The social life of sea-cucumbers in Madagascar: migrant fishers’ household objects and display of a marine ethos

Vezo coral reef fishers of southwest Madagascar, who live in ancestral villages where they also build perma-nent houses, have always been mobile during the cooler months of the year. Between July and November they used to leave the village for campsites closer to less exploited fishing grounds. In the past forty years, market production has become increasingly important and they have diversified livelihood skills in various respects (Grenier 2013; Koechlin 1975; Marikandia 2001). For some producers, market integration has meant a more sedentary lifestyle. For others it has involved extending formerly regional and seasonal migrations to longer stays in resource frontiers located up to 500 km away from the ancestral villages (Iida 2005). As a livelihood strategy, the change in the migration pattern is highly significant for the collective

understanding of the self by a people who to this day subsist almost entirely by reef foraging and fishing. At the same time, mobile livelihoods are both effect and cause of processes of spatially sequenced depletion of marketable marine species (Berkes et al. 2006).

The puzzle this article seeks to solve is that the live-lihood strategy seems to go against ecological common sense. Given that people are aware of the environmental impacts of fishing activity, it is surprising that the migrants do not see themselves, nor are they perceived by others, as victims of environmental degradation but as particularly worthy group members: the successful migrant is not just a social role among others, but an exemplary character or personage. I argue the puzzle is created by the tension between our wholesale third-person perspective on mutually enforcing environ-

The Social Life of Sea-Cucumbers in Madagascar

Migrant Fishers’ Household Objects and Displayof a Marine Ethos

Frank MuttenzerIndian Ocean World Centre,

McGill University

Etnofoor, The Sea, volume 27, issue 1, 2015, pp. 101-121

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mental degradation and social marginalization, and people’s first-person perspective where the scarcity of a species is perceived to be limited in space and time, and can always be overcome when skills are deployed.

To demonstrate how this tension between marine ecology and ethnic character plays out in practice, this article makes an argument about what might be termed an ‘ethos’ of what it means to be a good marine forager. This collective understanding of the self gets expressed in practices of production and consumption that are strongly informed by people’s notion of and interaction with the sea understood as a ‘giving environment’ (see Bird-David 1990). In southern Madagascar more generally, livelihoods are used as conventional markers or metaphors of the contrasting understandings of the self by fishermen, forest-dwellers, and pastoralists who occupy contiguous ecological niches. The ethnic boundaries that separate groups like the Mikea (Yount et al. 2001), Tanala (Harper 2002), Zafimaniry (Bloch 1992) and Vezo (Astuti 1995) are signalled conven-tionally by the contrasting skills of food procurement in particular environments, rather than by descent or a collective representation of history. These slash-and-burn cultivators, forest gatherers and marine fisher-foragers all aver that skills and livelihoods are the distinguishing marks differentiating them from neigh-bours.

Vezo fishers express this idea by saying that one becomes Vezo through what one does in life rather than by being born Vezo (Astuti 1995). The defining role of knowledge of the coral reef environment, skill in fishing and foraging, and practicing a marine lifestyle is not generally understood by them to establish who is Vezo, but to set a standard of excellence that applies to

those already identified as Vezo.1 For example, many fishermen who undertake the migration do so with the aim of building a house and purchasing a complete living room set including furniture and electronic equipment. Mobile livelihoods are today the only way of accessing these objects, because only sea-cucumber divers can earn enough money to purchase the complete set of furniture and equipment. The best sea-cucumber divers I encountered have already bought several sets since they first participated in seasonal migrations. In this way, the household objects become ‘key symbols’ of mobility and a condensed image of the desirability of continuing a marine foraging lifestyle more generally, whose economic viability is demonstrated by successful expeditions to resource frontiers, as displayed in migrants’ living rooms (Ortner 1973). The display is a stereotyped communicative practice, a way of saying that if one is a member of this group one ought to subsist on marine foraging and to learn the skills needed to overcome scarcity and access cash.

My ethnographic narrative will be structured around a list of household objects that only migrants can afford and are expected to purchase, heeding Arjun Appa-durai’s suggestion to study the social life of things (Appadurai 1986). Pieces of hardwood furniture index the money generated in marine resource frontiers from diving sea-cucumbers and selling them to Chinese traders, foraging as the making of economic values. Secondly they are icons of actual living rooms, houses and families back home, of foraging as the cultivation of moral virtue.

The next section lays out the research methods and analytical framework. I then describe the resource frontier and show that sea-cucumber (and previously

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shark fin) harvested to supply the Chinese demand for these products quickly generate large amounts of cash for migrants. To illustrate migrants’ perspectives I will present a first-person account of what being a good fisher means for them where I show that pioneering in frontiers has come to stand for the sustainability of the marine way of life more generally, whose viability is in fact threatened by decreasing resources. Then follows an analysis of how migrants assemble living rooms. The display of furniture upon returning home proves to others that migrants are excellent foragers. The consumption is stereotyped because they purchase the same kinds of household objects not just for their intrinsic usefulness but following a formal sequence (Irvine 1979). The final section discusses whether migration is a successful way of adapting to economic and environmental change. Leaving the question partly unanswered, I conclude that the status-seeking afforded by resource frontiers shapes migrants’ decisions by setting the goals pursued cooperatively in work groups, and affirming a collective understanding of what it is best for one to do.

Research methods and analytical frame-work

I first made contact with Vezo livelihoods and ecology in February 2007 as part of a multidisciplinary research project looking at the ecology of marine turtles in a group of islands off the west coast of Madagascar. The Barren Isles are important nesting sites for sea turtles. Although I went there initially to do a social assess-ment of planned conservation measures, I was surprised

to find such a large number of campsites of migrant fishermen from the south west coast and hardly any turtles. While working on the islands fishermen also used to net sea turtles and dig out freshly laid turtle-eggs. February is a time of the year when the seasonal migrants are supposed to be home in the ancestral village. Those I encountered were people who decided to stay over until the next season, roughly a fifth of the population camping and working there June to December. They explained that people go there to catch sharks. Shark fin is a highly prized product bought by local Chinese traders who then export it. In the meantime sharks have become scarce. When I went back to the frontier region in 2012 migrants had mostly redirected their efforts to certain species of sea-cucum-bers which are likewise a highly prized product exported to China.

