Rites of Birth
Iban rites of birth clearly illustrate these processes. At birth the mother and infant are confined to the bilik apartment. Here, following delivery, the mother is subject to a period of heating called bekindu’ (literally ‘to heat’ or ‘warm by a fire’) which traditionally lasted from a month to forty-one days, its duration formerly reckoned by the use of a string tally (Sather 1988:165–166).[32] During this time the mother heats herself by an open fire kept continuously burning inside the bilik and is treated with ginger and other heating agents so that her ‘body is made warm’ (ngangat ka tuboh). At the same time, members of the bilik-family observe a series of ritual restrictions (penti). These have a disjunctive effect, temporarily setting the family apart from the rest of the community whose members are not subject to the same restrictions. Similarly, heating itself places the mother and infant in a ritual status antithetical to other longhouse members.
For the mother, this status ends when she resumes river bathing at the pendai’, a ‘cooling’ act that marks her resumption of normal longhouse life. ‘Heating’ and ‘bathing’ are ritually antithetical categories, and before the mother resumes ordinary river bathing, she is first given a steambath (betangas) inside a mat enclosure at the tempuan bilik in which she is steamed with an infusion of medicinal leaves meant to induce heavy sweating (Sather 1988:166). ‘Steaming’ in this context can be interpreted as a mediating act between ‘heating’ and ‘bathing’. For the infant, on the other hand, its first bath at the pendai’ is made the focus of a longhouse gawa’ rite. This rite, the most elaborate of the series surrounding birth, gives social and ritual recognition to the infant’s entry into the longhouse community. Following its first bathing, mother and child undergo a secondary bathing rite on the longhouse gallery marking their ritual incorporation. The movement represented is thus from seclusion to incorporation, from heating to cooling.
What is significant here is that this series of rites is enacted as an ordered movement through the longhouse itself: beginning in the relative security of the bilik apartment; moving outward to the open-air veranda, the zone of the house most removed from the bilik; then journeying in ritual procession from the gallery to the river bathing-place, at the outer threshold of the longhouse, and back again; and ending in a rite of incorporation on the communal gallery. This movement gives cultural construction to the infant’s entry into the social and cosmological world — an entry signalled, at its beginning and end, by a fundamental ritual polarity: heating and bathing (or cooling). This polarity recurs at other life transitions as well, including death, and is an integral part of the rites that preserve the longhouse as a ritual entity, symbolized especially by its hearths and posts — the one a source of heat, the other of cooling.
Shortly after birth, as soon as the severed umbilical cord has dropped off, the infant’s confinement is temporarily interrupted and it undergoes a secondary birth, this time outside the bilik, in a brief rite called ngetup garam literally ‘to taste salt’. During this rite, the infant is carried from the bilik to the open-air veranda. Here it is presented to the sky (nengkadah langit) and to the daylight (nengkadah hari), the latter epitomizing the visible, ‘seen’ dimensions of bodily reality.[33] It is made to look up into the sky and so ‘take cognizance of the day’ (nengkadah hari). At the same time, a small bit of salt is placed in the infant’s mouth to give its body ‘taste’ (tabar). The elder holding the child then pronounces an invocation presenting the infant to the gods (petara) and asking them to take the child into their care. Reflecting Iban notions of the dichotomous nature of experience — the contrast between waking reality and the dream world of the soul — the principal gods invoked are Selampandai, the creator-god who, as a blacksmith, forges and shapes the child’s visible body (tuboh) (and later repairs it should it receive physical injury), and Ini Inda who, as the shaman goddess, is the principal protective deity associated with the soul (samengat) and with the invisible plant counterpart (ayu) that represents human life in its mortal aspect.
For the Iban, a child’s introduction into ritual life is graduated. Thus ngetup garam signals the first enlargement of its relational field beyond the bilik. Through ngetup garam the infant is removed for the first time from the confines of the bilik apartment and is introduced to the basic temporal dimensions of the Iban visible world, to daylight and the orbiting sun, and, at the same time, its presence is made known to the gods into whose care it is placed. The principal gods invoked are those responsible for the main constituents of its newly created person: namely, its visible body and its unseen soul. Finally, the journey from the bilik to the tanju’ and back to the bilik is seen by the Iban as a movement between areas of minimal and maximal spiritual danger, and back again, within the longhouse.
