Paper short abstract:

Anthropologists can continue contributing ethnographically how people live with and navigate intensive and imposed conservations efforts. Paying attention to reciprocal relations, conservation is not only ecological and economic question but ethical, emotional and existential.

Paper long abstract:

As a result of intensive and imposed conservation efforts by transnational organisations and funders (the World Bank, IMF), environmental conservation agencies (the WWF, IUCN) and bilateral development work (e.g. German, USAID), the Marojejy National Park was established in 1998 in rural northeastern Madagascar. People, mainly the Tsimihety ethnicity with a history of fleeing away from coercive and commanding state practices, access to the park was banned and people living in the vicinities of the park were recruited in ecotourism activities while some participated in illegal logging activities in the park area.

Anthropologists can contribute ethnographically by documenting and discussing how people live with and navigate intensive and imposed conservation efforts and how people transform and are transformed by them. Focusing on the Tsimihety way of living, their concepts, practices and historical processes concerning e.g., diverse relations and possibilities with conservation efforts and resources in the park, rice and vanilla cultivation, land ownership, funeral rituals and relationships with different places, plants, animals and spirits, revealed an important crosscutting theme. Reciprocity, an expectation for giving, exchanging or making corresponding actions between selected human beings, plants, animals and spirits challenged fortress conservation activities and socioeconomic and temporal differences between park visitors and people. Paying attention to these reciprocal relations, I highlight not only ecological and economic aspects but ethical, emotional and existential dimensions related with conservation.