The current curator of
the Colonial Museum of Marseille collection finds himself frequently
garbage-picking. At its prime in the first decades of the 20th century, the
museum, operated by the Colonial Institute of Marseille, became the unnatural
home to thousands of accumulated materials, mostly plants, from Africa, the
Caribbean, Asia and South America. Drawing huge crowds and attracting the
attention of industrialists to the museum and Marseille’s Colonial Expositions
in 1906 and 1922, these objects became material symbols of French control of
lands, territories, and people. The joint forces of colonialism, nationalist
propaganda, and scientific capitalism would designate Marseille’s ports as a
semi-permeable boundary between France and its declared possessions, resulting
in an ever-growing accumulation of looted rocks, skulls, tools, birds, mammals,
reptiles, and shells brought back in suitcases for scientific analysis. When
the first World War commanded a global captive audience, however, the Colonial
Museum of Marseille and its research institution fell into disrepair. A revival
before the Second World War was short-lived and futile. The institute would
soon fade into shameful obscurity during liberation and decolonization
movements of the 1960s through the 1980s. Natural history and ethnographic
museums, full of stolen objects and artifacts from former colonies and overseas
“departments,” became sites of politicized epistemic debates.

Rather than respond to
the demand to categorically interrogate French imperialism, and with the
scarcity of post-war funding, many scientific-colonial research institutions
and museums closed. The National Museum of Natural History closed its doors due
to safety hazards in 1965 and the roof of a museum in Toulouse caved in before
the end of the 20th century. But the 1990s saw a revival of many of France’s
colonial museums, undergoing identity shifts to demonstrate, or strategically
appear to, recognize their foundational colonial ideologies, marked by the
re-opening, rebranding, and re-appropriating of objects between the Museum of
Natural History and the Museum of Man in Paris. Most infamously, however, was
the 2005 opening of Quai Branly—an ethnographic museum dreamed up by former French
President Chiraq—which amassed hundreds
of thousands objects from the natural history and anthropology museums to form
a “new” museum which, in truth, resonates more with the classical systematics
of colonial collections than the revamped historic institutions. Through this
political and aesthetic shuffle, many smaller collections and museums struggled
to redefine themselves or assert new missions, falling out of national and
regional focus, and others avoided formulating a post-colonial museum ethics
completely.

In Marseille, like many
other cities beyond the Paris bubble, the historic collections have been
periodically picked through by niche researchers, colonialists with
commemorative nostalgia, and amateurs impassioned by the exotic, but mostly,
they have been fated to decades of mistreatment in damp storage closets. With
irreparable damages and disorder, an untrained eye might dispose of a crumbling
specimen, believing it to be trash that affixed itself to the autumn leaves
that blew in with the mistral, the uncomfortably cold Marseille wind. 
Of course, there are also those who round up these objects for dumpsters on
purpose. Some are fueled by embarrassment, subscribing to a genre of magical
thinking that believes purging evidence of injury settles past ordeals. Many
others do not see the value of holding onto this history, especially without
funding to keep it well preserved. In direct struggle for the limited space of
the overcrowded classrooms and laboratories of Marseille’s local science
university, the remains of France’s first colonial institution have been
squeezed into a few small rooms. In one room, leaflets folded and stuffed with
dried leaves, twigs, flowers and seeds fill floor to ceiling lockers. Spillover
from uncatalogued herbarium specimens and antique museum display cases from the
19th century are organized by territory and potential industrial application.
In both cases, objects are fated to real-life tetris: a crisis of constant
rearrangement, in a crowded cemetery of colonial nostalgia.

The threat of time on
recent memory and museum preservation is omnipresent. Presently, the once
celebrated, then hidden, now deteriorated objects of the Colonial Museum of
Marseille are being recovered and inventoried by over-committed staff and
volunteer retirees in an attempt to symbolically recover this “lost” heritage:
“lost” implying the paternalistic possession of objects that were never meant
to be so far from home.

The science fiction of colonial epistemic
culture / Colonial Projections / Long Distance, Exclusive Relationship

The founder of the
Colonial Museum of Marseille, Doctor Edouard Marie Heckel, never set foot in
Madagascar, but considered himself an expert anyway.

