The Time of Youth: work, social change, and politics in Africa by Alcinda Honwana (review)

Abstract

anthropological literature. She takes her readers on a wonderful tour along the underbelly of conservation work in order to give them a clear understanding of how labour plays out in a political economy ruled mainly by conservation stakeholders. Sodikoff uses theory to guide the empirical results of her field studies, rather than as an engine hammering down points. For example, she uses Marx’s materialist theory as a touchstone to help her derive insights about the contradictions of conservation, thereby avoiding the reduction of history, societal relations, and labour into a flattened Marxist space of victims and victimizers. Instead she brings the lives of Malagasy, with their limited choices, closer to her readers. Sodikoff has a clear sense of her audience, nurturing our interest in their lives by changing the pace and tenor of the narrative, integrating masterful descriptions of on-the-ground experiences with ethnohistorical scholarship and ethnographic findings. There are few faults worth noting. She might have strengthened her argument by discussing the attack in the conservation literature upon Malagasy loyalty to kin ( fihavanana) in the form of contriving local societal rules (dina) against conservation transgressors. But, in her defence, conservation policy makers only appropriated local rules to serve a conservation master after the ICDP experiments proved untenable. Sodikoff’s field study was done during the ICDP period. It is worth noting that Sodikoff is caught in something of a contradiction herself: that she is a cultural anthropologist who has spent time labouring in the conservation sector, and yet has a deep regard and concern for the sustainability of Malagasy lives vis-à-vis crushing poverty. Too few cultural anthropologists embrace this contradiction and try, as Sodikoff does, to lift their voices above a murmured string of curses aimed at conservation projects. She offers no way out of the contradiction other than embracing it and enlivening the conversation that needs to take place about ‘people and parks’ in the light of the failures of the last conversation that ground to a halt with the inept ICDP projects.