The Gawai Antu
The final secondary rites of the dead are the most complex of all. These rites, called the Gawai Antu, constitute major memorialization rituals and are ideally performed by each longhouse roughly once in every generation. Requiring several years of preparation, they memorialize all of the community’s dead (orang ke perai) whose deaths occurred since the last Gawai was performed by the longhouse. The head of the bilik having the oldest dead acts as the ‘Gawai elder’ (tuai gawai). The Gawai Antu feasts the dead and completes their final transformation into spirits (merantu). This transformation is effected primarily by erecting, at the conclusion of the Gawai, tomb huts (sungkup) over the graves of the dead. These elaborately carved huts are made of ironwood and are equipped with miniature furnishings and garong baskets, the latter symbolizing the personal achievements of each individual dead (see Figure 6). In the Otherworld these huts represent full-size longhouses or, in totality, the parts of a single longhouse. The Gawai Antu thus establishes the dead in a longhouse of their own, thereby providing them with the means for a self-sufficient existence independent of the world of the living. For this reason, the Gawai is sometimes described by the bards as a rite of berumah (house construction). In this sense, the final rites of death are, significantly, house building rites. But unlike ordinary berumah, construction takes place, not in the visible world, but in the Otherworld of the dead, as the sungkup, at the conclusion of the Gawai, are reassembled in the cemetery, ritually separated and physically removed from the world of the living.
At its beginning and end, then, the main rites of Gawai Antu are bracketed by major stages of ritual house building. The Gawai opens with the gawai beban ramu, the ‘ritual fashioning (ban) of construction materials (ramu)’. This is followed by ngeretok, the preparation of the parts of the sungkup huts, which are then carried from the forest and assembled by each family for temporary display on its tanju’.[43] Finally, immediately following the main Gawai rituals, the sungkup are removed from the longhouse and carried to the cemetery where they are reassembled, away from the longhouse, over the graves of the dead.
On the day that precedes ngeretok — the preparation of the parts of the sungkup — families repair or replace their panggau platform and make ready their gallery to receive guests.[44] In the late afternoon, the women begin to soak glutinous rice in the river, while the men construct the bamboo rugan altars in which each family feeds its dead. These are attached to the passageway pillar representing the family’s tiang pemun (see Figure 7). This feeding begins at dusk on the evening prior to ngeretok and continues each night until the conclusion of the Gawai. At dusk, the first welcoming of the spirits of the dead (ngalu antu) is performed on the longhouse gallery. From now until the end of Gawai Antu, at dusk and at dawn, the spirits are welcomed and seen off, as they arrive in the world of the living and temporarily depart again. The Gawai emphasizes the complementarity of male and female roles, as on the following day when the men perform ngeretok, fashioning the sungkup huts, and the women plait the ritual garong baskets. The work of plaiting is called nganyam and is performed by the women inside the bilik apartments, while the men work on the upper gallery. Both these tasks are generally completed in a single day. Afterwards, several days of preparation elapse before the main Gawai rites resume.
The final secondary rites of the dead are the most complex of all. These rites, called the Gawai Antu, constitute major memorialization rituals and are ideally performed by each longhouse roughly once in every generation. Requiring several years of preparation, they memorialize all of the community’s dead (orang ke perai) whose deaths occurred since the last Gawai was performed by the longhouse. The head of the bilik having the oldest dead acts as the ‘Gawai elder’ (tuai gawai). The Gawai Antu feasts the dead and completes their final transformation into spirits (merantu). This transformation is effected primarily by erecting, at the conclusion of the Gawai, tomb huts (sungkup) over the graves of the dead. These elaborately carved huts are made of ironwood and are equipped with miniature furnishings and garong baskets, the latter symbolizing the personal achievements of each individual dead (see Figure 6). In the Otherworld these huts represent full-size longhouses or, in totality, the parts of a single longhouse. The Gawai Antu thus establishes the dead in a longhouse of their own, thereby providing them with the means for a self-sufficient existence independent of the world of the living. For this reason, the Gawai is sometimes described by the bards as a rite of berumah (house construction). In this sense, the final rites of death are, significantly, house building rites. But unlike ordinary berumah, construction takes place, not in the visible world, but in the Otherworld of the dead, as the sungkup, at the conclusion of the Gawai, are reassembled in the cemetery, ritually separated and physically removed from the world of the living.
