Famadihana des secondes funérailles à la répé tition du mythe

Abstract

Taking a fresh look at the explications (be they autochton, historical or anthropological) of the meaning of the generic terms of the exhumation rituals of dead members of the family inMadagascar, leads us to the restitution of the repressed content of these rites and of the collective psychic process that underlies them, as concerns the exclusion of hostility in relation to all ambivalence ; the usual interpretation of this second funeral as symbolic of the end of themourning period, and themoreDurkheimian interpretation of the rite in terms of the social reproduction of groups, are also explored and partially reintegrated into a psychoanalytical construction inwhich the rite assumes a collective, structural psychic function that defends the group against the threat of division and the loss of its narcissism, in a collective figuration that is both dramatised and personified, of the birth of culture and the separation of the living and the dead, in a system of common symbols.