SIGNS IN SOCIETY - STIBA Malang

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