Water into Bones

Birth Rituals, Ancestors, and Religious Pluralism in Northern Madagascar

Erin K. Nourse

• Publisher: Indiana University Press
• Year: 2025
• eBook ISBN: 9780253072429
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: African History
• Index: Social Sciences

Water into Bones is an ethnographic exploration of the religious practices around birthing and infant care in northern Madagascar. The book highlights the processes by which Malagasy "instill bones" in the newly born by way of haircutting ceremonies, rituals of baptism and circumcision, and the use of "growth medicines" (aody be), teething necklaces, and special jewelries meant to embed the newly born in the powerful legacies of their ancestors.

Author Erin Nourse investigates how Malagasy women adhere to ancestral practices and engage with religion around moments of birth in the port city of Diégo Suarez. The people of northern Madagascar have incorporated a plethora of ancestries, ethnicities, and religious practices into their own, sometimes celebrating the hybridity that is their history while also performing rituals and traditions that set groups apart and create distinctive identities. Through women's stories, Water into Bones weaves together a retelling of this history—the traditions that East African, Arab, and Asian migrants brought to the island over the last two millennia; the colonial and postcolonial contexts that shape hybridized religious and lineage-based identities; and the ritual innovations of young Malagasy today whose customs are at once a nod to the ancestors and also, sometimes, a severing of ties with the ancestors as a result of newer Pentecostal and Charismatic religious worldviews.

Water into Bones reveals the vast possibilities for creating community, identity, and sacred power through the personal experiences of northern Malagasy women during pregnancy, childbirth, and parenthood.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Studying Birth Rituals and Ancestors in Madagascar
• Chapter 1. Birthing Babies in Diégo Suarez
• Chapter 2. Motherhood and Creative Confluences of Care
• Chapter 3. Bathing and Seclusion: Making Mothers Who Will Bless Their Babies
• Chapter 4. Turning “Water Babies” into “Real Human Beings”
• Chapter 5. Bearing Babies in Dynamic Religious Landscapes
• Conclusion: Birth, Loss, and Competing Moral Cosmologies
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• About the Author