Madagascar - Southwest Malagasy, Country Mahafaly

The proposed area is a mixed property both natural (I) and cultural (II). (I) The Mahafaly Country, like all of the southern part of Mada-gascar, is a rugged sub-desert region with a strange plant landscape adapted to drought and heat and which seems to belong to another world: leafless trees, drills without shade, thorns everywhere, succulents of all kinds, euyres-trees or candle-trees with thorny and spindly candelabra spurious euphorbia with caustic latex, puffed baobabs in the shape of bottles, pachypodium blistered, plants most of which are found nowhere else in the world ... (II) At all times, the inhabitants of southern Madagascar, and especially the Mahafaly, were able to take advantage of this hostile and thorny nature of vegetation for the defense of their villages that are then built in the middle of an impassable tree belt "thorny." It is also in this context that we find a traditional art form particularly characteristic of Madaga Scar, which at the same time forms part of a cluster of ritual practices: the Mahafaly funerary art. This funerary art is composed of tombs (large square edifices of 10 to 15 m on the side, 1 m to 1.50 m in height, consisting of stones roughly cut-lées on the external parts and rough stones piled in the internal part covering the funerary compartment); stone leyes dresses in the middle of the main facade and at each corner of the building; octopus trees which are planted against the edifice, on both sides of the main facade; aloalo which are carved wooden posts from 1.50 m to 1.80 m high planted on the top to the east and finally skulls zebu sacrificed at funerals that can last semainés and some familiar utensils of the deceased. The aloalo have geometric sculptures a day on their was and figurines carved at their summit evoking the personality of the deceased, goods that were dear to him, scenes of everyday life or zebus or birds ...