Governmentality, Language Ideology and the Production of Needs in a Malagasy National Park (Ranomafana, Madagascar)

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CAGOVERNMENTALITY, LANGUAGE IDEOLOGY, ANDTHE PRODUCTION OF NEEDS IN MALAGASYCONSERVATION AND DEVELOPMENTPAUL W. HANSONIndependent Scholar, Cleveland, Ohio

The town of Ranomafana is located some 140 kilometers west of the coastal city of Mananjary in Madagascars southeastern province of Fianarantsoa. For 18 months,I lived and worked in Ambodiaviavy, a hamlet(tanana)1 nestled in the Ranomafanaregion rain forest. Most of the 240 residents of Ambodiaviavy refer to themselvesas Tanala, or People of the Forest.2 Among four patrilineal clan identications

(karazana)it is the Sambinoro who are recognizedas thetompontany in Ambodiaviavy.Tompontany,or masters of the land, is among the most binding relation to land thatexists in Madagascar.

In recent years, the Sambinoros claim to be masters of their land has beenchallenged. On May 27, 1991, not long after the 1986 discovery of the GoldenBamboo Lemur(Hapalemur aureus)in the area by Dr. Patricia Wright,3 the Demo-cratic Republic of Madagascar ofcially established the Ranomafana National Park

(RNP).Today, Ambodiaviavy is located just a short distance from the parks south-eastern border. RNP planners justify their appropriation of 43,500 hectares of land by arguing that the rich store of genetic diversity at home in the Ranomafana regionis threatened with destruction by the slash-and-burn agriculture(tavy)practiced byarea farmers. Sambinoro, however, claim masters of the land status over 1,700hectares of ancestral estate(tanindrazana)now enclosed within the RNP. The Sam- binoro believe that both access to this land and recognition of their status in relation

to it is crucial if the many different groups of people in Ambodiaviavy are to remaincooperatively connected, andable to successfully managethechanges in agriculturalCULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY, Vol. 22, Issue 2, pp. 244284. ISSN 0886-7356, online ISSN 1548-1360.C 2007 by the American Anthropological Association. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproducarticle content through the University of California Presss Rights and Permissions website, http://www.ucpressjournals.com/reprintInfo.asp. DOI: 10.1525/can.2007.22.2.244.


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GOVERNMENTALITY IN MALAGASY CONSERVATION

Costs and benets of tavy in Ambodiaviavy Slash-and-burn agriculture doespresent important short-term benets to many farmers. The long-term effects of the prac-tice in eastern Madagascar, however, are decidedly negative. In Ambodiaviavy, farmers typicallyisolate a 0.2-hectare area of forest that is then cut, dried by the sun, and burned, releasing

nutrients and ash to the soil. Rice and a variety of complementary crops are grown in the rstfew years after which manioc is primarily grown as the soil looses fertility. Most farmers thenattempt to leave the land fallow for ten years. The burst of nutrients (needed in the nutrient-poor tropical soil) and the elimination of such pests as rats, mosquitoes, locusts, and so forth,represent the benets of tavy. Unfortunately, with Madagascars population growth rate at 3.03percent, the fallow periods have shortened. Erosion, gullying, and soil degradation are in evi-dence throughout the island. It is now estimated that since 1900, tavy has destroyed nearly 65percent of the eastern forests with close to 2 percent of the remaining forests burned each year.

production proposed by the RNP. The Samborino understand their own needs inrelation to the landnot only in economic terms(i.e., access tonatural resources)butalso in terms of the productive exchanges they carry out with ancestors buried intheir estate, being particularly concerned with the blessing, ortahy, these ancestorswithhold and release.

The Ranomafana National Park Project, or Park Project, was, until 1998,an Integrated Conservation-Development Program (ICDP).4 In ICDPs operative

worldwide, expanses of land are enclosed, dened instrumentally as national orglobal resources, and protected from a host of destructive threats, including thesubsistence practices of resident peoples. Planners understand such practices asslash-and-burn agriculture to be driven by poverty, and one of the leading causesof deforestation in and around the protected areas; planners also understand thesepractices to be non-sustainable. These same planners, however, rarely conceive of resident access to and use of resources in political economic, historical, or moralterms (Peterson 2000; Spence 1999).

