Placing the Dead: Tombs, Ancestral Villages, and Kinship Organization in Madagascar

Maurice Bloch is an anthropologist, and this Seminar Press book is his ethnographic study of tombs, ancestral villages and kinship organization among the Merina and related peoples of Madagascar. Its strength is that Bloch's fieldwork-based analysis connects Malagasy funerary and tomb practice directly to the kinship and social organization it expresses, becoming a widely cited reference in the anthropology of death and ancestor practice more broadly, not only in Madagascar studies. Its limit is that it documents the specific communities and period of Bloch's own fieldwork in the early study, so a claim about Malagasy funerary practice today, after decades of subsequent social change, needs a more recent source.