Rites of Death
In death the heating—bathing polarity is reversed. Immediately following death the body is bathed. This takes place, not at the threshold of the longhouse, but at its very centre on the liminal tempuan zone within the bilik. The floor of the tempuan bilik is especially slatted to allow bathing water to flow through it. Aside from containing the hearth, the tempuan bilik is also the location of the family’s water gourds and it is here, where the water gourds are, or were traditionally, stored that the dead are bathed.[34] After the body is bathed and dressed and three dots of turmeric are painted on its forehead, it is carried from the bilik onto the gallery. As it is carried through the bilik doorway, family members cast rice grain over it, signifying the separation of the dead from the family’s cycle of work, ritual and commensality associated with rice cultivation. The grain represents the dead person’s ‘share’ of the family’s rice equivalent to his/her contribution to this cycle. The body is then placed on the lower gallery inside a rectangular enclosure (sapat) made of ritual ikat cloth (pua’ kumbu’). This enclosure is said to shield the rest of the house from the ‘heat’ of the corpse. The top of the enclosure is similarly covered with a cloth (dinding langit) to shield the sky. An external hearth (bedilang)[35] is lit and kept burning at the feet of the body on the tempuan passageway beside the enclosure.[36] This fire is meant to keep the dead from becoming ‘cold’ (chelap)[37] and is carried by the burial party to the cemetery and extinguished only after the body is buried.
The body remains inside the sapat until it is buried. The initial period of mourning vigil, until the conclusion of burial, is called rabat. Burial takes place shortly before dawn and, throughout the night that precedes it, a female dirge singer (tukang sabak) sits beside the body and sings the poem of lamentation (sabak). As she sings, her soul accompanies the soul of the dead on its journey to the Otherworld. The words of her lamentation thus relate the experiences of this soul journey. In these experiences, the route of travel is depicted from this world to the Otherworld of the dead. It begins at the family hearth, with the soul first taking leave of the hearth frame. It then moves through the bilik apartment to the tempuan passage, and down the passageway to the entry ladder. Thus, its route of travel begins with the familiar landscape of the longhouse interior. In this sense, the lamentation stresses the continuity between this world and the next. The route the soul follows is identical to that later taken by the body as it is removed from the longhouse and carried to the cemetery. But what is significant here is that the words of the lamentation describe the unseen dimensions of this otherwise familiar setting. The soul enters into dialogue with the various features of the longhouse which now appear to the soul in spirit form. Some of these features are transfigured and perceived very differently from their everyday shapes. Thus, for example, the longhouse entry ladder now appears, in some versions of the sabak, as a crocodile. In this form, as a guardian of the community’s spiritual well-being, it announces its intention to prevent the soul from leaving for the Otherworld. Again, in some versions, the ladder tells the soul that the celestial shamans were invoked by the people of the house and that the ladder was spiritually waved with a fowl in order to prevent longhouse members from departing to the Otherworld, that is from dying (Uchibori 1978:186–187). The soul asks to be allowed to pass, promising that a trophy head will soon be carried into the longhouse by its warriors. And so the ladder relents.[38] Similarly, when the soul reaches the cleared ground at the foot of the ladder (menalan), it finds a large tree growing there which it has never seen before. The souls of the dead, who have come to join its journey, tell the soul of the newly deceased that this tree is called Ranyai Padi (see Uchibori 1978:186–187). It is covered with valuable wealth, sacra and magical charms. These the soul collects to give to the living as departing gifts. Later, during the rituals of memorialization (Gawai Antu), the souls of the dead, as they return to the longhouse of the living, again collect valuables from the Ranyai Padi tree which they give to their living descendants. Finally, the soul reaches the longhouse bathing place. Here it bathes in sorrow, knowing that it does so for the last time. Thus, the ritual singing of the poem of lamentation transfigures the longhouse landscape, superimposing an unseen reality on this otherwise familiar setting of everyday social life.
This superimposition of an unseen reality upon the visible features of the longhouse is developed even further by Iban shamans, who manipulate this transformation in order to work upon the social and intrasubjective experiences of their patients. In shamanic rituals of healing (pelian), the same journey is frequently depicted, but the course of travel followed by the souls and spirits is even more fully articulated with the physical and symbolic features of the longhouse.
