Azaghvana E-Book 2003 - Flipbook - Page 517
Chapter 3.22
On symbolic classification and the classification of things
Introduction
Throughout Part Three we referred to various aspects of symbolic classification1, such as the
seventh-born son as a symbol of good luck in contrast to the eighth-born child who in the past
fell victim to infanticide to keep all previous sons and daughters alive. The allocation of the
number two to a firstborn girl and the number three to a firstborn boy was also important, but
in terms of ritual counting there was not the same complexity as I came across among the
Mafa of Gouzda. Like the Dghweɗe, the Mafa also applied number two to a firstborn girl and
number three to a firstborn boy, but then reversed odd and even numbers in terms of ritual
counting. As a result, number three represented the female and number four represented the
male. We will use the Mafa example to show how the reproductive capacity of females was
brought under the ritual control of males by the addition of an invisible number one as a
representation of divinity to the original numbers two and three for firstborn girls and boys.
We will try to compare the Mafa approach with the Dghweɗe belief in the rebirth of twins,
and their ideas around cosmological pairing as an aspect of ancestral descent from twin
brothers or full-brothers of the same parents, as in the example of the rainmaker and
cornblesser lineages. We will also refer to the cosmological belief in both cultures that
divinity as a singularity was not reproductive and that it needed pairing. We will refer to the
ritual gender aspect manifested in the architecture of the house, and contextualise the mirror
image of the next world where remembered family ancestors used the left hand rather than the
right hand to receive the sacrificial food passed on to them by their successors in this world.
In the context of this, we will re-examine the symbolic meaning of why a son used his left
hand to eat for the first time after the divination for his deceased father, and why if a wife
slapped her husband with her left hand it would create the fear in him that he might die.
The second chapter section explores other examples of Dghweɗe classification, by analysing
our few notes on the classification of living and non-living things, and we will also present
what we know about Dghweɗe colour classification. In the first part of section two we will
show how the Dghweɗe used the prefix dg/dəg or dag/dug to refer to living and non-living
things, and that this prefix meant 'thing' or 'something'. While doing this we need to keep in
mind that both living and non-living things implied spirithood, and that there was a strong
transformational aspect between people and their natural environment. At the same time we
will point out that the Dghweɗe approach of classifying living and non-living things had a
very practical socio-economic dimension, such as whether or not things served as food.
Firstly they differentiated between 'wild animals of the bushland' (dgsiye) and domestic
animals, and then used sub-classes for other non-domestic 'things' depending on their
environmental links, and referred to them as 'things of the water' or 'things between the rocks'.
They differentiated further living things of the bush as 'flying things', under which they
categorised birds and insects, although in the latter case only insects that could fly. In that
sense butterflies would have been classified together with birds in Dghweɗe of the past.
With regard to colour classification, we will see that the Dghweɗe seemed to have no specific
names for colours, but used a variety of colour terms which appear more like shades of
colours. We will produce a list of such colour shades with the various often descriptive names
that the Dghweɗe used to identify to which range of colour a specific shade belonged. This
1
The term was originally coined by Needham, as explained by Gregory Forth (2010). Needham mainly
applied numerical classifications from a dualistic perspective, but Forth also points to more complex
numerical schemes. We use the term 'symbolic classification' in the wider sense here as recommended
by Forth, by specifically comparing Mafa ritual counting with the Dghweɗe belief in the good luck of a
seventh-born son and the bad luck once represented by an eighth-born child.
515