At its beginning and end, then, the main rites of Gawai Antu are bracketed by major stages of ritual house building. The Gawai opens with the gawai beban ramu, the ‘ritual fashioning (ban) of construction materials (ramu)’. This is followed by ngeretok, the preparation of the parts of the sungkup huts, which are then carried from the forest and assembled by each family for temporary display on its tanju’.[43] Finally, immediately following the main Gawai rituals, the sungkup are removed from the longhouse and carried to the cemetery where they are reassembled, away from the longhouse, over the graves of the dead.
On the day that precedes ngeretok — the preparation of the parts of the sungkup — families repair or replace their panggau platform and make ready their gallery to receive guests.[44] In the late afternoon, the women begin to soak glutinous rice in the river, while the men construct the bamboo rugan altars in which each family feeds its dead. These are attached to the passageway pillar representing the family’s tiang pemun (see Figure 7). This feeding begins at dusk on the evening prior to ngeretok and continues each night until the conclusion of the Gawai. At dusk, the first welcoming of the spirits of the dead (ngalu antu) is performed on the longhouse gallery. From now until the end of Gawai Antu, at dusk and at dawn, the spirits are welcomed and seen off, as they arrive in the world of the living and temporarily depart again. The Gawai emphasizes the complementarity of male and female roles, as on the following day when the men perform ngeretok, fashioning the sungkup huts, and the women plait the ritual garong baskets. The work of plaiting is called nganyam and is performed by the women inside the bilik apartments, while the men work on the upper gallery. Both these tasks are generally completed in a single day. Afterwards, several days of preparation elapse before the main Gawai rites resume.
Kindred (kaban) generally arrive the day before the start of the Gawai proper in order to assist the host families with preparations. They bring with them fowls, eggs, fruit and garden produce. Beginning soon after dawn on the first day of Gawai Antu, guests (pengabang) begin to arrive. After bathing at the penai’, they are ceremonially welcomed into the house. Among the first to be received are the principal warriors who will later drink the ai’ buloh, the main ritual rice wine served from the garong containers plaited by the women. They are followed by a second group of warriors who will later drink the ai’ timang jalong wine which is carried by the bards as they sing (nimang) the Gawai invocation. The welcoming of guests continues throughout much of the day. The principal guests comprise the house’s cofeasting allies (sapemakai); they generally arrive and are received in groups, as longhouse communities.[45] At dusk no further guests may be received. Instead, the hosts and guests combine to welcome the gods, spirit-heroes and spirits of the dead. After the latter have been welcomed and feasted with offerings, hosts and guests sit down to the first of a series of feasts consumed in emulation of their spiritual visitors.
During the performance of the Gawai Antu, the total panoply of intersecting social and cosmological categories comes into play and is given formal expression through the ritual organization of the longhouse itself. In everyday life these categories remain largely unmarked. Thus the Gawai makes explicit the basic categories of Iban social life: gender, age, bilik-family, longhouse, kindred and so on. The basic order of Gawai seating, for example, gives formal arrangement to gender and age categories. Adult and elderly male guests are seated along the raised panggau, while their male hosts sit facing them along the division between the upper and lower gallery. Married women sit either behind them, on the lower gallery, or remain inside the bilik where they receive and entertain women guests from other longhouses. While in everyday life these different areas of the house are used by both sexes, and by individuals of all ages, in terms of their ritual signification they are made, in this ritual ordering of space, to constitute these basic social distinctions. Thus the bilik is associated with women; the ruai with men; the upper sections of the house with men, seniority and age; the lower sections with women, juniority and the young. The transition from domestic to public space thus becomes a transition from women’s to men’s space, and from the bilik-family to the longhouse and its co-feasting allies. When food is served, the same distinctions are made. Young women cook at the hearths inside the tempuan section of the family apartment, older women eat in the main bilik, while young men carry food in and out of the bilik. Older men, both hosts and kindred, eat on the ruai, while the most senior male guests are served at the raised panggau. Thus, the relationship of domestic space to public space is like that of women to men, lower to upper, family to longhouse, young to old, hosts to guests, and so on. At times, however, in the course of ritual performance, these relationships are altered or inverted. During ritual processions, for example, gender and age distinctions are partially overridden, while other distinctions, such as those between hosts and guests or between ritual officiants and audience, are expressed instead. At other times formal gender arrangements are reversed, with men and women changing places. This occurs, for example, during the Gawai Antu following the invocation of the dead and signifies the state of inversion that distinguishes the Otherworld from the realm of the living.