The soul of a patient who is seriously sick may be diagnosed as being absent from the body and journeying on its way to the Otherworld. While in trance, the shaman’s soul goes in pursuit, following the same route as the errant soul. As Uchibori writes:
Usually the shaman claims to have caught the errant semengat [soul] at a particular point along the way. He may tell the attendant people that he has caught it, for example, at the foot of a gallery pillar. In the spiritual vision of the shaman, a gallery pillar in the longhouse structure is said to be seen as a nibong palm which stands by the path to the Land of the Dead (1978:208).
As in the poem of lamentation, the soul begins its journey at the family hearth. In a complex metaphor, the hearth is described as the Bukit Lebor Api, the ‘Hill of Raging Fire’.[39] The ‘dog wall’ separating the bilik from the ruai appears as a ridge, at the foot of which is a lake called Danau Alai. In the everyday landscape of the longhouse this ‘lake’ is represented by the section of the tempuan bilik floor where the dead are bathed. From this ‘lake’ a ‘stream’ or ‘path’ leads to the ‘Violently Shutting Rock’ (Batu Tekup Daup), which continually opens and closes, violently. This ‘rock’ is represented by the door of the bilik apartment. After leaving the bilik, the soul enters the main river or pathway running to the Otherworld of the dead. This river or pathway is represented by the tempuan passageway. The rice mortars standing along the tempuan are seen by the souls as boulders; the main pillars dividing the tempuan from the ruai as nibong palms; and the passageway itself is seen as a broad, well-worn path or as the reaches of the Mandai River of the dead.
The imagery of this superimposed landscape varies in detail between different shamans and dirge singers. According to Uchibori’s informants (1978:213), no reputable shaman in the Skrang would pursue a soul past the ‘Bridge of Fear’ (Titi Rawan) most often represented in the longhouse setting by its entry ladder. But in the Paku, shamans regularly travel beyond this point into the Otherworld itself, as well as to Mount Rabong and to the lairs of spirits who have taken the souls of their patients captive.
As in the poem of lamentation sung over the dead, the longhouse becomes a stage, with mundane social space transfigured to represent the reality that the soul experiences in the course of its travels and encounters with other unseen beings. The more serious the patient’s illness, the further the shaman’s soul must travel into the Otherworld in pursuit. Generally, the middle of the gallery represents the intermediate zone between the world of the living and the world of the dead. The shaman regularly uses props to signify landmarks within this unseen terrain: mortars, for example, as mountains, and a swing hung from the tempuan passageway to emulate the flight of his soul from one realm to another. The passageway itself typically represents the Mandai River, while the ‘Bridge of Fear’, which divides the living from the dead, is represented by a wooden pestle laid across the top of two upturned mortars blocking the end of the tempuan. The entry ladder now becomes the Limban Waterfalls (Wong Limban), a prominent landmark in the Otherworld. In this imagery, the Limban River, flowing through a deep chasm, is spanned by the ‘Bridge of Fear’.[40]
The clearing at the foot of the entry ladder to the longhouse represents the midway point in the shaman’s possible journeys into the Otherworld. At this stage, however, the longhouse of the living now represents the longhouse of the dead. Spatial progression still represents increasing proximity to the dead, but now the direction is reversed. Like the ordering of longhouse tiang pemun, this movement is bidirectional. But here the ‘tip’, represented by the ‘tip’ of the longhouse (that is, the foot of the entry ladder), is reversed, becoming, not the destination of this movement, but its midpoint in a mirror-inverted journey back to its original starting point. Thus the shaman re-enters the longhouse and his rituals move back toward the bilik of his patient, now representing the Otherworld bilik in which the errant soul has taken final refuge. The final limit of the shaman’s journey is thus marked by his entry into his patient’s bilik apartment. The starting point of his journey thus becomes, in the inverted Otherworld of the dead, its destination. There inside the bilik, where the shaman began his pelian, he snatches the straying soul and carries it back to the house of the living. This final journey, from dead ‘source’ to living ‘source’, from the centre of the Otherworld to the centre of the living world, is represented by the shaman’s physical passage through the apartment doorway, across the liminal tempuan passageway, from the bilik apartment to the longhouse gallery.[41]
Returning now to the rituals of death, following the singing of the poem of lamentation (nyabak), the body of the dead is carried from the longhouse and taken to the cemetery for burial. The route taken follows that of the soul as depicted in the sabak. In removing the body, upriver–downriver directions are observed. Thus the body, which is removed headfirst, is never carried past the central tiang pemun, but is removed by either the upriver or downriver entry ladder, depending on the location of the deceased’s apartment relative to that of the pun rumah. In contrast, the body of a shaman is removed by way of the tanju’. In the cemetery, the latter is buried with its head upriver, in contrast to the ordinary dead who are buried with the head downriver. The difference reflects the different journey taken by the shaman’s soul which, in death, is believed to travel to a separate Otherworld of the dead identified, not with the Mandai River, but with Mount Rabong at the juncture of ‘this world’ (dunya tu’) and the sky (langit). Here the souls of former shamans, together with the shaman god, the brother of Ini Inda, and the spirits of celestial shamans, are thought by some to tend the plant images of the living (Sather 1993).
