Vanilla Landscapes: Meaning, Memory, and the Cultivation of Place in Madagascar

"I really wanted my list to give a sense of people living today. Like David Graeber, Sarah Osterhoudt does this beautifully, through dialogue with people. Like him, she has a very anthropological way of writing and I like that. And yes, along with its unique plants and animals, Madagascar is indeed famous for vanilla. If you buy fancy ice cream it often says it’s made with ‘Madagascan vanilla.’ This book came out of Sarah’s PhD, which she did at Yale. In the interests of full disclosure, I was on her PhD committee. Sarah lived in Imorona, a village close to the northeast coast of Madagascar, in a community where both women and men were vanilla farmers. Her book is written as a fugue, as she says, alternating between chapters focused on what the landscape and vanilla cultivation mean for people living there and chapters about her own research. Her interest was in the community and their complicated agroforestry system, where many kinds of crops are grown — including vanilla — in a standing forest. “Madagascar is a good place if you’re not intrepid” The book is brilliantly written, and thought-provoking. It takes you deep into the practice of vanilla farming, why these forested landscapes are so valued by families, and how they resonate in Malagasy culture. Vanilla farmers live quite well. Imorona is a ‘successful’ place and, again, not some isolated paradise: for centuries, people have been trading — exporting produce (especially vanilla) and bringing new crops and ideas into their community. At one point during her time in Imorona, the farmers were writing a handbook about vanilla cultivation for other farmers. When Sarah told them that vanilla was actually brought to Madagascar from Mexico a few centuries ago, they first exclaimed’ ‘No, that can’t be true!’ — vanilla is too deeply embedded in the landscape, their culture and way of life for that to seem possible. In the end, they were convinced and revised the handbook. There was still no mention of Mexico, but they swapped French words associated with vanilla production for Malagasy words. One small glimpse of life in Imorona among many, all intensely interesting… Oh yes. There’s a chapter called “Happy Landscapes.” I told Sarah it should be the title of her whole book because it is about a place that works. There is a chapter in my book about ‘success stories’, and Imorona is one of them. As I wrote, I became very aware that the prevailing narrative about Madagascar is itself a story – an old and enduring one: the story of paradise lost. We’re a storytelling species, and the first and last chapters of my book are meditations on the power of stories. Sarah has a wonderful chapter about how history is promulgated in Imorona. It happens in two ways. There’s the ‘ historien .’ He has a formal education. He sits people down from time to time on chairs in rows, and they drink orange soda and listen respectfully. He speaks of dates, administrations, and chairmen of committees and so on and so forth. Then there is the teller of tantara . At these sessions, people sit on a mat on the floor in a hut, a bottle of rum is passed around and imbibed with enthusiasm, his account of the past is not chronological but thematically organized, and everyone joins in. He has little or no formal education but is a riveting speaker who understands different kinds of meaning. Both these people are highly respected by the community, and both are listened to. People understand that there’s more than one way of understanding and giving meaning to the world around us. Sarah’s book delves into these issues. It’s very readable and really interesting."