Razana

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On the ancestral land of a highland family the most solid thing standing is often not a house anyone lives in. It is a chamber of stone, half-sunk into the red earth, mortared and faced and roofed to outlast the generations that raise it, built to hold not the living but the dead. The Malagasy call it the fasana, the family tomb, and by long custom it is the most durable and expensive structure a family will ever build, of stone where the dwellings are of wood and mud, and often more finely decorated than the houses of the living (Culture of Madagascar). The reason is not sentiment. The dead housed there are the senior members of the family, and seniority is housed accordingly.

A Betsileo highland tomb topped with teza, the carved memorial posts of a family’s dead. Agence économique de la France d’outre-mer, via Wikimedia Commons. Public domain.

The dead who do not depart

The razana are the dead who do not leave the family. The word gathers a whole class of the departed into one standing order — parents and grandparents and the founders behind them, back to the forebear who first cleared the ground and whose name the land still carries — and it does not draw a line where memory fails. To be counted among the razana is less to be remembered as a person than to be seated among the seniors of a line that continues. The living are the junior members of that line; the dead are the elder members; and the family is the single society to which both belong, divided only by the threshold of the tomb.

They are reached where they are. A descendant addresses them at the fasana, in the honoring words spoken over the first-fruits of the rice, and in dreams, where a forebear may come with a warning or a demand. They are not creators. In this sacred world the making of the earth and of humankind belongs to the creator-power that the highlands call Andriamanitra and much of the island calls Zanahary — whether these are one power under two names, regional variants of a single sky-lord, or distinct powers is not settled among the tellers or their students — and the razana stand a rank below, between the living and that source. They are closer to it than the living can be, but they are not its origin. The creator makes; the ancestors bless and warn.

How this order reaches the written record runs through the highland kingdom and its missionaries. The oldest continuous highland idiom of the ancestors is preserved in the Tantara ny Andriana, the vast compilation of Merina royal history and custom assembled by the Jesuit priest François Callet across the 1860s and 1870s from the testimony of highland elders — a source of the first value, and, because it was gathered in a Christianizing court and set in type on a mission press, one to be read with its making in view. The London Missionary Society, reaching the highland capital between 1818 and 1820, wrote down the customs of the razana in its own record, from the outside and against the grain of its own purpose. The scholarly spine of the modern understanding is the anthropologist Maurice Bloch’s Placing the Dead: Tombs, Ancestral Villages and Kinship Organization in Madagascar (Seminar Press, 1971), whose central argument reorganized the whole subject: among the Merina it is the collective tomb, and not the house or village of the living, that defines the enduring group.

The wellspring of hasina

From the razana descends hasina, the sacred efficacy that runs through the Malagasy world — the life-force that legitimates authority and imbues those who hold it (Culture of Madagascar). Hasina is what fertilizes the rice and quickens the child, what ratifies a chief and holds a family whole; it is potency and rightness at once, and its wellspring is the ancestors. What flows from the dead to the living, above all, is their blessing.

Honored, they give. The blessing of the dead — breathed over a descendant, carried in the first-fruits, sought before any undertaking of weight — brings fertility to the fields and the line, health to the body, good fortune to the venture. Neglected or offended, they warn. A forebear left unhonored, a tomb allowed to fall into disrepair, a duty to the dead unmet, and the address comes back as a dream, a sickness, a run of misfortune — not punishment for its own sake, but the summons of a senior who remains present and expects to be answered, and who has means to compel an answer. The relation is not the judgment of a distant deity but the discipline of a family, exacting because the dead are near and interested.

Much of the order of fady — the taboos that fix what may and may not be done, eaten, said, or approached — is traced to the razana. A word or an act of a forebear binds the descendants after them, and is respected during and after the lifetime of the one who set it: a food an ancestor refused becomes a food forbidden to the line, a day or a direction marked by a forebear’s fortune becomes a day or a direction kept or shunned for generations after. So the Norwegian missionary-scholar Jørgen Ruud gathered the highland fady in his Taboo: A Study of Malagasy Customs and Beliefs (1960): the taboo-order read as the will of the ancestors made durable, carried forward as the very shape of proper living.

All of this is anchored at the tomb, and here Bloch’s argument does its work. A Merina may be born in one place, work in a second, marry into a third, and die far from any of them, but he belongs where his tomb is, and the tomb stands on the ancestral land to which the razana themselves belong. Membership in the collective tomb — the right to be laid, in the end, among a particular body of ancestors on a particular hill — is what fastens a person to a descent group. Residence is provisional; tomb-membership is not. This is why the fasana is built as it is: massive, of stone, sunk into the ancestral earth, more permanent and more finely made than any dwelling of the living, because it is the true and lasting house of the family, and the dead are its permanent residents. The living scatter and return; the dead stay, and are visited.

The building of it is reckoned accordingly. Among the Malagasy of the highlands the raising of a tomb is the single costliest undertaking a family sets its hand to, drawing in the labor and the savings of a wide kindred over years, so that a household may live plainly and yet spend without stint on the stone that will hold its dead. The proportion is deliberate. A house shelters one generation and passes; the fasana shelters all the generations at once, the newly laid beside the founders, and it is built to a standard the living do not claim for themselves. To scant the tomb would be to seat the seniors of the family beneath their rank, and no fortune reversed by such neglect would be a matter for surprise.