Following burial, during the initial mourning period called pana, a small hut (langkau) is erected between the river bathing place and the longhouse. Here food offerings are made each evening and in front of the hut a fire (api) is kept burning each night of pana, in an observance called tungkun api. The location of this hut and vigil-fire is called the palan tungkun api, ‘the tungkun api resting-place’ (Figure 5). Here the soul of the dead is said to return to eat and warm itself by the fire, its shadowy presence often seen just beyond the edge of firelight. As with birth, heating again signals an important transition. Here it occurs, however, not inside the bilik as at birth, but, reflecting the marginal status of the newly dead, outside the longhouse altogether, in the liminal in-between zone between the penai’ and the foot of the longhouse entry ladder (Sather 1990:29). Its location is said to prevent the dead from re-entering the house of the living, where their presence would pose a danger to the community. At the same time, the bilik of the deceased is subject to an inverted temporal order, as an extension of the Otherworld. Thus during the day the apartment windows or skylights are sealed and the interior is kept in total darkness; darkness representing ‘daylight’ in the Otherworld. No one in the community may work outside the longhouse, and on each night of pana an elderly woman, ideally the oldest still alive in the community, eats black rice in the bilik. This rice, called asi pana, represents white rice in the Otherworld (see Sandin 1980:35). After a final meal of asi pana, before the bilik’s windows are reopened at dawn to readmit daylight, a chicken is sacrificed and its blood is smeared by the woman on the window frames. Thus, for the duration of initial mourning, the bilik is placed in a disjunctive state, with daylight and darkness inverted, mirroring the reversed order of the Otherworld. This state ends with the sacrifice of a chicken and, paralleling the rites of birth, the ritual reintroduction of the bilik to daylight.
In addition to a body and soul, every living person is also constituted of a plant image (ayu). This image is commonly likened, in appearance, to a bamboo or banana plant, and, like it, is said to grow as a shoot from a common clump made up of the ayu of its other bilik-family members (see Freeman 1970:21; Gomes 1911:169; Sather 1993). The ayu thus grow in family clumps, separate from the body and soul, on, some say, the slopes of Mount Rabong in the shamanic Otherworld.[42] In illness, a person’s ayu is said ‘to wither’ (layu’), or become overgrown, and in death, ‘to die’ (perai). Thus in healing rituals, shamans often travel to Mount Rabong to ‘weed’ or ‘fence around’ a patient’s ayu, ritually emulating these actions on the longhouse gallery. In death, a person’s dead ayu must be severed (serara’) from his or her family clump in order to safeguard the health and spiritual well-being of the surviving family members. Thus, sometime after pana and following ngetas ulit, the conclusion of formal mourning, a shaman is usually engaged to cut away the dead ayu of the deceased (Sandin 1980:33–38). This is particularly so if family members fall ill or are visited by the dead in dreams. The rite of cutting away the ayu is called beserara’ bunga, literally ‘to sever the flowers’, and is performed on the longhouse gallery with the shaman’s audience seated facing him along the panggau. The ayu is represented by a bamboo shoot or by the branch of a flowering plant, such as bunga telasih or emperawan, which is placed at centre stage, in front of the shaman on the patient’s ruai. Here the shaman carefully cuts away a small piece of the outer sheath of the bamboo or part of the flowering branch. At the conclusion of the rite, the spirit of the dead is believed to appear beneath the tempuan passageway. Here the shaman presents it with a sacrifice and special offerings prepared by its bereaved family; these, together with its severed plant image, are then cast beneath the tempuan floor. The shaman concludes by placing the longhouse entrance under temporary taboo and by hanging a ritual pua’ kumbu’ cloth over the doorway of the deceased’s bilik as a ritual barrier (pelepa’), thus completing the family’s separation from the dead and reconstituting its ritual integrity.
