Benjamin, Danger and Dialectic in Temiar Childhood

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Collection Recherches Asiatiques, dirigee par Alain Forest

ENFANTS ET SOCIETES D'ASIE DU SUD-EST

Textes reunis parJeannine KOUBI et Josiane MASSARD-VINCENT

Ouvrage publie avec Ie concours duMinistere des Affaires etrangeres

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DANGER AND DIALECTIC IN TEMIAR CHILDHOOD

Geoffrey BENJAMIN*

Temiar childhood and socialisation differ significantly from many ofthe patterns followed elsewhere. On the Temiar view, parents and children areneither fully autonomous persons (as Westerners or Malays might think), norare they component parts of a single compound person (as Chinese traditionoften seems to insist)l. Instead, the Temiars regard parent and child as tiedtogether dialectically - as being simultaneously of the same and of differentpersonal substance. In this essay I shall discuss how, given the thoroughlyanimistic framework of Temiar thought, this dialectic has led them to regardchildhood - early childhood, in particular - as peculiarly dangerous forboth parents and chilci2.

My hypothesis is that, since Temiars think of a child's personhood asbeing formed by a process of differentiation out of it s parents' soul-substance,

* This essay was written on the basis of my own field materials, but it owes muchto Marina Roseman's comments on the penultimate draft and as the manyreferences to her book Healing Sounds attest to her own Temiar studies. GerardDiffloth's compendious knowledge of the Mon-Khmer languages saved me fromsome linguistic errors at a late stage in the writing. I alone am responsible for theargument as presented, however, and for the faults that remain.1. There is no space here to elaborate on these cross-cultural assertions, which aremade simply to emphasise the specifically dialectical character of the Temiarcultural regime. The comparative theory of the different modes of culturalcoherence - the immanent, the transcendental, the Zen and the dialectical - towhich these comments refer is discussed more sociologically and in greater detailelsewhere: see G. Benjamin, 'In the long term: three themes in Malayan culturalecology', in: K. L. Hutterer, A. T. Rambo and G. Lovelace (cds), Cultural valuesand human ecology in Southeast Asia, Ann Arbor MI: Center for South andSoutheast Asian Studies, University of Michigan, 1985, pp. 219-278; 'Notes onthe deep sociology of religion', National University of Singapore, Department ofSociology working papers po. 85, 1987a; and Semang, Senoi, Malay: thesocietal traditions of the Malay Peninsula, Singapore: Institute of SoutheastAsian Studies, in preparation.2. These dangers were not simply the result of 'cultural' imagination. Some yearsafter the research reported on here, death from childbirth was by far the greatestthreat faced by a woman of child-bearing years among the neighbouring Semais(A. Fix, Semai Senoi population structure and genetic microdifferentiation, PhDthesis, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor: University Microfilms, 1971, p. 72).It must be assumed that the same was true for Temiar women too. The possibilitythat this was due in large part to the anaemia resulting from parasitic infestationis raised on pp. 111-112 of R. K. Dentan, 'Notes on childhood in a non-violentcontext: the Semai case (Malaysia)" in: A. Montagu (ed.), Learning nonagqression: the experience of non-literate societies, New York: OxfordUruversity Press, 1978, pp. 94-143. See also footnote 47, below.


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38 Geoffrey Benjaminthe same soul-stuff must be shared between two, three, or more bodies atvarious stages between conception and maturation. (See Figure 1 for adiagrammatic representation of this idea.) For this to be possible those bodiesmust either have sufficiently permeable boundaries to allow such soulsharing, or they must each make do with a reduced amount of soul-stuff (orboth!)3. Moreover, the growth and source of the child's souls are problematic.In the womb and during infancy, these souls are thought of as dependentlyshared with those of the parents. Once safely out of infancy, however, thechild ends up with apparently stably bounded souls of its own. There must bea point in the process, therefore, when the parents could come to be thoughtof as dependently sharing in their child's souls, rather than the other wayround, as at first (see fig. 1).

Viewed in this way, pregnancy and early parenthood are mysticallyproblematic. To think of a person's souls as merging with those of others isto imply the possibility of soul-loss or its reciprocal, soul-sharing. Soulsharing, in turn, can readily be regarded as a form of soul-invasion4 Thus,although pregnancy, childbirth, infancy and parenthood are regular and desiredfeatures of Temiar life, they also have much in common with the manyabnormal soul-loss and spirit-invasion syndromes that Temiars recognise. Itis hardly surprising, therefore, that soul-abstraction and spirit-invasion shouldprovide much of the idiom that Temiars employ when talking of the specialtroubles thought likely to beset young children and their parents. Until thechild has begun to crawl, parents and child alike are attended by a battery ofclosely connected dietary taboos aimed at preventing such troubles. Thesetaboos, and certain other special ritualised actions, form the main focus ofthis essay. I shall attempt to explain them in terms of the peculiar economyof soul-relations that holds at this period of the developmental cycleS.

3. Is this why multiple births are regarded uneasily in so many hum a ncommunities? For a Southeast Asian example of the animistic complicationscaused by twirUling, see Kawai Toshimitsu, 'The navel of the cosmos: a study offolk psychology' of childbirth and child development among the Bukidnon', inYamaji Katsuhiko (ed.), Kinship, gender and the cosmic world: ethnographies ofbirth customs in Taiwan, the Philippines and Indonesia, second edition, pp. lOS-129, Taipei: SMC Publishing, 1991.4. The approach to animism taken here was first developed by K. M. Endicott, inhis An analysis of Malay magic, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970. In particular, thetheoretical insight that SPIRIT = UNBOUNDED SOUL and SOUL = BOUNDED SPIRIT,which is fundamental to my argument, derives from Endicott's work. I discuss thecontent of Temiar animism in more detail below. For an analysis of differencesbetween the various Malayan patterns of animism, see G. Benjamin, 'Indigenousreligious systems of the Malay Peninsula', in : A. Yengoyan and A. L. Becker(eds), The imagination of reality: essays in Southeast Asian coherence systems,Norwood NJ: Ablex Publishing, 1979, pp. 927.5. Some of the interpretations presented below derive from a more explicitlysociological framework of analysiS (see: G. Benjamin, 1987a, op. cit.; 'Theunseen presence: a theory of the nationstate and its mystifications', NationalUniversity of Singapore, Department of Sociology working papers no. 88, 1988;and 'Grammar and polity: the cultural and political background to standard Malay',in W.A. Foley (ed.), The role of theory in language description, Berlin: Mouton,1993). Lack of space precludes any further exploration here of such questions as:Why has the dialectical mode of orientation been maintained in Temlar culture?


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Stage III:Later Childhood

-P\\tlJJr0her 8hitdMolher

Danger and dialectic in Temiar childhood 39

Stage I:Pregnancy

\DJirn \tage II:Early ChildhoodJ

Fig. 1 : The dialectical soul economy ofTemiar parenthood

and Why do societal traditions differ so profoundly in the ways they characterisethe relations between people?


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40 Geoffrey Benjamin

TEMIAR SOCIETY

The Mon-Khmer-speaking Temiars form one of the larger populationsamong the Orang AsJi (Malay: 'original people'), the name now given to thetribal or recently-tribal aboriginal populations of Peninsular Malaysia.Temiar country is situated mainly in the states of Perak and Kelantan, onboth sides of the central watershed at the widest part of the Peninsula (seeMap 1). The settlements are located at altitudes ranging from around 100metres to more than 1000 metres. At the Census of 1980, the Temiarsnumbered 11593, which means that their overall density amounted to abouttwo persons per square kilometre; local densities were higher, however. Untilthe residential shifts brought about in recent years by the Government'srelocation programmes, the Temiars were living in small or very smallvillages, situated in forest clearings along the river banks, some kilometresfrom each other. During my field research at various times between 1964 and1978, the modal village population was about thirty, with a range from onedozen to about 150. Under these circumstances, and with (cognatic) kinshipand relative age as the main principles of categorisation, most social relationswere mainly of the 'face-to-face' type. But the inclusive and classificatorykinship system also allowed them to maintain wider social relations(including marriage) beyond the village, and even with non-Temiars,sometimes at great distances6.