While he may have never
proclaimed himself as such, his actions speak volumes, and those who honored
him throughout his career vehemently agreed. During the antecedent to a medical
school-resume-padding-gap-year, Heckel left France and headed to the Antilles.
Not unsurprisingly, as often happens, the group of colonizers fell ill. Unable
to take a hint, they persisted, often in desperate conditions fueled by greed,
fear of losing nationalist clout and facing the failure of their paternalism.
Somehow surviving an epidemic of yellow fever, Heckel outlived his colonial
buddies, claiming to have used local botanical samples which subsequently
oriented his scientific interests towards the possibility of colonizers using
local plants to heal themselves abroad.

At 22, barely out of
adolescence, Heckel was appointed chief of colonial naval pharmacy in New
Caledonia and he would later go on to be awarded a medical degree and doctorate
in natural sciences in France, between trips to places such as India, Java,
Senegal, and Australia. Starting around 1875, Heckel began his eventual
retirement project of methodically mining, organizing and appropriating medical
knowledge from French colonies, slowing circling in on his opportune interest
in Madagascar, France’s prized acquisition of 1894/5. Because France’s
1895 invasion of Madagascar is considered one of the worst medical failures in
the history of European colonization due to the calamity of disease-caused
deaths, Heckel was able to highlight his patriotic benevolence in the field of
research in tropical medicine.

In 1893, just one year
before the French invaded Madagascar with intention to colonize by any means
possible, Heckel politicked enough funds to found France’s very first colonial
institute for scientific research: the Colonial Institute of Marseille. Enticed
by the possibility of the ‘unknown’ of Madagascar’s highly specified and unique
endemic flora, Heckel recognized potential to profiteer by filling the space of
not-knowing with his own scientific-colonial mythologies. Under the veneer of
improving the colonies through scientific development or “mise en valeur”,
Heckel sold the exotic dream of Madagascar’s pharmacopeia for personal and
national exploitation to local merchants and politicians in Marseille.

Intimately examining plants under a microscope, Heckel sat in his armchair in the
soap industry capital of France, some 8,000km away from the country’s novel colonial possession of his
interest. He claimed to determine the usefulness and validity of these plant
materials to cure colonizers, despite never having had any personal contact with Malagasy healing practices. So it should come as no surprise that Heckel never recognized the plants as functional lines of communication
with Malagasy ancestors, portals only permeable to  an attuned beholder. 

By using the technology
of the encyclopedia – the 19th century natural history database system – Heckel
published authoritative texts on Malagasy “medicinal and toxic” plants.
Pieces of Malagasy plant knowledge were written on scraps of newsprint wrapped
in dried leaves, providing clues that Heckel would use in his determination of
usefulness. It was through his network of
colonial administrators, merchants and botanists that he was able to  extract information from Malagasy people, situating himself as an aggregator and filter of what knowledge
was “true” or “useful.” Meanwhile, the Malagasy people who were both interrogated for, and shared, this knowledge would remain uncited, nameless, and invisible contributors in Heckel’s scientific papers. (That is,
except for one man, Gershon Ramisiray, who was one of the first French-accredited Malagasy doctors and therefore recognized as meritting citation, despite Heckel’s colleague and prominent natural historian Grandidier
omitting Ramisiray’s “Dr” prefix in print.) The outcome of this pervasive and strategic politics
of non-recognition is such that Heckel continues to be widely cited to this day
and celebrated for his massive undertaking to amass, re-name, and record
“useful” plants from France’s colonial. But Heckel is no hero. Nor did he
invent Madagascar’s pharmacopeia. The salvation narrative of scientific progress has traditionally glorified the encyclopedic aims of colonial botany, slipping into the hagiographic genre of scientific forefathers.

How can you learn an epistemology of
something as intimate as healing from a distance? Concerned with cataloging
cures and remedies, publishing verbose encyclopedias, and obsessively authoring
himself into historical significance, Doctor Heckel did not realize the limits
of becoming expert in something he knew nothing about. He indexed this
information without regard for sovereignty of the knowledge already existing in
a structured form of its own superimposing his
own terms and categories. In re-authoring knowledge and dismissing local
epistemologies,, Heckel overlooked the true potency of Madagascar’s pharmacopeia.

Any encyclopedia created by a French
scientist with no knowledge of Malagasy ancestors is conveniently mistranslated
and misinterpreted,  a reenvisioning of Malagasy medicine as a fetishized cure
for France’s futile colonial economy, as something it is not – something weak,
something containable in materials alone.