On the initial enclosure of estates, ICDP managers offer assistance in meetingthe needs of resident people, generally assuming that all parties with a stake inthe future of protected area resources have needs in relation to those resources.The means for discovering, communicating, and negotiating these needs has re-ceived little attention. Methods in the assessment of need range from rapid ruralassessment questions and xed-alternative scheduled interviews to areawide ques-tionnaires and in-depth, key-informant interviewing. The information gathered inthe eld then travels from ofces in the regional capital to overseas headquarters.Far fromtheir eldofutterance and transcription, statementsofneedare given littlehistorical, economic or sociocultural context as they are massaged into preexistingdevelopment agendas.

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CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY 22:2

Often, there is signicant struggle, overt and subtle, over the way needs areheard,interpreted,andsatised.AsNancyFrazer(1989)pointsoutinherdiscussionof thepoliticsofneed interpretation, suchstrugglesarecomplicatedbythefact thatmany groups articulate their needs in andthrough differing culturallyspecic normsof interpretation and communication. All need politics are discursively mediatedand are therefore dialectically tied to the wider social process (Harvey 1996:78).

Building on Michel Foucaults (1991a) work on governmentality, I am con-cerned in this article with need technology as a mode of governance in ICDPs,and with the linguistic and textual techniques through which need technology op-erates. My focus throughout the article is on the intersection of language, languageideology, and governance in the Park Project. Through close analysis of a particular

speech event, I identify ve elements or steps in the needs-production processtranslation, entextualization, spacialization, summation, and reportingin whichmeaning and authority are articulated. In all, particular language ideologies make adifference, and particular languages and people enjoy greater automatic authority.It is through these discursive processes that need technology operates in IDCPs,and resident program participants are constructed as needy, green subjects. In thiscase, as in many others, individuals who serve as translatorshere Solo, Tody, and

Voaraplay particularly important roles. Trained in a variety of geographical lo-cales and responsible for a certain degree of transnationalization of ideas, these menrepresent what Michael Goldman (2001:510) calls hybridized state actors. Withfeet in multiple domains, their work is remarkable in its power to affect outcomesfor everyone in the project.

In this article, I focus on a particular meeting in 1993, conceived of as a speechevent, in which the Park Project was evaluated by an USAID team, with input from

residents, and translated by Malagasy staff. At the time of the meeting, I had livedin Ambodiaviavy for close to one year, and had publicly raised numerous questionsabout the Park Projects goals and operations. Ambodiaviavy residents appeared tohave welcomed my participation in the meeting as a foreigner(vazaha)who bothopenly questioned the Park Project in general and was not connected with the ParkProject in any direct way. USAID representatives tried to elicit my participation asa translator at numerous points throughout the meeting. I refused the role as thetranslation work carried out regularly within the RNPP was an important part of my study. Park Project staff members were, however, open to my recording of theentire meeting.

From well before the moment I arrived in Ambodiaviavy, my imagination wasalso active in constructing my own role there. I saw a monumental struggle between

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the forest farmers of the region and a powerful U.S.-backed, Malagasy state alliancehungry for land and resources. As a scholar comfortable in the Marxist tradition,my energies were squarely on the side of Tanala rights to landa struggle I sawto be the really earthly question in all its life size.5 As time went on, and as myexperiences widened, my sympathies for the many different struggles waged byeveryone involved grew stronger yet more rened.6 Of particular relevance hereis the appreciation I gained for the way language ideology shaped what people saidand did, and were able to hear. The story of Ambodiaviavy is indeed a story about areally earthy question, partly played out through intonation, timing, and gesture.

In the section that follows, I briey describe the emergence of green neolib-eralism and how Foucaults conception of governmentality can provide insight on

how neoliberalismand needs production in ICDPsworks. I then turn to east-ern Madagascar and the many ways that access to the land matters there. The rest of the article centers on the 1993 USAID evaluation meeting,and different steps in theneeds production process. The key argument is that different linguistic ideologiesare in play in the needs production process, driving particular modes of transla-tion, entextualization, spacialization, summation, and reporting that, together, arefoundational to the RNPs overall governance.