Temiar livelihood was based on the swidden farming of cassava andrice, supplemented by hunting, fishing and the trading of forest products.They therefore had to move their settlements every few years to new sites.These were situated within territories defined by the presence of stillproductive fruit trees growing in former village sites. Rights in the trees werelodged in the cognatic descent group (or ramage) that constituted the coregroup in each village. The senior member of the descent group usually servedas the village leader - a post with little authority. He often acted also as theheadman, appointed by state agencies to organise the villagers' relations withwider Malayan society.Temiar settlements contained one or more communal houses, raisedoff the ground on pillars and built of an open construction. This allowed air

6. The author's ethnographic accounts of Temiar society include the following:G. Benjamin, 'Temiar social groupings' Federation Museums Journal (N.S.) II,1966, pp. 1-25; Temiar religion, unpublished PhD thesis, Cambridge University,1967a; 'Temiar kinship', Federation Museums Journal (N.S.) 12, 1967b, pp.1-25; 'Temiar personal names', Bijdragen tot de taa1-, 1and- en vo1kenkunde 124,1968a, pp. 99-134; and 'Headmanship and leadership in Temiar society',Federation Museums Journal (N.S.) 13, 1968b, pp. 1-43. A more recent account,centred on Temiar religion and medicine, is M. Roseman, Healing sounds from theMalaysian rainforest: Temiar music and medicine, Berkeley: University ofCalifornia Press, 1991. For related discussions of Malayan historical ethnology,see: G. Benjamin, 1985, op. cit.; and 'Ethnohistorical perspectives on Kelantan'sprehistory', in Nik Hassan Shuhaimi bin Nik Abdul Rahman (ed.), Ke1antan zamanawa1: kajian arkeo1ogi dan sejarah di Malaysia. Kota Bharu: Perpaduan MuziumNegeri Kelantan, 1987b, pp. 108-153.


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2"j:"/'/lLOCATION OF THE TEMIARS

100kmL...-_--'__ -J'


NtPAHANG '7

JOHOR

Map 1 : The location of the Temiars in Peninsular Malaysia


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42 Geoffrey Benjaminand sounds to circulate freely. Internally, the central floor space wassurrounded on all sides by the separate conjugal-family compartments.Privacy was not easily achieved, for these compartments were usuallyseparated from the more public space by very low partitions. This mayexplain why Temiar villages alternated every few years between a single'longhouse' containing the whole community and separate houses eachcontaining one to three closely related households.Village life was highly communal. For example, although there wasno requirement to share swidden crops beyond the household, larger catches ofmeat were obligatorily shared throughout the village community, andsometimes beyond. The heavier swidden labour was shared by the settlementas a whole, and the boundaries between farms were merely nominal. Therewas little occupational specialisation, although Temiars did sometimesexpress generalised ideas about the different roles of men and women? Mostactivities, including farming, fishing, cooking and child-minding, werecarried out indiscriminately by men, women or children. Tree-felling,shooting animals and raising roof-beams, on the other hand, were treated asuniquely adult male activities, while pandanus-plaiting was thought of astypically female. But women and children did catch animals, and men wovebaskets. Children were not normally prevented from undertaking adultactivities if they wished, even when the activities were dangerous.Viewed on its own terms, Temiar social organisation was segmentaryand non-hierarchical; each village community ran its own affairs. There wereno formal rules of organisation apart from the kinship and descent structuresalready mentioned. More important than formal rules, however, were twodialectically conjoined values that pervaded Temiar social life: noninterference in other individuals' wishes, and a profound concern forcommunality. This dialectic was not always easy to maintain, but a varietyof cultural mechanisms seated in language, religion and kinship served tokeep it embedded in daily life.Although I have employed the past tense in the last few paragraphs,many Temiars (especially at higher altitudes) still live in the manner justdescribed. But education, road-building, logging, resettlement, the inflow ofcash, and an increasing density of governmental administration have led togreat changes. Sociologically, few Temiars are 'tribespeople' any more: mostof them have become peasants or proletarians belonging to one of the severalindigenous minorities that make up Malaysia'S ethnic mix. Since I havefewer data on the current circumstances of Temiar life, however, this studymust perforce concentrate on the still 'tribal' situation as I studied it in the1960's and 70's. Although the rest of this essay employs the present tense,readers should therefore treat it as an historical account.

7. For an account of Temiar notions of maleness and femaleness as revealed in avariety of contexts see M. Roseman, op. cit., pp. 118-128.


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Child-rearingThe interplay of communality and individual autonomy socharacteristic of Temiar society is especially apparent in their child-rearing.The job is shared evenly between the two parents and with other kin, whichoften gives the impression that all the villagers are jointly responsible for the

care of all the children. Fathers undertake the same care-giving activities asmothers, with the obvious exception of suckling - and even then theyfrequently hold children to their chests in a manner that could, from adistance, be mistaken for suckling.Children are allowed a great deal of freedom. Disciplining is limited toverbal advice or warnings of possible intervention by the thunder deity,Karey. Physical punishment or constraint is expressly avoided, even whenthe child throws a tantrum: it is regarded as leaving the child open to illness.This non-violent approach is absorbed into the child's emerging personality.Children may threaten each other in play, but their blows freeze in mid-air.They play soccer or other ball games, but no teams are formed: instead, theyjointly cooperate in helping one of the players land a goal.There is little educational or initiatory formality8. The rituals atchildbirth and first menstruation are private, and weaning is so gradual thateven six-year-olds will be given the breast if they ask. There are no rites ofadulthood (apart from first menstruation). Children are allowed to learn byexperimentation, whether it involves using knives, building rafts, having sexor smoking9. Other matters are explained, as the need arises, by citing theappropriate portion of Temiar mythology.By the time they become adults, Temiars have learnt to feel anxiousthat their actions might cause someone else to suffer unsatisfied desires, forthis is thought to leave that person open to accident, disease or misfortune.This conception is backed by a set of explicit, but diffuse, sanctions toensure that people should always share food, accede to requests for a serviceor object, and avoid setting up a definite future meeting for fear that thearrangement cannot be kept to10.NamingThe different stages in the emergent parent-child relation are marked bychanges to the personal names of the persons involved. The naming system8. Nowadays, most Temiar children attend government-run primary schools setup within their own territory. These have achieved basic NatIOnal-language (i.e.,Malay) literacy, but little more as yet. This process was just beginning during theperiod of my initial field research, 1964-65. For a more extended account ofTemiar child-raising at that time, see in G. Benjamin 1967b, up. cit., pp. 13-18.For a study of socialisation done among the same people a few years later, see S.Jennings, 'Temiar dance and the maintenance of order', in P. Spencer (ed.),Society and the dance, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985, pp. 47-63.For accounts of child-rearing in a neighbouring and similar cultural framework,see R. K. Dentan, 1978, op. cit., and The Semai: a non-violeIlt people of Malaya,New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1979.9. I once heard a man who had just seen a group of children openly play-acting atsexual intercourse tell them off by saying 'you'll be smoking next!'10. See also M. Roseman, op. cit., pp. 47-5\. An accessible account of the verysimilar set of sanctions as they operate among the Temiars' neighbours may befound (under the heading punan) in R. K. Dentan, 1978, op. cit.


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thus comes to serve as a cultural paradigm - an indigenous normativesociology - of the maturational process. Infants are usually called by aunique 'true' personal name, or autonym I . These names are derived from theseveral thousand unused but phonologically possible syllables available inthe Temiar language; they thus constitute, in effect, an open class. Whenchildren later progress from baby to toddler or youngster, they gradually droptheir autonyms in favour of names taken from a closed class of birth-ordernames. These fratronymsare really titles, positioning the bearer socially withreference to his or her sibling-set. Typically, the parents will now take overthe child's autonym as their joint teknonym, though they may continue to becalled by a variety of other kinds of name too (but never by their ownchildhood autonyms, of which they claim to be 'shy'12). For a period then,mother, father and child will all bear the same personal name, in an elegantnative modeling of the dialectical merging of the three persons in one. Inaddition, parents are normally addressed by special parental titles as soon astheir latest child is born: BaJeh 'Parent of a daughter' or Litow 'Parent of ason'13. These titles too are shared by both parents, again transforming themeffectively into a single merged person.In my earlier study of Temiar names, I argued that these (and otherchanges not discussed here) serve to image the child's maturation as aprogressive 'key-of-life' merging into his or her sibling-set, while theprogenerative affinal and filiative links are simultaneously declared to be inthe key of death. This image - the forging of active siblingship out of thesimultaneous dissolution of filiative and affinal links - is a fittingrepresentation of the developmental cycle that underlies Temiar domesticgroupsl4. I shall return to it later, in discussing the 'tree' imagery that seemsto underlie Temiar ideas about parenthood.Before pursuing the discussion further, though, we must first take acloser look at Temiar ideas and practices concerning souls and spirits.TEMIAR ANIMISM

