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The Rites of Rice and Community
by Gabriel S Casal (page 2)
Creative and resourceful, the Ifugao have adapted to their environment, utilizing what land is available, though this has required the carving of steep slopes into shelves. Each shelf is walled up with earth and stone. Serried rows of these shelves may create, as in Banaue, a vast amphitheater that looks like giant steps climbing as high as hundreds of feet up a mountain.
It has been calculated that the Ifugao rice terraces, if strung end to end, would reach 14,000 miles, or halfway around the world. But though so extensive, and though twice a year planted to rice, the terraces can barely feed their people. Right after planting, the hungry season, or tiyalgo, sets in; and famine threatens until the next harvest season.
The monotony of work is another punishment, for women and children must take turns in the day to shoo away the pests, and men must sleep in the fields to protect them at night. Moreover, the fields must be continually weeded - another back-beaking chore.
The Apayao say:
If there is no sweat
There is no sweet,
You slave at labor
In order to live.
This could be the text for the subsistence culture which is swidden cultivation and is not confined to the shifting cultivators. Even such settled agriculturists as the Kalinga, Tinggian, Kankanai, Bontoc and Ifugao of Northern Luzon, or the Maranao and Taosug of Mindanao, also practice shifting cultivation, though they have permanent ricefields. These fields are mostly for rice culture, while the swidden supplements provide the rootcrops and vegetable which cushion famine intervals.
"By October, the rice starts getting pregnant," say the Tinggian. And the last third of the year is a busy time for them, even for the children, who are drafted to pull a system of rattles whenever rice-hungry birds come flocking.
Volunteer harvesters take home one sheaf of rice for every five each harvests, or two bundles for a day's work. Strong, young men hired to carry the rice sheaves to the granary expect to be served dog-meat, a special delicacy for the Tinggian, and each may take home one bundle for every five he stores. He carries up to 24 bundles at a time on his shoulders-and runs while doing so. Women carriers pile about 15 bundles into a basket they balance on their heads. The inside of the granary door is decorated with tiny spirits.
The Ifugao celebrate the rice harvest with a feast. A priest is summoned to conduct the thanksgiving rites. Kith and kin gather to help in the reaping; they will be paid in coin or kind.
When the unhusked rice has been stored in granary or attic, it is time to carouse. Fowl and pig are slaughtered for the harvest feast; rice wine flows. Everybody makes merry. The young set a date for their weddings during this auspicious period when rice is plentiful. The feast is often lavish, but then the folk have need to relax after the long working hours of the rice cycle and the hungry pre-harvest days when there is little to eat but yams.
Among the Kalinga, no talking or singing is allowed during harvest until half the field has been reaped. While the rice is being stored, prayers are said to the rice gods and pig blood is sprinkled on the granaries. Then everybody partakes of the harvest feast, or palanos, where meat and rice can be eaten to satiety, for once.
To the Ibaloy, the first field to be harvested must be blessed and exorcised. Together they troop to the ripest field for the blessing, the exorcism, and the ceremonial reaping.
The mambunung, or priest, bends over a jar of rice wine as he chants:
"You, oh Kabigat and Bugan! You, oh Kabigat, dweller in the sky, who feeds us all and gives us rice in abundance! You, oh Kabigat and Bugan, bless the cutting, bless the harvest! Here is tapuy, here is rice wine! Come, let us drink together! Come, protect us and give us long life and wealth!"
A cup of wine is passed around and drunk. The reaping then begins. When the field has been harvested, the workers gather in the yard of the field's owner. Maidens have been preparing a supper of rice and meat.
The priest smears with rice the three stones on which the rice pot sits. "Eat you first," he says to the stones, "because you carry on your heads the heavy pot in which our rice boiled." Then he smears with rice the three stones on which the rice pot sits. "Eat you first," he says to the stones, "because you carry on your heads the heavy pot in which our rice boiled." Then he smears with rice the shelves where the rice sheaves are laid to dry, saying: "You too, shelf, eat first, who watch over our food and fire." After throwing some rice to the hollow log where unhusked rice is pounded, he invites the harvesters to sit down and eat.
Thus ends the bakak rite with which the Ibaloy open the harvest season. Everyone is now free to reap his own field.
The Taosug have no special rites for the period of cultivation, and none at the time of the first weeding. The harvest however is always marked by an act of thanksgiving. For this, the rice prepared is from the new harvest. An imam is invited to lead the thanksgiving prayers and is usually given half a sack of rice.
Part of the new rice is always distributed among the neighbors, and part is reserved as seed for the next sowing. There is no taboo against eating the new rice before the thanksgiving prayers, and no other rites are observed at this time.
The spread of wet rice agriculture among the peoples of Ma'i conditioned them to two permanences: a more stable food supply and a development of life in community. Wet rice culture also further developed the idea of a more permanent abode fixed near the family paddies. The simple hut would develop, in some cases, into a larger domicile, while retaining its original concept of the interior as single undivided space.
Tinggian housing developed in two ways. The more common type is a single room with a door opening out to an uncovered porch. The second type-two rooms divided by a hall-is in effect two houses joined by a covered porch. Each room has a door of its own, but not the dividing hall, which is used to dry tobacco and fishing nets in.
Volunteer harvesters take home one sheaf of rice for every five each harvests, or two bundles for a day's work. Strong, young men hired to carry the rice sheaves to the granary expect to be served dog-meat, a special delicacy for the Tinggian, and each may take home one bundle for every five he stores. He carries up to 24 bundles at a time on his shoulders-and runs while doing so. Women carriers pile about 15 bundles into a basket they balance on their heads. The inside of the granary door is decorated with tiny spirits.
However, even in a house with wooden flooring, one corner of the floor will be finished off in bamboo slats, wide cracks agape between the slats. In that corner will the woman of the house give birth to her children.
Among the Bontoc, the three types of dwelling that developed are the ato, which is both community hall and dormitory for bachelors; the olog, which is the maidens' quarters; and the afong or katyufong, which are the family domiciles from which sons and daughters are expected to move out upon reaching puberty.
The ato is an elevated stone structure with an open courtyard, and is at once a ritual area, a work area for weavers and other craftsmen, a place for communal meetings, and male sleeping quarters. The interior is taboo to women.
The nubile girls' olog is a common dormitory. Traditional to its cogon roof and clapboard walls are the courtship practices that may, or not, end in marriage.
The afong or katyufong, also of cogon and clapboard, is a single room that is kitchen, diner and bedroom. But the affluent build two-story houses with separate rooms and storage space for grain.
Among the Ifugao, houses are built small but durable, and often stand for generations, though their parts are fitted together without the use of nails and can be dismantled and reassembled if relocated. Around the top of the thick foundation posts are circular slabs of wood to prevent rats from climbing up. Doors are small and the removable ladders are pulled up at night. The steep pyramidal roof slopes down to cover the sides of the house. The ceiling forms a deep attic where rice is stored. Walls and floors are of quality hardwood. The floor space is usually no more than four meters in area and is the total scene for family life. Small watch-houses are built in the fields during the crop cycle.
A pyramidal roof also tops the Kankanai house. The eaves hang low, all around the house, and in these eaves are tucked tools and implements and the skulls of pigs butchered for ritual feasts. As all over the Mountain Provinces, the trend is toward the use of durable material: narra for the rich; pine for the humbler folk.
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