Genese Sodikoff's historical ethnography of Madagascar's eastern rainforest describes the area under study as a ‘salvage frontier’. This term, borrowed from Anna Tsing, denotes a natural space, inhabited and used by humans wherein the conflicting currents of conservation, production and resource use create a maelstrom of contradictory and paradoxical ideologies and practices. These conflicting currents include colonial hardwood extraction, large-scale cash cropping, peasant agriculture, conservation initiatives and so-called eco-tourism.

Sodikoff's analysis has a light Marxist underpinning, focusing on how value is created in the forest and the relationship of that value to the organisation of labour, be that colonial forced labour regimes, the production of vanilla and cloves, or the work of local conservation agents. Much of the first-hand ethnography presented is based upon time spent with these agents, who act as both guards and guides within designated conservation zones. Although they constitute a low-paid conservation proletariat, it is not their labour itself that produces the value of the forest. Rather, this value is created by the perceived scarcity of the resource they are employed to protect, a perspective fostered by international conservation organisations who dominate the ideological landscape in such places.

The book's early chapters deal with the period long before the forest was designated a ‘biodiversity hotspot’. In one chapter the author draws a parallel between the native bearers who carried 19th-century Europeans through the forest on palanquins and the forest guides who accompany ‘eco-tourists’ along the muddy trails of the protected zone. This revolves around a rather fanciful phenomenological analysis which compares eyes and feet as ways of experiencing movement through landscape. Another chapter describes colonial extractive initiatives and the problems that the French rulers experienced with what they perceived to be an innately truculent local workforce. This raises issues of ethnic stereotyping and different ideologies of work as played out in a context of hierarchy, power and resistance, but the analysis suffers from any detailed depiction of local conceptions of work.

Chapter 4 traces the history of the bureaucratic organisation of the forest and forest workers from colonial times, through independence to the present. The colonial state measured the trees, calculated their value and exported them while at the same time vigorously prohibiting the peasant practice of using controlled burning to create agricultural plots. This prohibition continues today, enforced with limited success by the national parks authority and conservation organisations, while large-scale illegal logging of rosewood and other valuable species has soared since the military coup of 2009. Sodikoff illustrates how the conservation rhetoric has taken hold in recent years, acutely pointing out how it was necessary to invent a Malagasy term for ‘environment’ (tontolo-iainana) to serve the political and pedagogic ends of the emerging ideological focus on conservation.

Later chapters depict the relationship between the international agendas of conservation organisations and lobbyists and the practices of local Malagasy peasants, some of whom work as conservation agents. The analysis of how ancestral practices of tending for the dead roots local people in their territory will hold nothing new for scholars of Madagascar but it raises the issue of how traditional agricultural practices that also embody this relationship produce meanings and outcomes that diverge from the value hierarchies of powerful outsiders. This is an important point to consider for it lies at the heart of conservation and development dilemmas and programming. Sodikoff illustrates this though an anecdote about how a conservation organisation's attempt to eradicate non-native species from an island reserve foundered in the face of a local taboo against harming rats. She also examines the divided loyalties of conservation agents who, coming from peasant backgrounds, may find themselves enforcing prohibitions on forest burning while at the same time cultivating burned plots or turning a blind eye to kin who do so. These forest guards embody the contradictions and paradoxes of the enforcement of the neo-liberal conservation policy.

This book does a good job of bringing such contradictions to life and illustrates how a global phenomenon is played out in a particularly apposite context. One of the reviewers providing back-cover blurb describes the book as ‘an obvious choice for undergraduate teaching’ across a range of topics, which may actually be damning it with faint praise. While it is true that Sodikoff employs perspectives from anthropology, history, political ecology and political science that broaden the book's appeal, there is a danger that there may be insufficient nuance and depth to enthuse specialist scholars from these disciplines. This reviewer, an anthropologist of Madagascar, found the ethnographic content somewhat superficial and, crucially, lacking a convincing depiction of the ideas, practices and perspectives of the local Malagasy forest dwellers, the Betsimisaraka.

These reservations apart, Forest and Labor in Madagascar is a pertinent and well-timed contribution to the growing literature on green neo-liberalism and its consequences at a time when the term ‘salvage frontier’ is becoming applicable to ever-greater swathes of this planet.