My familiarity with coral reef fishing livelihoods more generally is based on twelve months of ethno-graphic fieldwork in 2011-2012 in two ancestral Vezo settlements on Madagascar’s southwest coast.2 I had learned Malagasy, the common language of which Vezo speak a dialect, during previous field research on Mada-gascar (Muttenzer 2010). The testimonies presented in this article are from a survey done in 2012 in a frontier village near Maintirano where I followed the seasonal migrants from the southwest coast villages as well as from previous fieldwork periods in both areas and on camp sites in the Barren Isles in 2007 and 2008. The total population studied in this article varies between 300 and 400 sea-going outrigger canoes distributed over 12 islands used as campsites. A sea-going canoe (laka be) carries on average six to seven individuals. The 2012 survey included 35 randomly chosen migrant

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work groups. Since work groups consist of at least one and at most two sea-going canoes, the sample included in the survey is sufficiently representative of the total study population to infer general tendencies, although no claim to statistical relevance is made in this article. The survey was conducted through semi-directive ethnographic interviews. The topics discussed with informants were commodity chains, expected gains, skills and gear, the organization of work-groups, access to resources and fishing gear, fishing magic, acknowl-edged reasons for and alternatives to migration, consumption patterns, marriage strategies, and migrants’ perceptions of marine resource degradation in both the origin region and in the frontier areas.

Vezo understandings of and interaction with the sea as expressed in their practices of production and consumption can be compared to the behavior of other mobile resource users in unmanaged fishery commons elsewhere in the marine tropics. This behavior is known as the problematic of ‘roving bandits’ and to result in spatial sequences of species depletion (Berkes et al. 2006). I follow the proponents of the applied ecological problematic in taking individual strategies in exploiting marine resources as the starting point of analysis. However, I do not follow them in arguing that struc-ture, power and interests are sufficient to explain why ‘roving bandits’ act in the way they do. Since the exclu-sionary mechanism of global capitalism pushes them to the frontier, so the ‘roving bandits’ argument goes, resource dependent people are not responsible for the tragedy of unmanaged fishery commons.3 In this example, a complex livelihood practice is given a neat push-and-pull explanation of migration that empha-

sizes structure, power and interests, and discounts the ethical dimension of migrants’ conduct.

To avoid the overemphasis of structure, the analytic framework used in this article relates the causal influ-ences on migrants’ behavior to the historically specific ‘basic assumptions about what signs are and how they function in the world’ (Keane 2003: 419). The claim that ‘roving bandits’ are like other ethnographic subjects, ‘trying to do what they consider right and good’ (Lambek 2010: 1), does not deny that the ways in which they exercise their judgment is also constrained by causal influences of which they are unaware. The methodological challenge is to develop an ethnographic stance which can combine first-person accounts and third-person accounts in a fruitful way (Keane 2014). One way of doing so is to take material objects and practices – sea-cucumbers and iconic living room furniture – as possible indices or icons of conventions of interaction: the conventions of rural mobility in the context of fishing livelihoods.4 In this way a first-person account of migrants’ economic calculations can be connected with an externalist account of the material indices and icons of livelihood practice, or what I call the marine ethos. 5

The marine resource frontier

The Barren Isles archipelago includes a dozen distinct small islands without permanent inhabitants located 30-60 km south of the west-coast town of Maintirano, and is accessed through a coastal fishing village nearby this town. The Maintirano region is one of several marine resource frontiers of West Madagascar used by

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mobile fishing people from ancestral villages located between 300 and 500 km further south.6 Vezo from the southwest coast began to move to distant fishing grounds north of the permanent ancestral settlements around 1990, when sharks became scarcer on the southwest coast (Iida 2005). Pioneering unusually distant marine frontiers is an innovation whereby the existing practice of seasonally mobile foraging (tindroke) is extended to previously unexploited fishing grounds in search of particular marine species. The geographical extension of seasonal mobility is linked to international commodity chains for shark fin and sea cucumber, both of which are exported to China. The fact that these products fetch a high price and are exhausted along the southwest coast is the main reason and acknowledged purpose for the migration, together with the fact that these species were not harvested by people from the coastal fishing village who lacked shark-netting and diving skills. The original inhabitants of the coastal village are Sakalava people who also self-identify as Vezo, but more precisely as Sakalava Vezo. About a quarter of these are descendants of the Sarà clan, earlier Vezo immigrants from Anakao and St. Augustin near Toliara who had settled there as well as in other coastal towns of the region during the 1950s. The remaining village residents are Antimo, the recent Vezo immi-grants who had arrived after 1995 and some of whom married local Sakalava women.

Before the arrival of the first shark fishers in 1995, the Barren Isles were only sporadically visited by local fishermen who refer to the migrants as Antimo (South-erners). However, a number of local youth learned the skills from the newcomers and imitated the economic activity. Today the Barren Isles are exploited by a

majority of seasonal migrants and by some local fishing people. This means that unlike the Sakalava fishing people of the coastal village, the majority of fishermen camping on the islands are Vezo from villages located north of Toliara between Manombo and Morombe. However, all seasonal migrants have a ‘permanent address’ in the coastal village in virtue of being attached to a house either through a relative or friend married to a local woman, or through their own temporary local girlfriends. From the coastal village, the islands can be reached in a one day journey by sailing sea-going canoes. Seasonal migrants usually stay out in the camp sites from one to three weeks depending on the distance and elevation above sea-level of the island, before sailing back to trade the collected catch, buy food and fetch fresh water for the next trip. It is common for people from the same ancestral village to re-group for seasonal work on designated islands used as camp sites.