The ritual organization of longhouse space also underscores distinctions between the living and the dead and between human beings, the gods, spirit-heroes and spirits of the dead. After the human guests have arrived and been welcomed with rice wine at each family’s section of the tempuan, they are shown to their hosts’ ruai, where the male guests are eventually ‘arranged in order’ (bedigir) along their hosts’ panggau. At dusk, the gods (petara) and returning spirits of the dead (antu sebayan) are invoked by the bards and welcomed to the house by the Gawai hosts and guests through a series of ritual processions (ngalu antu) that circle the upper and lower gallery (see Figure 8). But before the bards begin their invocation, the warriors who are to drink the ai’ buloh wine prepare a pathway for the dead along the gallery floor (ngerandang jalai). Dancing along the ruai with drawn swords, they cut invisible ‘undergrowth’ and clear the way of spiritual obstructions (see Figure 9). After this, the warriors who are to drink the ai’ jalong wine, make the path prepared by the first group of warriors ritually secure by metaphorically ‘fencing it with an invisible handrailing’ (ngelalau). The arrival of the dead is anticipated in other ways as well. While living guests are welcomed into the longhouse by way of its upriver entrance, the dead are believed to come from downriver, retracing the route of their · original departure. Thus, before the spirits arrive, all the mats covering the gallery floor are taken up at the direction of the Gawai elder, reversed, and laid down again, so that their edges now overlap in the opposite downriver-to-upriver direction. This is said to prevent the spirits of the dead from ‘tripping’ as they walk along the gallery floor, their actions emulated by the processions of human guests.
During the performance of the Gawai Antu, the total panoply of intersecting social and cosmological categories comes into play and is given formal expression through the ritual organization of the longhouse itself. In everyday life these categories remain largely unmarked. Thus the Gawai makes explicit the basic categories of Iban social life: gender, age, bilik-family, longhouse, kindred and so on. The basic order of Gawai seating, for example, gives formal arrangement to gender and age categories. Adult and elderly male guests are seated along the raised panggau, while their male hosts sit facing them along the division between the upper and lower gallery. Married women sit either behind them, on the lower gallery, or remain inside the bilik where they receive and entertain women guests from other longhouses. While in everyday life these different areas of the house are used by both sexes, and by individuals of all ages, in terms of their ritual signification they are made, in this ritual ordering of space, to constitute these basic social distinctions. Thus the bilik is associated with women; the ruai with men; the upper sections of the house with men, seniority and age; the lower sections with women, juniority and the young. The transition from domestic to public space thus becomes a transition from women’s to men’s space, and from the bilik-family to the longhouse and its co-feasting allies. When food is served, the same distinctions are made. Young women cook at the hearths inside the tempuan section of the family apartment, older women eat in the main bilik, while young men carry food in and out of the bilik. Older men, both hosts and kindred, eat on the ruai, while the most senior male guests are served at the raised panggau. Thus, the relationship of domestic space to public space is like that of women to men, lower to upper, family to longhouse, young to old, hosts to guests, and so on. At times, however, in the course of ritual performance, these relationships are altered or inverted. During ritual processions, for example, gender and age distinctions are partially overridden, while other distinctions, such as those between hosts and guests or between ritual officiants and audience, are expressed instead. At other times formal gender arrangements are reversed, with men and women changing places. This occurs, for example, during the Gawai Antu following the invocation of the dead and signifies the state of inversion that distinguishes the Otherworld from the realm of the living.
The ritual organization of longhouse space also underscores distinctions between the living and the dead and between human beings, the gods, spirit-heroes and spirits of the dead. After the human guests have arrived and been welcomed with rice wine at each family’s section of the tempuan, they are shown to their hosts’ ruai, where the male guests are eventually ‘arranged in order’ (bedigir) along their hosts’ panggau. At dusk, the gods (petara) and returning spirits of the dead (antu sebayan) are invoked by the bards and welcomed to the house by the Gawai hosts and guests through a series of ritual processions (ngalu antu) that circle the upper and lower gallery (see Figure 8). But before the bards begin their invocation, the warriors who are to drink the ai’ buloh wine prepare a pathway for the dead along the gallery floor (ngerandang jalai). Dancing along the ruai with drawn swords, they cut invisible ‘undergrowth’ and clear the way of spiritual obstructions (see Figure 9). After this, the warriors who are to drink the ai’ jalong wine, make the path prepared by the first group of warriors ritually secure by metaphorically ‘fencing it with an invisible handrailing’ (ngelalau). The arrival of the dead is anticipated in other ways as well. While living guests are welcomed into the longhouse by way of its upriver entrance, the dead are believed to come from downriver, retracing the route of their · original departure. Thus, before the spirits arrive, all the mats covering the gallery floor are taken up at the direction of the Gawai elder, reversed, and laid down again, so that their edges now overlap in the opposite downriver-to-upriver direction. This is said to prevent the spirits of the dead from ‘tripping’ as they walk along the gallery floor, their actions emulated by the processions of human guests.
