Merina

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.

The Merina kingdom was built from the highlands around Antananarivo in the late eighteenth century under Andrianampoinimerina, and was extended over most of Madagascar by his son Radama I, who admitted the London Missionary Society in 1820. The missionaries produced a written Malagasy in Latin script and translated the Bible, which is the reason literacy spread through the highlands as fast as it did.

Ranavalona I expelled the missionaries in the 1830s and persecuted Malagasy Christians for a quarter of a century, and the church that survived that period did so without foreign clergy and remembers it as a founding ordeal. Under Ranavalona II the direction reversed completely. The queen was baptised in 1869, and the royal sampy, the objects that had guarded the kingdom, were publicly burned. That act is the sharpest religious turn in the island's history, and it was made by the state.

France annexed Madagascar in 1896 and abolished the monarchy. The churches, Protestant and Catholic, became the largest organised institutions outside the state and carried a political role through the colonial period and after independence in 1960. Ancestral practice did not end. Famadihana continues, church membership and tomb obligation are held together by most families, and clergy differ among themselves about how far the two can be reconciled.