Burn to harvest, burn to sabotage: Between fire and water on a sugar plantation in Madagascar

Abstract

Since 2009, the Chinese state-owned corporation SINLANX has been managing the Anjava Sugar Plantation, previously managed by French, Malagasy, and Mauritian companies, in northern Madagascar. Built upon the infrastructure constructed by the French colonial regime and operating based on a collaboration agreement between SINLANX and the Malagasy state-owned sugar company, Anjava presents a telling story of spatialized acts of survival and racialized conflicts over land and water in the interstitial spaces between capitalist production and subsistence economy. Malagasy villagers' access to resources is often squeezed by multiple enclosures: a waterdelivery system and a land-distribution system that prioritize sugar production and a bureaucratic system that punishes those who transgress the enclosures. Although Anjava villagers take advantage of the rhythm of sugar harvests and the nature of fire to sabotage sugar production or to make water claims for their livelihood, the agrarian and infrastructural arrangements at Anjava have perpetuated conditions of chronic precarity and profound marginalization of a landless population. The struggles at Anjava must be contextualized in the complex and ambiguous spaces between capital and labor, livelihood and resistance, dominance and adaptation, and ethnic collaboration and hostility.

Archaeology in 2022: Counter‐myths for hopeful futures

“…Capitalist states appear to be uniquely placed as enablers of greedy and violent behavior in the present. Billionaires, corporations, and governments (increasingly difficult to disentangle from each other) hoard unimaginably huge piles of wealth, while destroying entire ecosystems to wring every possible molecule of profit from the earth regardless of the scale of associated and cascading human disasters (Wutich et al, 2022;Zhang, 2023). All too often, uncritical archaeologists then project these contemporary modes of relation and patterns of inequality into the past, normalizing and naturalizing capitalist structures of power, innovation, and dominance (as critiqued in Frieman, 2021).…”

“…Rather than being scared of the fall, we suggest, following Krenak (2020, 62), to "put our creative and critical capacity to use making some colorful parachutes to slow the fall, turn it into something exciting and edifying-after all, we like nothing more than fun and games, enjoying our time on this earth." Nevertheless, billions of people (and nonhumans) on the planet currently live in apocalyptic conditions, from active warzones to poverty-ravaged suburbs, to towns, villages, and whole countries under water or on fire because of climate change (Wutich et al, 2022;Zhang, 2023). Indeed, some Indigenous and Black communities argue that the world already ended for their ancestors five centuries ago, with the arrival of settler colonialism, enslavement, and capitalism to their homelands (Krenak, 2020, 69;Whyte, 2018, 227).…”

“…Nevertheless, billions of people (and nonhumans) on the planet currently live in apocalyptic conditions, from active warzones to poverty‐ravaged suburbs, to towns, villages, and whole countries under water or on fire because of climate change (Wutich et al., 2022; Zhang, 2023). Indeed, some Indigenous and Black communities argue that the world already ended for their ancestors five centuries ago, with the arrival of settler colonialism, enslavement, and capitalism to their homelands (Krenak, 2020, 69; Whyte, 2018, 227).…”