From Birth to the “Path Wedding”
The situation of a human being after birth is liminal, precarious, and ambivalent. For this reason, the rituals of this phase serve to gradually embed the child in the community, ward off threatening powers, and homogenize the various elements of the person. Immediately after birth, a close relationship, we could say a ritual identification, exists between the umbilical cord (bumli, lond- ing*) buried at the house and the afterbirth (“flower,” phul), on the one hand, and the newborn child’s body, on the other. Like the placenta, the child is also referred to as a flower in the days before he or she is given a name,[1] and the mother bathes him or her every day on the stone over the “umbilical pit” (bumli kal). Medicine intended to protect the afterbirth and the child is buried in this pit on the day of the birth. By means of the rituals following birth, the baby is transformed from the status of a flower to a (still incomplete) social person. For this reason, the child is cremated at the cremation site if he or she dies after the name-giving ritual, the end of the ritual impurity following birth. If the child dies prior to that, he or she returns to the umbilical pit without ceremony or public participation and does not pass beyond the ritual status of a “flower.” However, the umbilical pit is not the only place associated with a newborn.
Already on the day of the birth, the newborn is served ritual rice (poti bat) for the first time, usually cooked by a neighbor woman and eaten by the mother in the infant’s place. The child remains connected to the “community of the dead” (duma kul) until he or she begins - at around six months old - to eat first millet gruel, then rice. Until then, rice (sig bat) is set aside for him or her at each daily meal. This offering is addressed to the vital energy (jibon) reincarnated in the child, which still retains character traits of the deceased (duma). For this reason, this food is supposed to be brought to the village’s ritual boundary (bejorna), one of the places where the dead linger. In practice, the rice is most often simply set aside in the house and eaten later by the house members. It is evident that during this phase, the child is linked to two places, the house (at first, the umbilical pit in particular) and the bejorna, and two communities, the living and the dead.
The name-giving (sutok sorani) about a week after birth is a decisive step in the development of a person. The ritual transforms the child into a member of the kutum and of the village. The infant receives a name and his or her first tsoru. With a name, the child can become the target of witchcraft attacks, so that he or she is also henceforward of social relevance in this regard. The ritual specialist (dissari) feeds the child tsoru in which the members of the kutum (ide?ally also the kuda) participate.[2] [3] In addition, the entire village takes notice of the now “named” person through the distribution of lakka’* food to every household. Further, this day ends the phase of ritual pollution (sutok), and non-aga- gain eat in the houses of the child’s local line. However, the child should not leave the house and yard - under no circumstances the village - until the birth cords are tied around his or her neck and hips with medicine a week later.
In this first stage of the child’s integration, relationships are thus established with the local groups and gods.189 The name-giving is followed by a ritual that aims to force the rau demon, unpredictable as a matter of principle, to also enter into a moral, that is, reciprocal and responsible relationship with human beings. During the first years of life, the child’s vital energy is at particular risk of being eaten (kai debar) by this demon. For this reason, the dissari suggests a kind of deal to him, in the name of the child’s relatives. Rau is promised that he will be provided with blood (an animal’s life), rice, meat, and liquor, if he does not eat the child’s jibon. Only if the child remains healthy or recovers after an illness is the promise carried out. The name of this ritual, already mentioned as an example above, refers to one of its actions, the tying of the “birth string” (jonom suta). Cords are tied around the child and the sacrificial animal and will be cut when the vow is redeemed around fifteen months later. The demon does not receive tsoru as part of the promised sacrifice, and humans do not eat together with him. This treatment underlines the qualitative difference between this relationship and the relationship between humans and gods.
In the first weeks after birth, the different aspects of the person are only loosely joined. The will, the feelings, and the awareness (mon) of the reincarnated vital energy make themselves noticeable in the child, as they did previously in the pregnant woman. Through the child’s wails, the jibon or duma, since the two concepts cannot be entirely separated in this context, articulates its own displeasure. It is necessary to find out whether the child’s name is in fact unsuitable and has to be changed, or - because multiple jibon have reincarnated in the child’s body - a dispute over the mother’s milk (kir, da’ktor*) is the cause. The ambivalence of this social figure in the process of becoming is also expressed, in the Gadaba’s view, in the child’s lack of control of his or her mimetic and motor capacities. A newborn’s gaze, smiles, and movements appear to be directed from another world, without reference to the living. As soon as children are old enough, they eat the tsoru in their houses as part of the festivals. Boys of the “earth people” or the Four Brothers are also soon able to eat the tsoru at the village shrines. During the April festival, they alone are served tsoru in front of the village goddess. They have then “seen the Four Brothers” (chari bai dekla), and their persons are linked with the village as a whole.
This first phase of the constitution of a person - from birth to bato biba - is sharply distinguished in ritual practice from the time after marriage, when collective relationships are at the forefront. It is striking that agnatic and affinal external relationships (tsorubai, panjabai, mamu) are without significance in the rituals after birth. The mother’s brother alone makes an appearance in the ritual “ending the impurity” (sutok sorani), and he has no active function in it. Ritual rice, whether tsoru or kordi rice, is prepared by the members of the house or of the kutum in these rituals and - at least in sutok sorani - fed to the child by the dissari. Nevertheless, sutok sorani and bato biba also include the commensal and communal aspects that characterize the marriage and mortuary rituals.
The rituals of the early phase of life are intended on the one hand to incorporate the child into the elementary social relationships of house, local line, and village and on the other hand to protect this person in the process of becoming from attacks. This double function is clearly expressed in the structure of sutok sorani, for example. The sacrifices at the umbilical pit are supposed to placate the greedy demons, so that they leave the newborn alone. This sequence therefore has the character of a prophylactic healing ritual. The second part of the ritual, which begins after the purification of the people and the house, serves the purpose of the social integration and recognition of the developing person, articulated and produced through the name-giving, the giving of tika by the local line, and the feeding of tsoru.
The costly “path wedding” (bato biba) celebrates the dissolution of the tie in existence between the child and the demons since the promise of a sacrifice. In her seance, the gurumai first establishes the gods’ support and the demons’ acceptance of the sacrificial offerings. She then dances until morning in a combination of sacrifice and divine play. For the children concerned, whom the guru- mai draws into her play, these actions prepare the way for their reintegration into human society, from which they were excluded for a period of time from a ritual perspective. Under divine guidance, they learn everything that a person needs to know: plowing, collecting honey, pounding rice, and celebrating gotr rituals. On the next day, the feeding of tsoru, the giving of tika, and the cutting of the children’s hair complete the ritual status transformation. The repetition of the ritual actions of giving tika and feeding tsoru and kordi rice reveals that the transformations of the person take place only gradually.
- [1] If a child dies shortly after the performance of the first, expensive rituals, it will be said, forexample, “Ah, if only you [the child] had just died as a flower (phul mal, “flower, vine”).”
- [2] Since the child cannot yet eat rice, some rice is rubbed on his or her cheek.
- [3] In some cases, the midwife has already made a sacrifice to the village goddess on the day ofthe birth.