Figure 1. Vezo seasonal migration routes.

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For example, Antsepoke people forage at Beanjavily (Antsepoke mitindroke Beanjavily), Lamboara people at Nosy Vao, and Belavenoke people at Nosy Manandra. However there are no exclusive access rights to specific islands by particular groups of people but at most prac-tical arrangements to avoid getting too much in each other’s way.

Individual fishermen’s practical reasons for migrating, their economic interests and life purposes are framed and organized in terms of existing social conventions. This way of organizing labor mobility is central to understanding how a transnational commodity chain for marine products impacts local marine ecosystems. Migrants from the southwest coast prefer to forage in distant places such as Barren Isles because resources are still relatively abundant there. These expeditions last usually three to six months as opposed to several shorter trips per season to closer fishing sites. There is not much variation in what migrants report about average incomes, prices of species, and availability of marine species. In 2008 informants stated that a work group exploiting sharks and sea-cucumbers generates about 1.5 million mga (=$ 750) per trip. Some informants declared that under favorable circumstances they can individually make up to 2.5 million mga (=$ 1250). In 2012, the income was mostly from sea-cucumbers, with earnings between $ 200 and $ 600 in a fourteen day trip to the islands. One informant mentioned that when the water is clean it could be more than $ 800 in seven to ten days. But after strong winds visibility is not as good and they would make only $ 250 in the same period. All figures for 2008 and again for 2012 are several times the incomes from sedentary fishing and foraging in the

home villages, where they say ‘it is hard to make a living’ (mahery ty velomam-po).

Disincentives against migrating are few. Elders have occasionally banned the young from leaving due to a high number of deaths in diving in previous years. In the case of married couples, the impossibility of sending the children to school is also mentioned by some informants. But in general this is not considered an obstacle. In many Vezo villages on the southwest coast, every young fisherman old enough to go by himself but not yet a father who can gather enough money to go and barring sicknesses or family obligations leaves for the tindroke (foraging). They try to make it to Moron-dava for the June 26 Independence Day, then after the 26th head north to Ambakivao, Beanjavily, Maintirano or Tambohorano, where they stay until they return in December.

The appeal for the migration besides the household objects is the adventure, party and risks involved, self-esteem and regard by others. Young men often stay over until the following year and some get married in the frontier areas. This does not mean however that the seasonal mobility concerns exclusively unmarried youth. It is fairly common that entire households leave together. Married men up to their forties may take wife and children with them, or join in with a sister and brother in law. In the villages of Ampasilava and Belavenoke, up to sixty percent of the active population are gone between April and December, in others the figure may be lower. For those who do not migrate, it is because they are too old or too young, or have more important things to look after. Elderly men who no longer migrate lend or rent out outrigger canoes and fishing gear to the young. The custom is that the boat

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or gear owner receives one part in the catch but in the case of long and distant journey this rule is weakly enforced. Migrants simply send a small amount of money every two or three months.

Rural mobility in Madagascar generally refers to long term livelihood migrations away from overpopu-lated ancestral lands to resource frontiers. People leave for several years with the purpose of making money with which to return to the homeland, without the intention of permanent settlement. But quite often they end up staying permanently in the areas chosen for a temporary livelihood, which may in some cases but often does not lead to the establishment of new ancestral tombs (cf. Evers 2006; Keller 2008). The best known migrations following this pattern are by peasants from the south and the southeast to less populated areas in the west and north-west (Deschamps 1959). The Vezo migration used to differ because it was seasonal and related to the ecology of coral reefs. But a comparison with the migration patterns of other Malagasy ethnic groups is useful to understand the recent development. Vezo subsist traditionally on reef gleaning, fishing and diving rather than gardening or raising cattle, they call themselves ‘fishing people’ (Vezo) rather than ‘agro-pastoralists’ (Masikoro). They seek marriage partners in their own midst, rather than among the Masikoro, and obtain fishing charms from spirit mediums, rather than from sorcerers. They have adapted to new economic opportunities and to scarcer resources at home by extending seasonal mobility to unusually distant fishing grounds, which materialize in significantly higher income than any other type of fishing and marine foraging. Local knowledge of incomes and resource availability is widely distributed,

consistent, grounded in the evidence and constitutes the main reason for migrating. The next section offers a first-person account of the migration and contrasts it with scholarly interpretations of rural mobility. The remaining sections work out the analysis of my own ethnography.

A roving bandit’s virtue

Comfortably seated on the chair of a seven place hard-wood living room set, I scrutinize the room while talking to Hervé in Ampasimandroro, the coastal fishing village located next to the port of Maintirano. I keep wondering how many people store their belong-ings in that house until the New Year holiday. Next to the living room set is a huge pair of loudspeakers with amplifier. tv set and dvd player are set up inside a two-floored hardwood living room cabinet that has window-paned shelves at the top. Hervé is a migrant from Andavadoaka, a south-west coastal village 500 km further south, where he owns a house. He tells me that he’ll return home in December and that he has come to Maintirano every year from 2009 to 2012 and returned home each Christmas. Their group’s outrigger canoe is worked together by four men and two women. Hervé is married to a woman from Belo Tsiribihy, a town on the way to Maintirano. Sometimes he works in Morondava because there is a diving ground there at Nosy Kely and that is where he had met his wife. In 2011 he worked at Nosy Marify, and now at Nosy Lava. These islands belong to the Barren Isles and are accessed via the coastal village. He says:

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That’s where the people from Andavadoaka really work, Nosy Marify, Nosy Manandra, diving (magni-riky) for sea cucumbers, deep sea net-fishing for sharks (manao jarify), and the women glean octopus on the reef flat (mihaky). One doesn’t catch a lot of sharks any longer but often 9only a few. He’s using a gtz (pelagic fishery) net at 50 meter depth and a jarify (self-made large meshed shark net) at 200 meter depth (Hervé, 27.10.2012).