Like everybody else, Temiars are forced to map less graspable notionsonto more familiar surrogates. The Temiar mode of surrogation represents theI I. For an extended discussion, sec G. Benjamin, 1968a, op. cit. The termautonym is taken from CI. Levi-Strauss, La pensee sauvage, Paris: Pion, 1961.12. This 'shyness' is related to the fear of causing a startle response, resultingfrom head-soul loss, in persons (and other entities) addressed by their true name(ct. M. Roseman, op. cit., pp. 27-29).13. For t y p o ~ r a p h i c a l reasons, Temiar words are printed here in a compromisenear-phonemic orthography. Vowels are pronounced approximately as in thefollowing French words: i as in bis, e as in the, e as in chere, eas the e in Ie, a asin bas, u as the ou in coup, 6 as the 0 in nos, and 0 as the 0 in choc, ii as in GermanHiitte-; doubled vowels are pronounced l o n ~ e r than single vowels; c is a palatalstop similar to the ch in English chill; ng IS the velar nasal continuant, as inEnglish singer (not as in finger,; 'is the glottal stop, a consonantal phoneme;word-stress is on the final syllable.14. Exactly the same image underlies the structure of Temiar kinshipterminology; see the final section in G. Benjamin, 'Process and structure inTemiar social organisation', Akademika: journal of social science and humanities,Bangi: Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia, in press.


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Danger and dialectic in Temiar childhood 45cosmos, and the religious and social relations that occur within it, not interms of things or words, but in terms of the direct experience that individualhuman beings have of their own subjectivity. This psychocentrism isfounded, moreover, on a thoroughly dialectical orientation of attention asbetween Self and Other. Unlike more familiar modes of orientation, in whicheither Self or Other is suppressed as the explicit focus of attention, thedialectical mode takes as its starting point the very mutuality of Self andOther. In Temiar culture, this dialectic serves as the tacit, pre-reflectivenotion out of which coherence is constructed: the Temiar Self can be focusedon and talked about, not as an autonomous entity, but only in ways that alsoimplicate Other (and vice versa).This construction derives its plausibility from individual Temiars'experience of their own subjectivity as (simultaneously) a controlling actorand an undergoing patient. The closest they come to articulating this centralunspoken mystery is when they talk of the various souls - i.e.,communicable-with subjectivities - that are thought to animate the people,animals, plants and other salient things that inhabit the world.In human beings these souls are the hup 'heart' and the rwaay 'headsoul' - respectively, the corporeal seats of doing (or willing) and ofexperiencing (or undergoing). The same animistic imagery extendsthroughout the rest of creation: any entity that appears capable of attractingto itself the attention of a human being is regarded as being able to do so byvirtue of the simultaneously hup-and rwaay-like subjectivity situated withinit. Non-human entities can thus become aware of, or act upon, thesubjectivity of individual human beings 15.This dialectical mutuality of agent and patient, subject and object,colours all domains of the Temiar worldview. Ordinary social relations (asalready mentioned) exhibit a complicated balance between extremecommunalism and extreme individual autonomy, which would be difficult tomaintain under any non-dialectical mode of orientation. The cosmos itself isthought of as a subjectivity that is simultaneously both the creator and theworld it creates. It constantly employs the bootstrap cosmogonic power of itsown thought and imagination to maintain the differentiated character of thephysical world as the Temiars know it. I f human beings (or any otheragency) should act in a way that distracts the cosmos's subjectivity awayfrom this task, then it is thought that the world might de-differentiate,through the agency of flood and thunder - the cosmos's voice personified asKarey - into the chaos of undifferentiated primal mud. I f that shouldhappen, all things would lose their identity and disappear, in a cosmicmerging of SUbjectivity and objectivity.Other entities are thought to partake in this interplay just as fully ashuman beings. The temporarily disembodied upper- and lower-body souls ofvarious mountains, animals and plants (seasonal fruit trees, especially)become powerful invasive spirits. Reciprocally, entities left depleted of soul15. For more extended accounts of Temiar religion see: G. Benjamin, 1967a, op.cit.; and 1979, op. cit . A rich account of the animistic permeability of Temiarpersonhood is presented in M. Roseman, op. cit., Chapter 2 ('Concepts ofbeing').


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thereby gain powerful valency to abstract soul from other entities. Soul-lossand spirit-invasion, separately or combined, are the mechanisms underlying alarge number of the disease-like misfortunes recognised by the Temiars.In more controlled contexts, disembodied souls become the personalspirit-guides to which Temiars direct their religious action. Individuals enterinto initial communication with their spirit-guides through dreams. I f theyfeel so inclined, they may then make their spirit-guide's power-for-goodavailable to the rest of the community by serving as a haJaa' - someoneadept at spirit-mediumship. Mediumship takes place at night-time trancedancing ceremonies involving one or more mediums, performing to theaccompaniment of contrapuntally sung music. The medium will often becalled upon to perform healing rituals on the sick during the ceremonies, butalso in non-ceremonial circumstances during the daytime 16.The bodyTemiars thus appear to feel that their body boundaries are so highlypermeable to the passage of soul and spirit that body and person may, onoccasion, cease to coincide. The reason for this, I believe, is that Temiars aremuch more concerned with body-insides (rwaayand hup) and with the spacearound the body 17, than with body surfaces. Although they bathe frequently,and although they decorate themselves with face-painting, earlobe ornamentsand belt-bouquets, Temiars do not otherwise show much interest in the bodysurface as such. The Temiar ceremonial dress of plaited head-crowns andbandoleers crossed over the chest is less a form of decoration than anexternalisation of what lies within l8 The head crowns are extensions of therwaay, the seat of undergone experience, lodged in the imperceptibly growinghair roots under the scalp. The bandoleers refer to the hup, the perceptiblyactive heart and blood, the seat of will, agency and memory 19.

On the other hand, Temiar spatial and directional symbolism generallyattaches to external, environmental, features - houses, fields, trees - and tothe various environmental entanglements people get into {such as theaffliction known as tracoog, mentioned below}. Temiar speech is peppered

16. In the late 1970's, many younger Temiars embraced more easily catechisedand apparently 'rational' reltgions. The highly monotheistic Baha'i faith, forexample, found many adherents, especially among Temiars with a few years'schooling who were looking for a religion comparable to those that theMalaysian authorities had been urging people to follow. Baha'i fulfilled theseyounger Temiars' desire for an easily explained religion, and one that better suitedtheir emerging sense of individualistic modernity. More recently, some Temiarshave become Muslims, while a very small number have converted to Christianity.17. Concern for this space is articulated in a complex set of ideas and practicesrelating person to odour (ngoo.n and shadow (woog); see M. Roseman, op. cit.,pp. 36-45.18. For photographs of Temiar ceremonial dress, see S. Wavell et aI., Trances,London: Allen and Unwin, 1966, and M. Roseman, op. cit., plates 6 and 10- 13.The ceremonial costume, which in effect has the people dreSSing up as trees (seebelow on tree imagery), also serves as an intersubjective device to make humanhabitations more inviting for the spirit-guides. See also M. Roseman, op. cit., p.82, on the 'camouflaging' role of ceremonial dress.19. This implies that for Temiars remembering is something they do, rather thansimply undergo. See also the discussion in M. Roseman, op. cit., pp. 30-36.