The main rites of birth conclude with the infant’s ritual first bath (meri’ anak mandi’) at the longhouse bathing place. Ritual bathing gives recognition to the child’s social persona within the community, while similarly locating it ritually in a beneficent relation with the spiritual forces believed to be present beyond its threshold. The rite opens at dawn with the preparation of three sets of offerings on the family’s section of the longhouse gallery. When prepared, one set of offerings is carried into the bilik apartment. There it is presented to the family’s guardian spirits (tua’). The other two are carried to the river side where, as part of the bathing ritual, one is presented to the spirits of the water (antu ai’), the other to the spirits of the forest (antu babas).
As soon as these preparations are completed, the bathing party assembles on the gallery and is formed into a procession. After making a complete circuit of the gallery, its pathway strewn with popped rice, the procession, bearing the child, descends the entry ladder and proceeds in file to the river bathing place accompanied by the music of drums and gongs. At the pendai’ the offerings to the water spirits are cast into the river. The chief ritual officiant then wades into the water. Standing in the river, he pronounces a complex invocation (sampi) in which he calls on the spirits of the water to form a parallel, unseen procession in the realms beyond the longhouse threshold. The spirits are described in his invocation as arriving at the pendai’ from both upriver and downriver, from the river’s headwaters, its many branching streams, and from its mouth at the sea. Like human beings, the spirits, although unseen, inhabit ‘this world’ (dunya tu’). The invocation is characteristically structured as a dialogue in which the officiant becomes a number of different characters, both seen and unseen (Sather 1988:178–180). At first he self-reflexively describes the purpose of the rites and the intent of his own actions. Then, as they assemble, he assumes the identity of the spirits. These include the spirits of turtles, crocodiles and river fish. The spirits, through this dialogue, announce their arrival in processional order. Speaking through the officiant, they describe the magical blessings and charms they have brought to distribute among the bathing party and declare their intention to look after the infant, preserving it particularly from drowning (see Sather 1988:175–180). The guardianship of the river spirits, established at first bathing, is believed to continue throughout an individual’s lifetime. In the poem of lamentation following death, the souls of the dead leave the familiar world of the longhouse by way of its bathing place, travel by river to the Otherworld and pass the homes of their former spirit-guardians. As they come to each of these homes in turn, they release the spirits from guardianship and bid them farewell. Later, in rituals that involve the souls’ return from the Otherworld, the souls again pass these homes just before they reach the penai’ of the living. The spatial imagery thus locates the river spirits within the living world but beyond the boundaries of human society, its outer limits defined in this ritual construction by the penai’.
As the infant is bathed, a chicken is sacrificed and its blood is allowed to flow into the river. The final set of offerings is then presented to the spirits of the forest. If the infant is male, these are hung from a spear (sangkoh), if female, they are hung from a shed-stick (leletan); spears and shed-sticks symbolizing the pre-eminent gender roles of men and women: warfare and weaving (Sather 1988:182). As these offerings are being set out the procession reassembles and, bearing the infant, returns to the longhouse gallery. Here the mother and infant undergo a secondary bathing rite called betata’, literally ‘to drench’ or ‘sprinkle with water’. The mother and child are seated together on a gong, covered by a ritual pua’ cloth, at their family’s section of the upper gallery (ruai atas). Here they are individually touched with water by other longhouse members and the family’s guests from neighbouring communities. Betata’ thus dramatizes the end of the mother’s and child’s confinement and their ritual reintegration into the community.
In the series of rites that follows birth, beginning with bekindu’ and ending with betata’, each rite makes use of a different socially demarcated area of the longhouse and its surroundings. As a result, the series as a whole is constituted as an ordered movement through the longhouse community at large. This movement ritually effects the progressive engagement of the newborn infant in an expanding series of social and ritual relationships — moving outward from the bilik to the longhouse and beyond to the larger river system that encompasses them both — and from confinement within the spiritually secure bilik apartment to location within an all-embracing, but increasingly dangerous cosmological order. Spiritual danger is spatialized and through the ritual organization of the longhouse, this danger is progressively confronted as the infant journeys through the community, becoming in the end a source of efficacy and spiritual protection. Finally, these journeys are always, like the internal ordering of the longhouse itself, bidirectional, returning to the source from which they began. Thus they move from inside to outside the longhouse, to its veranda and river bathing place, then back inside again, first to the bilik, then to the communal gallery; hence, not upriver and downriver but along its opposite, life-symbolizing east–west coordinates.
