An Analysis of Rites de Passage among the Endenese
My 1997 version of the paper dealt with the problem of how the anthropologist should describe a ritual. In answering to this challenge, I showed that one way to describe a ritual is by employing the speech act theory. Taking mortuary ceremony as an example, I showed there are two kinds of talking in ritual — one kind of speech that makes up the world, and the other that merely interprets the world.
★ My Old Version
In the light of the newly selected theme of this second conference, “The ritual articulation of cultural identity and socio-political order in Indonesia”, the old version looks rather out of place. It is true that the Endenese culture has been changing considerably; but the changes seem to have been caused not by the change of regimes at the national level, at least in this part of central Flores. Most changes seem to have resulted from the intrusion (or advancement) of the capitalist economy. I have written several papers on this aspect of the change and continuity of the Endenese culture (among others, on the Endenese labour migration to Malaysia and (soon to be published as a journal article) on the impact of the introduction of cash crops).
Considering that the Endenese situation has little to do with the national level politics, I have decided to retain most part of my old version, shifting the emphasis onto the ritual articulation of the social world, hoping that the theoretical consideration of speech act theory may be of some relevance to the idea of ritual articulation of identity.
What I’ve done here is adding a complementary analysis to the old one; before showing how the anthropologist should describe a ritual, I show how the people themselves describe a ritual. The paper now deals with “talking about rituals” as well as “talking in rituals”. The new addition deals with marriage ceremony so that, at least, in terms of the objects of the research, this addition complements the old version, which deals with mortuary ceremony.
★ Addition in this new version
Now let me begin.
Anthropologists have been trying to describe, analyze and explain rituals in various ways — functional, symbolical, hermeneutic etc etc. Sometimes one wonders if there is any definite way of analyzing rituals; perhaps, one thinks, no explanation might be the best explanation. Quoting Wittgenstein’s remarks on Golden Bough (by Frazer), Finch says:
Rituals, Wittgenstein makes clear, are no-cognitive and non-instrumental. They are not based on opinions and do not aim at anything. Burning an effigy or kissing the picture of a loved one are not primarily expected to influence events. They do not aim at anything. “We act in this way and then feel satisfied.”
★ Wittgenstein on Frazer
Do rituals not aim at anything?
I presume all the participants to this conference, more or less, disagree with Wittgenstein; there is at least one “aim” of rituals, that is to articulate identity. My answer to the above question is Yes and No — under some kinds of descriptions of a ritual, there appear an aim(s) of the ritual; while under others, we can find no aim at all. It all depends how we (anthropologists) and they (the native themselves) describe the ritual concerned.
To make the point above, in this paper, I am going to have a recourse to the speech act theory and show yet another way to describe a ritual.
My old version begins with the memory of one Japanese anthropologist who died young, name of Taro Go — I would rather retain this part, even though it may not be of as direct relevance as it was in the old version.
It was in the mid 1980s. I was at the Australian National University, working hard for my Ph. D., when I met Taro Go, a young Japanese anthropology student who, a few years later, died during his first fieldwork on the island of Sumba, and who would have been among us, had it not been for this tragedy. Anyway — on a certain hot night in Canberra, a few Japanese students got together at Taro’s room, drinking wine and engaging in a nonsensical talkand in useless discussion. One of us challenged us all whether anybody could provide a reasonable explanation why one is prohibited to urinate on an earthworm (as is a Japanese custom).
★ Taro’s Challenge
An earthworm helps farmers by digging up soils, so farmers might think that it is disgraceful to urinate on such a helpful creature’ said one. Another student (who, incidentally, was working for his medical degree) suggested
Urinating on an earthworm means that you are, at the time, fiddling with soil; that is, you’ve got dirty hands. The prohibition works such that dirty hands never touch a sensitive organ.’ These two, one might say, are functional explanations. I myself suggested a third — a symbolic, structuralist interpretation, referring to the metaphorical connection (a morphological similarity) between a penis and an earthworm.
★ Various Explanations
After a while, Taro gave us a definite explanation — Just Because! [[This is a new addition — actually this is what Wittgenstein maintains in his treatise on Golden Bough.]]