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Danger and dialectic in Temiar childhood 47with deictic particles that relate the various participants to the terrain or totemporality: 'the upstream man', 'across-the-river Singapore', 'the just-nowgoat', 'you-in-a-momenf, and so on. Longer periods of time are recounted interms of the people's territorial history: not '1968', but 'the year of theswidden at X'. Most important, the attachment of Temiar groups to land -which traditionally was unownable - was mediated through their corporateownership of physical entities standing off the ground, preeminently housesand trees.These features presumably relate to the fact that (as remarked earlier)the Temiar view of the cosmos is not materialistic, but spiritual orpsychocentric, being calqued on their own internal experience of their ownself-consciousness. In this respect they seem to contrast with the much morebody-surface and pollution-conscious cultures that fill many ethnographicreports. Why should this be? I suggest that it is because, in Temiar culture,the empirical self must be expressed by projection onto Self and Other in asimultaneous dialectic, leaving the 'empirical' body-surface relativelyunremarked and unritualised. Indeed, Temiar body-decoration may well be ameans of encouraging transition across the body boundary, since it is alwayscarried out in a mutual and interactive manner, thereby downplaying theboundary as such in favour of a more highly marked Self-Other transaction20.CHILDHOOD AND PARENTHOOD

Conception and pregnancyDespite my attempts to draw Temiars into discussion of themechanism of conception, I obtained just three explicit statements on thetopic. First, a man should refrain from having sexual intercourse with a girlwhose breasts have not yet developed, so as to avoid making her bear a childshe cannot suckle. Second, some Temiars claimed that if a woman has hadintercourse with more than one man, then her child would resemble all of themen (as well as the woman herself). Third, one man said that girls resembletheir mothers in appearance, but that boys resemble their fathers. Theseremarks are sufficient to confirm that Temiars understand the connectionbetween sexual intercourse and pregnancy, and that the father has a role inconception.Once a woman becomes pregnant, she and her husband should beginto follow many of the sexual and dietary restrictions that will continue untiltheir child leaves infancy. For example, there is a general rule that a manshould refrain from sexual relations with his wife for two months prior to thedelivery until the child begins to crawl, at the age of six or seven months 21 .20. An excellent photograph of two Temiars decorating each other can be foundin plate 3 of S. Wavell et als, op. cit .2 J. 'We search elsewhere', as one man put it, referring to the widespread Temiarinstitution of permitting sexual relations between opposite-sex siblings-in-Iaw,whether married or single, classificatory or 'true' (c!. G. Benjamin, 1967b, op .cit., p. II). If the man has sex with a woman outside this category, however, he isexpected to keep the affair secret from his wife. Husband and wife may resumesharing the same bed two months after the delivery, but they must not yet havesexual intercourse.


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48 Geoffrey BenjaminSome claimed that if this rule is broken, the woman's abdomen would swellwith blood. Most of the dietary taboos that will later affect the parents -mothers especially - also apply during pregnancy, as well as tomenstruating women.ChildbirthAs already remarked, Temiars generally treat life-cycle changes withlittle formality. So far as I could learn, only three stages - birth and theearly weeks of life, first menstruation, and death and burial - are picked outfor special ritual attention, and even then in a rather diffuse form. My directobservation of childbirth and its sequels is rather limited, for a child was bornonly once during my stay in any Temiar village, and this occurred almostwithout warning. On that day, the villager who had cooked my midday mealreturned to the almost empty longhouse, only to run back a few minutes laterto report that his wife had just given birth to a son. The only other villagerpresent was the midwife22. When I went to look, I found the young mothersitting up, suckling the baby as if hardly a thing had happened.Much of my remaining information on childbirth comes from a textdictated by the husband of the midwife just mentioned, as well as from manycasual statements thrown out by Temiars in different villages when Iquestioned them on ritual matters.The mother and her young baby should not come into contact with theground during the first few days after the birth. Instead, they must remainwithin the house. Since Temiar ritual categorisations in general are organisedaround an opposition between Off-the-ground (baIiik'skywards', feh'up') andOn-the-ground (te"earth', reh 'below'), this and the other confinementpractices discussed in the next few paragraphs must be regarded as havingritual content.The afterbirth is helped out by the midwife's firm massaging. Later, itis wrapped in a cloth and hung from a branch outside the village. The treemust first be examined carefully for any fused branches or trunks, as thiswould cause the mystical affliction known as tracoog, in which the miscreantmight suffer various illnesses or accidents23 For the first few days after thebirth, the midwife regularly bathes the mother and child by pouring warmedwater onto them from a bamboo container. I once chanced to see this happen:the midwife stood by the mother's outstretched legs, raised the tube of warmwater to about the height of her own head, and let it drip gently onto themother's genital and perineal regions. Throughout this time the mother restedon the slanting piece of springy split bamboo that had served to facilitate thebirth. Pouring water from a bamboo tube in this way also forms part of therituals performed at first menstruation, as well as at the first setting of housepillars into the ground and at the funeral of a baby. Its meaning seems to be

22. Temiar midwives - who are sometimes men - usually hold their position,not by hereditary succession, but because they are 'brave' enough to haveundertaken training in the job from an established midwife.23. See in G. Benjamin, 1967a, op. cit., pp. 129f.


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twofold. First, the water is warmed in a piece of bamboo that has beencarefully selected for freedom from impacted soil {which would causetracoo/p. This is an act of cooking, a making cultural: the performers avoidemploying water in its unmodified natural state - cold and in an unpreparedcontainer. Second, the water is poured from a height, emphasising that it iscoming from Off-the-ground. It washes away all the exuvia (which, on theanalogy of the way in which Temiars regard menstrual blood, are presumablyhighly polluting) through the open floor-slats onto the ground below. Thewhole procedure is almost literally a bathing of the mother and child in thewaters of culture so as to wash away all the non-cultural polluting elements,into the ground where they rightly belong. This leaves the subjects of theritual so much more securely in the domain of culture24 .After the first such washing, just after the delivery, the midwife putsthe child to the mother's breast so that it will 'know' the nipple and learn tofeed. After suckling is established, the midwife heats some special leaves inwater, places them still hot onto the mother's belly, and massages the motherthrough the leaves with her foot 25 . Then she binds the damp leaves firmly inplace with a piece of cloth, to reduce the pain. The mother can now leave thehouse if necessary26, but the baby remains inside (and thus off the ground),where it is frequently bathed and put to the breast. The hot-leaf massage andbinding continue for five days, after which the mother is considered to bephysically nearly recovered27.For the first eight days after the delivery both the mother and themidwife must refrain from eating meat, nor may they bathe in the river. I fthey break either rule they are thought likely to suffer sabat (discussedbelow), with consequent difficulty in breathing. Other villagers catch fish forthem to eat instead.When the baby's umbilicus drops off (after about seven days) themother keeps it in a small plaited pouch. Later she bums the pouch and itscontents on the ground and plants a few maize seeds in the ashes. When themaize ripens months later, she takes the cobs home, roasts them on the fire,and gives them to her child to eat 'because its own umbilicus-ash is in it'28.

24. Although this takes place near the hearth, it does not have theinstitutionalised character of the widespread Southeast Asian custom of 'roasting'the newly delivered mother. The Temiars know the latter to be a Malay practice,but they do not follow it - even i f its 'enculturating' rationale is similar to that oftheir own practice.25. A photograph of such a massage - without leaves - appears on p. 107 of M.Roseman, op. cit .26. One man said that the mother is allowed out of the house for the first timeonly after the first flow of true mille27. The various numbers of days given here should not be thought of as rules;they are simply what I was told in the accounts I collected. In practice, Temiarswould be unlikely to count the number of days between events so officiously, orto observe rigorously any 'rules' that might seem to be based on such counting.28. This ritual sequence echoes the Temiar custom (now little practised) ofburning down the house of a deceased adult and planting a crop (usually tobacco)in the ashes. It also brings to mind the Malay custom of burying the afterbirth -regarded as the neWborn's 'elder sibling' - at the base of a tree near the house.


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50 Geoffrey BenjaminThroughout the confinement there is no strict prohibition on theapproach of the father or other males near the mother. The bamboo couch onwhich the confinement takes place is often placed in the centre of the house,or at least near the hearth where everyone congregates. The father and mothershould nevertheless sleep apart until all is declared well and the mother has

gone out of the house for the first time. No other special restrictions affectthe father at this time, apart from the general dietary restrictions ofparenthood discussed below29 . But he is expected to make himself helpful intending to his wife's needs while she is confined to the house.At the end of the confinement, the mother asks her husband to presentthe midwife with ten pieces of sarong cloth in payment for her services. Themidwife then hands two of these to the mother 'because of the child's rwaay.'This is a recognised way of showing that she is bound to the mother by afeeling of care, and not just as the provider of a service. For the rest of theirlives, the mother calls the midwife by the pseudo-kinship term t6haat'healer'; the child too may later come to call the midwife by the same term.The reciprocal term is coo' 'pet, former patient'.YsngyowParents sometimes perform a little ritual from which we can learnsomething of their views of the young infant's situation. Eisewhere30 I havedescribed how during the first year or so of his child's life the father is liablewhen the occasion arises to make placatory offerings to those spirits (actuallyplant souls) thought likely to run off with the child's rather labile head-soul(rwaay). To a large extent parenthood is viewed as the protection of thebaby's head-soul from its tendency to 'wander away' (reyKWlY).The action in question is barely noticeable: the father (and perhapsalso the mother) tears off a bunch of leaves and throws them on the flowingwater before he bathes in the river or wades across it. One man I observedcarrying out the ritual claimed that he did so because he feared for the headsoul (rwaay) of his child. He was not required to make the gesture - hesimply regarded himself as 'helping' his young son. Furthermore, anyone elsewho wanted to help in the same way was welcome to do so; but no wrongwas attached to any omission. Although he was unable to explain themechanism of his performance, what he did clearly has something incommon with another Temiar belief, that allowing cultivated plants to floataway downstream puts one in danger of losing one's head-souI 31 . Perhaps thefather's act is a sort of spiritual counter-irritant. First, he is throwing anuncultivated weed onto the stream; second, the person to blame is anyoneother than the young child. I f any harm results, it will be mild and almostcertainly would not attack the baby's delicate head-soul.29. A c c o r d i n ~ to M. Roseman (personal communication), a man should not doany fishing With a cast-net while his wife is still pregnant, for fear that it mightcause the foetus to become 'tangled'.30. G. Benjamin, 1967b, op. cit., pp. 23-24.31. This presumably belongs with a wider set of Temiar ideas about the harm thatcan result from letting certain cultural objects, menstrual blood or the blood ofcertain game animals flow downriver.


