Chapter 11 Insular Southeast Asia 421decompose in the same way, with the fluids dripping through a bamboo tube
into a smaller container beneath the coffin. (More recently, encouraged by gov-
ernment, the jars have remained sealed.) Still, this fluid is referred to as the
“wine of the corpse.” Metcalf argues (1987) that the metaphor of producing
wine lies in the process: as the body decomposes and turns into white bones,
the soul is simultaneously being processed into an ancestor, who has departed
the community and finally joined the ancestors upriver in the origin place of
the Berawan. The body is a metaphor for the soul, being transformed from an
angry ghost to a pure, benevolent ancestral spirit.
The jar containing the decomposing body (or the wooden coffin) is carried
out of the longhouse via a special door and floated upriver to a cemetery,
where it must be left for at least a year.
This initial part of the mortuary ritual used to end with head-hunting rites.
However, since head-hunting was largely stopped at mid-century, the head-
hunting rites are now headless; there are no longer even any old heads to use,
as Long Teru lost all theirs in a fire and residents of Christianized longhouses
threw theirs away when they converted. Nevertheless, Metcalf writes, “the
modal male personality is still that of a warrior: vigorous, alert, stoical, and
capable of an incendiary temper if provoked, a kind of berserk for which the
Berawan are infamous” (1991:115). So the ceremony proceeds without heads,
new or old. A party of young men heads out early in the morning on the third
or fourth day after the removal of the corpse to collect a special kind of leaf that
is fashioned into a replica of a head and brought back to the longhouse. Young
women meet the returning warriors with a hilarious romp in the river edge that
ends with capsized boats and everyone covered in mud. The most important of
the subsequent rites in the presence of the “heads” is the initiation of young
warriors, made bloody by the sacrifice of chickens and a pig, whose blood is
spread over each boy and splashed about by adult men. Metcalf describes one
such scene: “Waving their bloody swords around recklessly, and running hither
and thither in wild-eyed confusion, the men reproduced in a way that I, at least,
found convincing, the bloodlust of real hand-to-hand combat” (1991:123).
If the family has decided to conduct a secondary treatment, on an
appointed day after a year or two, the bones will be fetched by a party of men
and women. Someone has to open the jar and clean the bones, a repulsive job
that requires a strong stomach and possibly a state of semidrunkenness. The
bones are brought out of the jar, one at a time, washed, stacked on a fine cloth,
then wrapped and inserted in another smaller jar brought for the occasion.
Back at the longhouse, the small jar is placed in a special lean-to on the veran-
dah outside, given tobacco and candy, and surrounded by valuables as before.
This is the beginning of even more elaborate ceremonies than the first stage a
year or more earlier. Along with customary wake behavior of drinking and
horseplay, lengthy songs and chants describe the journey of the soul to the
ancestral village, mentioning explicitly every stream and tributary the soul will
have to navigate to reach the place where the ancestors will welcome it in.