Azaghvana E-Book 2003 - Flipbook - Page 520
We notice that dada Ɗga referred to the fact that a girl was symbolically considered to be her
father's 'left hand' because she would leave the house, which is reminiscent of the Mafa idea
that a woman's reproductive capacity would be lost from the patrilineage of her father and
was changed from even to odd in terms of ritual number symbolism. This fits the picture we
have already discussed, namely that lineages which could intermarry exchanged daughters in
order to successfully reproduce. This led to the ever-widening network of kinship that we
generally refer to as kindred, which was facilitated by referring not only to ego's father's
siblings children but also to their mother's sisters sons or daughters, as male or female
siblings. In addition, ego's mother's father and ego’s mother’s brother's sons were referred to
as 'grandfather' (jije), and not only the male relatives of the patriliny of ego's father. We see
this use of the same term across several generations of patrilineal and matrilateral kin
connections as a very general way of classifying direct and collateral relatives. I like to
consider this inclusive way of referring to relatives across the bilateral divide as a
consequence of long-standing marriage alliances, bringing about such social relationship
networks across Dghweɗe.
It was not only the oral history of lineal and patrilocal descent which had set the agenda for
how the reproductive capacity of women was managed, but there were also cosmological
implications which had presumably led our Mafa friends to allocate a higher even number to a
firstborn boy. We can only speculate that the underlying reason was that even numbers
represented doubling because they could be divided, while odd numbers could not. An
indirect reference to this can be found in dada Ɗga's hint that the Dghweɗe liked to give more
than one item as a gift. We remember the doubling of gifts given by neighbours when twins
were reborn, and that they always had to be equalised so as not to annoy the twins. There was
a strong desire to balance things out, and perhaps we can make a reference to redistribution in
equal measures here, and consider it as a socio-economic symbol in which success was
embedded in a network of expanding kindred connections. Individual success was also
embedded in this, and we remember the importance of the redistribution of food during the
four stages of adult initiation. In the context of this, the ritual demonstration of fortitude was
key, represented by the participants of the later stage of adult initiation presenting themselves
as warriors while the senior rainmaker planted his spear in the ritual dunghole (Chaper 3.14).
We think that the warrior-like attribute of male fortitude reflects the tough collective
experience of terrace farmers in the semi-arid Gwoza hills, presumably going back to long
before the formation of Dghweɗe. One feature of their shared belief system was that they saw
divinity as an unpredictible agent that could nevetheless be influenced by symbolic ritual
action. While odd and even numbers did not seem to play an obvious role in Dghweɗe ritual
culture as far as dada Ɗga was concerned, we have many examples where the number three
was considered male and the number two female. That the Mafa of the Gouzda area did the
same but added a silent number one could be seen as a variation of this type of symbolic
interaction with divinity in order to ritually manage the reproductive capacity of women. For
example, that the birth of a boy was referred to by a Dghweɗe father as his 'right hand' and
that the word for 'right' also meant 'to eat food' underpins our interpretation that successful
food production contained a socio-economic and a cosmological dimension.
We remember that God as a personified divinity also had a wife and children, and the
personal gods who were guardian spirits of human fathers and their children were seen as the
children of divinity. We remember that bulama Ngatha had a personal god or spirit pot
transformed from a three-legged cooking pot in which he had prepared a ritual sauce for his
neighbour when his neighbour's first wife had been seven months into her first pregnancy. We
can only speculate as to whether the pot had three legs because it represented the wish of the
owner to eventually have a seventh-born son. What we do know is that the Dghweɗe were
aware that the foetus took on recognisable human form seven months after conception, and
they had the firm belief that without the intervention of divinity, sexual intercourse alone
would not have created a new human being (Chapter 3.19).
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