Famadihana belongs to the Merina and Betsileo peoples of the Madagascar highlands and rests on a broader Malagasy understanding of the dead as continuing, actively present members of the family rather than as departed strangers, ancestors called razana who remain bound to their living descendants and whose goodwill supports the family's ongoing prosperity. Every several years, at intervals a family decides for itself rather than on any single fixed schedule, the family opens its ancestral tomb, a substantial and often costly stone structure representing significant investment by Malagasy standards, and brings out the wrapped remains of ancestors to rewrap them in fresh silk lamba shrouds.
What follows is not solemn in the way many outside observers expect a funerary rite to be: the occasion is genuinely festive, marked by music, dancing in which some participants carry the wrapped remains, feasting, and the gathering of extended family from considerable distances, a reunion the community understands as maintaining real relationship with ancestors who remain socially present rather than as a memorial to loss. The custom is frequently glossed in English language sources as turning of the bones, a literal rendering of its name that outside audiences have sometimes sensationalised; the atlas records what the tradition's own participants and serious ethnography describe, a living family obligation rather than a curiosity.