Hervé explains that he first sets up the net, and only then goes diving. However when the water is clear, he doesn’t set up the net first, but rows straight to the diving ground two hours away from the island. This usually is between seven and nine am, until eleven am at the latest in case he first sets up the shark net on the way. He then explains: ‘When you need something from the island you must serve its spirit owner. You just put some money there, no need to offer lemonade or soft drinks, you do it once when you go to a place for the first time’. Before leaving the village for the seasonal migration he asks his grandmothers (father’s mother and mother’s mother) for a blessing. He doesn’t consult a spirit medium because he has no family member with spirit familiars. Often he stays out for a whole month on the island depending on the food supplies, coming down on land when there is no more food. From the income, he already has obtained a house (built from vegetal material) in Andavadoaka and he’s got equip-ment too, last year he obtained an electricity generator. People buy these goods in Maintirano and have them shipped home. In Hervé’s case the migration also pays for the children’s school fees. He sends money home each time he obtains produce. His children are all in

Andavadoaka, two boys, two girls. The eldest son is already fifteen years old, and they all go to school in Andavadoaka. The people working with Hervé’s work group are a brother and two or three sister’s sons. He explains that the product has decreased in quantity by twenty percent from the previous year. On a good day, he would often get twenty pieces of sea-cucumbers. Depending on the species, a piece is between two and fifteen dollars, or $ 25 a kilogram.

People sometimes mentioned to me that the income from sea-cucumbers is mafana, ‘hot money’. They explained that large sums of money are spent quickly and saving them is impossible, a point also made by sapphire miners and shrimp fishers in northern Mada-gascar (Gezon 1999; Goedefroit 2001; Walsh 2003). Luck is attributed to the good will of spirits whose extraordinary powers sometimes unexpectedly turn against the clients. Ritual cleansing of the cash appears to be a rationale for ‘money-laundering’ contracts with spirits and their mediums, a topic I hope to discuss elsewhere. A more straightforward way of cooling down hot money’s heat is to convert it into imperish-able living rooms or to pay for tuition fees. Both illus-trate the social usefulness of resource frontiers and the excellence of those who exploit them skillfully. 7

Instead of social usefulness, applied ecologists stress individual profit-seeking as a reason for highly mobile fishers and traders to deplete a given species in one area, before moving on to another. The term roving bandits evokes the short-termism of these mobile resource users (Berkes et al. 2006). Although rural poverty is recognized as a cause of livelihood mobility, roving bandits are considered ecologically maladaptive, and the proposed solutions are protected areas, temporal

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access restrictions, and the promotion of alternative livelihoods (Daw et al. 2012). Coral reef fisheries in particular have been described as social-ecological traps or poverty traps where processes of social marginaliza-tion and environmental degradation mutually reinforce each other (Cinner 2011). The observation that local people spend incomes on status symbols can only worsen the image of poverty traps. Primary producers for global markets presumably ought to use the money to satisfy ‘basic needs’, whose definition excludes status symbols.

Work in political ecology suggests, however, that roving banditry may be a result of market failure rather than community failure (McCay and Jentoft 1998). Resource frontiers are social settings characterized by high resource dependency and social marginalization, unequal terms of trade, resource enclosure by outside interests, exclusion from political decision making processes, and loss of traditional knowledge, all of which may lead to deregulation of previously more stable access regimes, competition for and conflict over resources, hence unsustainable use (Paulson et al. 2003). Being trapped in this undesirable situation is not the fault of the foragers, who have no other option. The proposed solutions are restoring communal self-organ-ization and addressing distributive injustices.

Social anthropologists tend to confirm the overall picture of resource frontiers emerging from political ecology. They also show that the victims in the process see themselves as pioneers seeking to improve their situation, or to live up to others’ expectations in a context of resource scarcity and competition for social status. In Madagascar, rural migrants can improve their social status either through conspicuous consumption

upon returning home of money earned during migra-tions (Réau 2002), or by cutting the link with the ancestral land and becoming permanent settlers in frontier areas (Evers 2006; Keller 2008). Michael Lambek is critical of a tendency in the literature to portray status-seeking as expressions of ubiquitous competition (2008: 146-148). He suggests that the values for or by which the actors compete in these ‘tournaments of value’ imply ongoing moral judgment about what is the right kind of life for them.

The competition among Vezo migrants is not ubiq-uitous, but limited to the fact that sea-cucumbers are scarce and highly marketable. Otherwise, successful people would be moving on from living room furniture to other items in an inflationary cycle. Instead, everyone wants to be on par with everyone else. Rather than competing for consumer goods, we may say that in purchasing the same finite list of desirable objects, they ‘totalize their biographies’ (Gell 1986: 114). Iconic commodities like tv s, loudspeakers and dvd players are a means of presentation of self, elements of biographical narratives that depict mobility as neces-sary stage of growing up and reproduce family and ethnic group. 8 The ideal way of life thus displayed is that of tindroke avaratra, ‘foraging north’ meaning seasonal work in marine frontiers diving for sea cucum-bers and netting sharks. The next section aims to substantiate this claim further.

Assembling living rooms

I have shown that seasonal migrants’ decisions to exploit specific resources in a given area are consistent

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with their environmental knowledge and the goal of obtaining cash. In this section I want look at how they spend the money and ask whether the organization of wants shows a similar consistency. I will describe first who buys what, where, and when, and the reasons people give for it. Then I will distinguish between the things people intend to buy and those they actually purchase. Related to this, I will identify empirical criteria to suggest that the consumption has a commu-nicative purpose, that it is considered ‘conspicuous’ besides being intrinsically useful.