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Dangcr and dialectic in Tcmiar childhocxJ 5 ISome years later, however, I was given a rather different account. Theleaf-throwing ritual was now portrayed as an offering to a river spirit knownas Yangyow who, despite being regarded as a Malay, looks like a water-skaterinsect. The act is accompanied by a spell in Temiarlsed Malay, aimed atpreventing Yangyow from stealing away the child's head-soul to play in thewhirlpools. The key phrase in the spell is smangad b6da' jangan larii', tdohskalii' 'don't run away with the child's s e m a n g a ~ remain calm.' The Malayword semangat 'vital force, soul' is often used by Temiars to translate theirword rwaay, and Malays too hold very similar beliefs about the dangers ofsemangat-loss in young babies.Whatever the explanation, this ritual underpins a notion that I shallexamine in more detail below: the extreme lability of the infant's soul. Inone sense, this expresses the quite rational fear that the baby may notsurvive, for the infant mortality rate was quite high at the time these data

were gathered. But the ritual also expresses specifically animistic ideas,concerned with Temiar notions of the economy of souls.Infancy and childhoodAs already noted, Temiars generally feel that they have no right tocommand the behaviour of others, even their own children32. Presumably,this is because one's will is thought to be situated in one's hup. To exercisecontrol over someone else could therefore be seen as a form of hup-invasionand/or rwaay-suppression. Although no Temiar offered me such anexplanation, I was expressly told that this is what happens in spiritmediumship (desired) or in spontaneous trance (undesired). The sameexplanation was also given for most of the soul-abstraction and spiritinvasion misfortunes that, they claimed, threaten them.In early childhood, however, the child's parents may legitimately tellit what to do - though only with regard to food taboos. This exception canbe explained through an examination of the way in which the child'sincreasing maturation is given animistic expression. As we have seen, thedangers thought to attend infancy are most commonly expressed in the fearthat the baby may lose its rwaayhead-soul, especially through the inadvertentactions of its mother33 As a consequence, the baby is sustained by a set ofpractices aimed at preventing rwaay-loss and any resultant hup-invasion; theYangyowritual is one of these. The dangers to the mother and child are32. The follOwing episode (taken from G. Benjamin, 1967a, op. cit., p. 216)serves as an example of what might happen when a parent does try to control achild's actions:Fear of thunder is something that Temiar parents find it necessary to tcachtheir children. One ten-year old boy reported to me, 'when Karey thundersMother stops up my ears.' On another occasion I saw a woman cover theears of her very young granddaughter as a clap of thunder sounded; but thegirl treated the whole thing as a joke and laughed happily. At the sametime another young girl's father was busy shouting at Karey about hisapparent attempts to kill us; but the girl blandly copied her father as i f i twas nothing but play.33. This fear may be expressed in other ways too: parents often refuse, forexample, to let their young child be photographed, in case the camera steals itsrwaay.


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52 Geoffrey Benjaminfrequently referred to collecHvely as lage: literally 'newborn baby,34. Ayoung baby's relation to its mother is so unitary that it is not even severedby the baby's death. I f this should happen, the mother must bathe the baby'scorpse with hot water dripped from a bamboo and then wipe it dry, so as toprevent herself from falling ill to03 5. The rationale for this procedure seemsto be that, since mother and baby share the same soul-substance, the baby'sdeath will put the mother in great danger of soul-loss and spirit-invasion.

It is while the child is still a newborn that the mother and child comemost firmly under the various dietary restrictions discussed in detail in thenext section. As the child grows older, however, the restrictions are graduallylifted, in step with the parents' fading ability to exert control. In other words,the erstwhile personal unity of mother (and/or father, and/or midwife) andchild moves towards a more differentiated set of relations, as if betweenautonomous persons. The transition is never straightforward, though, forneither the initial unity nor the final autonomy are absolute. I t is as if theparents - separately or jointly - and their child constituted a singlephysiological and psychological entity, at least until the child becomesmature enough to walk around by itself. The process constitutes a persistentdialectic, in which the players never separate wholly into self-sufficient'individuals.'Successive stages in this dialectic are marked by the establishing ofnew behaviours. The newborn and its parents follow the full range of dietaryrestrictions. As the child first begins to crawl around the house, and againwhen it begins to walk on the ground, the restrictions are progressivelylifted. By then, a degree of autonomy has been established, and it is nowmore difficult for the parents to tell the child what to do. They still try tohold the child to some dietary restrictions, however, as the dangers are not yetover. For example, although the child's head can now safely be shaven -this is done for cosmetic or health reasons - the continuing lability of therwaayrequires that a special tuft of hair (the wooj) must be left on the child'sscalp to prevent soul-Ioss36 . By this time, children spend much of the dayout of their parents' sight, playing with other village children. Theirincreasing ability to talk now enables them to discuss their own response todietary restrictions - an important step in reassuring the parents that thechild has become more responsible. The last stage in the progression isusually marked by changes in the personal names of both child and parents,as noted earlier.

34. The term Ia!..c'is often applied as well to the restrictions followed by thefather and midWife, further muddying the dialectical relation of personhood thatholds between the people most closely involved in the baby's earliest months.The slightly adversative connotation of Iagc' - the word is only employed whenthe child is being thought of as vulnerable or as needing protection - isconfirmed by the similarly adversative meanings of cognate forms in the closelyrelated Semai language: bge' 'to be naughty', bIage' 'dirty' (G. Diffloth, personalcommunication).35. I was told that the corpses of adults are not washed, for that would spread thedeath influences around.36. This tuft is over the forehead in boys and at the crown of the head in girls.


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Danger and dialectic in Temiar childhood 53Even after the child has grown out of immediate danger, however, themother may choose to keep her own diet restricted, especially if she is still ofchild-bearing age. Her husband and child, on the other hand, are free toexperiment with the hitherto forbidden foods. Experimentation is necessary,

as tabooed foods generally evoke considerable repugnance in the personconcerned. lida', a lad of about eight years, was asked by his uncle to passhim a piece of dropped pig flesh while he watched the carcass beingbutchered. He responded by flicking it delicately with the back of his hand,saying, with a look of horror, 'I feel revolted.' Responses of this sort arequite usual for adults also. Experiment is also involved in the father's trialeating of the hitherto forbidden food. I f nothing untoward happens -vomiting merely, let alone a full attack of the feared disease - only thenwill he reinstate the food as a permissible part of his child's diet.

Children generally rationalise their adherence to the dietaryprohibitions as a matter of obeying their father's orders, but this is reversedwhen the time comes to throw the prohibitions off. The young child mustfeel sufficiently galag 'brave' - it also means 'greedy' - to wish to try thenew food. Some Temiars claimed that the child must first in his or herdreams overcome any feelings of repugnance and horror. To eat the food whenawake then serves as a public sign of the child's increasing maturity and selfcontrol. But since autonomy of the individual is so prized in Temiar society,the father must wait for his son or daughter to have favourable dreams beforeallowing them the new food.THE DIETARY RESTRICTIONS

Temiars hold that a large number of misfortunes are related to theirbehaviour towards various natural species37 Of these, the afflictions knownas sabat, p6cuk and tenruu' are of special importance, for they separate outyoung children and their parents as a distinct social category, more restrictedin what they may eat than any other members of the community 38. The exactreferents of these words are not always easy to specify, for they are often usedinterchangeably. As one Temiar put it when I asked him the differencebetween sabat and tenruu; 'one disease, many sounds [Le., names].' Such anapparent - though not real - confusion results from the highly dialecticalframework of soul-ideas on which these ideas lean. It is nevertheless possibleto discern some focal meanings for each of the terms.Sabat is the most widely used of the three terms. Without furtherqualification, it refers primarily to sickness in children, women of childbearing age and the fathers of young children, caused by eating foodsforbidden to them; it also applies to both spouses during the wife'spregnancy. The same food taboos usually apply also to women while they

37. A systematic account of this complex body of ideas is presented in G.Benjamin, 1967a, op. cil., pp. 61-125.38. The words s a b a ~ p6cuk and lenruu 'are also used on other occasions, withreference to other social categories or individuals. Here we are concerned onlywith the 'unmarked' varieties, which relate primarily to parenthood and childhood.