Iban rites of birth clearly illustrate these processes. At birth the mother and infant are confined to the bilik apartment. Here, following delivery, the mother is subject to a period of heating called bekindu’ (literally ‘to heat’ or ‘warm by a fire’) which traditionally lasted from a month to forty-one days, its duration formerly reckoned by the use of a string tally (Sather 1988:165–166).[32] During this time the mother heats herself by an open fire kept continuously burning inside the bilik and is treated with ginger and other heating agents so that her ‘body is made warm’ (ngangat ka tuboh). At the same time, members of the bilik-family observe a series of ritual restrictions (penti). These have a disjunctive effect, temporarily setting the family apart from the rest of the community whose members are not subject to the same restrictions. Similarly, heating itself places the mother and infant in a ritual status antithetical to other longhouse members.
For the mother, this status ends when she resumes river bathing at the pendai’, a ‘cooling’ act that marks her resumption of normal longhouse life. ‘Heating’ and ‘bathing’ are ritually antithetical categories, and before the mother resumes ordinary river bathing, she is first given a steambath (betangas) inside a mat enclosure at the tempuan bilik in which she is steamed with an infusion of medicinal leaves meant to induce heavy sweating (Sather 1988:166). ‘Steaming’ in this context can be interpreted as a mediating act between ‘heating’ and ‘bathing’. For the infant, on the other hand, its first bath at the pendai’ is made the focus of a longhouse gawa’ rite. This rite, the most elaborate of the series surrounding birth, gives social and ritual recognition to the infant’s entry into the longhouse community. Following its first bathing, mother and child undergo a secondary bathing rite on the longhouse gallery marking their ritual incorporation. The movement represented is thus from seclusion to incorporation, from heating to cooling.
What is significant here is that this series of rites is enacted as an ordered movement through the longhouse itself: beginning in the relative security of the bilik apartment; moving outward to the open-air veranda, the zone of the house most removed from the bilik; then journeying in ritual procession from the gallery to the river bathing-place, at the outer threshold of the longhouse, and back again; and ending in a rite of incorporation on the communal gallery. This movement gives cultural construction to the infant’s entry into the social and cosmological world — an entry signalled, at its beginning and end, by a fundamental ritual polarity: heating and bathing (or cooling). This polarity recurs at other life transitions as well, including death, and is an integral part of the rites that preserve the longhouse as a ritual entity, symbolized especially by its hearths and posts — the one a source of heat, the other of cooling.
Shortly after birth, as soon as the severed umbilical cord has dropped off, the infant’s confinement is temporarily interrupted and it undergoes a secondary birth, this time outside the bilik, in a brief rite called ngetup garam literally ‘to taste salt’. During this rite, the infant is carried from the bilik to the open-air veranda. Here it is presented to the sky (nengkadah langit) and to the daylight (nengkadah hari), the latter epitomizing the visible, ‘seen’ dimensions of bodily reality.[33] It is made to look up into the sky and so ‘take cognizance of the day’ (nengkadah hari). At the same time, a small bit of salt is placed in the infant’s mouth to give its body ‘taste’ (tabar). The elder holding the child then pronounces an invocation presenting the infant to the gods (petara) and asking them to take the child into their care. Reflecting Iban notions of the dichotomous nature of experience — the contrast between waking reality and the dream world of the soul — the principal gods invoked are Selampandai, the creator-god who, as a blacksmith, forges and shapes the child’s visible body (tuboh) (and later repairs it should it receive physical injury), and Ini Inda who, as the shaman goddess, is the principal protective deity associated with the soul (samengat) and with the invisible plant counterpart (ayu) that represents human life in its mortal aspect.
For the Iban, a child’s introduction into ritual life is graduated. Thus ngetup garam signals the first enlargement of its relational field beyond the bilik. Through ngetup garam the infant is removed for the first time from the confines of the bilik apartment and is introduced to the basic temporal dimensions of the Iban visible world, to daylight and the orbiting sun, and, at the same time, its presence is made known to the gods into whose care it is placed. The principal gods invoked are those responsible for the main constituents of its newly created person: namely, its visible body and its unseen soul. Finally, the journey from the bilik to the tanju’ and back to the bilik is seen by the Iban as a movement between areas of minimal and maximal spiritual danger, and back again, within the longhouse.
