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

In 2005, Sarah Osterhoudt served as an environmental volunteer for the Peace Corps in Imorona, a rural village along the northeastern coast of Madagascar. When the program director asked, "Why are there so many trees here?" his question stayed with her becoming the catalyst for this volume. For generations the Betsimisaraka have cultivated farms in marshy lowland areas suitable for paddy rice cultivation and near hillside areas where farmers grow crops such as vanilla, coffee, and cloves. For Osterhoudt, observing the everyday activities of farmers and the decisions they make, highlight the slow and steady work of the cultivation of land, the cultivation of meaning, the cultivation of history, and the cultivation of self. "A very valuable piece of work about a distinctive crop, and merits the close attention of ethnobotanists and scholars of agriculture. That is an anthropologically interesting part of the world; we need more studies like this." — Dr. Harold C. Conklin (1926-2016) Franklin Muzzy Crosby Professor Emeritus Department of Anthropology Yale University
"Sarah Osterhoudt's book brilliantly succeeds in literally, grounding the claim that an indigenous, agrarian society narrates its genealogy, its collective history, and its value and meaning through its agro-forestry landscape. She has 'realized' to a rare extent a cultural reading of landscape so celebrated by Marc Bloch and Keith Basso. The result is something of a model that other ethnographers of landscape and environment will learn from." — Dr. James C. Scott Sterling Professor of Political Science and Professor of Anthropology and Environmental Studies Director of the Agrarian Studies Program Yale University