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are menstruating, whether or not they have young children39 In theprototypical case, a young child suffers an attack of sabat if its mother eatspig flesh, although the term is normally used more broadly than this inpractice.There are no inherently sabat-causing species: foods are classed assabat only in relation to defined persons. Others persons may eat these foodswithout incurring any of the dangers that attend those for whom they aresabat. The list of species and substances believed to cause sabat variessomewhat from valley to valley, but the differences are not directly relevantto the present discussion. I found that salt, pork and chicken were generallyavoided by young children and their mothers, but various other game-meatswere often forbidden as well40 The category sabat is capable of some open-ended extension.Nowadays many more foods are available to the Temiars than they formerlyhad knowledge of, and most are simply not subsumable under any of thefamiliar plant or animal categories. Until these foods become familiar bygradual experimentation, they are generally treated as sabat-causing. Forexample, one small boy had to stop accepting gifts of foil-wrapped cheesefrom me: his father had declared it sabat, even though he was already eatingcheese in its more familiar - in Malaysia, at least - canned form. I foundthat most Temiar women refused to eat beef when they had the opportunity'because we are not yet accustomed' and hence would suffer an attack of sabatTemiars generally claim that sabat is their version of the Malay wordsawan 'convulsions.' Although the word does not come directly from Malay,this folk-etymology may well be correct in a more general sense41 .Sabatisregarded as an 'illness' (jani'), the main symptoms of which were variouslyidentified as vomiting, giddiness, shortness of breath, cold, shivering orheadache - but not convulsions. The cause was described to me in severaldifferent ways. One man said that the sabatof game animals appears to spiritmediums in trance as a baby version of the animal in question. This is theanimal's rwaay, and it attacks the victim's hup. Another said that sabatis theanimal's ken/ook- Le., its rwaayas seen in the eye's twinkle - and that it39. A diagram of the social distribution of these dietary restrictions appears on p.139 of M. Roseman, op. cit .40. The hundred or so Temiars who live in Pahang state regarded fewer species ass a b a ~ c a u s i n g than their fellows, the vast majority, to the north in Kelantan andPerak. The result is that pork and fowl, among others, could be freely eaten by allmembers of the Pahang community. Among most Temiars, however, the women,children and many men were deprived of what would otherwise be the majorsources of meat. In Humid (Hmij), the village in Kelantan where I did a major partof my work, at feasts where pork or fowl was the main item the women andchildren were regularly provided with fish and, if available, permissible species ofmonkey meat, in order that they too might join in the meal.41. Phonologically, Temiar sabat should derive from an earlier saban (G.Diffloth, personal communication). I f the word is indeed related to Malay sa wan,it must therefore have come from some other Austronesian language that had -bwhere Malay has -W-. Any such language has long since disappeared from thePeninsula. However, the Peninsular Mon-Khmer languages have long been knownto contain many Austronesian words from sources other than Malay. Anotherpossible linkage of the Temiar word sabat is with the (Perak) Malay seban saban) 'protracted (of labour in childbirth)' quite likely a member of the sameword-family.


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attacks human beings through the head; from there it consumes the rest ofthe body. It is also widely held that certain plants (mainly tree-borne fruits)can cause sabat These species possess knoruk (root-souls that manifestthemselves as tigers), which are the plant equivalents of hup One man saidthat in this case the sabatdisease is caused by the knoruk-tiger sucking bloodfrom the victim's chest through its magical cords, then removing the hup andpulling the rwaayout after it. A milder version had it that if a child were toeat sabat fruits, it would simply 'fail to grow fat' - a quite appropriate wayof characterising the result of soul-abstraction, at least in the short run.Pocuk and tenruu'are regarded as more acute forms of sabat. Theseafflictions are quite commonly mentioned in casual conversation, but fromthe varied descriptions I obtained it is difficult to define them clearly. Instead,let me provide a sampling of the opinions I gathered and then try to draw outthe common themes they express.

Pocuk, like sabat, is the name of a bodily affliction believed to attackthose who fail to observe certain rules of behaviour42 The list of causativeanimals always includes the sambhur and rusa deers and the mousedeers.Some Temiars said that these were the only pocuk animals, while othersprovided much longer lists that included many ground-living game-birds,along with such exotic animals as tapir, rhinoceros and elephant. Somethought that some plants too, especially certain seasonal fruits, might causep6cuk, in which case the affliction may be referred to as wedweed 'giddiness'.Women and children are the main targets of p6cuk. I was told that ifthe father of a young child were to eat p6cuk-causing food, it is the child whowould die. The source of danger was thought by some to be the animal'sjreek, a term often applied to the reportedly tiger-like shape taken by animals'lower-body souls when envisioned in trance or dreams. The cause ofp6cukinchildren, however, was more commonly ascribed to c'aay (sometimes calledngooy lOot 'blood stink'), an emanation or vapour that originates from theblood of larger animals while they are being butchered. Young children mustbe kept away from this - which is why the initial butchering of huntedanimals is usually done outside the village, and why meat is usually washedin the river before being distributed for cooking.The mildest account of pocuk that I obtained described it as startinglike an ordinary sabat attack and then progressing to giddiness, unstablevision and staggering fits. More severe accounts had the victim falling into aparalytic state in which his or her limbs get fixed in a posture characteristicof the animal. Victims may even begin to move about the house for an houror so, making sounds like the causative animal; they are then said to haveliBs'metamorphosed' into the animal. I f not treated, and especially in the caseof a child, the victim dies. The preferred treatment is for a spirit-medium toremove the offending agent ritually in the form of a batuu' kahyek,supposedly a stony or crystalline - and therefore neutralised - form of thespirit-agency, which is normally thought of as a liquid when still active.42. Nevertheless, some Temiars insisted that (unlike sabat) pocuk is not an'illness' (janiJ. The word pocuk has no transparent meaning in Temiar, but onphonological grounds it could be well related to the Malay word moncong 'snout,beak', referring perhaps to the presumed animalian origin of the aflliction.


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This accords with the claim that p6cuk is caused by an emanation from theblood or the unbounded lower-body soul of the offending species. In otherwords, pOcuk - like sabat - results from invasion by stray spirit (Le.,unbounded souO, attracted by the valency of the soul-deficit generated by thedialectically overlapping personhood of early childhood. P6cuk is thus thelower-body-soul (hup) counterpart of sabat, for the latter has its source inunbounded upper-body soul (rwaay).

T e n r u u ~ the third of these afflictions, seems to be even more severe inits effects43. Grammatically, the word is a verbal noun, describing a staterather than a causative agent; the verbal forms truu'and te'ruu' 'to undergotenruu' are also used. Pigs were mentioned as causative agents in all theaccounts I obtained, but some said that other animals, including certain redfleshed fish, might be involved as well. The symptoms were variouslydescribed as 'vomiting, shivering, loss of appetite', 'blood in the urine' or 'thebody becomes like rubber,and one cannot sleep'. However, the most dramaticdescription, obtained from several different sources, characterised tenruu' as akind of transmogrification in which the patient both transforms into theanimal concerned and flees the house to join the wild herds. For example, ifpigs (and perhaps other herd animals) are sighted in the evening bravelydigging up swidden crops near human habitations, they are thought by someto be truu'-ed humans in animal shape. Such pigs are regarded as verydangerous.In cases of this sort, the cause is assumed to be the feeding of sabatmeat to the parent of a Jage 'infant or to a menstruating woman. In someaccounts, a newly delivered mother will truu' not only if she eats pork, butif she eats any meat, fish, salt or seasonal fruit - and so will her husband ifhe eats with her for the first week after the delivery. I was told that one wayof curing this type of tenruu'is to perform the special blood-offering knownas s6mok This rare ritual more typically takes place in response to violentstorms occurring right overhead, when it is performed by those who feel thattheir actions brought the storm on in the first place. The aim is to appeasethe thunder deity Karey. They collect some of their own blood by cuttingtheir shin with a bamboo sliver, mix it with water, and throw it into the airand onto the ground, uttering appropriate imprecations44 . When the ritual isdone in response to a case of tenruu: it should be carried out by the personwho fed the wrong food to the patient. The blood-and-water mixture iscollected early in the morning and flicked from the end of a leaf-whisk two or43. For another account of tenruu', see M. Roseman, op. cit., pp. 137-142.44. For a graphic published account of this ritual, performed by the midwifementioned earlier in this essay, see J. Slimming, Temiar jungle: a Malayanjourney, London: John Murray, 1958, Pl" 154-155. Several scholars havedebated the Significance of the Orang Ash blood sacrifice: see R. Needham,'Blood, thunder, and mockery of animals', Sociologus (N.S.) 14, 1964, pp. 136-149; D. Freeman, 'Thunder, blood, and the nicknaming of God's creatures',Psychoanalytical Quarterly 37, 1968, pp. 353-359; K. M. Endicott, BatekNegrito religion: the world-view and rituals of a hunting and gathering people ofPeninsular Malaysia. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979, pp. 155-160, 1979; C. A.Robarchek, 'Blood, thunder, and the mockery of anthropology: D. Freeman andthe Semang thunder-god', Journal of Anthropological Research 4, 1987, pp.273-300.


