Mastering the fertile Betsiboka valley: ritual techniques of allochthonous dominance among a re-anchored ‘lost people’ in Madagascar

Abstract Despite two hundred years of interethnic coupling and domestic migration into the Betsiboka valley in north-western Madagascar, Sakalava are still considered the autochthonous ‘masters of the land’ ( tompontany ). Some migrant families whose ancestors from the central highlands settled in the valley broke custom by burying kin in new tombs near their residence rather than returning them to ancestral tombs upcountry, in their purported place of origin. In so doing, these settlers disembedded themselves from the social and financial expectations of distant kin in the highlands. While new tombs reinforced their claims of belonging in the valley, neighbours understood these families’ actions as paradoxically signifying lowly social status and possibly enslaved origins. These migrants doubled down on their outsider ethnic identity rather than attempting to incorporate themselves into host communities. Ritual and kinship techniques such as new tomb construction and heterosexual marital alliances with Sakalava women allowed this allochthonous community to master the land and the cash crops that it produced. These migrant families reversed the well-established model of ‘autochthonization through incorporation’ commonly described in scholarship on African agrarian societies by refusing to become absorbed into the first-comer Sakalava communities. In gaining symbolic and political ascendancy over the Sakalava, these migrants achieved allochthonous dominance and challenged prevailing assumptions about the directionality of assimilation and belonging.