Simultaneity and Hierarchy

Chapter Summary

Roy A. Rapport, Ritual Religion in Making of Humanity: 1999, 236 – 276

Spirit of Maring peoples classified in to High and Low. High spirit related with higher parts of
body such as arm and chest and attributed by hot, hard, dry, strong, cultural, spiritual and
immortal and substantiated in men, patri lineage, territoriality, warfare, high land. Low spirit
related with lower parts of body such as legs, sex organ and characterized by low, soft, cold,
moist, fecund, natural and mortal are associated with the Spirits and substantiated in women,
gardening, and pig husbandry. The high places consists of Red spirits (Raua Mugi) spirit of
killed and been killed in warfare of matrilineal clan living in high attitudes of clan’s forest which
Marsupials is his pig. And Smoke Women (Kun Kase Ambra) Living in highest clan’s territory,
her home on the peak of mountain and acting as intermediary between living and other spirits.
She Communicate with shaman at night in the dark men’s house by deeply the smoke of native
cigarettes and not sleep with women for indefinite time because of might be jealousy of Smoke
women, who was no never women and has relationship with women. Raua Mai is general name
for the lower spirit and which it mean antecedent in biological sense and owner of Pandanus fruit
and his pig is eels. To segregate the two sets of spirits and everything associated with them as
much as possible, and to identify the community, especially the men, more closely with the Red
Spirits declared war and accomplished in an elaborate ritual during which certain objects called
fighting stones (bamp ku) are hung from the center post of a certain ritual house (ringi ying).
This ritual transforms the relationship of the antagonists from one of brotherhood into one of
formal and sanctioned enmity (cenang yu), if that relationship had not already been so
transformed in earlier rounds of warfare. The territories of cenang yu may not be entered except
to despoil them, and enemies may not be touched or addressed except in anger . Planting rumbim
trees signifies peace and Amame represents mediation between nature's fertility and the designs
and ends of men. Liturgical orders may communicate over a number of channels simultaneously:
through words and non-verbal uses of the voice, through instrumental music, through graphic
and plastic art, pageantry, dramatic display and physical movement, and even through the senses
of smell and taste and variations on touch, including pain may a number of important ritual
simultaneously in a canonical sign, but all sensory channels may participate in representation.
Further enriching communication, a number of canonical signs may be presented, and
apprehended, simultaneously. pig sacrifice and the killer, having worked himself into a sobbing
state in an address to the ancestor to whom the pig is offered, runs back and forth, screaming,
before the tethered animal, Liturgical orders are not simply social or psychic orders played out
and mystified in public representations. Some liturgies make no reference to existing social
arrangements or, if they do, they may at the same time signify entities transcending the existing
social order and values from which the social order has fallen away, as well as processes internal
to individuals. The world as constituted by a set of oppositions between certain qualities which
are associated with the two general classes of spirits and, on the other hand, manifested in the
social and physical world. Whereas the oppositions in such are irreducible, the relationship of the
opposed terms is transformed, through the course of the cycle, from inimical to complementary.
The ritual cycle is a sanctioned rule governed sequence of formal acts and utterances during
which cosmological oppositions substantiated in multi vocalic representations are transformed
from a state of antagonism and fragmentation into one of complementarily and wholeness
attendant to these transformations relationships among persons, social groups and ecological
systems. This characterization of Maring liturgical order recognizes the concurrence not only of
its sequential and simultaneous dimensions, but also of its hierarchically organized
understandings. The planting of rumbim not only transforms war into peace, warriors into
farmers and aliens into brothers, all per formative actions establishes as institutional or social
elements of both cosmic structure and the social conventions through which cosmic structure is
realized. Relations among the understandings represented in liturgical orders are organized into
concurrent hierarchies of concreteness, longevity, mutability, contingency, instrumentality
spirituality and the spiritual order.