Malagasy Beekeepers: Cultural Meanings and Practices
Tasha Rijke-Epstein, 2023-24 RPW Center Faculty Fellow. This year’s group is exploring the theme of “The Place of Memory.”
So Many Beehives
The knowledge, techniques, and practices of relating to the more-than-human world accrued by the Malagasy hold possibilities for imagining alternatives to contemporary predicaments of capitalism and environmental change.
On an expedition to the Indian Ocean island of Madagascar in the early 1600s, French explorer François Cauche was astonished to discover a bounty of beekeeping activity. “I never saw so many beehives,” he remarked, noting that “no inhabitant is without a number of them.” Cauche was among European explorers and agents who, captivated by the rich endemic ecosystems and trade prospects, had been drawn to Madagascar’s shores for centuries. Beyond environmental wealth, Madagascar held strategic and economic importance for the expanding European empires owing to its location at the heart of the longstanding trade routes spanning the southwestern Indian Ocean.
Following military conquest in 1896, French colonial administrators tasked with surveying the newly conquered colony’s economic prospects recorded numerous beehives found in forests across the island; they hoped these hives would be tapped to sustain the growing export market of beeswax demanded by European and North American industrial agents. For French colonial officials, Madagascar appeared as a land flowing with honey, a trove of Eden-like richness in cattle, graphite, and beeswax, an imaginary that endured as consumption demands grew in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
Much of Madagascar’s colonial and postcolonial history, like African colonies more generally, reads as a succession of extractions of natural resources and labor that shaped and were shaped by capitalism and uneven networks of knowledge. French officials forced Malagasy colonial subjects to grow cash crops like coffee, tea, and sugar; build roads and railways; pay onerous cattle and land taxes; and contribute their knowledge to French research projects, usually without recognition.
Yet by the 1970s the profound ecological impacts of externally-driven extractivism had become apparent in Madagascar, and the island became the site of intensive conservation activities and campaigns. Today, Madagascar is perhaps best known as both a biodiversity hotspot of the world’s rarest and most extraordinary fauna and flora, and an island under duress from mass species loss, deforestation, and widespread poverty.
The More-than-Human World
These flashpoints signal the two competing frameworks through which Madagascar has historically been understood—one, as a site of bounty in need of conservation and another, as a site of extraction to fuel consumption domestically and globally. Yet, these ways of relating to the environment leave in the shadows the complex ways Malagasy communities have engaged with the more-than-human world, and the layered knowledges they have developed to navigate the uncertainties of the rise of imperial encroachment, global capitalism, changing vegetation patterns, and climate change.
I am currently working on the history of place-based, ecological knowhow among different Malagasy actors—beekeepers, silkworm farmers, cattle pastoralists—in early, colonial and postcolonial periods. These men, women, and children undertook activities that often evaded colonial, capitalist control and they produced substances that at times fell beyond the grasp of commodification. Historians have long been troubled about how to read the colonial archive for insights into experiences of marginalized voices, and finding traces of Malagasy farmers over time is no different. Where and what are the buried histories of human-insect and -animal relationships?
European travel accounts and French colonial records, though filtered through European, male perspectives, provide some glimpses into how Malagasy beekeepers, for instance, persisted with apiculture as a livelihood practice in the face of monocropping and forced labor regimes. Local colonial reports and export records suggest that while many Malagasy apiculturists sold beeswax, partly to pay for colonial taxes, they kept honey for local consumption, preserving its value and use as a vital substance that sustained life.
To dig deeper into the dynamic, cultural meanings and practices associated with apiculture in Malagasy communities, my research draws on an eclectic archive, including proverbs and tales; historical dictionaries; and oral histories with elder farmers. This research has taken me to the national archives in Madagascar and France and, most recently this summer, to the forests and fields of Madagascar where I was privileged to learn from Malagasy beekeepers. They shared how bees can be understood as offering lessons on the organization and ethics of human life, and the challenges they have faced in managing their apiculture activities over the last few decades with the rise in pesticide campaigns, deforestation, and climate change. By centering Malagasy voices and places in the documentary and living archive, I argue that their accrued knowledge, techniques, and practices of relating to the more-than-human world hold possibilities for imagining alternatives to contemporary predicaments of capitalism and environmental change.
Tasha Rijke-Epstein is a historian and cultural anthropologist, whose research centers on questions of belonging, materiality, environment and the politics of placemaking in Madagascar and the broader Indian Ocean. Her first book, Children of the Soil: The Power of Built Form in Urban Madagascar is forthcoming with Duke University Press (October 2023), and her articles have appeared in a range of journals including Comparative Studies in Society and History, History and Technology, and The Journal of African History. She is currently Assistant Professor in the Department of History.