In death the heating—bathing polarity is reversed. Immediately following death the body is bathed. This takes place, not at the threshold of the longhouse, but at its very centre on the liminal tempuan zone within the bilik. The floor of the tempuan bilik is especially slatted to allow bathing water to flow through it. Aside from containing the hearth, the tempuan bilik is also the location of the family’s water gourds and it is here, where the water gourds are, or were traditionally, stored that the dead are bathed.[34] After the body is bathed and dressed and three dots of turmeric are painted on its forehead, it is carried from the bilik onto the gallery. As it is carried through the bilik doorway, family members cast rice grain over it, signifying the separation of the dead from the family’s cycle of work, ritual and commensality associated with rice cultivation. The grain represents the dead person’s ‘share’ of the family’s rice equivalent to his/her contribution to this cycle. The body is then placed on the lower gallery inside a rectangular enclosure (sapat) made of ritual ikat cloth (pua’ kumbu’). This enclosure is said to shield the rest of the house from the ‘heat’ of the corpse. The top of the enclosure is similarly covered with a cloth (dinding langit) to shield the sky. An external hearth (bedilang)[35] is lit and kept burning at the feet of the body on the tempuan passageway beside the enclosure.[36] This fire is meant to keep the dead from becoming ‘cold’ (chelap)[37] and is carried by the burial party to the cemetery and extinguished only after the body is buried.
The body remains inside the sapat until it is buried. The initial period of mourning vigil, until the conclusion of burial, is called rabat. Burial takes place shortly before dawn and, throughout the night that precedes it, a female dirge singer (tukang sabak) sits beside the body and sings the poem of lamentation (sabak). As she sings, her soul accompanies the soul of the dead on its journey to the Otherworld. The words of her lamentation thus relate the experiences of this soul journey. In these experiences, the route of travel is depicted from this world to the Otherworld of the dead. It begins at the family hearth, with the soul first taking leave of the hearth frame. It then moves through the bilik apartment to the tempuan passage, and down the passageway to the entry ladder. Thus, its route of travel begins with the familiar landscape of the longhouse interior. In this sense, the lamentation stresses the continuity between this world and the next. The route the soul follows is identical to that later taken by the body as it is removed from the longhouse and carried to the cemetery. But what is significant here is that the words of the lamentation describe the unseen dimensions of this otherwise familiar setting. The soul enters into dialogue with the various features of the longhouse which now appear to the soul in spirit form. Some of these features are transfigured and perceived very differently from their everyday shapes. Thus, for example, the longhouse entry ladder now appears, in some versions of the sabak, as a crocodile. In this form, as a guardian of the community’s spiritual well-being, it announces its intention to prevent the soul from leaving for the Otherworld. Again, in some versions, the ladder tells the soul that the celestial shamans were invoked by the people of the house and that the ladder was spiritually waved with a fowl in order to prevent longhouse members from departing to the Otherworld, that is from dying (Uchibori 1978:186–187). The soul asks to be allowed to pass, promising that a trophy head will soon be carried into the longhouse by its warriors. And so the ladder relents.[38] Similarly, when the soul reaches the cleared ground at the foot of the ladder (menalan), it finds a large tree growing there which it has never seen before. The souls of the dead, who have come to join its journey, tell the soul of the newly deceased that this tree is called Ranyai Padi (see Uchibori 1978:186–187). It is covered with valuable wealth, sacra and magical charms. These the soul collects to give to the living as departing gifts. Later, during the rituals of memorialization (Gawai Antu), the souls of the dead, as they return to the longhouse of the living, again collect valuables from the Ranyai Padi tree which they give to their living descendants. Finally, the soul reaches the longhouse bathing place. Here it bathes in sorrow, knowing that it does so for the last time. Thus, the ritual singing of the poem of lamentation transfigures the longhouse landscape, superimposing an unseen reality on this otherwise familiar setting of everyday social life.
This superimposition of an unseen reality upon the visible features of the longhouse is developed even further by Iban shamans, who manipulate this transformation in order to work upon the social and intrasubjective experiences of their patients. In shamanic rituals of healing (pelian), the same journey is frequently depicted, but the course of travel followed by the souls and spirits is even more fully articulated with the physical and symbolic features of the longhouse.