I now think that Taro’s was the closest to a native explanation (that is, no explanation).1 People often answer, with a tinge of boredom because of the repeated anthropologist’s questions of “Why do you do that ritual in this way?”, “Just because! There is no reason. That, you see, has been our way since our ancestors”.
★ No Explanation is Their Explanation
What is the point of the story? The point is that we, anthropologists, have to admit that no explanation is a good explanation — at least, “from the native’s point of view”. The same point has been stated repeatedly in this volume (by Sugishima and Nakamura, among others). [[I don’t know whether they still retain their positions now.]]
What, then, is the anthropologist’s task if she wants to write ethnography from the native’s point of view — merely describing whatever is the liturgical sequence of the ritual in question without explaining anything? Exotic as it may be, that kind of ethnography would be, almost certainly, of no theoretical significance. Taro’s answer might have been meant to be a challenge, a provocation: “How else can the anthropologist analyze a ritual?”
★ What then is the good Ethnography
This paper attempts to show yet another way of an anthropological analysis of ritual — neither a functional, nor a structural, nor a simply descriptive one. 2
[[Now back to the old version.]]
To make my contention clear, let us imagine we are asked to analyze
the game of chess. There can be conceivably an infinite
number of ways of analyzing chess. De Saussure distinguishes two types
of analyses of chess: (A1) external analyses such as a
study of historical expansion of chess from India to Middle East, to
Europe, to China, or to other countries such as Thailand, Japan, etc, or
an aesthetic study of the various chess pieces and (A2)
internal analyses such as a study of the interrelatedness of various
rules of the game. The second kind (A2) is defined, by de Saussure, as
the structural analysis. Yet, apart from the two types mentioned by de
Saussure, we can surely make our analyses in yet another way, namely,
once we focus on an actual match of chess. This way can also be divided
into two types, following the Saussurian approach —
(B1) external, such as a study of a historical
importance of a certain game (Bobby Fisher becoming the first American
champion etc.) or a micro-psychological study of the players in a
certain match and (B2) a study of strategy and
tactics,
like those descriptions one find in common chess literature.
I would like to make the (B2) kind of analysis in this paper, with a
certain theoretical twist.
★ Ways of Analyzing Game of Chess
[[I am not sure to which category (A1 to B2) the additional section belongs to. Perhaps, I would say, it belongs to (A2) kind.]]
Let me, first, introduce you to the proper ethnographic background. The Endenese is an Austronesian speaking population, inhabiting the central part of Flores, to the west of the Lionese (reported, in this volume, by Sugishima as well as Aoki) and to the east of the Nage Keo people(s) (see the contribution by Forth).
The social world of an Endenese is conceptualized as consisting of
tripartite parts — his/her agnates (ari ka’E),3
his/her wife-givers (ka’E embu) and his/her wife-takers
(weta anE). These different types of relation
accrue from the two ordering principles: (1) agnation
and (2) the asymmetric alliance (rules about
matrilateral cross cousin marriage), Often, a third principle, namely,
that of prestation (ceremonial gift exchange), as
forceful as the first two, is to be exploited for the ordering of the
social world.
★ Two Principles of Ende Kinship
The third principle refers to the bridewealth transaction, or more precisely, the ngawu transaction. 4 The dogma has it that the wife-taking group should give a certain amount of valuables (such as elephant tusks, gold items and, nowadays, cash) to the wife-giving group in contracting a marriage. In other words, this is an institution.
★ Dogma of Prestation: Being Makes Doing
The principle of prestation does not, in effect, seem to be directly involved in the ordering of the society; it only seems to be a by-product of the kinship principles (agnation and asymmetric complex), such that things (ngawu) flow in a direction already defined in kinship terms. We might say that “being (kinship) makes doing (prestation)”; thus a prestation is not, one might continue, one of the principles of kinship to be placed along with agnation and asymmetric complex .
What makes the prestation the third principle rather special is the fact that the principle of prestation employs, when working as an ordering principle, a reversal of the directionality of this dogmatic explanation (“being makes doing”) —“doing makes being”.
