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dancing with corpses reconsidered: an interpretation of famadihana (in Arivonimamo, Madagascar)
Author(s) -
GRAEBER DAVID
Publication year - 1995
Publication title -
american ethnologist
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.875
H-Index - 78
eISSN - 1548-1425
pISSN - 0094-0496
DOI - 10.1525/ae.1995.22.2.02a00030
Subject(s) - kinship , interpretation (philosophy) , ambivalence , culmination , relation (database) , sociology , anthropology , gender studies , ethnology , genealogy , history , social psychology , psychology , philosophy , linguistics , physics , astronomy , database , computer science
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]