Tanala Erotic

The Tanala took their name from the ground they hold: an-ala, in the forest. Their country is the eastern escarpment of Madagascar, a steep wet belt of rainforest, ridge and river gorge running inland from the coastal town of Manakara toward the highland plateau. It is awkward country to cross and worse country to invade, and the Tanala have spent much of their recorded history putting that to use. They divide into two branches whose difference is political rather than cultural: the Ikongo in the south, who held out when the Merina kingdom pushed east in the nineteenth century, and the Menabe in the north, who came to terms with Merina rule. Both trace descent from an ancestor called Ralambo, remembered as a noble of Arab origin, a claim that recurs across southeastern Madagascar and says as much about how prestige was argued as about anyone's actual genealogy. Their reputation among neighbors was military: in the eighteenth century Tanala forces overran the Antemoro, the coastal people to their east, who were no small power themselves. The forest was never a place they hid from history. It was the position they fought from.

Livelihood rests on tavy, hill rice grown on burned forest slope, supplemented by coffee, bananas, and what the forest yields: honey, wax, timber, medicinal plants. Tanala herbalists and diviners, the ombiasy, are respected well beyond Tanala country for their command of forest pharmacopoeia, and ethnobotanists working around Ranomafana have leaned heavily on that knowledge. Daily life is shaped less by doctrine than by fady, prohibitions specific to a lineage, a place or a day, and by obligation to the razana, the ancestors, who are treated as participants in family decisions rather than as a memory of them. Christianity has a real presence and sits alongside all of this rather than displacing it. The twentieth century handed the Tanala an unfamiliar problem: the farming method that sustained them at low population became the thing conservationists arrived to stop. Ranomafana National Park, established in 1991, drew a line through land families had cleared and rested for generations, and the argument over who the forest belongs to is still live. The Tanala also occupy an odd footnote in anthropology, since Ralph Linton's 1933 monograph on them became a standard teaching case for a generation of American scholars, most of whom never went near Madagascar.