The soul of a patient who is seriously sick may be diagnosed as being absent from the body and journeying on its way to the Otherworld. While in trance, the shaman’s soul goes in pursuit, following the same route as the errant soul. As Uchibori writes:
Usually the shaman claims to have caught the errant semengat [soul] at a particular point along the way. He may tell the attendant people that he has caught it, for example, at the foot of a gallery pillar. In the spiritual vision of the shaman, a gallery pillar in the longhouse structure is said to be seen as a nibong palm which stands by the path to the Land of the Dead (1978:208).
As in the poem of lamentation, the soul begins its journey at the family hearth. In a complex metaphor, the hearth is described as the Bukit Lebor Api, the ‘Hill of Raging Fire’.[39] The ‘dog wall’ separating the bilik from the ruai appears as a ridge, at the foot of which is a lake called Danau Alai. In the everyday landscape of the longhouse this ‘lake’ is represented by the section of the tempuan bilik floor where the dead are bathed. From this ‘lake’ a ‘stream’ or ‘path’ leads to the ‘Violently Shutting Rock’ (Batu Tekup Daup), which continually opens and closes, violently. This ‘rock’ is represented by the door of the bilik apartment. After leaving the bilik, the soul enters the main river or pathway running to the Otherworld of the dead. This river or pathway is represented by the tempuan passageway. The rice mortars standing along the tempuan are seen by the souls as boulders; the main pillars dividing the tempuan from the ruai as nibong palms; and the passageway itself is seen as a broad, well-worn path or as the reaches of the Mandai River of the dead.
The imagery of this superimposed landscape varies in detail between different shamans and dirge singers. According to Uchibori’s informants (1978:213), no reputable shaman in the Skrang would pursue a soul past the ‘Bridge of Fear’ (Titi Rawan) most often represented in the longhouse setting by its entry ladder. But in the Paku, shamans regularly travel beyond this point into the Otherworld itself, as well as to Mount Rabong and to the lairs of spirits who have taken the souls of their patients captive.
As in the poem of lamentation sung over the dead, the longhouse becomes a stage, with mundane social space transfigured to represent the reality that the soul experiences in the course of its travels and encounters with other unseen beings. The more serious the patient’s illness, the further the shaman’s soul must travel into the Otherworld in pursuit. Generally, the middle of the gallery represents the intermediate zone between the world of the living and the world of the dead. The shaman regularly uses props to signify landmarks within this unseen terrain: mortars, for example, as mountains, and a swing hung from the tempuan passageway to emulate the flight of his soul from one realm to another. The passageway itself typically represents the Mandai River, while the ‘Bridge of Fear’, which divides the living from the dead, is represented by a wooden pestle laid across the top of two upturned mortars blocking the end of the tempuan. The entry ladder now becomes the Limban Waterfalls (Wong Limban), a prominent landmark in the Otherworld. In this imagery, the Limban River, flowing through a deep chasm, is spanned by the ‘Bridge of Fear’.[40]
The clearing at the foot of the entry ladder to the longhouse represents the midway point in the shaman’s possible journeys into the Otherworld. At this stage, however, the longhouse of the living now represents the longhouse of the dead. Spatial progression still represents increasing proximity to the dead, but now the direction is reversed. Like the ordering of longhouse tiang pemun, this movement is bidirectional. But here the ‘tip’, represented by the ‘tip’ of the longhouse (that is, the foot of the entry ladder), is reversed, becoming, not the destination of this movement, but its midpoint in a mirror-inverted journey back to its original starting point. Thus the shaman re-enters the longhouse and his rituals move back toward the bilik of his patient, now representing the Otherworld bilik in which the errant soul has taken final refuge. The final limit of the shaman’s journey is thus marked by his entry into his patient’s bilik apartment. The starting point of his journey thus becomes, in the inverted Otherworld of the dead, its destination. There inside the bilik, where the shaman began his pelian, he snatches the straying soul and carries it back to the house of the living. This final journey, from dead ‘source’ to living ‘source’, from the centre of the Otherworld to the centre of the living world, is represented by the shaman’s physical passage through the apartment doorway, across the liminal tempuan passageway, from the bilik apartment to the longhouse gallery.[41]
Returning now to the rituals of death, following the singing of the poem of lamentation (nyabak), the body of the dead is carried from the longhouse and taken to the cemetery for burial. The route taken follows that of the soul as depicted in the sabak. In removing the body, upriver–downriver directions are observed. Thus the body, which is removed headfirst, is never carried past the central tiang pemun, but is removed by either the upriver or downriver entry ladder, depending on the location of the deceased’s apartment relative to that of the pun rumah. In contrast, the body of a shaman is removed by way of the tanju’. In the cemetery, the latter is buried with its head upriver, in contrast to the ordinary dead who are buried with the head downriver. The difference reflects the different journey taken by the shaman’s soul which, in death, is believed to travel to a separate Otherworld of the dead identified, not with the Mandai River, but with Mount Rabong at the juncture of ‘this world’ (dunya tu’) and the sky (langit). Here the souls of former shamans, together with the shaman god, the brother of Ini Inda, and the spirits of celestial shamans, are thought by some to tend the plant images of the living (Sather 1993).
