dancing with corpses reconsidered: an interpretation of famadihana (in Arivonimamo, Madagascar)

The ritual of exhumation and rewrapping of ancestral bodies practiced in Imerina, Madagascar, is the culmination of a pervasive relation of memory and violence—a relationship that can only be fully understood by contrasting the attitudes toward ancestors held by ambitious or powerful men in rural society, and those attitudes held by most women. Doing so reveals the parameters of a complex and ambivalent attitude toward authority. kinship, authority, gender, mortuary ritual, Madagascar