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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
Date : |
3 / 1988 |
4,668 Words |
| Author
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John Mack
John Mack, an assistant keeper in the British Museum's
Department of Ethnography at the Museum of Mankind, undertook
extensive fieldwork in Madagascar in 1984-85, and again in
1987. |
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
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