The main rites of birth conclude with the infant’s ritual first bath (meri’ anak mandi’) at the longhouse bathing place. Ritual bathing gives recognition to the child’s social persona within the community, while similarly locating it ritually in a beneficent relation with the spiritual forces believed to be present beyond its threshold. The rite opens at dawn with the preparation of three sets of offerings on the family’s section of the longhouse gallery. When prepared, one set of offerings is carried into the bilik apartment. There it is presented to the family’s guardian spirits (tua’). The other two are carried to the river side where, as part of the bathing ritual, one is presented to the spirits of the water (antu ai’), the other to the spirits of the forest (antu babas).
As soon as these preparations are completed, the bathing party assembles on the gallery and is formed into a procession. After making a complete circuit of the gallery, its pathway strewn with popped rice, the procession, bearing the child, descends the entry ladder and proceeds in file to the river bathing place accompanied by the music of drums and gongs. At the pendai’ the offerings to the water spirits are cast into the river. The chief ritual officiant then wades into the water. Standing in the river, he pronounces a complex invocation (sampi) in which he calls on the spirits of the water to form a parallel, unseen procession in the realms beyond the longhouse threshold. The spirits are described in his invocation as arriving at the pendai’ from both upriver and downriver, from the river’s headwaters, its many branching streams, and from its mouth at the sea. Like human beings, the spirits, although unseen, inhabit ‘this world’ (dunya tu’). The invocation is characteristically structured as a dialogue in which the officiant becomes a number of different characters, both seen and unseen (Sather 1988:178–180). At first he self-reflexively describes the purpose of the rites and the intent of his own actions. Then, as they assemble, he assumes the identity of the spirits. These include the spirits of turtles, crocodiles and river fish. The spirits, through this dialogue, announce their arrival in processional order. Speaking through the officiant, they describe the magical blessings and charms they have brought to distribute among the bathing party and declare their intention to look after the infant, preserving it particularly from drowning (see Sather 1988:175–180). The guardianship of the river spirits, established at first bathing, is believed to continue throughout an individual’s lifetime. In the poem of lamentation following death, the souls of the dead leave the familiar world of the longhouse by way of its bathing place, travel by river to the Otherworld and pass the homes of their former spirit-guardians. As they come to each of these homes in turn, they release the spirits from guardianship and bid them farewell. Later, in rituals that involve the souls’ return from the Otherworld, the souls again pass these homes just before they reach the penai’ of the living. The spatial imagery thus locates the river spirits within the living world but beyond the boundaries of human society, its outer limits defined in this ritual construction by the penai’.
As the infant is bathed, a chicken is sacrificed and its blood is allowed to flow into the river. The final set of offerings is then presented to the spirits of the forest. If the infant is male, these are hung from a spear (sangkoh), if female, they are hung from a shed-stick (leletan); spears and shed-sticks symbolizing the pre-eminent gender roles of men and women: warfare and weaving (Sather 1988:182). As these offerings are being set out the procession reassembles and, bearing the infant, returns to the longhouse gallery. Here the mother and infant undergo a secondary bathing rite called betata’, literally ‘to drench’ or ‘sprinkle with water’. The mother and child are seated together on a gong, covered by a ritual pua’ cloth, at their family’s section of the upper gallery (ruai atas). Here they are individually touched with water by other longhouse members and the family’s guests from neighbouring communities. Betata’ thus dramatizes the end of the mother’s and child’s confinement and their ritual reintegration into the community.
In the series of rites that follows birth, beginning with bekindu’ and ending with betata’, each rite makes use of a different socially demarcated area of the longhouse and its surroundings. As a result, the series as a whole is constituted as an ordered movement through the longhouse community at large. This movement ritually effects the progressive engagement of the newborn infant in an expanding series of social and ritual relationships — moving outward from the bilik to the longhouse and beyond to the larger river system that encompasses them both — and from confinement within the spiritually secure bilik apartment to location within an all-embracing, but increasingly dangerous cosmological order. Spiritual danger is spatialized and through the ritual organization of the longhouse, this danger is progressively confronted as the infant journeys through the community, becoming in the end a source of efficacy and spiritual protection. Finally, these journeys are always, like the internal ordering of the longhouse itself, bidirectional, returning to the source from which they began. Thus they move from inside to outside the longhouse, to its veranda and river bathing place, then back inside again, first to the bilik, then to the communal gallery; hence, not upriver and downriver but along its opposite, life-symbolizing east–west coordinates.
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