Epistemologies of Healing in Madagascar
Today / Sizeable Incongruencies

Tucked away on a dirt-road passage a few
blocks from the central open-air market, vendors of Malagasy medicine, or pharmacie
gasy, as it’s called, go about their daily affairs of sorting dried plants,
arranging bottles of oils and diagnosing clients. Maudeline laughs and gossips
through closed teeth as she flosses using the stem end of a leafy twig, a
confident gesture that, according to her son, lures in potential business.
Whether or not this is the source of her success, I do not know. But I do know
that on any given day, Maudeline, also known as Mody, is one of the most
successful vendors in the city.

Mody is first and foremost a salesperson -
her time spent gathering bundles of plants into marketable sheafs measured by
wrapping two-hands around the girth and stringing ody beads onto fishing
line to hang from the wooden beams. In Madagascar’s ancestral practices, healing
includes the medico-botanical. But more significantly, healing spans beyond a
Cartesian segmentation of time and space;;'>—the
motions of material and social exchange of Malagasy medicine begin, and end,
long before and long after the point of sale.

Fiscal,
familial, and bodily concerns are all of equal gravity and
can always be traced to a spiritual cause. As a pharmacist of ‘traditional’
medicine, Mody is a broker of protections. She keeps the ancestors pleased and
the work of evil spirits at bay. The daughter of a migrant from the southern
regions of Madagascar (well known for healers and diviners) and growing up
around a pharmacie gasy stall herself, Mody has built a loyal clientele
over 30 years through word of mouth and reputation for her competence in both
inherited and acquired knowledge.

Holding the foundational beliefs of
Malagasy traditions and taboos, she is simultaneously an avid church-goer,
placing her in the profitable position of appealing to clients through the
joint logics of Malagasy beliefs and Catholicism. Anything she cannot diagnose
herself, she refers to those who can call directly upon ancestors, such as
healer-priests, witches, and some midwives, who consult the wise spirits often for a fee (a sacrifice of livestock, an offer of cigarettes,or present of libations, depending on the
situation and spirits being indulged). Each of these providers work individually with clients depending on their spiritual and physical needs, ranging from misfortune to spirit possession to cancer – illnesses which
are all not necessarily unrelated in a cosmology that often locates the root causes of ailments in ancestral discontents.

Malagasy medicine is incredibly
site-specific in its origins, applications, and emergent strategies. Many
elders go so far as to contend that pharmacie gasy, does not work away from
the sea-bordered red island simply because the ancestors are not there. In
addition to the highly unique flora of the island--much of which exists only in
Madagascar--and the perimeter of pharmacie gasy influence, people must
physically go to Madagascar to heal themselves. And many do. Clients from
surrounding islands and even neighboring continental habitants come to
Madagascar seeking the cures of pharmacie gasy, usually as a last resort
for ailments that defy biomedicine’s bisections of the social/physical and
material/spiritual logics. It is in this space of Malagasy homeland – the tanindrazina
– that the island’s highly endemic and specialized plants and epistemologies of
healing work for those who believe its power. As long as the materials remain in
Madagascar, they can easily reach the ancestors. The pharmacie gasy
epistemology of healing is in the intentionality of the plant usage, its
connection to the land, the ancestors, the healer and of course, the specific
needs of the patient. In this worldsense, the material is a portal, not a pill.

Vendors like Mody have a consistent
location, fixed in position that holds the materials of a system of knowledge
static for a moment that is already otherwise in perpetual motion, only visible
during moments of impact, like evidence of the atomic structure captured by the
Rutherford gold foil experiment. Heckel and his colleagues only saw the
evidence directly before their eyes, missing the real magnitude of pharmacie
gasy beyond the scale of their microscopes.

Exporting Medical Epistemes / Economic and
Cosmological Friction

Maudeline is aware of the centuries-long
history of forced migration of plant materials across borders. She attributes
it to a global need for pharmacie gasy and to the lucrative quality of
medicinal plants, or what pharmaceutical interests have deemed green gold. “We
offer a health service, but this is also a business for us,” Mody described her
work, “and some people are profiting more than others.” On the other hand, Mody
conceded, even if people are unaware of the root causes, “There are people
worldwide who need p​harmacie gasy,​ especially if they are
possessed by evil spirits.” Even in defense of the global need for pharmacie
gasy, the skewed relationship between Mody’s economic precarity and vital
expertise pose the relevant questions: At what cost? With what understanding?
And at whose expense?

The 500 Ariary ($0.15) it costs to buy a
plant from Mody is not the going rate in Global North economies. The same
materials can be found in luxury age-defying cosmetic products at a price point
five-hundred times that amount and containing mere drops from the extracted
plant. With France remaining the final destination of more than half of the
essential oils derived from Madagascar’s plants, the diaspora of plants for
profit across national borders reveals the ways that, once removed from
context, healing epistemologies become lucrative along centuries of
well-grooved economic routes of colonial power.