Like a detective trying to reconstruct the wife’s shopping list by observing the husband in a grocery store, I first reconstructed a list of goods purchased simply by looking over migrants’ shoulders. Of course such a list does not contain its own interpretation. Different types of functions are assigned to commodi-ties either because of their intrinsic, list-independent utility, or because these objects are list-dependent status symbols (see Searle 1998). Useful objects may at the same time be status symbols, and status symbols may not lack all practical utility. The tricky questions in interpreting the shopping list concern the relationship of status function and intrinsic utility of a given commodity. Since people cooperate in work groups to achieve shared goals, I expected status functions to be assigned by collective rather than individual intention-ality. But a uniform desire to possess the items on the list cannot account for the differences between, on the one hand, objects like suitcases used as wardrobes and foam mattresses without which hardwood beds are useless, and on the other hand iconic living-room sets, tv s and speakers, and electricity generators, which also are useful besides being iconic.9

How then is a function assigned to commodity? To describe the intentionality involved in consumption I assume first a ‘list to world direction of fit’ and present the reader with a shopping list that fits my observations of the order in which people effectively purchased different types of commodities, and compare these in terms of current prices or amount of expenditure.

Large sums (with exact amounts difficult to measure) are spent on local girlfriends, as well as manao la bombe, conspicuous drinking and partying. For instance, a standard way of showing off among peers is to buy up a whole bar and privatize access for the evening. Regarding the women, many migrant men complain that the incoming cash is siphoned off by the local girl-friend and her family network. They consider these women unreliable marriage partners because they won’t agree to follow their husbands.

Jean Laborde explains that he does not yet have a permanent girlfriend back in Salary, his home village, because he cannot easily go home while working in the islands. Whereas the problem with the local women is that they change their minds (miola) and in the end want to remain in Maintirano instead of following their husbands. He and his six co-workers have sent money home once, by postal transfer: four million ($ 400) for the entire group. He has been considering building a house when he gets back to Salary. He has already got a tv, a dvd player, and loudspeakers. ( Jean Laborde, 19.10.2012).

Material goods purchased by migrants fall into three categories: fishing gear, houses and living rooms. In the category fishing gear, the items are: talirano, nylon cord

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to be used for jarify, a self-made large meshed shark net; harato zz or barrage, smaller meshed ready-made fishing nets; maks, snorkeling mask; palme, flippers; and of course laka, sea-going outrigger sailing canoes which need to be replaced every two to three years. The cate-gory houses includes: ndrala alefa, remittances to family often used for house construction on behalf of the migrants; valizy, suitcases used to store clothes and personal belongings; valany, cooking pots; f inga, dishes; kidoro, eponge, foam mattresses; kitrely or fatoria, hard-wood bed-frames. The items in the category living rooms include: tele, tv sets; lektera, dvd players; baffle, pairs of oversized loudspeakers; amplí, amplifier; tabili-satera, power inverters to avoid damages to the sound-system; groupe, electricity generator; salon, hardwood seven place living room sets; ermoara or table tele, hard-wood two-storey living room cabinet with tv space, dresser for short.

The order in which these items are purchased is dictated by their price as well as by intrinsic usefulness qua being the object it is. The first regularity is that the most indispensable things are bought first, the less dearly needed later. The second regularity is that the least expensive comes first, the more expensive later. Combining these two regularities in consumption one also gets three categories of expenditure: the unavoid-able, the useful and affordable (objects in this category are within the $ 25 to $ 100 price range), and the iconic (the most desirable and expensive objects).

Thus far I have described what people most regu-larly purchased. But I now want to turn the things people have the intent to buy and ask which commod-ities are for them the most desirable. The ‘world-to-list direction of fit’ assumes that the actor intends to make the world correspond to a list in her mind. Here the list has the status of a rule to be followed, rather than a mere regularity in what people purchase. The simplest way of showing that there is a rule in people’s mind that says ‘buy a tv set and a dvd player next’ is to elicit their preferences through direct or indirect questions. The answers look like this.

Bôsy says that he got his first tv in the year 2000. He has the complete set with loudspeakers and dvd player. He already has built a house in Andavadoaka as well. However, he hasn’t got an amplifier. But he has a nylon cord fishing net being used in Andava-doaka. The jarify shark net is here in Maintirano. He’s now working for a living room cabinet with tv space (vao mikajy Armoir), he already has got the seven seat living room (Bôsy, 19.10.2012).

Zidane sends money to family in Ampasilava, Figure 2. Roving bandit with status symbols.

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the amount is between half and one million fmg ($ 50-100) every four months, and he purchases household commodities. The program is to build a house in Ampasilava. He sends the money and the house is being built there. It goes little by little. He will return to Ampasilava. There is a lot of money in Maintirano whereas in the home region only hard work will get him some money. But it would be preferable to work in the village because he thinks about family, how they are doing over there. And the product in Maintirano is getting less. Possibly after a short time the opportunity to make money here in Maintirano will be the same as in Ampasi-lava ( Zidane, 16.10.2012).

Mario, Alex and Razafy from Belavenoka are building a house. Family at home have already bought a wooden bed frame, a tv, and plastic chairs from money sent home every month. Each time they get back from the island they send 500,000 fmg ($ 50) or more. But now the foraging is getting tough. They do make money, between five and fifteen million ($ 500-1500) per trip/work group. They spend quite some cash on partying when in Maintirano in between trips to the islands, roughly 250,000 fmg ($ 25) per person/day. But he wants to build a house made of stone, already has the tv, loudspeakers and dvd player (Mario, Alex and Razafy, 17.10.2012).

Kokola is from Belo sur Mer and married to André from Belavenoke. She first came to the area in 2010. He works at Nosy Manandra with four other people. She says: ‘The income from a ten-day trip will be at least eight hetsy (800,000 Ariary, $ 400) for the entire group. There used to be a lot of

sea-cucumbers, you sometimes would get two hetsy per person but now it is mostly one hetsy per person. We haven’t got a table tele (tv cabinet) and a salon (living-room) yet. That is what’s worrying us! But we’ve got a tv set, curtains, dishes, and a dvd player’ (Kokola, 25.10.2012).