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three times onto the patient's throat. Other treatments, especially when thevictim is a child, include special shamanic 'blowings' by a spirit-medium.Since the source of power in the medium's breath is usually explained asderiving from his hup (which Temiars regard as the organ of breath), andsince hupand blood stand for each other in Temiar symbolism, it is clear thatthese two 'cures' are very similar in their cultural logic.The connection of tenruu' with blood is apparent also from itsassociation with menstruation, as mentioned above. But menstrual danger iscontagious. I f a woman starts to menstruate while eating meat and then givesit up because of the taboo, anyone who unknowingly eats the left-over meatis thought likely to suffer tenruu' and transmogrify into the animal thatcaused the trouble. The cure for this, I was told, is for the menstruatingwoman to cut her leg and somok her own blood onto the chest of the sickperson45.

I t is clear, then, thattenruu' (like sabat and pocuk) is thought of asinvolving soul invasion. Its special feature seems to be that - in severecases at least - it is the victim who becomes invasive, by fleeing into theanimal realm. The precipitating states (childbirth and menstruation) bothinvolve loss of blood, and the cures involve replacement of that lost blood inmaterial or symbolic form. In soul-economy terms, this means that theaffected person becomes temporarily h u ~ d e f i c i e n t , a state that generates apowerfully soul-attracting valency. Soul-invasion is the almost inevitableaccompaniment to such an image, whether the victim is the one who getsinvaded or who (reciprocally) does the invading. Moreover, given the mutualdialectical involvement of mother, father and young child, it is hardlysurprising that the dangers should be thought likely to befall them all.PHENOMENOLOGY, PHYSIOLOGY, IMAGERY

The discussion so far may have given the impression that I amconcerned, in a cognitivist or structuralist manner, with the 'meanings' of thevarious practices that attach to Temiar childhood and parenthood. Where ritualis concerned, however, the Temiars seem not to share a body of explicitmeanings, nor do they always agree about the referential content of the moremystical words in their lexicon. I suggest therefore that the analysis shouldnot proceed solely on the level of articulated meanings, but that it should dealalso with the more embedded level of unspoken feelings. We need to ask notonly what these rituals and restrictions 'say' to the people who perform them,but also what they do. In this section I hope to show how notions as basic asthe dialectic of autonomy and communalism, or the dangers that attend earlyparenthood, come to be felt rather than just cognised. These notions are notso much 'expressed' or 'articulated', as condensed at one and the same timeonto (a) directly felt bodily processes, (b) a view of kinship in which siblingties are generated out of the simultaneous degeneration of affinal and filiative

45. These seem to be rather archaic beliefs, for some Temiars did not know themat all, while others said that such things used to happen generations ago but do sono longer.


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58 Geoffrey Benjaminties, and (c) the cosmogonic imagery that sustains it all. The discussion musttherefore bring together psychological, cultural and linguistic data, within agenerally phenomenological framework of interpretation.Blood and thematicisation

Earlier, I argued that Temiars show more concern for body-insides thanfor the body's surface. Let us now examine this proposition more closely,with special reference to a topic that has underlain much of the precedingdiscussion - the phenomenology of blood. That will lead in turn to aconsideration of the possibility that physiological issues might underpin thematerial presented earlier46.As we have seen, the Temiars use blood ritually, or refer to i tsymbolically, in a range of different contexts. Examples include the offeringof one's own blood in a somak ritual, or the symbolic hint of blood that liesbehind the spirit-medium's hup-derived 'blowings'. In other contexts,however, blood is avoided, as with the dangerous c'aay blood-vapour ofcertain animals, or in menstruation47 In Temiar imagery, blood is theconcentrate or trope of agency and will. It is therefore thought of aspossessing inherent power to bring about new states-of-affairs. Theimportance accorded to blood as a trope of agency is especially apparent fromthe embarrassment that attaches to menstrual blood in Temiar culture. Whyshould this be?As a trope of free hup, blood is in effect a form of spirit. Free(bleeding) blood is acceptable when used deliberately to achieve some balancein the world, as in the blood-offering rituals. But since free blood is normallyuninvolved in any such complementarity, it is not usually acceptable.Menstrual blood is the most troublesome form that free blood can take, beinginherently without counterbalance. First, although menstrual blood is ineffect a form of spirit, it is nevertheless shed regularly in normal contexts oflife. Second, unlike hupunder normal circumstances, menstrual blood is notcounterbalanced by any rwaay-token, since hair (the trope of rwaay) is notshed regularly from the body. Third, menstrual blood is not balanced by anymale equivalent, which does not sit well with the usual Temiar concern forcomplementarity between males and females. Fourth, as free hup, menstrualblood has power, but no apparent ritual use: it is therefore a danger that must46. I t is probable that other phYSiological processes are involved besides thosediscussed here. Dentan, for example, argues that the anaemia resulting from thetypically heavy helminthic infestation in Semai communities plays a major rolein generating the kind of 'startle' responses that the Semais talk of as soul-loss(see R. K. Dentan, 1978, op. cit., pp. 122-123). Although I do not possess therelevant epidemiological data, there IS every reason to suspect that the same wastrue of Temiar communities during the period reported on here. If so, blood is thekey to much of what I discuss here, not only conceptually but materially.47. There are several other domains of Temiar life where the management of outof-place blood proves troublesome. I found that the following events are allassociated with complicated rules of behaviour: the removal of blood-gorgedleeches from one's body; the treatment of bleeding that occurs while one iseating; the escape of blood from monkey meat while it is being butchered on theshore of a river. See also Dentan's account of the careful precautions taken insome Semai communities against letting the afterbirth and other effluvia fall tothe ground ( in R. K. Dentan, 1978, op. cit., p. 110).


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be contained. So, not only is menstrual blood polluting and treated as 'dirt'('esniis, 'ednid), it is also profoundly embarrassing, as evidenced by theblushing and verbal evasion generated by my attempts to discuss it. It simplycannot be either explained or 'understood' by the means through which theTemiars nonnally approach their world.This brief discussion raises the possibility that the dietary taboosdiscussed earlier might be concerned with the psychological thematicisation

of physiological processes. Could it be that meats, salt and 'commercial'foods are forbidden by the rules of sabat because they increase the heart-beatand raise the blood-pressure? That would have the effect of making themother's own hup and blood a thematic object of her attention at preciselythe times when she has the most reason to be worried about the 'economy' ofher soul-stuff. These same foods are also the ones that children should avoiduntil they have become 'brave' enough (through dreams?) to eat them.To make something thematic is to make it the object of attention,thereby shifting i t from the plane of the taken-for-granted to that ofarticulated and worrying concerns. Thematicisation in this sense is a commonfeature of Temiar culture, and it sits right at the core of the psychocentricmode of surrogation mentioned earlier48. It is hardly surprising therefore thatthe same concern reappears in regard to soul-based maturational processes.As already noted, Temiar parents get away with telling their childrenwhat to do only during the children's early years and only with regard to thefood-avoidances that mark the children's maturation. When the children growa little older, the parents avoid interfering with their actions. This suggeststhat for the first few years of life the child is felt to be a part of the parents'Self, rather than an Other. But the dialectical character of Temiar thoughtimplies that Selves are also Others, and vice versa. Having a child, becominga parent, is a process that starts with the generation of a dialectical Other out

of one's own Self, but ends as the dialectical regeneration of one's Self out ofthe Other it originally produced. Phenomenologically, the child's maturation- the transformational differentiation of the child as Other out of the parents'Self - therefore amounts to a process of changing emphasis.This makes sense if we assume that during the earliest stages ofchildhood the mother and child constitute the hup- and rwaay-vessels,respectively, of the dialectical 'whole' that they jointly form (see figure I).Later, by the time they become autonomous individuals, the mother mustsomehow have obtained her own rwaay, and child its own hup. I suggest thatthis can be achieved only through the appropriate focusing of the mother'sattention. She must be made as aware as possible of rwaay in herimagination, just as she must not imagine hup if she is to redress the balancebetween them. This, I suggest, is what underlies the rituals and dietaryrestrictions discussed earlier. By avoiding foods that might actphysiologically to bring her hup(Le., her heart and blood} into thematicisedattention, she will be better prepared to bring rwaay into her awareness. Theritual washing at first menstruation commences this process early, by48. Temiar ideas imply that the cosmos too maintains its own existence in thisway, by subjectively holding itself within its own span of attention.


