Madagascar

Malagasy religion is organised around the dead. The razana, the ancestors, are not remembered so much as maintained: they remain participants in the family, they are consulted, they are owed obligations, and misfortune is frequently read as a failure to meet those obligations. Around this sits fady, a system of prohibitions that varies by lineage and by place rather than being general, so that a food, a day, a direction or an animal may be forbidden to one family and unremarkable to its neighbours. Any account of Malagasy religion that describes only the churches has described the smaller part.

The population is majority Christian. The London Missionary Society arrived in 1818 and worked with the Merina court, producing a written Malagasy in the Latin alphabet and a Bible translation, and Catholic and Lutheran missions followed. The turn came under Queen Ranavalona I, who from 1835 banned Christian practice, expelled the missionaries and executed converts, some by being thrown from the cliff at Ampamarinana below the royal palace at Antananarivo. Her successors reversed it: Ranavalona II was baptised in 1869 and had the royal sampy, the talismans that guaranteed the kingdom, publicly burned. Both the persecution and the burning are foundational memories, read in opposite directions by different Malagasy.

The four largest Christian bodies work together through an ecumenical council that has repeatedly intervened in national political crises as a mediator.

A Muslim minority, long established through Comorian, Arab and Indian Ocean trade, is concentrated on the northwest coast.

Among the Merina and Betsileo of the highlands, a family will periodically open the ancestral tomb, bring out the remains of its dead, rewrap them in fresh silk lambamena, carry them about, speak to them, dance with them and then return them. This is famadihana, the turning of the bones. It is held every several years rather than annually, in the dry season, and it is expensive: the shrouds, the musicians, the cattle and the feeding of everyone who comes can absorb a very large share of a family's resources.

The logic is not commemoration. In the Malagasy understanding the recently dead are not yet fully ancestors; the transition takes time and requires the attention of the living, and the wrapping is a form of care given to someone who is cold. The occasion is also the moment at which the extended family assembles, quarrels are settled, and the tomb, which is often the most substantial structure a family owns, is repaired. It is a cheerful event.

The churches have had to decide what to do about it. The Catholic Church came to treat famadihana as a cultural practice compatible with Christian faith, provided the prayers said are Christian, and Catholic families hold them. Many Protestant churches accommodated it similarly. Some evangelical and Pentecostal churches condemn it outright as ancestor worship, and refusing to participate has become one of the visible markers of conversion to those churches, with real cost inside a family.

Two pressures have reduced the practice: the expense, and public health guidance during plague outbreaks, since Madagascar has endemic plague and handling remains has been identified as a transmission risk.