The reversal can be done only when the original idiom (in this case, “being makes doing”) is articulated as a dogma (or an institution), or an indigenous linguistic rule to be followed.5
A dogma or a description of an institution (“being makes doing”) can be sometimes reversed such that one can say that “doing makes being.”
★ Reversal of Dogma: Doing Makes Being
For example, all Endenese assume as a rule that one should marry a girl from his wife-giving group. This is a dogma; that is, this is a description of a certain institution. The reversal applies here — that is, that the group, from where the girl comes, is his wife-giving group. By marriage, an Endenese thus can recruit non-kin into his/her social world articulated in the idioms of affinity. We now see an example of the reversal of a dogma (a description of an institution) — “doing makes being
A mere statistical tendency, the statement of which may look like a rule, does not function in this way.
★ Dogma (rules ) vs Tendency (non-rule)
A couple tends to adopt the husband’s sister’s son when they do not have a son for some time after their marriage. But no Endenese has ever mentioned that to me as an institution. 6 Thus, even if one adopts a child of a person, other than one’s sister or sister’s husband, that person will never be considered as one’s sister or sister’s husband.
★ Adoption (statistical tendency)
Ngawu transactions are like the marriage rules (institutions), since ngawu are transferred from wife-taker to wife-giver, so if ngawu goes from A to B, A is regarded as the wife-taker and B as the wife-giver. In this way, “doing” (paying ngawu) makes “being” (kinship).
★ Bridewealth transaction (dogma)
Let me give one striking example of how “doing makes being” (“prestation generates kinship”), namely, the institution of what I call “bridewealth-linked brother and sister”.
Suppose there are a pair of a man and a woman, between whom there is no kinship relation, and that you are a rich man, without any kinship relationship to either of them. You are the one who is in charge of the woman (`a la your own daughter) and, thus, when she marries, you receive the bridewealth (ngawu) paid for her. Now the man is poor, so poor that he cannot marry since he has no ngawu. Say, you propose to pay bridewealth for his marriage and he assents. You use, for the promised payment, the ngawu you received for the woman’s marriage. The man and the woman are now in the relation of what I term “bridewealth-linked brother and sister”
Platenkamp’s suggestion If a man (a) has custody over a woman (b) as if she were his own daughter, then he is entitled to the ngawu prestation transferred by the wife-taker upon the woman’s marriage. If the man (a) then agrees to transfer their prestation to the wife-giver of another man (c) who wishes to marry a woman but cannot afford to pay the bridewealth, then the latter man (c) and the woman (b) — for whom the bridewealth was originally received — are now in a relation of what I term “bridewealth-linked brother and sister”.
In Endenese, this situation is described as wa’u se ’imu // nai se ’imu, “one (woman) getting off // one getting on”. The first part refers to the woman (b) who marries out and the payment for whom one uses for the poor man’s (c) bridewealth and the latter part refers to the man’s (c) wife who enters (“getting on”) your family now. This relationship between the man (c) and the woman (b) is conceptualized as one of brother and sister (even though there is no actual kinship relation between them) and the connection between them is considered much stronger than an actual genealogical link between brother and sister (without any bridewealth transaction), in the sense that the man’s (c) daughter must marry the woman’s (b) son.
Now, lastly, at the end of this section, let me drop some words about the interrelation of the kinds of exegeses of rituals and the kinds of rituals in Ende, before proceeding to analysis of the marriage ceremony.
Native exegeses of rituals, in general, among the Endenese can be said to be composed of two parts — (1) a cosmological and (2) a sociological one.
The cosmological language system contains such words as “witch” (’ata porho), “ancestral spirits” (’ata mata, embu kajo), “spirit” (nitu), “to attack” (tau) etc. The sociological language system consists solely of idioms of kinship described above.
★ Two Kinds of Exegeses
The exegeses of agricultural rituals (nggua tana watu) are rich in cosmological interpretations, both official (and unanimously agreed upon) and spontaneous (those of a personal nature, not necessarily with unanimous agreement), but they are lacking sociological interpretations; whereas rites de passage (there is no special native category denoting this genre of nggua) are given both kinds of interpretations.
