Being Ethical among Vezo People

Being Ethical among Vezo People analyzes environmental change in reef ecosystems of southwest Madagascar and the impacts of global fishery markets on Vezo people’s material well-being. The ethnography describes fishers’ changing perceptions of the physical environment in the context of livelihood and ritual practices and discusses their shared understandings of how Vezo persons should live. Community marine protected areas now restrict access to the unenclosed reef commons. Each village is responsible for managing its octopus fishery with a temporal closure. Frank Muttenzer argues that the participants’ apparent willingness to improve livelihoods does not commit them to a conservationist ethos. Vezo people know that fish, octopus and sea cucumbers became scarce after they started selling these products to seafood processing and exporting companies. To cope with resource depletion they migrate to distant resource rich marine frontiers, target fast growing species, and perform rituals that purport to achieve material well-being. But they doubt conservationists’ opinion that reef ecosystems can be managed for sustainable yield.The richly documented, elegantly theorized, and fresh ethnographic outlook on the Vezo addresses current issues in marine ecology and conservation, small-scale fisheries, and the semiotics of rural livelihoods and human well-being, particularly its expression in ritual. It will be of strong interest to environmental scientists, Madagascar specialists and anthropology generalists alike; particularly those who are interested in what the modes of engagement with the environment of foraging peoples can teach us about the human condition at large, and the nature-culture debates in particular.

Being Ethical among Vezo People is a thoughtful and original approach to one of the most pressing problems on the anthropological agenda, people's relations to their environment and the threats it faces. It takes the anthropology of ethics into fascinating new terrain.--Webb Keane, University of Michigan; author of Ethical Life: Its Natural and Social Histories

Frank Muttenzer is lecturer of social anthropology at the University of Lucerne.