... FROM THE FIELD
A Death on Easter
23 April 2000: The boisterous singing of popular Iban love songs and the rhythmic drumming grew louder as the crowd of celebrants moved down the open longhouse gallery ('ruai') to where I lay. Today was Easter Sunday, but I had declined to join the festivities. The previous day had seen the traditional ritual of 'niki' ka benih' or lifting up the rice seed, and the normally quite sober Iban had prepared an abundance of rice wine, a necessity for such rituals. My tolerance is not what it used to be, and so by early afternoon after beginning to drink at sunrise, I had passed out. The next day I was in 'recovery' mode, and simply endured the noise as the more stalwart people celebrated. Little did any of us know that the laughing and singing would turn to weeping and anguish later that day.
* By REED L. WADLEY
Anthropological fieldwork often puts its practitioners through a range of strong emotions, from exhilaration at new insights to excruciating boredom when nothing seems to be happening. My own long-term fieldwork among the Iban of West Kalimantan, Indonesia had put me through it all, and as my social ties to the people around me grew deeper, so too did the emotions. I can never forget when I left the area and returned to the US after living there continuously for two-and-a-half years. No amount of training in fieldwork methods could have prepared me for that, or for the intense 'homesickness' I felt for months back in the US and even occasionally now. But I would not have traded my experiences there for any easing of the pain of leaving.
What is perhaps the more difficult part of this deep involvement in other people's lives is seeing them die, something that is, of course, inevitable with all social relations, be they anthropologically initiated or otherwise. Right before I left the community in 1994 as my long fieldwork was ending, Empayung, a mother of three small boys, died of a ruptured spleen. Given the extreme lack of medical facilities, there was little the medics at the district clinic could do. They thought she had hepatitis - the same diagnosis I had made at the longhouse before telling her husband to get her to the clinic immediately. But it could never have been enough. Because visa expirations do not postpone themselves for these exigencies, I had to leave the country before the ritual end of the mourning. Now her death has become something of a marker when people there ask me when I left the first time.
I returned to 'my' community in April 2000, and it had been nearly four years since my last visit. Then, I stayed briefly in July 1996, a time that convinced me to schedule any future fieldwork better. I had walked into the middle of the 'after-harvest' activities when area longhouses host elaborate ritual feasts (gawa'), inviting kin and friends from other communities. Needless to say, rice wine flows rather freely, and I drank the stuff everyday during the entire two weeks of my stay, all the while trying to conduct serious research. This was not something I cared to repeat, and so I timed my most recent fieldwork when there would be the least chance of ritual activity. April seemed best as it came between the busy work of harvesting and the equally busy work of big gawa', and all I had to contend with were niki' ka benih and Easter.
The niki' ka benih had been a nice time, and I couldn't help recalling that the first ritual I had ever participated in there had been the same one eight years previously. The serious work of making offerings to call blessings on the all-important rice seed was mixed with the raucous laughing and teasing, essential parts of Iban ritual life. It felt good to be back, despite my increasingly intoxicated state. Even the next day's hangover was bearable as the community celebrated a holy day that held no meaning for them until three decades ago.
Then that afternoon as my head began to clear and as others rested from the day's light-hearted exertions, the news arrived. Those of us at the 'upper' end of the longhouse saw people rushing down the ruai as the cry went up that Sauh was dead. I hurriedly joined them and passed a grief-stricken mother on the way. My elder adoptive brother had just arrived by motorcycle from the district market town to spread the news: the nineteen-year old had been found along the main road just that afternoon, the tragic victim of motorcycle accident. He had left the Easter celebrations in the late morning, taking his brother-in-law's motorcycle to buy fresh fish at the market six km away. A combination of handling an unfamiliar bike, an all-too-steep and dangerous road, and alcohol led to his death. In fact, the very place where he died had also claimed the lives of two others in the last few years, and his body had languished in the sun amid the rusting wreck of a truck. He lay undiscovered for hours on a holiday when the normally sparse traffic was even less than usual along the very rural stretch of road.
People swept around me, weeping, wailing, and despite their tears, expertly organizing the coming funeral. They had done it before so many times, and such work was a good way to focus themselves amid the grief. I, on the other hand, was virtually useless and so just sat down to take stock of the situation, feeling angry with Sauh for wasting his young life in a reckless and needless way. It's hard to be an anthropologist at times like this, when someone you've seen grow from an eager boy into a promising young man comes to such an end. I couldn't help reflecting on the irony that Sauh died on the day commemorating the resurrection of a man-become-deity from an ancient and far-away land. I kept this to myself, but now I doubt any of us there will ever be able to look on Easter in quite the same way.
Sauh's family insisted that the community hold adat rarong rumau, a funerary ritual reserved for those who are beloved but die prematurely. (Rumau is applied to trees that fail to produce fruit.) Although there are taboos applied to the household for seven days, there is no general period of formal mourning as with other rituals. Meanwhile, as the women kept up their eerie ritual wailing over Sauh's body, the men occupied themselves by building a rough wooden coffin. We had to bury him the next day, and none too soon. Having laid untended in the sun, with a bellyful of palm wine, the body was in a state of rapid decay during the all-night vigil. I, for one, will never be able to smell palm wine and recall anything else.
Although the material circumstances of Sauh's accident were clear, they were not meaningful enough to satisfy everyone except me, and over the next few days people began placing the death within Iban conceptions of such events, relating ominous signs they had seen just before his death. They had done the same following Empayung's death six years previously, shifting from a medical explanation to a more culturally meaningful one. (I was told during my 2000 field trip that her new household had placed their farm in 1994 between much older households that shared the same strains of ritual rice. The supernatural 'heat' from this intrusion led to her death.) For me, it doesn't much matter how Sauh's death is explained now or even years later, because I know the next time I am there, the terrible event will become the marker of my visit. 'Exactly when did you last leave us?' they will ask. And I must answer, 'Just after Sauh died.' *
Dr Reed L. Wadley is an anthropologist currently completing an ethnohistory of the Iban of West Kalimantan.
E-mail: rlwadley@excite.com