★ Two Kinds of Rituals
Be it noted that I am not saying that nggua tana watu have
no “sociological” relevance; they do. For example, a specific
clan may want to emphasize its political power by conducting a nggua
tana watu in an unusual time, thus forcing the rest of the society
to participate in the ritual.7
In this way, people do comment on a nggua tana watu,
or on the way of performing a certain, specific occurrence of
nggua tana watu. However, when asked to formulate the meaning
of a ritual in general (say, a ritual held at the time of
planting, kaki), without referring to any actual performance,
people do not attach any sociological meaning to kaki.
I would like to use the word “political” rather than “sociological” for this genre of exegeses. Political kind of speech8 is the one which mentions the “actor’s intentions”. About this genre, a short theoretical comment, in relation to the overall conclusion, will be given at the end of this paper,
★ Political exegeses
In contrast to the nggua tana watu, rites de passage are rich in both cosmological and sociological interpretations. This paper focuses on one of the rites de passage of the Endenese, i.e., the marriage ceremony and the funeral ceremony.
Now that we know a general background knowledge about the Endenese world, let us proceed to the first and new part of my paper — how the Endenese people themselves talk about a marriage ceremony. There are 3 ways of talking about marriage ceremony in Ende — (1) a literary way, (2) a sociological way, and (3) a political way.
★ 3 Ways of Talking About Ritual
What I term “literary way” is a way to describe a ritual liturgically, describing one phase after another. This is what I acquired in the early part of my fieldwork, whenever I asked Ende people how a marriage ceremony is carried out. An example runs as follows:
The first stage is arhE (“asking”). For this, a messenger (called korE mborE taka taso) is sent to the house of the would-be bride with a proposal of marriage. If the members of the bride’s group agree with the said proposal, then the representatives of the groom’s group go to the bride’s house (“go and sit to talk” mbana ngambE) and a token gift is given — this stage is called “to hang a token on a banana tree, and to put a mark on a sugarcane” (tEo muku//tanda tewu).
After the token gift (tEo muku) comes the main gift exchange, “to remove the token and to take off the mark”. (renda ru’u//wenda tanda). For this gift exchange, a negotiation (mbabho) is to take place.
Then, finally, comes a marriage feast (pesia).
★ Liturgical sequence
I call this a “literary” way because of its coherent literary theme; it is full of botanical metaphors. A woman is compared to a banana/sugar cane and a man is compared to a harvester of those plants. (See for the significance of plants in eastern Indonesian context.) In a way, this description is parallel to a description of a harvest of sugar palm wine (mokE), where a harvester is regarded as “a man asking for a woman” and a palm tree is “a woman asked”.
★ Botanical metaphor
Except the botanical metaphors, you can ask no “why” in the arena of this liturgical sequence; one cannot find any structure in this narrative — one stage simply follows another. There is no hypotaxis but merely parataxis. If you ask, for example, “why there are two payments of bridewealth”, the only plausible answer would be “Just because”.
★ Liturgy has no structure
Sometimes, people describe the marriage ceremony in a different manner. This version concentrates on the very day of the pesia.
On the day of the marriage feast, pesia,
which is held in the bride’s village, The core member of the bride’s group gather in a hut constructed for this purpose (ghembu senda), waiting for people to come. They are the original “waiting people” (ata napa). Close relatives, villagers and friends come to the place. They are called ata mai, “the coming people” and served with tobacco and sirih pinang (rhoo weti). After being served they, ata mai, are now assimilated into the waiting people, ata napa, waiting for another group to come. In this manner the original ata napa, the waiting people, become larger as time goes by, assimilating such people as their co-villagers, agnates and wife-givers. Now, they wait for the last and most important”coming people”, the groom’s group to come.
The last “coming people”, the wife-taker, are never to be assimilated. People often talk about the magic contests of the old days. One such story goes like this: “When the groom’s group reached the edge of our village, an elder on our side (the waiting people) tried some magic trick (tau) on the coming people and a coming man’s machete was broken. Then began a magic contest between the coming people and the waiting people.” There is a marked animosity between them.
