This is why in Figure 20a we highlighted the first wives of the different house owners of ourlineage section collectively as 'mothers of thaghaya', which is an expression I framed to markthe ritually and socially most important women in the nuclear family households shown in thediagram. Together with their co-wives, they brought about the concept of a 'kitchen' (kuɗige),the formation of a patrilineal subgroup consisting of the sons of one mother. This socialdivision along the lines of different mothers triggered patrilineal splitting, and in the contextof this, the most senior thaghaya lineage traditionally had the role of starting activities such asplanting and harvesting. Figure 20a shows how the seventh born served as custodian of thelineage shrine (khalale), being the one responsible for carrying out sacrifices to the foundingancestor, to incorporate in ritual the local beginning of such a lineage section.For ease of illustration we allocated only a small number of houses to two of the extendedfamilies in our scheme, in order to demonstrate the principle of how the skmama systemworked with the two stones dedicated to the deceased grandfather and great grandfather.Besides this, the sets of three ancestor stones outside of the three extended family groups havebeen placed without encirclement, but each of them represents an extended family of severalfarmsteads, indicating that the scheme similarly repeats itself. It is very important toremember that the overall number of houses represented by the individual sets of ancestorstones in our illustration does not at all reflect the true number of individual households alineage shrine once embraced. Families from other lineage wards might have also resided insuch a local neighbourhood, and the illustration only deals with those who held thecustodianship over a lineage ward. We know that this would mark them out as the mostnumerous local lineage group of the neighbourhood. In the next subsection we present a listof ritual steps typical for har ghwe, which in Figure 20b we visualise as a ritual journey in thecontext of the architectural layout of a house.Pots and people in the context of har ghwe and har jijeWe have already referred several times to the ritual pots found in the 'stomach' of thala, but so farhave not dealt with what they represented. Bulama Ngatha (1995) explained to me that therewere two pots inside the house shrine (thala), one for the owner of the house and another for thedeceased grandfather. He said that the owner of the house called upon his dada (family priest) tocarry out the sacrifice for his deceased grandfather, and that he could also be called zal jije, andhe was ideally a close friend and generation mate (skmama) of the deceased. He pointed out thatanother generation mate came to each house owner, but this time for the ancestor stone of theirshared deceased great grandfather (wuje). Following John's suggestion, we use the generaltranslation family priest for zal jije, and note that they had to come from outside.We know that neither the deceased great grandfather nor the deceased father had a tughdhe thalapot, meaning a ritual beer pot with a small aperture, kept in the 'stomach' of thala. The only twotughdhe thala were the one for the owner of the house (zal thaghaya) and the one for thedeceased grandfather (zal jije). The tughdhe thala representing the owner of the house was nothowever referred to as zal thaghaya as was the case for zal jije. Later in this chapter we will listmore ritual pots and differentiate them from ordinary pots. At this point we want to make thedistinction between the personal tughdhe thala of the owner of the house, and the zal jije pot forthe deceased grandfather, these being the only pots with small apertures inside the 'stomach' ofthala.Although the skmama (generation mate) who came from outside to carry out his duty could alsobe referred to as dada, we only refer to him here as zal jije (family priest). Here we will neglectthe generation mate for the great grandfather (wuje), because we do not know how he wasritually served, apart from the fact that he came from the next generation up. We reserve the termdada for the senior brother who visited the family homes of his junior brothers to handle the firsthar ghwe sacrifice after their father had died. Such a ritual was called kaɓa, and it made a juniorbrother independent and able to become a candidate for the first stage of adult initiation (dzum315
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