Azaghvana E-Book 2003 - Flipbook - Page 204
• Your mother's brother you call jije (grandfather), including her father, while you refer
to any mother's sister as baya (mother). You call your mother's mother bajije (meaning
grandmother). Your father's mother you call bajije too, and you also call the sisters of your
father's and mother's mother bajije. Even the sons of your mother's brother you call jije,
and the fact that any other male person of your exogamous lineage is also referred to as
jije shows the great importance of the concept of jije as a form of address across several
generations of bilateral family. On top of that, you can call any elderly person jije. Greatgrandchildren are referred to by their great-grandparents of both sides as zightare or
zighe.
The concept of jije is quite central to our understanding here. Jije was included in the name of
the ancestor stone for a deceased grandfather which was found in every house, which was
called kwir jije (kwire = stone), while the ancestral beer pot kept inside a house shrine (thala)
was known as zal jije. Also, the generation mate (skmama) who functioned as custodian when
handling the zal jije pots of his deceased age mate (jije) was referred to as zal jije, which we
translated earlier as family priest. Due to his seniority, he was often also referred to as dada
(father). Dada was also the official term used to refer to the senior brother when he
served the seventh-born of his extended family first. We will learn in Chapter 3.18 that the
seventh-born son was seen as a representation of good luck, while the eighth-born child was
cast out or fell victim to infanticide to keep all previous siblings alive.
The above shows that we need to distinguish between the custodianship related to the
patrilineal extended family, and the house of a nuclear family as the basic unit of socioeconomic reproduction. The nuclear family did split between full-siblingship and halfsiblingship, in that the sons of the first wife had a higher chance of becoming ritual custodians
than their fellow half-brothers, but there seems to be no siblingship term to express the
division between them apart from ‘descent from the same kitchen' (kuɗige). All half-brothers
and full-brothers refer to one another as vjarnukwe, not only within their own birth family but
also across the extended family divides. For example, someone's mother's sister's sons would
be called vjarnukwe, and your sons would refer to your sister's sons as vjarnukwe.
While the term vjarnukwe does not seem to distinguish between half-siblingship and fullsiblingship, it does not seem to cross the generational divide, and we realise that the same
principle applies regarding the relationship between full-sisters and half-sisters
(daghaunukwe). This is different from the relationship term jije for grandfather, because even
the sons of your mother's brother were regularly referred to as jije, and it was allegedly
correct to refer to any other male person of your exogamous lineage as jije. This would
presumably have meant that a much younger male person of the same patrilineal lineage
group could be referred to as jije by someone of an older generation.
Figure 13a: Half- and full-siblingship across the paternal and maternal family divide
The triangles in Figures 13a represent paternal siblingship, and the circles maternal
siblingship, from the perspective of the husband and the first wife in the centre of the
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