Azaghvana E-Book 2003 - Flipbook - Page 310
came across the same idea of stones being seen as a kind of primordial food among the Mafa,
on the other side of the international border.
Wood was also used to make ritually important objects such as drums that were kept in
particular places of the house. Other materials were animal bone from domestic animals, such
as the jaws of bulls, and others were used for making charms to be fixed on or hung from
walls of certain rooms. Finally, there was clay and the making of ritual pots, which are of
particular ethnographic importance to us. Their ritual handling was linked, together with the
ancestor stones, to the preparation of sorghum beer and ritual sauce. While the beer was
prepared in the lower kitchen of the first wife, the sauce was cooked in her husband's ritual
sauce kitchen next to it.
There was a whole variety of terracotta pots kept in a traditional house, and below we
introduce a list of such pots, including the places where they were kept and the ritual
functions they fulfilled. This will lead to a better understanding of how social relationships
were embedded in ritual contexts for their annual or bi-annual renewal. We will demonstrate
as such for har ghwe, the slaughtering rituals for a deceased father, and har jije for the
deceased grandfather. We will describe in detail how the ancestor stones and related ritual
pots were once handled by specific elders, such as a senior brother or a generation mate
(skmama) of the deceased acting as a family priest (zal jije).
We already mentioned skmama as a kinship term for a generational group formed by sons of
one particular father, while the kinship term kuɗige concerned the formation of a lineage
group among sons of one particular mother. Both systems were reflected in the ritual aspects
of a house as a place of worship, in the context of which it was always the seventh born who
was served first. A generation mate acting as a family priest was preferably referred to as zal
jije, and a senior brother as a family priest was more frequently called dada. The seventh born
did not serve the ancestor stones of his brothers, but was seen more as a potential custodian of
lineage shrines beyond the generational limitations of the house.
We will learn that the lower loft (gude tighe) above the lower room of the first wife was a
ritually important space, but we do not know whether there was a separate ritual for it known
as har gude (slaughtering for the first wife's loft). We will discuss the importance of
sacrificing a he-goat in the context of slaughtering for divinity (har gwazgafte), and illustrate
how the mountain path passing the shared platform of two neighbours would be blocked to
signal to potential passers by that one of them was about to sacrifice to his house god. Apart
from touching on the meaning of a personalised god belonging to the owner of the house, we
will also begin to discuss in greater detail the ritual importance of guts and stomach contents
as sacrificial matter linked to the cosmological worldview of the Dghweɗe.
We cannot know the exact age of the houses we visited, but infer that the ancient parts we
documented had been ritually used for several generations, and many of the material aspects
described could easily belong to the late pre-colonial period. We have seen that the Dghweɗe
liked to leave traces of their ritual past in the ruins of houses, in the form of smashed pottery.
We will show an image of a mound of such discarded pottery belonging to the ruined house
introduced in the previous chapter. There we see the typical small apertures we have referred
several times as being similar to pottery found on the surface of most DGB sites. We will
show the Dghweɗe technique of making small apertures, and how they sealed them to
maintain the freshness of the beer during the journey to its ritual consumption.
3D groundplan of a traditional house
We begin with a three-dimensional model of the groundplan of a Dghweɗe house, and
recapture what we have already learned by repeating the names and numbers of its rooms. In
this way we will become increasingly familiar with the architecture for when parts of a
traditional Dghweɗe house are referred to in subsequent chapter sections. Figures 19a-19c
show that our 3D model consists of three views, and we see how they form integrated parts of
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