Western Anthropology Students Partner with Malagasy Peers in Madagascar Field Course Focused on Ecotourism and Climate Change
When Andrew Walsh was a master’s student, he travelled to Madagascar for a research project. Then a budding anthropologist, he immersed himself in the African island’s culture, gaining critical insights and building lifelong friendships.
Today, alongside fellow anthropology professor Ian Colquhoun, Walsh helps Western students do the same, through the Environmental Anthropology in Madagascar field course.
The course was created in 2007 by Walsh, Colquhoun and the late Alex Totomarovario from the Université d’Antsiranana (UNA) in northern Madagascar.
Its longevity is rooted in relationships and reciprocity, with both Western and UNA students benefiting from learning opportunities that pair them together, working with community groups on research projects of interest to local stakeholders. All students gain important research skills and experience, first-hand, what Walsh calls “the joys and challenges of cross-cultural collaboration.”
“So much of what we do in anthropology is built on our relationships with other people, and the ones we’ve kept with our colleagues and the communities in Madagascar have been so important,” Walsh said.
That includes his friendship with Louis Philippe D’Arvisenet, who has been Walsh’s “brother in Madagascar,” since his first visit 32 years ago.
Now D’Arvisenet is one of Walsh’s students’ beloved guides and teachers during their five-week stay on the island.
“He’s been with us right from the start and is a huge part of the program,” Walsh said. As is Martelline Razafindravola Be, the first Malagasy student selected to come to Western in 2007 (and again in 2016) as part of an exchange program associated with the course.
Today she’s one of Walsh’s key collaborators at UNA.
“The field course itself is about collaboration. From the beginning, we’ve worked hard to never allow students from Western to imagine they are going in as experts,” Walsh said. “They’re going to learn how little they actually know. One of the big learning outcomes is to appreciate uncertainty and ambiguity and that there are no simple solutions to big problems.”
It’s a lesson fourth-year anthropology student Hannah Lenon embraced as she and her Western classmates Simon Smith, Rojah Hajimirzakhani and Safaa Ali learned alongside their UNA peers.
“The collaborative nature of this experience was so important,” said Lenon. “It gave us the opportunity to interact with a whole new culture, and the Malagasy people the chance, maybe for the first time, to interact with foreigners.”
Promoting conservation, providing jobs through sustainable ecotourism
Northern Madagascar is one of the most biodiverse regions in the world, home to incredible wildlife and valuable natural resources. An ongoing challenge is finding different ways to approach this abundance in a way that conserves its natural wealth for future generations, while also improving the socioeconomic welfare of the region’s present population.
Walsh, who authored Made in Madagascar: Sapphires, ecotourism, and the global bazaar, said ecotourism offers a viable option – “if done the way it’s meant to be done.”
“The idea is to promote ecotourism in a way that benefits the people who are responsible for taking care of their environment, rather than those who might exploit it,” he said.
That is the goal of the community-based campsites being developed at Bobaomby Nature Conservation (BNC), co-founded by Hortenisa Rasoandrasana, a former field course and Malagasy exchange student, and KOFAMA Tsingy Mahaloka, a project situated near Ankarana National Park, run by long-time course collaborators in northern Madagascar.
But attracting tourists who understand this ideology can be challenging.
“A lot of tourists who think they want to participate in ecotourism actually don’t,” Walsh said. “This is not about staying at a luxury resort and going on a little hike. This is camping out in the wild, minimizing the impact on the local environment and ideally, a portion of the money paid for the campsite goes directly back to the community organizations.”
As part of a service learning research project, the Western and Malagasy students did just that, camping at BNC and KOFAMA, exploring forests, caves and massifs.
“Studying ecotourism in these areas, we could see the differences and challenges that come with running sites like this to support the local population,” Lenon said.
The project also gave BNC and KOFAMA organizers valuable insights to better accommodate and promote ecotourism.
Having the students camp, modelling responsible ecotourists, “helps organizers learn what’s involved in being a guide and become more familiar with foreigners and what facilities make touring safe,” Walsh said.
Conducting climate change surveys in rural Madagascar
While at BNC and KOFAMA, the students also surveyed residents of surrounding rural communities on their understandings of climate change. Through more than 60 interviews, they gathered and recorded, for the first time, important data essential to attracting funds to support climate change mitigation and education projects. The students then presented their findings to an audience of academics and community stakeholders.
“It was such an eye-opening experience to see how climate change affected their crops and changed their livelihoods when it becomes extremely hot or extremely cold,” Lenon said.
Making memories, lifelong friends
Travelling to Madagascar was an “amazing opportunity to learn about the vast diversity that exists in the world and in the beautiful cultures of the Malagasy people,” for Lenon, who documented the trip through photos and videos. She’s now editing and uploading them on the ecotourist sites’ social media channels, as part of an undergraduate summer research internship, supervised by Walsh.
It’s content she’s keen to share.
“So much of what Canadians know about Madagascar comes from the (animated) Madagascar movies,” she said. “But to actually go there and experience the nature and biodiversity is like nothing you’ve ever seen before.”
In addition to honing her competency in photography and videography, Lenon said the course helped improve her interpersonal, inter-cultural communication and language skills. “I learned a lot of Malagasy and since French is their second language, I improved my French 10-fold. And I’m sure the Malagasy students improved their English too, because that was the main language we were speaking.”
The friendships she made with her Malagasy peers also had a profound impact.
“We got to know each other really well during the camping trips. We talked about how our everyday lives are different, but in the end, I was surprised by how similar we are,” Lenon said, noting that the students even shared the same sense of humour.
“I don’t think I’ve ever laughed so hard in my life,” she said.
The Western and Malagasy students have maintained contact on social media. It’s these new connections that keep Walsh engaged and offering the award-winning course.
“The research is important, but what’s ultimately so satisfying is the work done through the collaboration of the Canadian and Malagasy students,” he said. “Seeing them come together ─ and even better, not seeing them because they’re off doing their own thing as a group ─ is the most rewarding thing to come out of the program.”