DEVELOPING, CONSERVING, GOVERNINGICDP planning, in its focus on exchange values in nature and the education

of residents as individually responsible for their actions in the forest, is guided bya political rationality of green neo-liberalism. As employed by Foucault (1991b),a political rationality is central to the analytics of government, foregroundinghow forms of rationality inscribe themselves in practices or systems of practices,

and what role they play within them, because . . . practices dont exist without acertain regimeof rationality(1991b:79). In theterm governmentality itself, Foucault brings together two terms:gouverner (governing) andmentalite(modes of thought).Governing, in this sense, involves structuring a eld of knowledge and power sothat power itself is seen as rational. Neoliberalism, for its part, is a political strategydatingfromthe1970sthatforegroundstheeconomy,themarketasefcientandjust,and the conception of the ideal state as involving smaller government, privatizationof public services, and large-scale deregulation (Goldman 2004).

Over the last 20 years, a green neoliberal project has emerged, guidedin part by a rationality that Kathleen McAfee labels green developmentalism, acomplex of institutions, discourses and practices that facilitate objectication andcomodication of natures values, widespread adoption of environmental cost and

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benet analyses, andstructures to managetheefcientuseandexchange of naturalcapital (1999:134; see also Bandy 1996).

An important opportunity opened by Foucaults turn to governmentality isthe possibility of reconciling modes of domination with the subjects own self-guidance. Foucault writes, Governing people . . . is always a versatile equilibrium,with complementarity and conicts between techniques which assure coercion andprocesses through which the self is constructed or modied by himself (1993:203204). Critical to the green neoliberal project are practices of green interiorizationand normalization through which resource-based peoples (like the Tanala) becomedisciplined environmental subjects, able to rationally assess environmental costsand benets (Sairinen 2000). I contend that a technology of need (and its con-

stituent linguistic techniques) is critical to attempts at environmental normalizationof residents in the Park Project, in particular, and in ICDPs, more generally.

It is in the latter work of Michel Foucault that the intellectual roots of the gov-ernmentality approach are grounded.7 In an inuential series of lectures deliveredat the College de France in 1978 and 1979, Foucault detailed the emergence, in17th-century Europe, of qualitatively new forms of governance whose object, incontrast to sovereignty, is not the exercise of a totalizing will to power, but the over-

all condition of the population. Interrelated notions of population and biopoliticsare important here. Foucaults conception of population begins with the historicalobservation that, in the 18th century, a shift occurred in the way European statesunderstood their subjects. A concern with governing a population replaced a con-cern for populousness (Curtis 2002).Populousnessdescribes a countable groupof people with social distinctions that are conceived to be irreducible. This is anorganic view of subjects and the territories within which they reside. Population,

however, grows from an assumption of practical equivalences among those ruled.The population is seen as an atomistic essence, a statistical phenomenon. Throughprobabilities, one encounters the regularities important for rule.Biopolitics,then,is the endeavor, begun in the eighteenth century, to rationalize the problems pre-sented to governmental practice by the phenomena characteristic of a group of living beings constituted as a population: health, sanitation, birthrate, longevity,race (Foucault 1994:73).

Liberal rule of populations works through freedom, with agents of governancemovingsubjects through thesefreedomssothelatter alignthemselveswithparticularrationalities. The population, then, while being the subject of needs,of aspirations. . . isalsothe objectinthe hands ofthe government, aware, vis-a-visthegovernmentof what it wants but ignorant of what is being done to it (Foucault 1991a:100,

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emphasis mine). In this approach, governancerather than being identied with acentralized state apparatusis seen to be a decentered process, itspower associatedwith broad discourses of rule (or political rationalities), governmental programs,andtechnologies andtechniques(lower-level practices) ofgovernment. In ICDPs,needs production is one such technology.