The spirits are led in procession by the gods and goddesses of the Otherworld, beginning with Raja Niram and his wife Ini Inan. They bring with them to the living world gifts to exchange with their former family members for food offerings. The bards begin their invocations inside the Gawai elder’s bilik. They then move, in an important transition, onto the gallery where they sing the main timang invocations as they circumambulate the ruai floor, going from one end of the house to the other. Their movements at once emulate the journey of the dead and at the same time define the whole of the longhouse as a ritual space. As they sing they carry cupped in the palm of their right hand a bowl of ritual wine called the ai’ jalong. The invocation they sing recounts the journey of the gods and spirits as they travel from the world of the dead (menoa orang mati) to the world of the living (menoa orang idup). In this journey, the spirits pass through a series of unseen realms, as in the poem of lamentation, except that now the direction of the journey is reversed.
Prominent among these realms, and adjacent to the land of the dead, are the settlements of the spirits of various kinds of birds associated with death, including the Bubut (the coucal or crow pheasant) who watches over the Bridge of Fear dividing life and death. In time, they enter into the longhouse menoa. Here they pass ancient house sites and former farmlands, which the spirits of the dead recall from former times when they were still alive. They finally reach the river-landing threshold between this world and the world of the dead. From here they travel by boat. Journeying along the river, they pass the spirit realms of the tortoises, crocodiles, fish and other river spirits who were invoked when the newborn infant received its ritual first bath. After passing these realms, they reach the bathing place of the longhouse holding the Gawai. Here they bathe and are received in a ceremonial procession. They are welcomed with food offerings, and, as they arrive inside the house, the men and women of the longhouse sing songs (berenong), in the form of a conversational exchange between the living and the dead, to entertain them. The spirits are also welcomed with a series of cockfights held on the gallery floor. Here cocks belonging to the visitors and hosts are pitted against one another. Those of the visitors represent the cocks of the dead and those of the hosts, the cocks of the living. In these contests, the cocks of the dead always ‘lose’ to those of the living, no matter what the actual outcome.
Prominent among these realms, and adjacent to the land of the dead, are the settlements of the spirits of various kinds of birds associated with death, including the Bubut (the coucal or crow pheasant) who watches over the Bridge of Fear dividing life and death. In time, they enter into the longhouse menoa. Here they pass ancient house sites and former farmlands, which the spirits of the dead recall from former times when they were still alive. They finally reach the river-landing threshold between this world and the world of the dead. From here they travel by boat. Journeying along the river, they pass the spirit realms of the tortoises, crocodiles, fish and other river spirits who were invoked when the newborn infant received its ritual first bath. After passing these realms, they reach the bathing place of the longhouse holding the Gawai. Here they bathe and are received in a ceremonial procession. They are welcomed with food offerings, and, as they arrive inside the house, the men and women of the longhouse sing songs (berenong), in the form of a conversational exchange between the living and the dead, to entertain them. The spirits are also welcomed with a series of cockfights held on the gallery floor. Here cocks belonging to the visitors and hosts are pitted against one another. Those of the visitors represent the cocks of the dead and those of the hosts, the cocks of the living. In these contests, the cocks of the dead always ‘lose’ to those of the living, no matter what the actual outcome.
From dusk, when they are first invoked, and throughout the night that follows, the gallery itself is believed to be thronged with unseen visitors. In their processions, feasting and drinking, cockfighting, and other actions, the hosts and guests play the part of these visitors: the spirits of the dead, gods, and spirit-heroes and heroines.[46] During the night, older men in the house may sleep on the gallery in order to share the same space with the dead. Yet distinctions between the living and the dead are maintained; the spirits of the family dead are received, not inside the bilik, but on the tempuan passageway. Here they are fed in the rugan altar, which, together with a stalk of sugarcane, is attached to the tempuan pillar representing the tiang pemun (see Figure 10). In addition to being given special foods unique to the dead, such as smoked belau fish and keli eels, the family lights a fire each evening at the base of the rugan so that the family’s spirits may warm themselves.
