Famadihana

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The day-diviner has named the hour, and it falls in the dry cold of the highland winter. A little after the sun is well up, the family gathers at the tomb on its own ancestral ground, sets its shoulders to the stone that closes the door, and levers it back. What comes out first is not silk. It is the forebears themselves, each a long bundle in a shroud gone brown with the years underground, lifted into the daylight and carried a short way off to be laid on mats spread in the sun — and onto the laps and shoulders of their descendants, who bend their faces to them and begin, quietly, to tell them the news of the years since they were last brought up. A marriage. A birth. A house built, a debt cleared, a trouble weathered. Only after the dead have been greeted and thanked and asked for their blessing is a single fresh length of cloth unrolled. This is the famadihana, glossed in Malagasy as the turning of the bones, and it is a reunion before it is a burial.

A wrapped forebear is carried aloft through the gathered kin at a famadihana. Hery Zo Rakotondramanana, via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 2.0.

The turning, and how far back it turns

The name is built from the Malagasy root that means to turn, to turn over, and it is usually rendered as the turning of the bones — though what is turned is less the bones than the whole relation between a family and its dead. The rite belongs to the peoples of the central highlands: principally the Merina of Imerina, the plateau country around Antananarivo, and the Betsileo to their south around Fianarantsoa. It is a rite of secondary burial. The dead are first interred, left to lie until the flesh is wholly gone, and only then, after a span of years, brought out again to be honored and rewrapped and returned. By long custom a family line holds a famadihana roughly once every five to seven years — popular accounts give ranges from about two years to seven, and sometimes a decade or more — an interval set, in part, so that a body has time to decompose fully between one turning and the next (Famadihana).

How far back the rite itself reaches is honestly contested, and the honest answer runs through the scholarship rather than around it. The oldest continuous highland memory of mortuary custom is held in the Tantara ny Andriana, the compiled royal history of the highlands, whose accounts of tomb-building and second burial precede the ethnographers by a century. Against that memory the historian Pier M. Larson set a careful reconstruction. In “Austronesian Mortuary Ritual in History,” published in Ethnohistory in 2001 (Duke University Press, pp. 123–155), Larson argued that although forms of secondary burial were known in the early nineteenth century, most mortuary attention then fell on primary interment, and that the recognizable famadihana of tomb-to-tomb transfer and rewrapping re-emerged and consolidated from the 1820s. Two things drove the change, on his reading: the long-distance repatriation of soldiers’ remains as the Merina kingdom expanded across the island, which made the movement and reburial of the dead a common business, and the building of new sepulchres of cut stone as lime-kilns and stone-working spread through the highlands, which gave the reopenable tomb its durable form.

Popular accounts reach further back and less certainly. They date the present form of the rite “perhaps only since the 17th century,” and suggest it may be an adaptation of older double-funeral customs carried to the island by its Austronesian settlers from Southeast Asia and Oceania, where secondary treatment of the dead is widely attested (Famadihana). The honest reading holds these together without forcing them: the impulse to gather and honor the dead a second time has deep roots, very possibly seaborne ones, while the familiar highland shape of the rite — the stone tomb opened, the forebears carried out and rewrapped in silk — is a comparatively recent consolidation. Its exact antiquity is not agreed among those who study it. What is not in doubt is the thing the rite does, which the tellers and the scholars describe in nearly the same terms.

The reunion, and the debt it discharges

Famadihana is not mourning. Mourning belongs to the first burial, when the death is raw and the loss is close. The turning is a reunion — the moment when the living discharge a standing debt to their dead and renew the bond that runs between them. That bond has a name: fihavanana, the web of kinship and mutual obligation that holds a Malagasy family and its wider kindred together, the solidarity of those who owe one another everything. At the famadihana that web is stretched to take in the dead, who are not treated as gone but as absent seniors come home for a day. They are lifted, embraced, spoken to by name, told the family’s affairs, thanked for past favor, and asked for more. The full account of who the dead are — the razana, the ancestral order into which a completed life is raised — belongs to the ancestors’ own reckoning; what the rite adds is the body of the thing, the ancestors handled and carried and addressed in the flesh of their shrouds.

The razana are held to be present and powerful. From them descends hasina, the sacred efficacy that quickens the rice and the child and legitimates those who hold authority, and the ancestors are its nearest wellspring for the living. Honored, they send fertility, children, health, good fortune; neglected, they warn — through a dream in which a forebear complains of the cold or the wearing-thin of a shroud, through an illness, through a run of reversals that a family reads as a summons it has failed to answer. The famadihana is how the summons is answered. It is the channel between the tomb, the ancestral land, and the household kept open and kept clear, the debt of the living to their dead paid in cloth and cattle and time. It is also the completion of a person into an ancestor: the recently dead, still close and still remembered as individuals, are brought up and honored and rewrapped alongside the older bones, gathered by degrees into the collective body of the family’s forebears and settled, at last, among the razana of the ancestral ground.

The anthropologist Maurice Bloch made this the center of the first full ethnography of the Merina. In Placing the Dead: Tombs, Ancestral Villages and Kinship Organization in Madagascar (Seminar Press, 1971), he argued that the collective tomb, and not the house or village of the living, is what defines the enduring group — and that the famadihana is the act by which the Merina reincorporate their dead into the society of the ancestors by placing them in the tombs that stand on the ancestral homeland. A Merina may be born in one place, work in another, and die far from either, but he belongs where his tomb is; the turning is what carries the dispersed dead home to the single sacred territory to which they and their descendants both belong, and so binds the scattered living to it as well.