Following burial, during the initial mourning period called pana, a small hut (langkau) is erected between the river bathing place and the longhouse. Here food offerings are made each evening and in front of the hut a fire (api) is kept burning each night of pana, in an observance called tungkun api. The location of this hut and vigil-fire is called the palan tungkun api, ‘the tungkun api resting-place’ (Figure 5). Here the soul of the dead is said to return to eat and warm itself by the fire, its shadowy presence often seen just beyond the edge of firelight. As with birth, heating again signals an important transition. Here it occurs, however, not inside the bilik as at birth, but, reflecting the marginal status of the newly dead, outside the longhouse altogether, in the liminal in-between zone between the penai’ and the foot of the longhouse entry ladder (Sather 1990:29). Its location is said to prevent the dead from re-entering the house of the living, where their presence would pose a danger to the community. At the same time, the bilik of the deceased is subject to an inverted temporal order, as an extension of the Otherworld. Thus during the day the apartment windows or skylights are sealed and the interior is kept in total darkness; darkness representing ‘daylight’ in the Otherworld. No one in the community may work outside the longhouse, and on each night of pana an elderly woman, ideally the oldest still alive in the community, eats black rice in the bilik. This rice, called asi pana, represents white rice in the Otherworld (see Sandin 1980:35). After a final meal of asi pana, before the bilik’s windows are reopened at dawn to readmit daylight, a chicken is sacrificed and its blood is smeared by the woman on the window frames. Thus, for the duration of initial mourning, the bilik is placed in a disjunctive state, with daylight and darkness inverted, mirroring the reversed order of the Otherworld. This state ends with the sacrifice of a chicken and, paralleling the rites of birth, the ritual reintroduction of the bilik to daylight.
In addition to a body and soul, every living person is also constituted of a plant image (ayu). This image is commonly likened, in appearance, to a bamboo or banana plant, and, like it, is said to grow as a shoot from a common clump made up of the ayu of its other bilik-family members (see Freeman 1970:21; Gomes 1911:169; Sather 1993). The ayu thus grow in family clumps, separate from the body and soul, on, some say, the slopes of Mount Rabong in the shamanic Otherworld.[42] In illness, a person’s ayu is said ‘to wither’ (layu’), or become overgrown, and in death, ‘to die’ (perai). Thus in healing rituals, shamans often travel to Mount Rabong to ‘weed’ or ‘fence around’ a patient’s ayu, ritually emulating these actions on the longhouse gallery. In death, a person’s dead ayu must be severed (serara’) from his or her family clump in order to safeguard the health and spiritual well-being of the surviving family members. Thus, sometime after pana and following ngetas ulit, the conclusion of formal mourning, a shaman is usually engaged to cut away the dead ayu of the deceased (Sandin 1980:33–38). This is particularly so if family members fall ill or are visited by the dead in dreams. The rite of cutting away the ayu is called beserara’ bunga, literally ‘to sever the flowers’, and is performed on the longhouse gallery with the shaman’s audience seated facing him along the panggau. The ayu is represented by a bamboo shoot or by the branch of a flowering plant, such as bunga telasih or emperawan, which is placed at centre stage, in front of the shaman on the patient’s ruai. Here the shaman carefully cuts away a small piece of the outer sheath of the bamboo or part of the flowering branch. At the conclusion of the rite, the spirit of the dead is believed to appear beneath the tempuan passageway. Here the shaman presents it with a sacrifice and special offerings prepared by its bereaved family; these, together with its severed plant image, are then cast beneath the tempuan floor. The shaman concludes by placing the longhouse entrance under temporary taboo and by hanging a ritual pua’ kumbu’ cloth over the doorway of the deceased’s bilik as a ritual barrier (pelepa’), thus completing the family’s separation from the dead and reconstituting its ritual integrity.
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