The address of the dead is close and particular. The razana are not petitioned as a crowd but named, and they answer as themselves — a grandmother in a dream, a founder whose fady still holds, a forebear who comes to a descendant to say that the shroud has worn thin and the tomb must be opened. Such a visitation is read as a summons, and a family that receives it will set about the rite. The honoring words spoken at the tomb, the portion of the first-fruits set aside, the small observances kept through an ordinary year — these are not worship offered to a god but the courtesies owed to seniors who remain in the household, transacted with the nearness and the exactness of family business.

Death, in this understanding, is not an ending but a passage into rank. To die well and be gathered into the tomb is to be raised into the condition of the razana — to pass from the junior order of the living into the senior order of the dead, and to continue from there as a member of the family who watches over it. There is, in the traditional reckoning, no hell to be sent to and no paradise to be won, and no return to the world in another body. The dead go to be gathered among the ancestors. In Betsileo and highland telling the souls of the dead make their way to Ambondrombe, the forested mountain in the south, near Ambohimahamasina below Fianarantsoa, where they assemble and take up a common life of their own — a mountain kept whole by fady, its forest left standing where the surrounding country is cleared, and from which, the people who live below it say, the sounds of that gathered life can be heard at night. To become razana is thus the aim of a completed life and not its defeat. The dead whose house of stone outlasts every dwelling of the living are not gone. They are seated at the head of the family.

The great rite by which the highland dead are brought out and honored is the famadihana, the returning, in which a family opens the tomb, lifts out its wrapped ancestors, renews their shrouds of red silk — the lamba mena, cloth bound up with hasina — and carries them out among the living before laying them back. The full account of the rite belongs to the rite itself; what matters to the standing of the ancestors is that the famadihana is the bond made bodily, grief turned to festival, the place of the dead within the family renewed and their names spoken aloud so that they are not lost. To rewrap a forebear is to answer, with one’s hands, the seniority the razana hold.

The kingdom, the mission, and the living present

In the highland kingdom the order of the ancestors was also the order of the state, and the greatest of the razana were the royal dead. The tombs of the sovereigns at Ambohimanga and within the Rova of Antananarivo, the sampy — the royal talismans that guarded the realm’s hasina — and the offices that tended them stood at the summit of a hierarchy of the sacred that the Merina kingdom built up under Andrianampoinimerina and his son Radama I. The full political history of that order is the kingdom’s own; what belongs to the ancestors is that royal power was itself a claim upon them, the sovereign the living apex of a line of ancestral kings whose blessing legitimated the throne.

The nineteenth-century Christian encounter pressed hard on the razana. The London Missionary Society came in 1818–20 with letters and a press; the Malagasy New Testament was printed in 1830 and the whole Bible completed in 1835, the translators taking up the highland name Andriamanitra for the God of the scriptures — a reframing whose weight belongs to that name’s own account. Under Ranavalona I, who held the throne from 1828 to 1861, the practice of Christianity by her subjects was forbidden and the converts who persisted were punished, jailed, and in numbers put to death, the court standing as the defender of the ancestral order against the printed Word. The decisive turn came under Ranavalona II: in September 1869, on her baptism and the declaration of a Christian monarchy, the royal sampy were brought out and publicly burned (Ranavalona II). The talismans that the missionaries called idols were, in the highland understanding they were burned to end, guardians of hasina and not idols at all; the fire relocated the sovereignty from the ancestral palladia to the Christian God, with the crown as its custodian.

The honoring of the razana, rooted in the household tomb rather than in the dynasty’s talismans, did not end and does not end. It continued alongside the churches, and continues now. Roughly half the country is Christian; a small share — some 4.6 percent by one count — hold to the ancestral customs alone, the Fomba-gasy that keeps the tie between the living and the dead; and very many Malagasy Christians keep both at once (Culture of Madagascar), blessing their dead in church before the traditional rites, or asking a minister to consecrate a famadihana. The ancestors are honored by families who are also parishioners, and the two allegiances are held together rather than traded.

The scholarly reception turns on Bloch and those who came after him. Placing the Dead set the tomb-membership thesis; Bloch’s later From Blessing to Violence: History and Ideology in the Circumcision Ritual of the Merina of Madagascar (Cambridge University Press, 1986) read the highland circumcision rite as the transfer of ancestral blessing joined to a movement of ritual violence, blessing and force bound together in the making of a descendant. David Graeber, working from fieldwork at Arivonimamo, reconsidered the famadihana in Dancing with corpses reconsidered (American Ethnologist 22:2, 1995, pp. 258–278), reading the turning of the bones as a working-through of memory and its violence rather than the “cult of the dead” of older description. Where outside writers reduce the rites to a spectacle of “dancing with corpses,” the phrase says more about the visitors than the visited, and can be set to one side. Michael Lambek’s The Weight of the Past (2002) and Lesley Sharp’s The Possessed and the Dispossessed (1993) carried the study of how the dead bear on the living to other quarters of the island, where the ancestors reach the present through mediums as much as through tombs — though that relation belongs to another order of the dead and its own telling.

A stranger to the highlands, seeing the stone chambers stand where the villages have thinned, might take them for monuments to grief. They are nearer the opposite. The fasana is built to last because the family it houses is not finished; its senior members have only changed their rank, and a family lodges its seniors well. The living build in wood and mud and expect to move on; for the razana they build in stone, on ground the dead already hold, and come back to them with red silk and the first of the rice. The house that outlasts every house is the house of those who did not leave.

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