Azaghvana E-Book 2003 - Flipbook - Page 237
worship. The spatial network of ritual interaction was much less dense outside the highly
populated hamlet areas, but there were still public spaces in the form of flat places for ritual
gatherings, or ritual routes up and down the hills connecting those public spaces with the
homes of senior representatives of the local population. We will learn a lot about the ritual
dimension of the wider hillside as a typical cultural landscape in our chapter about the various
stages of the adult initiation rituals (dzum zugune). The spatial network of dzum zugune did
not however explicitly connect northern and southern Dghweɗe, such as the bull festival
represented in the social and spatial order it travelled across Dghweɗe and beyond.
We mentioned the role of the seventh-born son (thaghaya) who inherited the house and the
infields and also acted on the lineage level as the custodian of the earth of his lineage section
(kambarte). He was as such ritually responsible for the lineage shrines (khalale) linked to the
founding ancestor of that kambarte. We discuss his role as a representation of good luck in
contrast to that of the eighth-born child in Chapter 3.18. At this point, we only want to refer to
the bareness of the ritual sites and places outside the intensely populated hamlets of a hillside.
They lacked the decorum of ancestor pots and other ritual paraphernalia of the house as a
place of worship. This unsettled part of a Dghweɗe farm was also close to the bushland,
referred to as susiye (see Figure 17), and it seems that the closer one got to susiye (bush farm)
the less important the land became as a ritually relevant space. We think that this was to do
with the labour-intensity the generations of families went through in keeping their infields
fertile by bringing out the manure produced in houses nearby.
The underlying clan and lineage structure of Dghweɗe local group formation was, however,
ritually embraced by the journey the bull festival took when it travelled through the whole of
Dghweɗe. The travelling bull festival demonstrates that the ritual cycle had a spatial
dimension, by moving from the nuclear family home as part of a cluster of houses, then out
into the wider Dghweɗe community, and therefore was the unifying ritual interaction. That
the rituals of the house occurred in the calendar before the ones related to Dghweɗe as a
whole, underpins the fact that local group formation started with the 'kitchen' (kuɗige) as the
smallest unit of descent, before growing into a localised lineage section represented by a
variety of shrines. We will learn in the next chapter that the custodianship of local shrines did
not necessarily follow a strict calendrical order of key rituals, as was the case for the spatially
dense house shrines.
Conclusion
In this chapter we have presented the calendar of the Dghweɗe, and learned that in crop
rotation guinea corn was the ritually most relevant crop. The local beer was also made of
guinea corn, and it had altogether a much higher ritual function than millet. Having said that,
we have also seen how the ritual calendar changed and adapted over time and that for
example har ghwe (sacrifice of he-goat for deceased father) was until the recent past most
likely not carried out during a millet year. The big community festival involving the ritual
release and subsequent slaughter of a bull had also stopped, as had adult initiation which had
consisted of four progressive bi-annual stages of rituals. We think that this was intended for
the promotion of competition for the sake of survival in a cyclically alternating semi-arid
mountainous environment.
We have also looked into the possible cultural-historical dimension of the Dghweɗe calendar,
by linking it to a scale of palaeoclimatic change showing a 400-year-long wet period until
about 600 years ago. After this there was a sharp climatic decline during the 14th century,
leading eventually to the foundation of Kirawa and to the DGB period which lasted until the
mid-17th century. We think that 'Johode' as an early arrival zone was perhaps contemporary
with the end of the DGB period, eventually leading, during a long period of high rainfall, to
the formation of Dghweɗe as we have come to know it. In the context of that, we identified
the last 300 years as having had many ups and downs in terms of climate change. We
concluded that the Dghweɗe calendar might well have been the historical result of the
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