Completely void of any Malagasy understanding
of what is being healed, the causes, and the suitable metrics of success,
pharmaceutical, natural health and cosmetic brands fashion pharmacie gasy materials
into culturally inappropriate, fetishized tools for profit. Aided by the fact
that Madagascar is deemed a “biodiversity hotspot” in which most of the flora
and fauna is endemic, Madagascar is depicted as a Garden of Eden which belongs
to all humankind, thus avoiding the neocolonial truth of the treatment of the
Malagasy people and their epistemologies of healing in a localized context.

With pharmacie gasy, it is about
plants, but also about diagnosis. The diagnosis can be identified once the
cause is pinpointed, embedding the entire process in social relationships with
the spirits of royal ancestors, nature, and lost souls, including the dynamics
of faith entrusted in the tradi-­practitioners themselves. Depending on the
belief system of the patient, different protections and risks of exploitation
throughout the healing process are present. In the marketplace of pharmacie
gasy, patients have options regarding the approach they wish to take
depending on their situation, beliefs and finances. The origin of an illness
itself also dictates how one might seek out proper care; for example, when
afflicted by certain metaphysical illnesses, one cannot go to a biomedical
doctor to be treated because they are not experts in addressing malevolent
spirits.

If pharmacie gasy prioritizes
determining individualized social and (often invisible) spiritual causes to
imbue  phytomedicine with healing intention, biomedicine defines medical care
as visual diagnostics based on a generalizable patient and the repeated use of
pills. Biomedical treatment is a set of discrete, standardized practices
grounded in material cures that possess physical matter with the potential to
heal. This emphasis on materiality in biomedicine attempts to sterilize
networks of social and spiritual relationships that are central to pharmacie
gasy​. This epistemology of healing explains biomedicine’s obsession with
isolating the specific “active” elements of the plant, which then undergo
enhancement through privatized European technology. The concretization of the
material and monetary occludes the connections between the material and
immaterial world, an undeniable aspect of all ecosystems of healing in all of
its personal, symbolic, material, political, transnational, intergenerational,
and economic complexity.

Epistemic violence of  the isolating and
mono-narratives of healing uphold the delusion that it is possible to heal in a
vacuum. How does anyone experience healing if not in relation?

[Conspiring bodies, bullets and water, one
shot cure all, medicine and mirage]

There are too many centuries of
testimonies and evidence to dismiss the power, relevance and ubiquity of pharmacie
gasy. No data or statistics exist to demonstrate how pervasive the practice
of pharmacie gasy is in Madagascar precisely because it is undeniably
omnipresent. Figures of speech, logics of local government, pregnancy and birth
practices are all bound to the presiding ancestral cosmology. Regardless of
political and religious  beliefs, the ancestral realm reigns in Madagascar,
especially when it comes to health. Healing can both take place at church with
an ancestral ceremony and at a biomedical clinic depending on a number of
factors: the root of the illness, a client’s financial situation, and the
interactions between multiple overlapping belief systems. Even those in
Madagascar who choose not to practice pharmacie gasy are believers in
their own right, and skepticism is often a form of reverence and trepidation.
Not practicing does not indicate disbelief or doubt, but quite the opposite:
calling the ancestors into play is power, at times with considerable
consequences that can touch any aspect of life.

All use of “charms and talismans” of
“traditional medicine” was banned in Madagascar from 1904 to 1947 under
France’s Code de l'Indigénat in attempt to control the Malagasy population and
criminalize healers. The forced assimilation policies made it so that Malagasy
people were mandated to comply with biomedicinal standards imposed by the
Western world – a masked humanitarianism initiated by the French
governor-general of Madagascar at the time, Joseph Simon Gallieni. Gallieni
used biomedical rationale to conduit Madagascar’s growing population into an
exploitable labor force used to build colonial infrastructure. Acting as a
riptide, colonial legislation and medical imperialism evacuated Madagascar of
its healers, occupying the vacuum with authoritative stances on corporeal
autonomy; the calculated undercurrents pulled Malagasy medicine into French
laboratories for closer examination and forced Malagasy healers to retreat
further into secrecy. (Even after “independence” from France in 1960,
Madagascar’s political and ethnic elite instated health policies closely
aligned with those installed by the French, requiring all practitioners to have
formal, standardized university knowledge in order to practice, confining
healers and practitioners into a tight space of illegality.)