After the arrival of the groom’s group, the whole process of the ritual now revolves around the theme of “making peace” papa pawE between the two groups (the bride’s group and the groom’s group).
The story has a coherent structure of causation. The driving force of the story is the animosity between the two groups, and its main theme is “to make the complete world of kinship” (consisting of “us” and the wife-givers and the wife-takers).
★ Driving Force and Theme
The key word of the third kind (“the political way”) I am going to introduce here is “intention”.
Following is a remark of Epu, my main informant, made a few days after a pesia of Bhato’s daughter. Epu and Bhato lived in the same village.
“Rude was Bhato. He asked me to come to his”gathering” (bou). He should not have done so. I am his wife-giver and not of his group.
On the day of the pesia, he treated me right — he served me with proper food. But the problem is that he served Ara, my (classificatory) brother, wrongly. Bhato treated Ara as though Ara were a member of his own group.”
There had been ill-feelings between Bhato and Epu, because, according to Epu, (1) Bhato was Epu’s wife-taker, and yet (2) Bhato tended to ignore this tie and regard Epu and his agnates as if they were just co-villagers (kind of ari ka’E). What Bhato tried to do was to cut the oldest wife-givers (Epu’s group) from his kinship world, and, instead, to focus on the newer wife-givers.
★ Bhato and Epu
A bou, gathering, is a meeting held in order to accumulate a necessary amount of bridewealth. By inviting Epu to his bou, Bhato implied, according to Epu, that Epu was just a co-villager and not his wife-giver.
Here we see native’s interpretations of his world, in terms of the actors’ political intentions.
So far, we have seen three ways of talking about a ritual (a literary, sociological and political ways). When you converse with people using the literary way, there is no more explanation. In the arena of the sociological exegeses, the structure of the events is evident and you do not have to ask the “why” question (even though it is not irrelevant as in the arena of literary way of description of the ritual). Only in the political way, is the question “why” relevant — one can, for example, sort out and shed lights on the underlying, deep, malicious intentions of the actors and, by so doing, one can re-interpret the world and present the image to the members of one’s group.
★ 3 Ways of Talking about Ritual
The political way of talking about ritual does make the world anew — yet, I contend, it is a mild way of making the world. There is another way, much stronger way, to make an entirely new world. (1) What is this specific way and (2) what is the difference between mild and strong ways of making world — shall be answered in the following sections.
★ Two Problems to be solved in the next sections
In this section, I will deal with a sequence of ceremonial customs revolving around an occurrence of death, among the Endenese. As the aim of the game of chess is, as any player would agree, clear, that is, “to win’, so is that of mortuary ceremony and is agreed upon by almost any player —”to separate the dead from the living”. The entire verbal framework is usually presented to consist of different stages, each contributing to that aim. I would like to focus upon smaller segments (than a verbally framed stage) to see how people “do things,” — that is, re-establish their social world — especially “with words.” In other words, I shall omit the literary way, and concentrate, instead, on the sociological and political ways, so that the main theme of this paper, the making of the world by saying, come to the fore more clearly.
★ 3 Ways
The Endenese regard an occurrence of death as a potential threat to, as well as an occasion for the re-establishing of, their current (presumably stable) social world. Such a conceptualization is salient in the indigenous sociological exegeses.
★ Re-establishing Social World
The main theme of the ritual is thus the removal of the ill effects of the death from the society and the reconfirmation of the peacefulness of the living world. This sociological theme is repeatedly confirmed by the informants. They refer to every specific ritual observance by saying “this is done in order to separate the dead from the living”. In other words, such exegeses are not hidden deep in the symbolic structure of the ritual, waiting to be found and analyzed by the anthropologist, but are explicitly formulated by those involved.
On the fourth night, for example, after a period marked by prohibitions, at dawn, the bereaved go to bathe themselves at a certain place, “in order to cleanse themselves and rid themselves of the deceased”. When they return from the bathing, an ata marhi (a medicine man), waiting for them at the threshold of the village, sprinkles bhonggi (enchanted rice grains) over the bereaved, “in order to separate them from the deceased”. This is the sociological way to talk about mortuary ceremonies in Ende. Everything is, thus, clear to the performers of the ritual.
