Vezo Funerary Post, Madagascar

Louisiana Gallery, Houston
Balene McCormick, Santa Fe, acquired from the above by 1974

On Madagascar, large, fully three-dimensional grave post figures were erected in the proximity of the tombs of important deceased chiefs and other persons of high rank.  According to Martineau (in Phillips 1995: 149): "The Vezo are a fishing population who should be distinguished from the surrounding Sakalava with whom they are often confounded and to whom Vezo funerary art is sometimes erroneously attributed. Vezo tombs are located in forests and sandy clearings distant from villages and are visited only for the purpose of burying the dead.  The sculpture placed on tombs is to that extent largely visible both to Vezo and to visiting ethnographers.  Indeed there is no unique indigenous term by which it is known, unlike the aloalo that surmount Mahafaly tombs."