Merina religion is organised around the razana, the ancestors, and around the tomb that holds them. Maurice Bloch's study of tombs and kinship in the highlands describes a system in which a person's primary belonging is to a tomb group and to the ancestral land it sits on, so that where someone will be buried is a more decisive fact about them than where they happen to live.
The best known practice is famadihana, the turning of the bones. At intervals of several years a family opens the tomb, takes out the wrapped remains of its dead, replaces the silk shrouds, carries them in procession with music and dancing, speaks to them, and returns them. It is a festive occasion rather than a mournful one, and it is expensive, financed by the wider family together. Bloch's later work on the circumcision ritual traces the same movement, in which a blessing beginning with the ancestors ends in an act performed on the living.
Above the ancestors stands Zanahary, a creator, and Andriamanitra, a name Christian missionaries took over for God. Diviners working with the sikidy, a system of seeds cast and read in a grid derived ultimately from Arabic geomancy, and the vintana reckoning of favourable and unfavourable times, order the timing of everything above.