Everything in the day carries this sense. The day-diviner — the mpanandro, the maker of days, the specialist who reads the reckoning of auspicious and inauspicious time — is consulted first, and it is he who names the day and the hour at which the tomb may be opened, so that the rite is set on ground that the calendar of fortune has cleared for it; the manner of that reckoning is his office and is not the family’s to improvise. The tomb itself is a solid structure of stone, built partly below ground, its inner chamber lined with shelves on which the wrapped dead lie, raised on the family’s own land where the founders first cleared the ground. When the stone is levered back and the forebears carried out, they are laid in the winter sun and, once greeted, wrapped again — each in a fresh lamba mena, literally a “red cloth” though the fine silk or silk-and-satin shroud need not actually be red — and on the new cloth the names of the dead may be written, so that no forebear passes out of memory unremembered. Then the dead are lifted shoulder-high and carried, and the day becomes a feast. There is live music and there is dancing, the wrapped forebears borne over the heads of their descendants and turned about the tomb, and the mood is deliberately not one of grief but of celebration — the reunion of a whole family, living and dead, on the one ground that holds them all.

And it closes before the sun does. The dead are carefully returned to the tomb before sunset, the stone set back and the chamber sealed for the years until the next turning. Families give the reason plainly. “The bones are returned to the tomb before sunset because the sun is the source of our energy,” one highland man told a reporter who came to watch (CNN); the dead go back to their shelves while the light that sustains the living still holds, and the cycle closes for another five to seven years.

None of this is cheap, and the cost is part of the meaning. A famadihana turns on the slaughter of zebu cattle, the purchase of silk shrouds for every forebear rewrapped, and days of feasting — rice served with zebu and pork, drink distributed — for an extended kindred and its guests, who come from wherever the family has scattered to. To spend heavily on the dead is to honor them at the rank they hold and to make the fihavanana visible, the whole kindred fed and gathered at one family’s charge. The expense is not incidental to the rite. It is one of the ways the debt is paid.

Kings, churches, and the weight of the present

The turning has never been only a family matter. Under the highland kingdom it was already a political one. Larson’s history shows why: because the famadihana consumed time, cattle, and money, and because it drew a wide kindred together around a family’s own tomb and so strengthened local networks of loyalty and authority, it came into tension with highland royalty from the reign of Radama I, who ruled the expanding Merina kingdom from 1810 to 1828. A rite that concentrated wealth and allegiance on the ancestral tomb was, from the throne’s vantage, a rival claim on both — even as the same spread of stone-tomb building that gave the kingdom its monuments was carrying the practice outward across the plateau.

The Christian encounter that followed the London Missionary Society’s arrival in the highland capital between 1818 and 1820 cut both ways, and did not end the rite. The ancestral customs continued alongside the new faith rather than vanishing before it, and in the roughly half-Christian Madagascar of the present the churches remain divided over the famadihana. The Catholic Church no longer objects, having come to treat the turning as a cultural observance rather than a religious one; many evangelical and Protestant Christians, by contrast, reject or abandon it (Famadihana). The full account of the mission encounter and its long aftermath belongs to the wider history of the highland faith; what matters here is that the rite passed through it and out the other side, kept by families who are as often as not also parishioners.

The scholarly reception has a clear spine and a real argument along it. Bloch’s tomb-and-kinship thesis of 1971 set the terms, and his later From Blessing to Violence (1986) extended his reading of highland ritual as the transmission of ancestral blessing bound to a movement of ritual force. Against and around that reading David Graeber set his own. Working from fieldwork at Arivonimamo, Graeber published “Dancing with Corpses Reconsidered: An Interpretation of Famadihana (In Arivonimamo, Madagascar)” in American Ethnologist in 1995 (vol. 22, no. 2, pp. 258–278), reading the rite through memory and its labor, and through the differing relations that powerful men and most women hold to the ancestors — the turning as a working-through of the past rather than a simple cult of the dead. His title takes up the outsiders’ phrase in order to turn it over, and it is used here as scholarship, not as endorsement of the frame it names. Larson’s historical reconstruction, of the rite’s transformation and consolidation, completes the trio: the ethnographers on what the turning means, the historian on how it came to take the shape it has.

That outsiders’ phrase deserves naming for what it is. Travelers and headline-writers have persistently reduced the famadihana to “dancing with corpses,” a shock-frame that says more about the visitors than about the visited and misses the thing entirely. What happens at the tomb is a family reunion — an act of love and of obligation, the living carrying their own dead into the sun to thank them and be blessed by them. The spectacle is in the eye that came for a spectacle. The people who keep the rite keep it for their forebears.

The pressures on it now are real, and they are more of cost and distance than of doctrine. Zebu, silk, and multi-day feasting are heavy on families of modest means, and each turning falls due again within a few years. Urban migration pulls the young away from the ancestral land where the tomb stands and where the dead must be brought home. And in 2017, during a pneumonic plague outbreak, health authorities directed that plague victims be laid in permanent graves not reopened for a later turning (Medical Xpress / AFP) — a public-health measure, not a verdict on the rite, and families widely affirmed that they would keep the custom.

They keep it because the dead are not finished with the living, nor the living with the dead. The forebears carried into the winter sun are told the year’s news because they are held to want it, wrapped in new silk because seniors are lodged well, and set back on their stone shelves before the light fails because the light belongs to those not yet gone. The turning of the bones is the hand the living reach back into the tomb, and the grip the dead return.

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