Needs production is a critical dimension of ICDPs and demonstrates howthese projects embody neoliberalism. Statements of need, their interpretation,and the subsequent formation of programs related to them are constitutive of neoliberal processes and rationalities. In Ranomafana, the ICDP process seeks toguide a large number of slash-and-burn farmers (and other people involved in non-sustainable production in the region) to be accountable and responsible for their

damage to theforest andthe land. Moregenerally, environmental individualizationnames the process by which every single individual becomes responsible for heror his environmental self-control in every situation (Darier 1996:14). During the1993 meeting focused on here, for example, words of Ambodiaviavy elders weretranslated as declaring a broad acceptance of the enclosure of their ancestral land bythePark Project. Thus constructed as distanced from their estate, theobjecticationof their needs was imaginable and the people themselves become approachable as

potential partners in the protection of the land and its resources.Ongoing work with the youth of the region provides additional examples of

these processes. Anu Lappalainens (2002) study of the impact of the Park Projecton area residents includes survey research in twelve primary classrooms. The re-sulting information, Lappalainen tells us, when given to RNP managers, will helpenable the needs of locals to be taken into account (2002:2). Kaisa Korhonenand Lappalainen (2004) conducted a similar study in the Park Project in which the

environmental awareness of children from 18 villages was analyzed. Two othereducation programs runningin theRanomafana area arealso worthmentioning:TheNational Association for the Management of Protected Areas (ANGAP) establishedan environmental education center in Ranomafana called Kianjo Maitso (GreenPlace) with a focus on children. The Nando Peretti Foundation, an Italian NGO,also runs a school program in Ranomafana and Antananarivo called the Future forthe Lemurs and Children Project.

The ordering of terms in the name of the Peretti Foundation Project is initself striking, and suggests how the Future for the Lemurs and Children Projectillustrates the convergence of conservation, governance, and educational concernsin the making of green neoliberalism. In Ranomafana, conservationists understandthe lemur to be an index of a complex set of ecological relations, the integrity

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of which must be sustained. A similar, holistic way of thought is also operativein state governance, in which the lemur becomes a type of citizen with rightsof protection. Alive in its natural surroundings, the lemur represents a source of monetary exchange from tourism, conservationanddevelopmentaid, andresearch,as well as a pivot for various forms of management that can be outsourced to localactors and NGOs. The protection and cultivation of what is constructed as naturalresources is paramount here. For educators in the Ranomafana, such ecologicaland economistic reasoning (with the lemur as its symbol) is a rationality to be laidout for residents to adopt at an early age. This rationality has now been workedinto primary curricula throughout the region. Since 2002, children involved in theFuture of Lemurs and Children Project have participated in reforestation efforts,

research on lemur habitats, conservation coloring book activities, and green mediacampaigns.

Foucaults work on governmentality is not, however, neatly applied to theRanomafana context, past or present. As James Ferguson and Akhil Gupta (2002)point out, because Foucaults approach was informed by a notion of grounded,independentnation-states(whatLarner andLeHeron[2001:3]call methodologicalterritorialism), transnational locales like Ranomafana, where state and extrastate

practices and institutions intermingle, are difcult to theorize. Arjun Appaduraihas also noted that we are now living with new geographies of governmentality(2001:24). In Ranomafana, World Bank structural adjustment directives, U.S.universities, development agencies, and scores of national and international NGOswork in tandem with the Malagasy state. In conceptualizing this situation, thenotion of a transnational apparatus of governmentality is useful (Ferguson andGupta 2002:994), and it is important to recognize how the multiplicity of actors

hailing from different regions and countries turns language ideology and practiceinto a key terrain of transnationalization. I now turn to the people of Ambodiaviavy,offering a view of their lives that might help us better understand their needclaims.

