SIGNS IN SOCIETY - STIBA Malang

66 I Signs in Ethnographic Context
Transactional Symbolism in Belauan Mortuary Rites I 67
through the female associations of turtleshell items—deriving, I am sure, from
the facts that they are made out of the shells of animals which lay eggs on dry
land according to lunar cycles and that the production process involves the softening
of the shell material into a mold (cf. A. Weiner 1992:12—13).
This, in turn, allows us to unravel the mystery of one of
Kubary's
(1895:190) statements about nineteenth-century funeral customs, namely, that
trays and slicers are "paid at funerals to the outsiders who have come to mourn."
This is confusing, since in the modern context these two kinds of objects are
given not to "outsiders who have come to mourn" but rather to the wives of men,
people not technically considered to be mourners. And as we have seen, visiting
mourners are given traveling food rather than tokens of female wealth. The solution
seems to lie in the fact that neither Kubary nor Semper observed an important
role for wives of men at funerals; in fact, both state clearly that relatives
of the deceased prepare food for visiting mourners and that these mourners receive
coconut syrup (destined to be the principal ingredient of traveling food)
purchased by women of the house.
The historical development appears to be this: that the gradual inflation of
funeral rituals in the modern period led to the increased involvement of wivesof-men
houses, people who seize upon funeral service as one more way to obligate
their in-laws to contribute male valuables to them in the future. But, in order
to downplay the affinal nature of these activities and to stress the "female" quality
of the rite itself, mourners gave them female valuables rather than male valuables,
thus putting them in the category of friendly female helpers rather than
greedy male affines. So Kubary's observation about turtleshell trays most likely
refers to reciprocal presentation (mengebar)
of female valuables among dirge
singers, who perfectly fit the description of being "outsiders come to mourn."
The final irony of this development is a new pattern which I witnessed in
!979> when the female relatives of the husband and of the deceased wife decided
to give the spouses of men cash amounts graded by the closeness of their link to
the deceased's brothers: wives received $150, more distant telatives such as sisters,
cousins, and children of these wives received $100, $50, and $30. One of
the women involved in this explained to me:
Yes, this is very new. The women said, "We have to go all the way to Oreor
and purchase these plastic basins and soap and carry them all back here, and
then we give these goods to the spouses of men, who must pack them up and
carry them right back to Oreor. This is a lot of extra work. So they decided
just to put cash in their handbags, so they could depart carrying only a light
load." . . . They said that it would be good if this became the custom in Belau.
I think that Belauan customs have started to change, and I think that at some
point [these prestations] will be just cash, with no goods at all. ... I have a
whole room full of these funeral goods, and yet every time I go to a funeral I
feel that I need to purchase new ones. My shower room is full of them; my
garbage area is full of them. I have so many basins that I should open a store!
So I think it is much better what [personal name] began, that is, just using
money. We can take the money and use it to buy food and drink. And that is
a lot better than plastic basins. (F)
And, as if to compensate for the intentional modernism of this substitution, the
women in charge of this funeral tried to prepare traveling food baskets with locally
produced items such as taro, tapioca, fish, and coconuts, rather than with
store-bought food.
Considered in diachronic perspective, this change is laden with additional
significance, since it is one of the first instances where women use cash, normally
parallel to but not intersecting male valuables, in their transactions. The first substitution,
that is, the use of store-bought kitchen goods in place of turtleshell
trays and oystershell slicers, retains the "female" symbolic meaning. But the second
substitution, cash for goods (klalo), cannot maintain the gendered differentiation
of exchange objects, thus undermining the parallelism between male and
female valuables (cf. Barnett 1949:56) and making it more difficult to overlook
the penetration of affinity into the funeral context. The presentation of cash
opens these exchanges to the interpretation that they are, after all, just like financial
presentations in the affinal exchange system.
The thitd and final transaction to be completed is the gift to the children of
the deceased. Gender differentiation becomes important once again, since male
children are given carved wooden plates (ongall), while female children are presented
with one of a variety of turtleshell items, either a hammered tray
(chesiuch),
a large spoon (terir), or an elongated ladle (ongisb). These objects are
the personal possessions of the deceased, who leaves careful instructions with her
sisters as to the eventual disposition of the treasured objects. Every senior woman
would have had only one each of these plates and trays, and so the children who
inherit them are thereby acknowledged to be the "real" children of the house.
The wooden plates are given to male children at the death of a senior man by his
closest sister, while turtleshell objects go to female children at the death of their
mother. The plates and trays are functionally distinguished by gender in that
wooden plates are used to hold "protein food" (fish, fowl, pig), the collection of
which is the task of men, whereas turtleshell objects are used by women in food
preparation. Furthermore, the individuality of the present is signaled by the fact
that a titleholder eats off a single wooden plate, and no one else (with the exception
of very small children) is permitted to use it. So the presentation of this
object to a son implies that the child will some day become a titleholder with his
own reserved plate. (Although titleholders eat off china and plastic dishes today,
the practice of reserving a bowl for the "father of the house" still remains.) While
this pattern of transgenerational inheritance certainly identifies the young heirs