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Making Ancestors: Funerary Traditions of the Malagasy
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14524 |
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Section : |
CULTURE
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| Issue
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3 / 1988 |
4,668 Words |
| Author
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John Mack
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Moramanga, a town on the island of Madagascar (now called the Malagasy Republic), is at once a major economic and cultural crossroads. To its west is the country's capital, Antananarivo. To the east are the island's most extensive remaining areas of tropical rain forest, and its main port, Toamasina. Antananarivo is the center of the Merina peoples, and Toamasina of the Betsimisaraka; they represent the two largest of the eighteen officially recognized ethnic groupings in Madagascar.
Both Madagascar's French colonial government and the present authorities found it expedient to mount economic barriers at Moramanga in order to supervise the flow of goods through the region. Baskets of bananas, cloves or vanilla from the east coast, and sacks of rice from the central highlands, are inspected and their contents logged and checked. In the process curious discoveries are occasionally made--for the traffic at Moramanga also includes human remains, usually skeletons, carefully wrapped in cloth.
The reasons for these unusual finds, however, are not sinister. In such cases the remains are those of a person who has died far from his or her native region. In such circumstances, relatives are obliged to seek some means of retrieving the deceased's body so it can be placed in the ancestral tomb or grave. This may involve exhumation of the body, arrangements for its transports, and the often considerable expense of the appropriate ceremony once the corpse is returned. Such practicalities--together with the requirement that the body should be as nearly as possible in a skeletal condition--mean that it is often not until years later that the dead are recovered. But, in principle, no matter how dispersed relatives may become in life, it is anticipated that they will be reunited in death.
Similar scenes unfold throughout Madagascar, even at Ivato, the island's international airport. Last October, for instance, the remains of a well-known soccer player, who had died in France several years previously, were returned by air to his native soil. From the airport the coffin was taken to the National Sports Stadium and laid out at the touchline, while several games of soccer were played in honor of the deceased. The shrouded corpse was then taken to the ancestral tomb and placed, according to tradition, alongside those of other family members.
The most celebrated example of this practice occurred in 1938 when the remains of Ranavalona III, queen of the Merina people and of Madagascar, were repatriated for final burial. She had died fully twenty-one years before in lonely exile in Algiers. On her return she lay in state at the railway station; the next day her coffin was brought to the royal palace and reinterred.
Such events are by no means limited to the famous. It remains the common ambition to be finally laid to rest in the family vault. In the past, the ultimate penalty for the most serious transgressions of traditional law was the threat of being denied burial in the tomb. In popular writings, the nature of the relationship between the living and the dead in Madagascar is often characterized as "ancestor worship." That description is, however, inadequate to describe this complex relationship.
A culturally diverse island
Funerary practices
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