But “out of sight, out of mind” often
proves illusory. Pharmacie gasy, much like witchcraft and occult
practices, can obfuscate political control by drawing upon sources which cannot
always be named or reside in a concealed presence. Despite the legal
enforcement of epistemic violence and exploitation, Malagasy healers persisted
under French colonialism, continuing to either apprentice with elders or answer
to convocations from spirit guides. Pushes for Malagasy national independence
from colonial strongholds have always been grounded in tenants of access to
ancestors and land, the same two central aspects of pharmacie gasy. The
strength of the Malagasy people defending their land throughout history is
insurmountable.

Historical accounts confirm their
successfully pushing away multiple waves of potential colonizers, including the
Portuguese, English, as well as many shipwrecked pirates and wanderers who
mistook Madagascar as their own. In 1895, just two months after the
pronouncement of formal French colonization, the Menalamba (or “red shawl”)
revolt was led by a cult of hidden ancestors. Revolutionaries in this anti-colonial
and anti-foreign influence rebellion wore fabric sanctified with smears of red laterite soil from the island’s highlands. Despite France’s response to replace the island's civil governor with General Joseph Gallieni, exiling Malagasy Queen Ranavalona III
to Reunion Island in the process, the movement successfully destroyed many European churches and inspired a resistance throughout the island.
Twenty years later,
Malagasy French-trained doctors Joseph
Raseta and Joseph Ravohangy, in a secret society at medical school, mobilised students to build a nationalist movement against French colonial rule (the Association
des  étudiants d’origine malgache, AEOM.) AEOM gained traction in response to the 1921 plague outbreak, eventually forming a political party in 1944 called the Mouvement  démocratique  de  la  rénovation  malgache,
or MDRM, which claimed sovereignty for the Malagasy people.

France rejected the MDRM’s formalized
attempts at legal liberation. The insurrection against colonial rule that
followed began in Moramanga and Manakara as a few Malagasy ambushes of French
military bases and plantation, and soon spread throughout the south and central
highlands. The French tripled down on military presence and the subsequent
events of 1947 has been delicately documented by Malagasy author and poet
Jean-Luc Raharimanana, who collected testimonies from the few elders who
survived. In an atrocity against humanity, an incalculable number of Malagasy
people-- most of whom were unarmed--were massacred by French troops by a
profusion of terror tactics in response to demands for freedom. In
Raharimanana’s interviews, survivors recount the rifle charm that saved their
lives, “rano, rano” (water, water) – an ancestral technology which
transmuted bullets shot by French colonial forces into droplets of water upon
contact. Protecting the body as the bullets passed through like a river
required a revolutionary shift in reality, one which traded the manufactured
reality of colonizers for a more liberatory future. Echos of this revolutionary
call sent waves throughout the Francophone world, its reverberations undoing
this particular iteration of colonialism.

While the initial French interest in
Malagasy botanical knowledge was economic, as much of it still is today, it is
wrapped up in an unresolved ethics of colonial exploitation and epistemic
justice. Today, museums catalogue and re-catalogue items according to public
debates over the history of the “metropole”; they continue to re-shuffle
objects a, and reproduce violence through taxonomy, avoiding the deeper
epistemic work of reexamining questions of ownership, categories, names,
locations, and material histories. Meanwhile, vendors throughout Madagascar,
like Mody and her family, continue to develop botanical solutions acknowledging
the presence of ancestors in all generative possibilities of  past, present,
and future.

[Footnote]
Non-anonymization in ethnography:

The fields of
anthropology and sociology are rooted in colonialism and eugenics. In
contemporary discourse, despite having ethics boards and review processes, they
maintain an  unresolved presence, to say the least, and especially so with communities
that have historically been subjected to research. These disciplines require an
overhaul, one which may require that they do not survive the process, and
definitely warrant a revision of methods and methodologies.

In ethnography, the
standards of anonymization has been of recent debate. Other than the reality
that anonymity is often impossible in the data collection process,
anonymization also poses a fair share of troubling ethical concerns. Operating
on a paternalistic model of protection and privacy, it has reproduced dynamics
of epistemic violence in which information is extracted and presented as if the
information does not have a traceable source, preventing fact-checking in many
situations.

For the purposes of my
own research, I believe it is important to not just identify and critique
hagiographic figures in science history but to also name knowledge producers
whose contributions have been violently and systematically silenced. With the
consent from informants, interlocutors, collaborators, and friends, after
discussion of associated risks and confidentiality, I use real, identifiable
names when I can.