Azaghvana E-Book 2003 - Flipbook - Page 519
and received beer or water with his left hand but did not support it with the other hand. In
turn, a husband would hand beer or water to a woman with his left hand. If a man of lesser
ritual importance handed sacrificial beer to someone of higher ritual importance he used his
right hand, and the one who received it would libate the beer using his left hand. 3
Unfortunately we were unable to identify any equivalent complicated ritual reversals
concerning odd and even or left and right among the Dghweɗe, but we do remember that the
ritual beer kitchen of the first wife was on the left side of a house, which was the side where
the male ritual sauce kitchen and 'the stomach of the house shrine' were located. Equally, the
granary of the first wife was adjacent to the ritual sauce kitchen where an exogamous lineage
brother cooked a ritual sauce for a deceased grandfather of the father of the house. We also
remember the image of descent from the same matrilateral 'kitchen' (kuɗige) as a metaphor for
lineage splitting and local group formation, and how it was used in a similar way to the image
of twins, an even more powerful symbol of communal reproduction.
We illustrated this way of thinking as an image of cosmological pairing manifested in the
narrative about the ancestral descent of the rainmaker and cornblesser lineages who were
from the same 'kitchen'. We also described the belief that there were seven worlds above and
below this world, and that the next world was a mirror image of this world where things
happened in reverse. The celestial world above was seen as the home of divinity where events
took shape before they happened in this world, as represented by personal gods who were the
children of divinity. If a personal god died or had no children, the same would happen to the
person such a god represented. Divination was the means of finding out what was happening
in the worlds 'above' and 'below' this world, and what demands ancestors or divinity might be
making and how they could be satisfied by ritual and sacrificial means.
Unfortunately we only carried out one specific and rather short interview about aspects of
symbolic classification in Dghweɗe, which was with dada Ɗga in August 2001. We will
present it before going on to discuss questions arising from that interview, and from other
direct or indirect references to the subject of Dghweɗe symbolic classification:
If a man has a boy born to him after several girls, he will give that boy the name Dawa, meaning
'only boy among girls'. When a girl is born to a man she will be referred to as davadha'a, meaning
your left hand (dava = hand; dha'a = clumsy, awkward) because she will leave your house. When
a boy is born, he will be referred to as dava wuskife (wushkife = right; lit. 'eating food'), meaning
your right hand.
There is not much ritual use of the left hand during ceremonies, only the right hand. The left hand
is only used after the divination following the death of your father (ghar ndughwa) and when you
eat for the first time after that divination, but you will libate beer over the ancestor stone of your
deceased father with only your right hand. The reason the first food is eaten with the left hand is
the belief that the father also eats with his left hand in the next world.
A woman always hands food with her right hand. Using her left hand would imply that she wants
you to die. The man uses any hand he wants to receive the food from his wife, however the best
way is if a man receives food with both hands. If a woman uses the left this is called vungka
vunga, which means that somebody is wishing you to die or wishes you bad luck. For example, if
a woman slaps you with her left hand this means that she wants you to die, but this applies only to
a wife who slaps her husband. The right hand is used by men for shooting or fighting while the left
hand is for defence, but you can also fight with the left hand.
There does not seem to be anything in a Dghweɗe ritual which points to the importance of even or
odd numbers, however the Dghweɗe like to give more than one item as a gift.
3
Here we do not want to go into the Mafa concepts of bay and biy gwala, which respectively mean
'strong' and 'follower of the strong', but in a previous chapter we already mentioned the kr-biy, meaning
'children of the strong' in the sense of chieftaincy by number. The concept transcended Mafa ritual
culture, and when ritual beer was distributed within the family represented by the 'bay', the more senior
members of the extended family and the biy gwala were seen as representatives of the 'follower of the
strong'. The same was repeated on the ancestor-centred level of patrilineal descent (see Muller-Kosack
2003:62).
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