SIGNS IN SOCIETY - STIBA Malang
SIGNS IN SOCIETY - STIBA Malang
SIGNS IN SOCIETY - STIBA Malang
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48 I Signs in Ethnographic Context<br />
Transactional Symbolism in Belauan Mortuary Rites I 49<br />
valuables and real property by finalizing the exchange balance between affinal<br />
sides. These four tasks are accomplished by the highly prescribed activity of individuals<br />
and social groups, action focusing primarily on the manipulation of<br />
four classes of meaning-laden objects: various kinds of food, "male valuables" in<br />
the form of ceramic and glass beads {udoud), "female valuables" in the fotm of<br />
hammered turtleshell trays and oystershell sheers (toluk or chesiuch), and funeral<br />
mats (badek or bar). In the contemporary period, additional Western items have<br />
become included in these four traditional categories. And, finally, the interplay<br />
between the presupposed symbolic meaning of these objects and the interpersonal<br />
and intergroup relationships activated at the moment of death is pragmatically<br />
mediated by several distinct modalities of transaction, including asymmetrical exchange,<br />
reciprocal gift-giving, and transgenerational inheritance. This third analytical<br />
variable is designed to integrate what Bloch and Parry (1982:6) call the<br />
"sociological" and the "symbolic" dimensions of funerals.<br />
The full course of the mortuary sequence can be divided into two complementary<br />
segments, the first being the week-long "funeral feast" (kemeldiil) and<br />
the second being the final "death settlement talks" (cheldecheduch) held several<br />
months later in cases where the deceased leaves a surviving spouse. The first segment,<br />
primarily a female rite, focuses on the kinship relationships which the living<br />
have to each other by virtue of their links to the deceased; thus, consanguineal<br />
(and, in particular, matrilateral) ties play an extremely important role. 2<br />
The second segment, primarily a male rite, focuses on negotiating the closure of<br />
affinal relations between husband's and wife's kin and on transmitting property<br />
(land, money, status) to the offspring of the marriage. This chapter is confined<br />
to the analysis of the first segment, which can itself be divided into four ritual<br />
components: the taking of the title, the burial proper, divination of the cause of<br />
death, and the paving of the grave. In all the funerals I witnessed, the third and<br />
fourth components took place together one week after the burial.<br />
Funerals held in Ngeremlengui district differ from those described in the ethnographic<br />
record in five basic ways. 3<br />
First, contemporary Belauan customs are<br />
completely infused with Christian symbolism, language, and sentiment. Also, the<br />
strength of Modekngei, a local syncretistic religious movement, colors the funerals<br />
of members of this group living in the district. Second, the events themselves<br />
are far more socially and financially elaborate than any described in the eighteenth<br />
and nineteenth centuries. This is partly because of better intervillage communication<br />
and transportation and partly because of the overall inflation of customary<br />
exchange which has occurred since the influx of American dollars into<br />
the economic system. Third, funerals and death settlement talks regularly take<br />
place in the district's chiefly meeting house (located in Ngeremetengel village)<br />
rather than in private houses. The ritual procedures begin, of course, in the house<br />
where the person dies, but soon thereafter the coffin and the mourners, along<br />
with piles of funeral goods, food, and mats, move to the meeting house. I think<br />
that this shift, which took place for Ngeremlengui district in the 1930s, cannot<br />
be attributed merely to the larger numbers of people attending funerals. Equally<br />
important is the fact that many houses of titleholders no longer stand on their<br />
ancestrally prescribed spot, so that senior people from these houses would rather<br />
use, or actually rent, the public meeting house to feed and honor distinguished<br />
invited guests.<br />
Fourth, in the contemporary scene death no longer automatically entails the<br />
dissolution of the household. Prior to the colonial periods, residential houses<br />
(blai) were located on prescribed land parcels controlled by the senior members<br />
of the matrilineal group. At marriage, a woman went to live in her husband's<br />
village, and when her husband was mature enough to receive a chiefly title, the<br />
couple and their children moved to his matrilineal house. The result of this disharmonie<br />
pattern is that married women regularly lived in villages where they<br />
had no strong kin ties and where titleholding men ruled over houses in which<br />
they did not grow up. In fact, the higher the social rank the greater the disharmony,<br />
since chiefs try to use nonlocal marriages to form political alliances. Death<br />
or divorce, accordingly, meant that in-married women and their children no longer<br />
received the deference of members of the house and had, in fact, to struggle<br />
to protect forms of wealth (valuables and household items) from forced seizure<br />
by the deceased's younger brothers or mother's brothers. Kubary, the brilliant<br />
Polish ethnographer of Micronesia, describes the situation in the mid-nineteenth<br />
century:<br />
The wife living abroad with het husband manages his house and enjoys great<br />
respect from her husband's family as long as he lives. She is called chedil<br />
"mother" by everyone, but in many respects her influence is limited by the<br />
conditions maintaining inside the blai. She is watched in secret by the ochellel<br />
"younger brothers" of her husband, and special attention is paid to the udoud<br />
"male valuables" given by the husband. If the husband dies, and even befote<br />
the corpse is buried, as much money as possible is squeezed out of her, this<br />
attaining patticular prominence in the important houses, where greater values<br />
are at stake. She then remains for the whole period of mourning in the house,<br />
and leaves it, together with her children, after a formal osumech "departure<br />
payment" on the part of the dead man's relatives. (Kubary 1885:58)<br />
With the introduction of private ownership of domestic houses in this century,<br />
men take steps to provide for their surviving wives and children, who frequently<br />
continue to live in the same house aftet the spouse's death. In Ngeremlengui at<br />
least, widowed women who were married to titled men continue to be called by<br />
the correlative female title, despite the fact that another woman (married to the<br />
successor to the male title) also commands the same respectful form of address.<br />
And fifth, burial no longer takes place, as it did in precontact times, beneath<br />
the stone pavement in front of the house but rather in community graveyards<br />
located on the empty hillside behind the villages. This change was the direct re-