MASTERING THE LAND, THE PAST, AND THE FUTUREAt least three-quarters of the people living in Ambodiaviavy (see Figure 1)

claim to be part of the Sambinoro line of kin. Ambodiaviavy Sambinoro share theirSambinoro identity with families living in six other tanana scattered around thesoutheast border of the RNP. All of these family groups are masters of the landon the Sambinoro ancestral estate. As Zanaka, an oral historian in Ambodiaviavyexplained, the status of master of the land was rst claimed by the Sambinoro in

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FIGURE 1. Ambodiaviavy is only ve kilometers east of the town of Ranomafana. From theprovincial capital of Fianarantsoa, National Route 25 meanders through a series of mountainsand slowly descends into Ranofamana from the west. During the approach to the town, onepasses the entrance to the RNP, the RNPP Museum, and houses of Park Project staff. At the

bottom of the hill are the Ranomafana market and the central ofces of the RNPP. The residents

of the town are spread out on the hillsides and in small, roadside homes and shops. At thenorthern end of the market is the Namorona River, which separates the town and its marketfrom a hot springs complex (baths, ofces, swimming pool, etc.), a presidential residence, and

the Hotel Thermal. With Ranomafana nestled half way up its eastern edge, the RNP sprawlsabout 43,500 kilometers north and south. There are at least 100 tanana hugging the RNPs

borders. National Route 25 continues east, out of Ranomafana, past the trail that leads overmountains to Ambodiaviavy and to the port town of Mananjary.

Ranomafana around 200 years ago when their ascendants began burying their dead

in wooden cofns(ringo)dug deep into the oors of natural caves(lakoto).Fromthese cofns, ancestors continue to hold their descendants to the land, as it is theywho are the ultimate source of the blessing(tahy)required for such activities astaming(folaka)theforestedmountainoorsforswiddenandconstructinghomestoensure the growth of their own children. Like the Sakalava peoples of northwesternMadagascar described by Gillian Feeley-Harnik (1991), the Sambinoro did not tellme of unembodied ancestral land. Rather, ancestors exist among the living, in theland that sustains them, in trees, in their very bodies. Living, land, and ancestry areinseparable because either people live where their ancestors rst settled the land,and thus are masters of the land(tompontany),or they live elsewhere as strangers(vahiny),dependent on the ancestors of others as well as their own (Feeley-Harnik1991:22).

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The bulk of everyday life in Ambodiaviavy takes place between the housesof the living in the tanana and the houses of the dead(tranom-paty)in the forestcaves.Community members practice a mixture of slash-and-burn agriculture (tavy)on the mountain slopes and wet-rice agriculture on the valley oors. A seasonalmovement exists between the tanana and the eld houses(trano antsaha),wherefarmers protect the maturing rice in their swidden elds from birds and wild boar.Each day baskets of rice, manioc, beans, and greens can be seen atop the heads of residents returning from the elds to the familyhearth. A gathering of older womenfrom Ambodiaviavy spoke of this seasonal movement as being indexical of the healthof the communityan indication that key needs are being satised. A steady owalong the paths linking tanana to the tavy elds points to the relative absence of

illness, natural disaster (cyclones, drought, locusts, etc.) and crop failure, all of which are caused, in the nal instance, by ancestral displeasure.

Master of the land status in Ambodiaviavy determines the precise spot in thetananawhereonelives; it also determines ones relation toSambinoroclaimson landwithin the RNP. Families tied to the Sambinoro line through men(tera-dahy)occupythe highest ground to the east of the community. Families connected to the line viawomen (tera-bavy)encircle the core group. Over the years, the tanana has grown via

a set of diverse relations that include friendships, blood brotherhoods, and land-usearrangements. Most of these latter strangers live to the west of the community.Masters of the land in Ambodiaviavy farm the largest holdings of the best irrigatedland in the regions narrow valley spaces and have privileged access to the largestportions of swidden land closest to the tanana houses. Master of the land statusdoes not, however, determine all types of wealth. For example, two young non-Sambinoro families in Ambodiaviavy have managed to acquire a good deal of cash

and boast ownership of large numbers of cattle. It is, however, the Sambinoro whospeak for the entire tanana in matters involving outsiders, and who have traditionalclaims to forested land within the RNP. The needs of the Sambinoro are rmlyrooted in their understanding of ancestors and land. The health and growth of thekingroupincluding those livinganddeaddepends on a critical setof productiveexchanges: in properly recognizing the ancestors (admittedly, a very difcult, orsarotra task), the abundance of the land and the growth of the people are assured.