★ Sociological way
Now, let me proceed to the third way of talking about rituals, the political way, whereby, I want to claim, the Endenese articulate their world.
D. Schneider (1984) once emphasized a more dynamic aspect of kinship than that of merely one’s “being” in a certain kinship relation with another person, namely one’s “doing” something towards another. In his words, kinship is not only being but also doing. What I want to establish here is that kinship for the Endenese is not merely being, nor only doing, but also “saying” — saying something in order to influence the actual world of kinship relations.
★ Schneider
Schneider has given us a hint; J. L. Austin is to give us an idea.
In his influential book, How to do things with words, Austin (1975) begins his argument by focusing his attention on a special kind of speech acts, which he calls “explicit performatives”, and then proceeds to distinguish between three kinds of speech act (discernible in every speech, not only in explicit performatives), that is, (1) locutionary, (2) illocutionary and (3) perlocutionary acts. In other words, every speech act, according to Austin, performs the three kinds of acts mentioned above simultaneously.
★ Three Forces of Speech Act
Let us focus on the explicit performatives, whose illocutionary force is conspicuous even to an ordinary speaker, that is, a na"ive non-philosopher.
The salient fact about this kind of speech genre is that it directly
works on the world. When you say, “Out”, as an
umpire (in a baseball game), then the batter is out;
when you say “I name this ship Queen Elizabeth the second” (as a person
entitled to do so in the proper situation), then the ship is named
“Queen Elizabeth the second” and so on.
In short, in this kind of situation, one can exercise a direct influence
upon the world by the mere utterance of words. The man, who was safe
(“not out”) before, is now “out”; the ship, which bore no name before,
is now named “Queen Elizabeth the second”. This is the way “explicit
performatives” work on the world. And a ritual provides the appropriate
setting for “saying”. The Endenese make maximum use of the illocutionary
force to adjust their kinship world.
★ Explicit Performatives
Let me, first, take an episode from my field notes:
A feud broke out between a mountain village and a coastal village over the ownership of a certain parcel of land which lies midway between the two villages. One day, early in the morning, a group of coastal people came up to the mountain village, armed with bows ボウ and arrows. They demonstrated their willingness to do whatever they had to do by brandishing bows and arrows; after a few minutes, seeing that nobody came out of the houses, they went away.
A few days later, a coastal man, who had been on the scene as a
member of the warring party, came up to the mountain village,
selling fish. He said, “I was songga (”asked
for help”)9
the other day. I could not refuse my co-villager’s request, could I?
This time, I assure you, I’ve come only to sell my fish. I’m your friend
(’orho ’imu).”
This is one example of “making up the world by saying”, frequently employed by the Endenese. A mortuary ceremony employs many of such devices, since a funeral provides the Endenese people with a convenient occasion for a reconciliation with people with whom one had an awkward relationship (such as ro’i) and for a more precise articulation of hitherto unclear relationship.
Let us turn back to the kinship idioms for a while before proceeding further. The main (proper) principles (agnation and asymmetric complex) ordering the Endenese social world produce conceptually three categories of kin: (1) agnates, (2) wife-givers and (3) wife-takers. This seemingly orderly social world of an Endenese can be disturbed by events of a personal nature, such as ro’i (a purposive rupture of the friendly relationship supposed to be maintained between affines) or a wrong type of marriage (rarha sarha, “a wrong path”). Ro’i turns two affines into non-relatives of each other, whereas rarha sarha reverses the wife-giver/wife-taker relationship. One, thus, can never simply say so-and-so is, say, a wife-taker, for the person referred to might also be categorized as a wife-giver via a different application of the three principles.
★ Order and Chaos
When a person traces such multiple types of relationships to someone with whom that person has daily interactions, the two persons have many occasions to discuss which type of relationship should prevail when this question arises. But with a person in a fringe of one’s social world (such as a person in a distant village), one may not have the chance to decide which relationship one should exploit. Thus, when one day during my recent field work, I asked my Endenese friend about his kinship relationship with a person who just passed by his house, he said “*rhatu mesa”’ (Ind. “Ada saja”) — that is, “anything goes,” implying the person could be counted as his wife-giver, agnate or even wife-taker, depending on how he traces a history of kinship.
