), most Malagasy rely on oral history to transmit their knowledge of the past. What interests me about their brand of historicism-their particular way of knowing themselves by knowing their past-is their use of trees to locate significant human ancestors. Malagasy consider their ancestors a very important part of the past. For most Malagasy, ‘the idea of the ancestors … encompasses and expresses all that is considered morally desirable or appropriate in social relations’ (Mack, 1986, p64). Ny razana, the ancestors and the spirits that, according to Malagasy belief, stay in contact with their descendants after their bodies have perished, occupy various spaces in ny tanindrazana, the ancestral lands, within reach of their living kin. For example, Merina and Betsileo razana stay in underground tombs; Bara in aboveground caves; Sakalava razan’olo (ancestor people) have their trees, as do Mahafale ancestors and many other Malagasy ethnic groups whose ancestral homelands are ‘coastal’ and turned away from the interior highlands. Most Merina of the central highlands perform the ritual of famadihana, or ‘turning the bones,’ wherein every few years the shrouded bones of ancestors are brought out of the tomb and into the light of day, reshrouded, fêted and turned a little more into dust and a little further into the past (Bloch, 1971; Graeber, 2007b). Malagasy are adept at applying rituals, like the famadihana, to remember people past by the work of people present. They find trees helpful in making history by placing ancestors in a relationship with their descendants via trees. Trees are effective agents for several reasons (Feeley-Harnik, 1991): they are close at hand, the hardwoods last many generations, and the trees are upstanding-an ambiguous, hence powerful, quality found in some people too. After the French colonial era ended in 1960, Sakalava, who have their ancestral homeland in the west and northwest, used trees to tell the story of the history of royal dynasties ruling the territories before the French colonized them (Feeley-Harnik, 1991; see also Lambek, 2002). Putting together the royal funeral (menaty) and in particular carving down certain trees to get at their heart or core (teza), then erecting the core poles around the tomb amounted to erecting ‘tree-people’—a category of thought, somewhat like the classification ‘Christmas tree’ as representative of Christ-whereby Sakalava see and treat certain trees as royal ancestors. As Feeley-Harnik explains: In short, workers in the menaty service handled the trees like royal bodies, and they handled the teza like royal corpses. The transformation of trees that had died on the mainland into posts reburied in theground around the royal tomb thus paralleled the transformation of the fleshy corpse into a skeleton, enclosed in a tree trunk and buried in the tomb itself