By acting in and on the forested land of the Ranomafana region, the Sambinoroof Ambodiaviavy also understand themselves to be Tanala (People of the Forest). AsPierre Beaujard points out in his monumental study of the Ikongo Tanala (a grouplocated to the south of Ranomafana), Tanala identity is not to be conceived in termsof race (i.e., as based on physical features or some biological essence). Rather, the

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term designates only a commonality of mode of lifefounded on the exploitationof the forest . . . within an identical physical milieu (1983:24). As it is for manyother groups in Madagascar, Tanala is a geographically determined, performativeidentity. For the Sambinoro Tanala, life with the forests in the present is also tightlywoven into the past. Access to the landprecisely that which was taken away in theformation of the Park Projectis thus about much more than natural resources.8

THE 1993 PARK EVALUATION MEETING AS A SPEECH EVENTIn1993, the Park Project was evaluated by USAID, its primary donor organiza-

tion. According to its nal report published in the same year, the evaluation had twoobjectives: to assess the project accomplishments to datevis-a-visthe objectives

stated in the Phase I proposal; and to improve the planning and implementation of the RNPP (USAID 1993:1). An evaluation group arrived in Madagascar on June24, 1993 and left on July 15, 1993. Group members spent a total of seven daysin the Islands capital city of Antananarivo and remained in the Ranomafana regionfrom June 27 to July 11.

The evaluation group divided into a series of teams to handle the variouscomponents of the Park Project, including biodiversity, agricultural development,

health, and education. The analysis to follow is concerned with the agriculturaldevelopment evaluation team composed of two U.S. consultants hired by USAID(markedinthediscoursetranscriptionsasDr.LongandDr.Ryan),socialscienceandevolutionarybiologyprofessors,respectively; theMalagasyAssistantEnvironmentalOfcer in Madagascar of USAID (marked as Voara);andthreeMalagasy Park Projectstaff, including the leaders of the education and health components (marked Soloand Tody, both accompanying the team as translators) and a driver (Vily). As I show,

Tody and Solo are important actors in the analysis to follow.Theevaluationteammetwith agatheringofaround40Ambodiaviavyresidents.In attendance was the Sambinoro lineage segment head(mpanjaka),15 elders(rayamandreny) the most vocal of whom being Ravanomasina, Toky, Zanaka, andKotoand an assortment of young men, teenagers, and children. Understandingsof the encounter among participants varied signicantly along a number of differentaxes. In constructing an initial analytic framework for these diverse interpretations,I expand on the ethnography of communication approach as originally developed by Dell Hymes, especially Hymess (1974) later expanded explication of speechand the speech situation, and the constituent components of both.

On entering Ambodiaviavy in early July, the evaluation team rst visited thehouse of the local council president, greeting the president and a number of other

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elders from the tanana. The broad-level framings of the entire speech situationdivided neatlybetweentheevaluators andtheresidents. For thelatter, theencounterwas avoriana,or meeting. The primary speech style within such meetings is thekabary,or oratory. Oratory in Ambodiaviavy is a highly formalized discourse stylethat unfolds in a dialogic manner, is replete with proverbs, aphorisms, and otherancestral words, and isopentothe participation ofmostelder men inthe community(see also Keane 1997; Kuipers 2000:173175).9

The team, for its part, approached the meeting as an informal interview.In opposition to the oratorical style, the interview format regiments turn takingaccording to questionanswer pairs establishedbythe interviewee, andforegroundsthe referential function of speech (or, the ability of speech to pick out and make

propositions about entities in the world).Arguing that the denitions of the encounter fell neatly into two opposing

camps is not to say that there was not a range of what Hymes calls purposes-goals(Hymes 1974:57) in play. A few of these more situationally dened goals deservemention. First, both Solo and TodyPark Project staffers who were serving astranslatorswere striving for positions higher up in the Park Project bureaucracy.Both men correctly reasoned that the USAID consultants and staff present at the