The way people respond to direct questions suggests that the consumption does follow rules. However, the constitutive rules of the status-seeking game are not theorized. People find it difficult to state any rules followed in spending the cash. But if one compares the iconic objects in the third category to the unavoidable and affordable objects in the first and second, several differences seem obvious. The first is that the acquisi-tion of iconic objects follows and ordered, uniform, almost compulsive pattern. This is not so with the objects in the first and second category. The regularity and uniformity observed in assigning both intrinsic and status functions suggests that in the case of icons, the list may be prior to the world, in the sense of deter-mining the observable acquisitions rather than being determined by them. The purchase of intrinsically useful objects can never prove that people follow rules. The shopping list might reflect nothing more than a statistical regularity. The fact that everyone happens to live in the same way and feels the need to buy similar goods cannot show that they ought to do so. Conversely statistical regularity cannot explain why someone would ever purchase a status symbol. The second difference, then, is that although one can expect that people develop new practical uses for iconic objects, there is no rationality in assuming that people buy these status symbols just for their intrinsic utility,

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whereas purchasing objects without a symbolic value would be sensible even if nobody else purchased them.

It is often said that anthropologists ought to make people as rational as possible or to avoid making them appear any less rational than they are. This can be done by altering the premise of their reasoning in such a way that people follow rules only when purchasing status symbols, as opposed to say buying a suitcase or wanting to sleep on a foam mattress. On this interpretation, there is a double direction of fit, both ‘world-to-list’ and ‘list-to-world’. The list-dependent status function determines how intrinsic functions (such as the useful-ness of a suitcase to store personal items) are assigned a relative rank according to collective rather than indi-vidual preferences. Put another way, by effectively purchasing particular items in a certain order of priority, people set a standard for evaluating other people’s acquisitions, and thereby create a rule determining what everyone should purchase if he wishes to be considered an excellent forager.

The wish to be excellent suggests a reason why rural mobility cannot simply result from individual or family-level coping with changes in ecosystems, scarcer marine resources and unequal benefits from globalized fisheries, but why the rules governing seasonal mobility (which are part of ‘what it means to be Vezo’) are shared at the level of the entire group. The relocation to the ancestral village of material indexes of personal excel-lence shows that the wish to be such a person expresses a collective self-understanding rather than only a matter of individual choice. Not relocating the house-hold objects to the ancestral village shows the intention to settle in the frontier region and emigrate perma-nently. This generally happens at later stage, only after

one or more complete living room sets from previous expeditions have been relocated to the ancestral land.

Adaptive strategies and environmental regulation

When migrants display household goods, they demon-strate to the rest of the community that adaptive strate-gies such as pioneering frontiers will allow skilled foragers to overcome scarcity. But is this actually true? Yes, in the sense that it temporarily solves the problem of scarcity for the time of a generation, and no, in the sense that it displaces the problem rather than solving it (Tucker et al. 2010). Rural mobility and conspicuous consumption contribute to the self-understanding that Vezo ought to subsist on marine foraging. And yet neither institution is uniquely about marine foraging or distinctively Vezo.10 This section examines the latent ecological function of rural mobility as viewed by an outside observer applying objective criteria. A third-person perspective also illuminates the communicative practice through which mobility is regulated, which includes the display of objects purchased during the migration. The problematic issue here is to what extent an externalist explanatory account may legitimately diverge from the acknowledged purposes of agents whose actions are being explained (Vayda 2008). I argue that, even if pioneering distant frontiers was not taken up as an adaptive response to changes in the reef fishery, which were not perceived at that time, today its role is to offset loss in incomes from overharvested reef fish-eries in the migrants’ origin region, and hence to reduce their susceptibility to harm from environmental change.

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The notion of roving bandit in the applied ecology discussion correctly identifies a syndrome of ecological change. In the home region, harvesting for national and transnational markets results in ‘trophic cascades’ where people ratchet down the food chain starting from big predators all the way down to small herbivores (Birkeland 2004). In the Barren Isles, they initially harvested only sharks, and when catches decreased they moved to sea-cucumbers. Sea-cucumbers are already showing signs of becoming depleted and in five years from now, there might no longer be a resource frontier in the sense that these two species will have become equally scarce as on the south-west coast. I have said earlier that political ecologists explain this harvesting pattern as a consequence of primary producers’ margin-alization by markets and politics, arguing that the ecological outcome is not the fault of foragers who have no other choice. In fact, people’s autonomy and sense of agency is denied by the argument that they are not choosing to be roving bandits, but are driven to act in this way by structural causes which need to be miti-gated by outside intervention so that local people recover agency.

The view that people are pushed to the frontier, then, seems to involve a misunderstanding of the acknowledged purpose as it is stated by the migrants. Contrary to the push-and-pull view, ethnographic data shows that pioneering frontiers is a continuation of traditional seasonal mobility, as much as response to the new opportunities with transnational commodity chains for particular species. The traditional short distance seasonal mobility component of the economy has been transformed into seasonal mobility to ever more distant marine frontiers, sometimes followed

permanent emigration. At the same time the sedentary component of the local economy is maintained unchanged by this transformation in the mobility component. The wish to be an outstanding forager explains why the seasonal mobility component of the local economy, albeit extended in time and space to unusually distant areas, does not produce structural changes in the home economy.

Changing the economic structure would require capital investment in local infrastructures and changes in resource access regimes in addition to consumption for subsistence and display, yet to achieve the immate-rial good of being an excellent forager, such productive investments or changes in property relations are not required. All that is needed to live up to standards of excellence is successfully adjusting to new economic opportunities and the effects of overharvesting high prized species in the frontier, irrespective of what happens at home. Searching for cash in distant frontier fails to produce a change in the dual structure of the fishing economy. While it may make a difference for migrants and close kin through remittances it does not for example lead to investment in processing and marketing marine products, or improve access to education, health and transport infrastructures in the home villages. Rather than indicating a wholesale transformation of the fishery, the migration is one possible and perhaps particularly effective coping strategy among others.