As the end of the night approaches, the bards finish their timang songs and the second group of warriors who are to drink the ai’ jalong wine are arranged in a row along the upper gallery with the women who will serve them seated facing them (see Figure 11). A few other guests, as a special honour, are invited to sit beside the warriors. Only men who have received dream instructions or who have killed in war (bedengah) may drink these ritual wines. As the men and women are seated, the bards come forward, each carrying a cup of wine. As they approach, they sing praise songs which relate how the Otherworld goddesses Ini Inan and Endu Dara Rambai Geruda are searching for brave warriors to drink the sacred wine. The bards then place a cup in front of each woman, who, representing a goddess, serves it to the warrior facing her. Before he drinks, the warrior first ‘clears’ the wine with the tip of his sword. Then, after he drinks, he gives a loud war shout. After this, the leader of the first group of warriors who are to drink the ai’ buloh wine goes from one family’s section of the tempuan to the next and dismantles the rugan altars and cast them under the tempuan floor. This is a moment of great poignancy, for it marks the severing for each bilik family of its conjunction with its dead for another generation. The next time the Gawai is held some of its current members are likely to be among the newly dead being memorialized.
As the end of the night approaches, the bards finish their timang songs and the second group of warriors who are to drink the ai’ jalong wine are arranged in a row along the upper gallery with the women who will serve them seated facing them (see Figure 11). A few other guests, as a special honour, are invited to sit beside the warriors. Only men who have received dream instructions or who have killed in war (bedengah) may drink these ritual wines. As the men and women are seated, the bards come forward, each carrying a cup of wine. As they approach, they sing praise songs which relate how the Otherworld goddesses Ini Inan and Endu Dara Rambai Geruda are searching for brave warriors to drink the sacred wine. The bards then place a cup in front of each woman, who, representing a goddess, serves it to the warrior facing her. Before he drinks, the warrior first ‘clears’ the wine with the tip of his sword. Then, after he drinks, he gives a loud war shout. After this, the leader of the first group of warriors who are to drink the ai’ buloh wine goes from one family’s section of the tempuan to the next and dismantles the rugan altars and cast them under the tempuan floor. This is a moment of great poignancy, for it marks the severing for each bilik family of its conjunction with its dead for another generation. The next time the Gawai is held some of its current members are likely to be among the newly dead being memorialized.
Following the ‘casting away of the rugan’ (muai rugan), the climax of the Gawai occurs at dawn when the principal warriors drink the ai’ buloh (or ai’ garong) wine from bamboo tubes inserted in the plaited garong baskets. One basket is woven for each individual dead, but only those of adults hold wine tubes. They are served by the previous group of warriors in a mock combat. Only men of singular prowess can drink the ai’ buloh. Many Saribas bards equate this wine with the ai’ limban, the lymphatic fluids that flow from a decomposing corpse. But in the dichotomous seen/unseen imagery of the Iban, the Limban is also the major river of the Otherworld that separates this world from the next. During the Gawai Antu the Limban River is verbally identified with the tempuan passageway, while the Bridge of Fear that spans it — linking the living and dead — is signified by a pestle laying width-wise across it.
Here, then, longhouse space is transformed by Iban rituals of birth and death from the familiar mundane setting of everyday social life to a symbolically organized landscape, displaying basic social distinctions and mirroring a series of superimposed realities, both seen and unseen. Everyday social space is merged with unseen ‘spiritual’ space and through the ritual organization of the longhouse, the order underlying Iban social experience is given explicit form, while at the same time this order is transformed to conjoin the seen realities of everyday social life with the invisible realities of the soul, spirits and the gods.
Here, then, longhouse space is transformed by Iban rituals of birth and death from the familiar mundane setting of everyday social life to a symbolically organized landscape, displaying basic social distinctions and mirroring a series of superimposed realities, both seen and unseen. Everyday social space is merged with unseen ‘spiritual’ space and through the ritual organization of the longhouse, the order underlying Iban social experience is given explicit form, while at the same time this order is transformed to conjoin the seen realities of everyday social life with the invisible realities of the soul, spirits and the gods.
No comments:
Post a Comment