Paper short abstract:

Capitalist-statist efforts to establish the forest as controlled, modern and productive clash with the more-than-human landscape of Ranomafana’s forests in Madagascar.

Paper long abstract:

This study examines a persistent frontier in Ranomafana at the eastern rainforest corridor of Madagascar. The pre-colonial, colonial and post-colonial states have viewed Ranomafana as the source of cheap labour or natural resources such as coffee, gold and for the past three decades, nature conservation and ecotourism services. During the past decade, violence has erupted between the military and those hiding or mining gold illicitly in the forest. While the state represents the current conflict as one between legal and illegal, preservation and extraction, this study argues that the contradiction is rather between a forest landscape and the capitalist-statist attempts to establish it as productive, controllable and modernised. As these capitalist fantasies arrive in Ranomafana, they have come into an uncomfortable contact with the more-than-human landscape that is not compatible with such ambitions. Based on ethnographic fieldwork and a review of historical literature, this study traces the processes of rural transformation in Ranomafana by considering the agency of the forest itself. The mountainous cloud forest has played a significant role shaping the frontier. Tools such as debt and privatisation of land – common to rural frontiers across the world that drive capital accumulation and social differentiation – have created conditions that force forest people to conduct the hard, muddy and dangerous labour needed to produce commodities out of this landscape. Yet, the forest continues to provide obscurity, which enhances the possibilities of some forms of accumulation over others while it also provides a space to escape the state and capital.