Nature conservation is the most recent ideology, after Christianity, colonial rule, and Bretton Woods liberalism, to have been imposed by powerful outsiders on the people of Madagascar. All these have been accompanied by what Althusser calls ‘state apparatuses’. As was the case for these other ideologies, some Malagasy have been converted, some half-converted, and many not at all. It is always difficult to know how deep the conversions are, though, in the case of this latest innovation; many fewer people really accept the implications of what is proposed than official and public manifestations of support would suggest. This is especially and significantly the case for those most directly affected by conversion programmes. These form two groups: first are people who, through the creation of parks and reserves, lost their lands and resources to people who they see as foreigners and whose purposes remain obscure. Second are people who work for the parks as agents or tour guides. Genese Marie Sodikoff's book falls into two parts. In one part, she traces the historical and political continuities between colonial and postcolonial situations. In the other, she shows the ambiguities conservation employment creates in the lives of park employees and those close to them.

Sodikoff clearly knows Madagascar well, especially the North East, her main field site and the location of the Manara North reserve. For the ethnographic portion of the book, her focus is a village that is both an administrative base and houses a tourist facility. Some of the park workers she knows best are convinced by the conservation aims, most are not, but all have to be careful not to express their doubts lest they are not promoted or lose their jobs and the rather meagre benefits that go with them. In any case, all these people live side by side with Malagasy peasants not involved in conservation and inevitably have close links with them. These non-employees are almost universally hostile to the conservation enterprise, partly because they understand only too well how its ideology conflicts with their values and interests and partly because they rightly and clearly see the creation of reserves and parks as the seamless continuation of different types of oppression going back to before colonisation and more clearly to the colonial period and postcolonial administration. All these powerful outsiders seem to them to have been on the side of forests, wild animals, plants and trees, and against people. Our understanding of the point of view of non-staff peasants is perhaps better advanced by other studies than this book and Sodikoff could have made deeper use of the existing anthropological studies, especially for the area she refers to. Where Sodikoff excels, however, is in showing us, through a number of very telling anecdotes, the contradictions in the lives and thoughts of the park workers who have to be promoters of a foreign, and often antagonistic, system to their fellow villagers and even their kinsfolk.

The other portion of the book is a politico-economic analysis of the history of Madagascar, especially since the period of colonisation by the French at the end of the nineteenth century. It makes sense to do this in combination with the study of environmentalism in the present since both the author and her informants rightly see what is going on now as the continuation of a much longer history of subjugation. However, doing this type of history in this book – a history that inevitably concerns the whole of Madagascar and even beyond – is problematic if only for reasons of space. It is made all the more difficult by Sodikoff's decision to place this history within a highly traditional Marxist framework that occasionally borrows terminology from recent, radical American social sciences. So we hear continually of subalterns, workers, proletarians, capitalists, neoliberalism, imperialism, etc. Although I have much sympathy with the enterprise in general, she runs into two difficulties. The first is that this theoretical analysis is juxtaposed with an interpretative study based on the point of view of the research subjects. These people's understanding of their situation and of their history is not completely different to what a Marxist analysis would reveal, but it is of another kind. Relating these two stances is complex and the difficulty is not explored. Secondly, the lack of connection between the traditional Marxist framework and what is actually being explored is no accident. Marx's own analysis was anchored in nineteenth-century Europe while recent American radicalism is a mixture of moralism and an understanding of the world that ignores local specificities and histories.

I do not believe that these perspectives and the vocabulary with which they are associated give us incisive analytical tools for understanding the colonial situation in a place like Madagascar, much less for grasping what is going on in that country since colonisation. If class exists in Madagascar, it is not the traditional Marxist class structure or even the system that postcolonial studies talk about for South America or India. If it exists, it is fundamentally different in this new context. We cannot push frameworks ready made for totally different situations onto Madagascar and a lot of new theoretical thinking, perhaps in a supple and innovative Marxist tradition, needs to be done, although it is perfectly true that none of us working on the great island have yet sufficiently done so. The need for new types of thinking is all the more necessary for understanding the politico-economic significance of the relatively new phenomenon that is global environmentalism in a country with such a weak state. The extraordinary power of the naturalist ideology and its significance for a remote corner of the globe has been tackled by a number of writers but, so far, not very successfully.

Perhaps it is unfair to criticise Sodikoff for not having achieved such an analysis and the relevance of this historical background for North-West Manara is very real. Still she seems to have set herself a task that would have required many books and not one so heavily focussed on a particular place and a fairly restricted group of people.