meeting could help them reach their career goals. Also, serious differences existed between the Sambinoro lineage segment chief who called the meeting in his res-idence and the council president in whose house such meetings occasionally takeplace.10 The council president, along with a number of other residents consideredto be vahiny in Ambodiaviavy, are seen, to varying degrees, as being outside of theSambinoro lineage. These vahiny live in the western part of the tanana, directlyopposite thechief.Thecouncil presidenthadbeen interested inacquiring more wet-

rice land in Ambodiaviavy for some time. His position as councilpresident, and thushis relation to the Malagasy state, made this interest a threat to the lineage leader.A close look at language practice is also in order. None of the Ambodiaviavy

residents participating in the meeting spoke either French or English. Thus, ques-tions in French from two of the three USAID team members (Dr. Long and Dr.Ryan) were rst directed to either the Malagasy member of their team (Voara) orto Solo or Tody (Park Project staff members) for translation. None of the MalagasyPark Project staff spoke English well and their competence in French hovered ataround the intermediate level. The two U.S. members of the USAID team did notspeak Malagasy and functioned at only an intermediate level in French.

The meeting began with a discussion of Sambinoro perceived needs, ancestralland, the future of tavy farming in the region, and the history of the tanana. At

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the outset of the discussion, Dr. Long sought to determine whether Ambodiaviavyresidents felt they were permitted to enter the RNP, whether they did indeed enterthe RNP to search for medicinal plants and visit sacred sites on their ancestral land,and who it was that originally explained access laws to them.

One topic requires special comment. Numerous references were made tothe 1947 rebellion, which was primarily a rebellion against French colonial rulewaged by people from Madagascars east coast. The repression by the French thatimmediately followed was one of the most severe in colonial African history. The1947 incident reached the doors of Ambodiaviavy because at least one of the elderscurrently residing in the tanana aided rebels from the nearby town of Ifanadiana.In retribution, colonial troops entered the Sambinoro hamlet of Antanamaso (the

hamlet from which present day Ambodiaviavy residents moved most recently), burning houses and searching for sympathizers. Antanamaso residents ed to theirancestral land within the forests (forests that are now part of the RNP), survivingon lemurs, boar, and craysh, and returning to the hamlet under cover of night togather stored food. Throughout the meeting, the event as a whole is referred to bythe utterance 47.

THIRSTING: TRANSLATION AND LANGUAGE IDEOLOGY INNEEDS PRODUCTIONLet us now look closely at the discourse of the meeting, and at the relationship

between translation and linguistic ideology.11 Immediately after a long historicalaccount of the movement of the Sambinoro people by Zanaka, Dr. Long, theUSAID consultant, shifted abruptly back to the question of whether residents feltthey were permitted to enter the RNP. Frustrated, Zanaka, the younger brotherof the ailing Sambinoro chief and the man in direct line for the post, made thefollowing statement:

Zanaka (elder): original Malagasy 145.

a. Ny ilainay anie dia ohatra an izao: > b. Ny mba tsy vita ny hoe IFANESOESO IZAHAY SY NY PARK. >c. Fa tokony HI-FORMER NY ANAY izany an, b. in order that it does not happenthat is THE PARK AND US RIDI-

CULING ONE ANOTHER>c. [they] should TRAIN US,

Todys French Translation of Zanakas Discourse146.

a. CES GENS LA, < b. ils acceptent la delimitation d. Ceci cest pour le PARC, c. Then they MOVED, moved to AMBODIMANGA. >d. They moved. . . b. The village there was destroyed by the enemy. >

Todys FrenchTranslation of Zanaka and Kotos Oral History Tody

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62.a. Au DEBUT, < b. le

Zanaka63.

a. Tanana voalohany izany. >Tody64.

a. Et puis,Rahasoa (Female Elder)65.

a. AMBODIMANGA. >Tody (RNPP Translator)66.

a. Et puis APRES ce village < b. DOITetre

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Governmentality, Language Ideology and the Production of Needs in a Malagasy National Park (Ranomafana, Madagascar)