Azaghvana E-Book 2003 - Flipbook - Page 315
underpins his religious role as lineage priest, while the senior brother remained the house
custodian. As the firstborn son of the first wife of their father, he might even have been from the
same 'kitchen' (kuɗige). Seniority also played an important role when it came to choosing a
generation mate (skmama) for the zal jije ritual. It was ideally the oldest generation mate from
the level of the deceased grandfather who came from outside to perform the ritual for the
ancestor stone jije representing the deceased. If there was no longer such a person alive, anyone
else who was close to them could reportedly act as skmama and be a visiting family priest,
something which might have been naturally more common for the ritual to the deceased great
grandfather (wuje).
Considering that every traditional house had the three ancestor stones, we can perhaps better
understand why bulama Ngatha gave us his dream of the father complaining to his son that he
had not yet ritually fed him. It presumably implied that there was quite some competition
going on between the various households, for example who was best prepared for har ghwe
(sacrifice to a deceased father) or har jjie (to a deceased grandfather) which followed suit. In
the past this was regulated to take place every other year, but perhaps it had already merged
during my time into an annual sacrifice generally referred to as har ghwe, literally meaning
'sacrificial slaughtering of a he-goat'. Chemical fertiliser had meant that animals were no
longer raised for manure production, and the competition over sacrificing a he-goat in honour
of a deceased father or grandfather was no longer the driving force in keeping the terrace
fields fertile.
Ancestor stones were replaced when
the father of a house died. We infer
that all of his sons replaced their
ancestor stones at the same time,
including his seventh-born son
(thaghaya) who inherited his house
and infields. A new dada stone had to
be installed to represent his now
deceased father, while the old dada
stone would be moved one up to
become the new jije stone (deceased
grandfather), while the old jije stone
became wuje, and the old wuje stone
was retired underneath the granary as
seen in Plate 36a (a). We think that all the brothers did the same, and the oldest brother would
have carried out the rituals as their dada priest. Concerning jije and wuje, the already
mentioned skmama pattern operated, which meant that the senior brothers of the deceased
father now came as generation mates to serve as skmama or zal jije (custodian for the zal jije
pot). The fact that the seventh born was a cultural institution representing good luck in
successful reproduction encompassed the fact that it was not always the biological seventh
born who became thaghaya. We will explain later in Chapter 3.18 the significance of the
seventh- and eighth-born child, and how the role of thaghaya was passed on across several
generations of patrilineal brothers.
Plate 36a: Retired ancestor stones under bulama
Ngatha's granary in Hudimche (1995)
In Figure 20a below we aim to visualise an ideal scheme of the order in which the three
ancestor stones would be ritually attended by one’s senior brothers and the generation mates
of the deceased, through and beyond three extended families of at least four generations. This
included the existing father of the house, the triggering point being the death of his father,
leading to each ancestor stone being moved one place to the right. In our scheme, '1' marks
the house of a senior brother, while '7' refers to that of a seventh born (thaghaya). The
numbers '2' to '6' are those of the remaining brothers of the extended family. We see that the
darker arrow shows the senior brother (1) in his role as key custodian of the deceased father
(dada), by first going as dada priest to his seventh-born brother, before assisting his other
junior brothers (2) in their own celebrations.
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