Lost and/or left behind in a Malagasy outpost of the ‘underworld of gemstones’

Abstract

In the once booming, but now slumping, northern Malagasy sapphire mining town of Ambondromifehy, people make do in the face of uncertainty. As a place of internal migrants organized around the mining and trade of a commodity destined for complex and fickle foreign markets, this town features a wide range of distinctive arrangements and compromises. Of special concern here are the arrangements through which people strive to live responsibly – in accordance with traditional Malagasy norms of sociality – while still managing to make a living through work that can lead them astray. I argue that such distinctive arrangements owe a great deal to the particular articulations of place and mobility one finds problematized in a context like this one. The first articulation is well encapsulated in the experience of what Malagasy people term being very or “lost”, a condition of mobile people who either don’t know or have no hope of returning to the places from which they have come. The second articulation is apparent in the experience of being tavela or “left behind”, the condition of people who find themselves staying put while the things, people and possibilities they value flow away from them. For the many people in Ambondromifehy who are managing either or both of these conditions and the circumstances that come with them, idealized systems of social and moral exchange – systems of responsibility – are inevitably forums for compromise.