The Longhouse Bathing Place
The principal point of entry to the longhouse is its pendai’ (river bathing place) (Figure 5).[22] Here canoes are typically tied up, women draw water for household use, and longhouse members bathe. Symbolically, the pendai’ represents the outer threshold of the community. Thus whenever a house is undergoing a ‘cooling’ ritual, signs are placed at its pendai’ to notify would-be visitors that the longhouse is temporarily taboo to guests. Otherwise, visitors enter the community by way of the bathing place, first bathing at the pendai’ before being welcomed into the house by their hosts. On major ritual occasions, this welcome takes the form of a ceremonial procession. The ritual entry of a newborn infant into the longhouse is marked by a river bathing (meri’ anak mandi’) similarly structured around a processional welcome to and from the community’s pendai’ (Sather 1988). Following death, the soul of the dead retraces this journey, taking leave of ‘this world’ — the visible world of the living — by way of the same bathing-place through which, as an infant, it made its initial ritual entry.
In so far as biliks are built upriver and downriver, the longhouse itself is construed, like the river to which it is oriented, as a totality produced in time; a unity of parts related by the botanic-morphological metaphor of ‘base’, ‘tips’ and ‘trunk’. Moreover, just as each bilik is part of the longhouse, so each longhouse, too, is part of a larger whole. Each local community is named, and so individuated, by reference to a specific topographic feature[23] which places it within a landscape, the dimensions of which are defined by the configuration of the main river (and tributaries) on which it is built. Thus situated, each longhouse is positioned within a social universe of upriver and downriver neighbours, the ultimate limits of which are defined by the river system itself, its totality metaphorically envisioned as an encompassing batang or ‘trunk’.
Since most travel was traditionally by river, the location of a longhouse within this system of rivers and streams establishes the basic social identity of its members. Surrounding the longhouse are neighbouring houses bound to one another as ‘co-feasters’ (sapemakai),[24] allies who alternately act as ritual hosts and guests during major bardic rituals (gawai). Traditionally, in addition to feasting together, a community’s sapemakai were its principal allies in warfare and raiding, directing their attacks against enemies living outside their home river system. Thus the horizons of the river also define a further dichotomy distinguishing, very roughly, one’s own river, sapemakai allies and kindred, from the rest of the world, enemies and strangers.[25]
Within this river-defined social universe, each longhouse’s pendai’ serves as the nodal point in a network of river travel, with the river itself defining the horizons within which human undertakings are seen as occurring. For men, reputations derive mainly from ventures undertaken as a result of travel beyond their home river: leading migrations, pioneering new domains, warfare or trading, for example. Rivers in turn are conceptualized in terms of a temporalizing metaphor, as flowing between a ‘stem’ (source) and outer ‘tips’ (Figure 5). In death this metaphoric association of life and river travel is symbolically expressed through the soul’s journey from this world to the Otherworld of the dead (menoa sebayan). Thus, in death, the soul leaves its home longhouse and travels first downriver to the river mouth and then upriver to its headwaters, making a total river circuit from horizon to horizon before entering the Otherworld of the dead, itself conceived of as a river system (Batang Mandai).[26] This journey which is ritually represented in the poem of lamentation sung over the dead precisely replicates the temporal ordering of the longhouse itself, as represented by the order of its ‘source posts’: first downriver, then upriver and ending, most remotely from its central ‘source’, at its upriver ‘tip’. But in death this journey is reversed and its tips form a mirror-like image so that the final destination of the soul’s journey becomes, in the transposed Otherworld of the dead, a new beginning, and its end, a new ‘source’.
The principal point of entry to the longhouse is its pendai’ (river bathing place) (Figure 5).[22] Here canoes are typically tied up, women draw water for household use, and longhouse members bathe. Symbolically, the pendai’ represents the outer threshold of the community. Thus whenever a house is undergoing a ‘cooling’ ritual, signs are placed at its pendai’ to notify would-be visitors that the longhouse is temporarily taboo to guests. Otherwise, visitors enter the community by way of the bathing place, first bathing at the pendai’ before being welcomed into the house by their hosts. On major ritual occasions, this welcome takes the form of a ceremonial procession. The ritual entry of a newborn infant into the longhouse is marked by a river bathing (meri’ anak mandi’) similarly structured around a processional welcome to and from the community’s pendai’ (Sather 1988). Following death, the soul of the dead retraces this journey, taking leave of ‘this world’ — the visible world of the living — by way of the same bathing-place through which, as an infant, it made its initial ritual entry.
In so far as biliks are built upriver and downriver, the longhouse itself is construed, like the river to which it is oriented, as a totality produced in time; a unity of parts related by the botanic-morphological metaphor of ‘base’, ‘tips’ and ‘trunk’. Moreover, just as each bilik is part of the longhouse, so each longhouse, too, is part of a larger whole. Each local community is named, and so individuated, by reference to a specific topographic feature[23] which places it within a landscape, the dimensions of which are defined by the configuration of the main river (and tributaries) on which it is built. Thus situated, each longhouse is positioned within a social universe of upriver and downriver neighbours, the ultimate limits of which are defined by the river system itself, its totality metaphorically envisioned as an encompassing batang or ‘trunk’.
Since most travel was traditionally by river, the location of a longhouse within this system of rivers and streams establishes the basic social identity of its members. Surrounding the longhouse are neighbouring houses bound to one another as ‘co-feasters’ (sapemakai),[24] allies who alternately act as ritual hosts and guests during major bardic rituals (gawai). Traditionally, in addition to feasting together, a community’s sapemakai were its principal allies in warfare and raiding, directing their attacks against enemies living outside their home river system. Thus the horizons of the river also define a further dichotomy distinguishing, very roughly, one’s own river, sapemakai allies and kindred, from the rest of the world, enemies and strangers.[25]
Within this river-defined social universe, each longhouse’s pendai’ serves as the nodal point in a network of river travel, with the river itself defining the horizons within which human undertakings are seen as occurring. For men, reputations derive mainly from ventures undertaken as a result of travel beyond their home river: leading migrations, pioneering new domains, warfare or trading, for example. Rivers in turn are conceptualized in terms of a temporalizing metaphor, as flowing between a ‘stem’ (source) and outer ‘tips’ (Figure 5). In death this metaphoric association of life and river travel is symbolically expressed through the soul’s journey from this world to the Otherworld of the dead (menoa sebayan). Thus, in death, the soul leaves its home longhouse and travels first downriver to the river mouth and then upriver to its headwaters, making a total river circuit from horizon to horizon before entering the Otherworld of the dead, itself conceived of as a river system (Batang Mandai).[26] This journey which is ritually represented in the poem of lamentation sung over the dead precisely replicates the temporal ordering of the longhouse itself, as represented by the order of its ‘source posts’: first downriver, then upriver and ending, most remotely from its central ‘source’, at its upriver ‘tip’. But in death this journey is reversed and its tips form a mirror-like image so that the final destination of the soul’s journey becomes, in the transposed Otherworld of the dead, a new beginning, and its end, a new ‘source’.
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