The Merina circumcision ceremony is always described as a ritual that, like the second funeral and the royal bath, dispenses blessing or tsodrano, and as we shall see, its overall form is indeed governed by the pattern of Figure 3.2, which represents the notion of Merina blessing.

During field-work among the Merina in and around the village of Ambatomanoina (Bloch 1971a), I attended nine circumcision rituals, and of these I have detailed notes on five. All were different, but they shared the same fundamental symbolic structure. The significance of the variations between these different occasions will be discussed in Chapter 7. In order to examine the basic structure of the ritual, the present chapter concentrates on a description and preliminary analysis of just one such ritual, which took place in 1971. This particular occasion has been chosen because it was the most elaborate of the rituals I witnessed and because, since I was by then familiar with most aspects of the circumcision, I was able to understand what was happening more fully and to record it in more detail. In Chapter 5 a more general consideration of the overall pattern of the ritual will be undertaken.

All Merina boys are circumcised between the ages of one and two, and almost as soon as a boy is born people begin saving to organise a circumcision ritual.