Perhaps the question of why the boom-and-bust cycle of sharks and cucumbers and the conspicuous consumption that it enables, has failed to produce structural changes in the fishing economy rests on a mistaken premise about local perspectives on poverty

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(see Tucker et al. 2011). Seasonal mobility was never meant to produce such a change. What, then, was it originally about? Its role was to provide for expenses related to house construction or large ceremonies that could not be covered by day to day foraging near permanent villages. Another explanation I was frequently given is that it was impossible to save any money with all the family around while staying in the village. Lack of wisdom in handling money is a well-described aspect of Vezo livelihoods (Astuti 1995). It is evidenced in this article by the ways in which surplus from the migration is spent. On the other hand, economic dualism and group-controlled mobility is still a very effective way of overcoming individual liquidity shortages due to inability to save sufficient amounts for larger expenses while fishing near the permanent village. Even if large investments in house construction or expensive fishing gear is not always how the majority of surplus from mobile fishing is spent, the point about liquidity does suggest a rationale also for the contemporary pioneering.

The economy was always dual, and the present day pattern of mobility is a modification, diversification, or simplification of the previous seasonal mobility. Catching sharks and sea-cucumbers in marine frontiers therefore does not replace, but adds up to, sedentary fishing and foraging coral reefs on the southwest coast. While the duality of sedentary and mobile livelihoods reflects a group-wide pattern, individuals personally involved in pioneering are less than half of the total population. As people explained it to me, this means that those who do not migrate must still succeed in sustaining livelihoods on their own by foraging for markets in already heavily harvested ecosystems

without having to count on remittances by migrants. Ecologically speaking, seasonal migration therefore cannot substitute for harvesting of octopus and reef fish near the home villages, since it does not relieve sufficient pressure from the local ecosystems. Moreover, the fact that migrants seek out the lucrative species to obtain cash quickly and in large amounts suggests that the geographical extension of the activity is not driven by scarcity of marine products in general, but rather only by the scarcity of high-value species like sharks and sea-cucumbers. Although environmental changes are real enough, they are not the historical cause of seasonal mobility, which existed long before the reef fishery became degraded, nor the cause of extended mobility which was at first driven by new markets for shark and cucumber rather than by the scarcity of other species. Pioneering then is not an adaptive response to perceived vulnerability, if by this we mean awareness of being unable to subsist on the degraded fishery.

The transition from nearby and short term seasonal migrations, to longer term pioneering in distant fron-tiers was made progressively. In the south-west, sharks began to be exploited commercially in the 1980s when people used to catch them with the jarifa, a locally invented hand made large-meshed gill net. When sharks became scarcer after a few years, people responded in two ways. In the mid-1990s, they started to migrate to more remote areas where they continued exploiting sharks with the jarifa. On the southwest coast, they switched to the so-called zz, a net originally introduced by the German development agency (gtz) to develop pelagic fisheries, but which could be used to catch smaller-sized sharks as well. Thus, although the sedentary and the migratory components of fishing

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livelihood are not substitutable but complementary, technology (that is fishing gear and skills) first adopted near permanent settlements are transferred from there to marine frontiers. As of today, the hand-made gill net is still being used in the Barren Isles by migrants who often own a more expensive zz which they rent out in their origin village while they are away. Many migrants say that the jarifa now no longer catches a significant amount of sharks, but most of them rather than switching to different nets direct their effort at diving for sea-cucumbers, which procure a higher income than finfish and even shark. The few who have invested simultaneously in smaller meshed commercially produced nets to catch smaller sharks and pelagic fish are all former migrants who married and settled perma-nently. The most recent evolution is that sea-cucumbers are becoming scarce in the Barren Isles because they are also harvested by local dive teams with scuba gears sponsored by Chinese and Malagasy bosses. I expect that the depletion of cucumbers will eventually force the migrants to invest in more expensive fishing nets.

While boom-and-bust cycles for single targeted species are not sustainable (and lead to the spatial sequence of depletion described as roving banditry), and although seasonal migrations to distant frontiers wasn’t taken up in response to perceived environmental change in the origin region, it has made the Vezo as a group less directly vulnerable to the economic effects of declining fishery productivity near historical settle-ments. That is to say, even if their economy remains exclusively based on marine livelihoods, the dual ecological base makes it less susceptible to disruptions by environmental change. As a medium term economic alternative (initiated in the early 1990s) mobility has

left them less ready than ever to exit the fishery but reinforced livelihood conservatism by confirming existing assumptions that fishery resources are inex-haustible, that commons are preferable to enclosures, and that it is better to subsist on marine foraging than switching to some alternative livelihood.

Contrary to what local awareness of declining fishery yields would lead one to expect, the possibility of migrating confirms the understanding that less useful species can be replaced by more useful ones, and that marine foraging need not be replaced by other livelihood practice as long as useful species can replace extinct or economically useless ones. In functional ecological terms, marine livelihoods (as opposed to non-fishery alternatives) can only be sustained by extending mobility to ever more distant resource fron-tiers, generating a surplus to sustain consumption, which in turn sets a standard of excellence in foraging. Given the premises, pioneering for money and material display are rational actions. To understand the unusual aspect of the process, insofar as it is driven by status seeking as much as ecological considerations, one must look at people’s display of living rooms as a conven-tional procedure for showing that they have got it right.

Conclusion

In this article, I described patterns of production and consumption among seasonal migrant fishers. I identi-fied a list of household objects they purchase with the cash earned in the frontier and showed that they valued these goods both for their intrinsic usefulness and as a conventional means to demonstrate the skill in earning

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money and reproducing family and community. The goal of displaying this historically specific fisherman ethos shapes young adults’ desire to migrate, enrolls them in family-based work groups and enables them to get married and found their own household. Inform-ants’ interpretation of the livelihood practice and my personal observations converge on the conclusion that their awareness of susceptibility to environmental change in the origin region is not a major reason for the migration. But pioneering in distant resource frontiers is motivated by the desire to possess and display the standard set of living room icons.

