Azaghvana E-Book 2003 - Flipbook - Page 317
This is why in Figure 20a we highlighted the first wives of the different house owners of our
lineage section collectively as 'mothers of thaghaya', which is an expression I framed to mark
the ritually and socially most important women in the nuclear family households shown in the
diagram. 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 social
division along the lines of different mothers triggered patrilineal splitting, and in the context
of this, the most senior thaghaya lineage traditionally had the role of starting activities such as
planting and harvesting. Figure 20a shows how the seventh born served as custodian of the
lineage shrine (khalale), being the one responsible for carrying out sacrifices to the founding
ancestor, 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 extended
families in our scheme, in order to demonstrate the principle of how the skmama system
worked 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 have
been placed without encirclement, but each of them represents an extended family of several
farmsteads, indicating that the scheme similarly repeats itself. It is very important to
remember that the overall number of houses represented by the individual sets of ancestor
stones in our illustration does not at all reflect the true number of individual households a
lineage shrine once embraced. Families from other lineage wards might have also resided in
such a local neighbourhood, and the illustration only deals with those who held the
custodianship over a lineage ward. We know that this would mark them out as the most
numerous local lineage group of the neighbourhood. In the next subsection we present a list
of ritual steps typical for har ghwe, which in Figure 20b we visualise as a ritual journey in the
context of the architectural layout of a house.
Pots and people in the context of har ghwe and har jije
We have already referred several times to the ritual pots found in the 'stomach' of thala, but so far
have not dealt with what they represented. Bulama Ngatha (1995) explained to me that there
were two pots inside the house shrine (thala), one for the owner of the house and another for the
deceased grandfather. He said that the owner of the house called upon his dada (family priest) to
carry out the sacrifice for his deceased grandfather, and that he could also be called zal jije, and
he was ideally a close friend and generation mate (skmama) of the deceased. He pointed out that
another generation mate came to each house owner, but this time for the ancestor stone of their
shared deceased great grandfather (wuje). Following John's suggestion, we use the general
translation 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 thala
pot, meaning a ritual beer pot with a small aperture, kept in the 'stomach' of thala. The only two
tughdhe thala were the one for the owner of the house (zal thaghaya) and the one for the
deceased grandfather (zal jije). The tughdhe thala representing the owner of the house was not
however referred to as zal thaghaya as was the case for zal jije. Later in this chapter we will list
more ritual pots and differentiate them from ordinary pots. At this point we want to make the
distinction between the personal tughdhe thala of the owner of the house, and the zal jije pot for
the deceased grandfather, these being the only pots with small apertures inside the 'stomach' of
thala.
Although the skmama (generation mate) who came from outside to carry out his duty could also
be referred to as dada, we only refer to him here as zal jije (family priest). Here we will neglect
the generation mate for the great grandfather (wuje), because we do not know how he was
ritually served, apart from the fact that he came from the next generation up. We reserve the term
dada for the senior brother who visited the family homes of his junior brothers to handle the first
har ghwe sacrifice after their father had died. Such a ritual was called kaɓa, and it made a junior
brother independent and able to become a candidate for the first stage of adult initiation (dzum
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