Madagascar Culture and Etiquette Guide

Madagascar shares a language across the whole island and eighteen or so recognized ancestral groupings within it, and it holds two ideas so consistently that understanding them will carry a visitor through almost any situation.

The first is that the ancestors, the razana, are participants rather than memories. The second is fady: the specific prohibitions that attach to a place, a family, a day or a person.

Fady, and why you must ask

A fady is a prohibition, and the crucial thing about it is that it is local. It may be fady to point at a tomb, to eat pork in one village, to work a particular day of the week, to swim in one stretch of a river, to bring a particular animal to a particular place. The next village along may have none of those and three others.

There is no list to memorise and no book to read. The only working approach is to travel with a local guide, ask before doing anything at a tomb, a spring, a forest or a village, and accept the answer without negotiating it. This is not superstition to be humored; it is the local law of the place you are standing in.

Famadihana, and why this page has no photograph of it

The custom outsiders have heard of is famadihana, the turning of the bones: a family exhumes its ancestors from the tomb after some years, rewraps them in fresh silk shrouds, carries them, speaks to them and dances with them, and returns them. It is a celebration, it is expensive, and it is the clearest expression of the idea that the dead remain part of the family.

It is also a funeral rite involving the remains of named people. A visitor attends by invitation, through a family, and not as an item on an itinerary. This page describes it and does not illustrate it, which is the same standard this site applies everywhere.

Kabary, and the value of not being blunt

Malagasy Kabary is the formal oratorical art, and UNESCO inscribed it on the Representative List. A kabary is delivered at weddings, funerals, famadihana and public occasions, and it works by indirection: proverbs, allusion, deference to the ancestors and a long approach to the point.

That style is not confined to the stage. Malagasy conversation generally prefers the indirect route, and a visitor who states things flatly and asks direct questions will be answered politely and will not get very far. Slow down, take the long way round, and let the other person arrive at the subject.