The real world can be sometimes too muddled for the two main Endenese kinship principles (agnation and asymmetric alliance) to classify exclusively. And it is in such contexts that the principle of “saying” comes to the fore, to articulate the world.
★ Messy world and saying
As often as not, a funeral speech consists of addressing the deceased’s wrong doings such that they, the bereaved, forget the bad influences caused by the deceased and try to create a better social world.
“Something has been going wrong with you and us. We’ve had an awkward relation up until now. Look here. All of it was caused by him, the one lying here in front of us. He is, thank goodness, dead now. He was a witch (ata porho). He was the one who caused all ill feelings and animosity between us. Now let us forget about him, his doings and the past. And let us start our new relation from now on.”
The past episodes are now set in a context different
from the previous one.
The past is now reinterpreted such that the only bad
person is the one who is dead.
★ Funeral speech
More effective than the mere re-interpretations of the social world as discussed above is the assignment of three roles (the agnates, wife-givers and wife-takers) by means of saying.
★ Assignment
Immediately after a death has occurred, co-villagers come to the deceased’s house as ari ka’E, or more precisely, as ari ka’E onE nua, “co-villagers”.
In the village where I did my field work, a man died. A co-villager, who was the deceased’s main wife-giver (i.e., his mother’s brother’s son), came to the house and performed many tasks for the preparation of the coming funerary ceremony (ghena). The main wife-giver is supposed to perform only ritually significant actions, such as the first digging of the grave and putting a twig over the grave.10 I was rather amazed by his generosity. He said to the people in the house, “I have come here as a co-villager now. Later, I’ll come as a wife-giver. And, then, treat me as such.”
To quote another episode from my field notes.
A boy, who was a member of the deceased’s wife-takers, was helping women around the hearth. Somebody of the in-group said, “you brought such a small amount of ngawu.” The boy replied that he had not come fully as a wife-taker yet.
In this context, a special importance is attached to the process of sodho (sometimes bEku), or “notifying”, carried out at an early stage of the ceremony. On the death, a messenger is to be sent to every conceivable relative, to notify (sodho) them of the death and ask them to come to the funeral (ghena). The messenger does not only notify them of the death, but also of their assignment to attend to the mortuary ceremony as “agnates”, “wife-givers” or “wife-takers”. In doing so, people can re-order their actual world, at least, in the current context.
★ Notification
以下は発表では省略してもよいだろう—Conclusion へ Failing to assign a role (whether appropriate or not) may provide the notified party with an excuse for being absent from the — altogether expensive — ceremony.
After a certain funeral, I talked with an old man, whom I knew as the deceased’s wife-taker, and who had not attended the funeral. I asked him why he had not attended the funeral and if the messenger had not arrived. He said that the messenger had come but had not said that he should come as a wife-taker. “That was not a proper procedure. That’s why I did not attend the ceremony,” he concluded.
★ Failing assignment (notification)
It is true that, as somebody else told me later, the incident of not notifying properly might not be a reason for his absence; not the whole reason, anyway — he may have had some political reasons. The point is, rather, that this excuse is regarded as proper. One might, “legitimately” as it were, accuse the failing party in this way.
We have seen that the Endenese people make frequent use of “saying” to influence the world (“being”) mainly articulated in a kinship idiom, agnation and the asymmetric alliance. They do so especially when their world is in crisis such as on the death of a constituting member. What is lacking in the analysis, however, is that we don’t know what we mean, exactly, by “changing the world by saying”. How can mere saying alter the world?
★ Ende way of saying
In How to do things with words, Austin argues that the
essence of the magic of “doing things with words” is a “tradition” or
“institution”, an idea which later is made clearer by
Searle (1969) .
He recapitulates it as a “constitutive rule” —
corresponding more or less to what in this paper I labelled a
dogma (that is, institution)
But still the question remains, this time in a form slightly different from the original one, that is, “How can a speech act, based upon a constitutive rule, act on the world?”