From a third-person perspective, rural mobility can be described as a way of coping with economic impacts of mutually reinforcing environmental degradation and social marginalization. Unequal remuneration by commodity chains causes primary producers to move to less degraded ecosystems where the same process of marginalization and resource depletion is repeated and conflicts with local populations may be generated. The push-and-pull model roughly fits the Vezo case, if only because migrating for long periods to very distant places has today a ‘latent ecological function’ it didn’t have when they first started it. But even now that push factors play a greater role, the causal determinism assumed by the push-and-pull model conflicts in some respects with the actors’ conceptualization of mobility.

The two components of the coral reef fishery, sedentary reef flat foraging near ancestral settlements and seasonally mobile foraging are complementary. Individual migrants are attracted by cash rather than actually being forced to migrate by scarcity or inequality, to avoid which is only a latent effect of mobility. The aim is to exploit only a few high-value marine species,

not to substitute frontier ecosystems for a home ecosystem that is no longer able to sustain the popula-tion. Mobility does not change the economic structure of the village communities from where migrants origi-nate, nor is it meant to. It is meant to let migrants access a standard set of material goods, which they obtain at the cost of depleting the stocks of targeted marine species, sharks and sea-cucumbers. I have shown that the migration concerns mainly (though by no means exclusively) the younger segment of the population rather than an entire population forced to be mobile in order to survive. For the young mobility facilitates house construction and setting independent households. They have lives to live, and the role they play as foragers must be seen in connection with their kinship role of marrying back home or increasingly often, away from home. Most importantly, the migra-tion pattern both in terms of perceptions of alternatives and criteria for deciding to leave is shared at the level of the ethnic group, rather than resulting simply from the coping strategies of individual families, although these are of course part of the explanation. Linking up this character definition with an occupationally bounded pool of acceptable marriage partners can only reinforce livelihood conservatism.

Livelihood mobility, then, is regulated by communi-cative events that enforce an existing value system upon young adults by making it right and good for them to become successful migrants. tv s and speakers pass as success, and regard by others is due in virtue of that which passes as success. But this way of measuring and evaluating success is contingent upon a wider defini-tion of the right kind of life, which tv s and speakers now indicate, represent or symbolize. Displaying one’s

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freshly bought living room set elicits others’ regard in virtue of one’s own conforming to a pre-established and relatively unchanging role model, according to which ‘being Vezo’ means learning foraging skills and practicing them for a livelihood. To enact the role of roving bandit is to reaffirm a conception of human flourishing that Vezo recognize more generally, and within which the display of key symbols must be placed.

E-mail: [email protected]

Acknowledgements

Fieldwork in Madagascar and eighteen months as a Postdoctoral Fellow at University of Toronto have been generously supported by two Advanced Mobility Grants from the Swiss National Science Foundation. Prior versions of this article have been presented to the Graduate Writing Seminar of the Anthropology Department at University of Toronto and to the Speaker Series of the Indian Ocean World Centre at McGill University. I would like to thank all participants at both venues, and in particular Michael Lambek for written comments on an earlier draft of the ethnography.

Notes

1 Like elsewhere in Madagascar, any individual with a legitimate claim to burial, or whose corpse can be claimed for burial in an ancestral tomb located on the ancestral territory counts as a group-member. Given that by virtue of the ancestral livelihood ethos Vezo tombs and villages are located next to the sea, the different criteria push in the same direction and are sometimes conflated in the mind of some informants.

2 The villages are Andravona located near Salary 120 km north of the city of Toliara, and Belavenoke, located near the district town of Morombe.

3 The fact that migrants assume responsibility for their actions does not imply they ought to be held responsible for all the outcomes of their actions.

4 In contrast to semiology that stresses the conventional dimen-sion of signs, a material semiotics in the tradition of Charles Peirce stresses also the indexical (where the sign-object relation is causal) and the iconic (where sign-object relation is one of resemblance) dimensions.

5 Maurice Bloch has argued that Malagasy ancestors are thought to be continually acting through living persons and material objects like houses, and that ‘morality is thus experienced less as a matter of individual choice and more as a matter of sub-mission and recognition of the presence of others who pene-trate you’. (Bloch 2013: 14). From a virtue ethics perspective, one might say that submission and recognition of others who penetrate you is a matter of individual judgment.

6 Other popular fishing grounds along the way to Maintirano are found near Morondava, Ambakivao, Beanjavily, and Tam-bohorano.

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7 The hot money concept may not have as much purchase for foragers whose livelihood is in any case defined by immediate returns, as it has for a long-term predictable agricultural work cycle where extraordinary gains are unusual and provide more of a contrast with ordinary economic rationality.

8 An interesting example of status seeking is discussed by Alfred Gell who notes that ‘it is easy to laugh at such crass conspi-cuous expenditure, which by its apparent lack of utilitarian purpose makes at least some of our own consumption seem comparatively rational. Because the objects these fishermen acquire seem functionless in their environment, we cannot see why they should want them’ (Gell 1986: 114). He invites eth-nographic observers to recognize the cultural vitality expressed in status seeking consumption, and points to consumers’ ‘ability to transcend the merely utilitarian aspect of consumption goods, so that they become something more like works of art, charged with personal expression’ (1986: 114). Discussing Stirrat’s ethnography of consumption by Sri Lankan fishing communities, Gell writes that ‘in purchasing such an item to form the centerpiece of a personal collection of wealth-signi-fiers, the fisherman is totalizing his biography, his labor, his social milieu, in the form of an object whose technological associations dialectically negate the conditions under which the fisherman’s wealth was actually obtained’ (1986: 114).

9 Below I argue that the constitutive rules for assigning list-dependent status functions define the ways in which intrinsic useful objects are collectively, rather than individually, ranked. This hypothesis excludes absolutely indispensable commodities that satisfy very basic needs (although it explains for example why people prefer rice to manioc when they can afford it).

10 Vezo are in many (most) ways like other Malagasy. An analysis of what is specific to marine livelihood skills and ethos should also account for non-specific characteristics of the people it is about.

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