ABSTRACT
The Zafimaniry are swidden cultivators living in the eastern forest of Madagascar and they number about 20,000. However, they are famous because they are one of the few groups which originally produced the kind of things museums and tourists can take away and display, and subsequently they have developed a tourist-goods industry of some significance. Here I am concerned with their traditional carvings. These are low reliefs or engravings of relatively elaborate geometrical patterns which cover the wooden parts of their houses - especially the shutters and, most beautifully, the three main posts (Fig. 14). Since the 1920s, at least, professional and amateur anthropologists and archaeologists have bothered the Zafimaniry by asking them what these carvings 'meant'. Included among these, in the recent past, has been myself.