★ Question to answer
The question can be answered only by analyzing the relations which words have with the world. Let me, for the sake of the argument, state the conclusion first. There are two ways of relations words can have with the world: (1) words “fit” the world and (2) words “organize” the world.11
★ Words (saying) and World (being)
“CAN to describe X as Y really be the same as to call X Y? Or again the same as to state that X is Y?” writes Austin. This rather out-of-the-worldly, seemingly useless (that is, philosophical) question can lead to a really fascinating conclusion. I will not go into the details of Austin’s discussion here; instead, I will quote his telltale examples of “describing” and “calling”.
★ Three ways of saying about X and Y
You describe it as crimson? But look, it has a lot of blue in it. It is not really like crimson at all.
He describes me as a dictator, whereas in fact, as he must have known, I have always acted only on the advice of Parliament.
He then continues, “If many such examples are studied, the watershed
between calling and describing appears to take shape.”
Note the important fact that this paper is meant to be a sequel to the
paper entitled “Truth” . The contrast between
“calling X Y” and “describing X as Y” is supposed to shed light on the
notion of “truth”. Actually, by that contrast, Austin is now leading us
to see the distinction between two kinds of “truth”:
the truth of “calling X Y” and that of
“describing X as Y”.
The difference lies, according to Austin’s phraseology, in the “directions of the fit”. In my terms, “calling X Y” is a case of “words organizing the world” and “describing X as Y” is one of “words fitting the world.” “Calling X Y” can succeed or fail — that is, succeed or fail to “organize the world.” If it succeeds, then the statement is true because the world is so made; otherwise, it is false. This is a clear case. “Describing X as Y”, on the contrary, is not. The statement can be closer to the world but can never “mirror the world” .
★ Direction of Fit
In this context, it is of interest to note that, in the “truth” paper (), Austin contrasts the two usages of the English word, “true”: (1) “true of” and (2) “true to”. A record of proceedings can be “true of” the proceedings of which it is a record; but a replica or a photograph cannot be “true of” the original — it can only be “accurate or lifelike (true to)” ().
★ “True of” and “True to”
Now let me summaries the above discussion. When words
“organize” the world, the statement can be “true of”
the world because the world is so organized/made. The statement really
changes the world. When words merely
“fit” the world, the statement can only be “true to”
the world. The statement is, so to speak, to be in accordance with the
world. Constitutive rules
(institutions) are rules for the words to organize the
world, thus enabling them to change the world.
My cases of the Endenese people changing their kinship world by “saying”
(such as notification or sodho) are those of words organizing
the world, making use of the relevant constitutive rules
(institutions).
★ Notification — “Calling” “Organize”
What, then, is the theoretical importance of the second kind of statement?
To answer this question, let us turn our attention to the
community in question, the community in which the said
statement is regarded as true or false (or, more true
or less true).
If, in the case of “calling” (as in sodho),
the statement is true, all the members should agree with the statement —
a constitutive rule has such power. In contrast, in the case of
“describing” (as in a funeral speech),
even if the statement is, more or less, true (“true to
the world”), there still can be some who do not agree with it — witness
the examples by Austin. The statement is, to use a vogue anthropological
idiom, an “interpretation” of the world and it can never be said to be
true of the world. The community in question has been called an
“interpretive community” whose border is rather blurred and fuzzy, just
like the truth value of the statement itself. What I termed “political”
speech is the case in point now. Political speech, such as guessing at
the unstated intention of the players and/or actors, is a kind of
interpretation in this sense. It can alter the world as well, but not in
the way “calling” or sodho can change the world. A
political statement can increasingly
pervade the community in question and can be a major
opinion, when it becomes “truer to” the world. It
changes people’s conceptualization of the world
gradually.
That is the functioning of such political
interpretations as cited in the paper. The man who made
a speech about the wrong doings of the deceased can, thus, modify the
(kinship-)world view of the people around him.
★ Funeral speech — “Describing” “Fitting”
And, this is the end of my, somewhat belated, funeral speech.