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prefiguring the rwaay-enhancing properties of the same ritual as performedafter childbirth. The child's situation, as might be expected, is directly linkedto this. While the mother is protected against focusing her attention on hup,the child's well-being is protected by a battery of ritual restrictions aimed atpreventing rwaayloss.The mother as treeIn Southeast Asia, vegetal imagery is widely employed in talkingabout consanguineal relations; the child may be seen as a kind of plant, forexample49 The Temiar material seems to share this characteristic, but itimplies the view that mother and child together form a tree.As we have seen, the pouring of water forms part of the rituals at firstmenstruation, childbirth, and the setting of new house-posts. These acts arevery similar to the ordinary watering that Temiars carry out when caring for anewly planted fruit tree. Temiars explicitly say that a tree's hup (j.e., itsknoruk) is situated in its roots and that its rwaay is found at the growingpoints of the leaves, where the petioles join the blades. Thus, if a 'tree' imagewere applied to human reproduction, the mother would be the roots (the hupcontainer) and the child the leaves (the progressively emerging rwaaycontainer). For this image to work, however, it would be necessary for thetrunk eventually to die off, so that the two parts - mother and child - thatwere initially joined together may achieve their proper autonomy. At firstglance, this interpretation may seem over-imaginative, but it is supported bysome remarkable features of the Temiar lexicon50.The most obvious of these is the fact the ordinary word for'mother',boo', also means 'tree-trunk'. But there is additional evidence, of a moreopaque historical-linguistic kind, in support of this mother-as-tree view.Comparative studies in the Austroasiatic and Austronesian language-familiessuggest that the Temiar words boo' 'mother; trunk', top 'formerly' and suul'navel' have undergone a linked set of lexical relations. The proposed linkageis based on the findings: (a) that in bOO' the meaning 'trunk' is a secondaryelaboration from the 'mother' meaning; (b) that in top the meaning 'former'is a secondary elaboration of the word's etymological, Mon-Khmer, meaningof 'trunk', which has dropped out of usage in Temiar; and (c) the Temiar wordfor 'navel' is an archaic Austronesian-derived word (suul) that originally49. Cf. J. J. Fox, 'Sister's child as plant: metaphors in an idiom ofconsanguinity', in R. Needham (ed.), Rethinking kinship and marriage, London:Tavistock, 1971, pp. 219-252.50. Lack of space precludes full discussion of the historical-linguistic evidence onwhich this argument is based; it will appear elsewhere. However, readersinterested in working through the materials for themselves should consult thefollOwing sources: H. L. Shorto, A dictionary of the Mon inscriptions from thesixth to the sixteenth centuries. London: Oxford University Press, 1971 (p. 142,under tam 'base, foot, beginning; plant, tree'); and A dictionary of modern spokenMon, London: Oxford University Press, 1962, p. 164 under b3? 'female ofanimal; mother'); P. K. Benedict, Austro-Thai: language and culture, New Haven:HRAF Press, 1975 (p. 226, under *[(m)po]sol 'basis, trunk (of tree, body),buttocks, heel'); Th. Headley, 'Some sources of Chamic vocabulary,' in Ph. N.Jenner, L. C. Thompson and S. Starosta (eds), Austroasiatic studies. part I,Honolulu: University Press of Hawaii, 1976, pp. 453-476 (p. 458, under'formerly': Proto-Mon-Khmer "'ta:m 'trunk (of a tree)'; 'formerly').


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meant 'trunk', and which is remotely cognate with the Malay word for'trunk'(pohon). How could these semantic shifts have come about?The meanings 'trunk' and 'formerly' can be connected if we link themto the World-Tree image of cosmogenesis that is widely distributed inSoutheast Asian cultural traditions, including aboriginal Malaya. The trunkof the World-tree, in holding heaven and earth conditionally apart, ismaintaining the 'now' of the human world-space against the threat that itmight dissolve back into the former primal state of undifferentiated mud.This parallels on the macrocosmic level the microcosmic image linking the'mother' and 'trunk' meanings of boo' in Temiar. As remarked earlier, themother-child filiative tie is what holds the key-of-life tie of siblingship apartfrom the key-of-death tie of affinity (i.e., mother-father, husband-wife) thatgenerates it.Thus, in Temiar motherhood, when the 'trunk/mother' (bOO'}filiativetie enters the key of death, it becomes fop ('former/trunk'). Only when thatstage is reached can mother and child become relatively autonomousindividuals and cease to imply dmlger for each other. In so doing, they are reenacting the primal separation that the cosmos maintains in providing humanbeings with a here-and-now life-space.What then of the Temiar word suul 'navel'? This word, whichprobably derives from the same Austronesian source as the Malay wordpohon 'trunk; tree', seems to have replaced some earlier Aslian word for'naveI'SI. I f so, the Temiars must formerly have engaged in a very literal useof tree imagery in enriching their understanding of the mother-child dialectic.What of father?In the last few sections I have concentrated on the relation betweenmother and child. Earlier, I presented evidence to suggest that the father isentangled in the mystical dangers of parenthood almost as much as themother. At first sight, this almost equal, non-differentiated contribution ofthe mother and father is puzzling: it runs counter to the fact that motherhoodis physiologically a much more involving situation than fatherhood. But, aswe have seen, Temiar 'equality' or 'identity' is always fundamentallycomposed of a Self/Other dialectic. Temiars can thus easily claim that twothings are the same while also being aware of the dialectical complementaritybetween them - especially when the two 'things' are both the dialecticaltransforms of the 'same' precursor. This is the case when (as Temiar idiomhas it) mother and father are seen as the 'backwards' transforms (sid) of theirchild: to express the idea 'she looks like her mother', Temiars say na-sid mabOO' 'fih 'she is transforming into her mother'.

51. The current alternative Temiar word for navel is panik This too seems to be aloan-word, probably from a pre-modem form of the Malay word pending'ornament worn in front of body; belt clasp'. (The phonological changes involvedare all quite regular.) The original Mon-Khmer word for 'navel; placenta' wasprobably '*suak (G. Diffloth, personal communication); this is represented inTemiar by the word swag 'afterbirth'. These shifts imply that 'navel' words inTemiar were formerly subject to linguistic avoidance, allowing for their easierreplacement by the tree-imagery word suul.


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62 Geoffrey BenjaminThus, if the mother is hup (heart-soul) to the child's rwaay (headsoul), as Temiar imagery would have it, then the father should indeed berwaay to the mother's hUp. But he could also be seen as hup to the child'srwaay - as is suggested by the way he shares in his wife's hup-relatedtaboos (see Figure O. These views are not formed 'structures', not dogmas,not explicit statements. Rather, they are my formulations of an attempt torepresent the range of meanings that individual Temiars can, if they sochoose, construct for themselves. They are projective formulations preciselybecause this particular domain is unformulated and thus open to the play ofimagination. Just as is the case with the component parts of the cosmos, thedifferent elements here can be seen variously and in different combinations assometimes the same and sometimes as different.The father, however, would seem to be slightly more peripheral thanmother or child. In phenomenal terms, of course, his peripherality is

understandable: it is the mother, not the father, who physically produces andsuckles the child (despite male attempts to 'suckle'). It is the mother, whothrough menstruating, bears the obvious relation to hup - the 'best' maleequivalent to which is semen, which might just be seen by some individuals,therefore, as a trope for rwaay. The only evidence I have for such a view isthat Temiars regard semen, despite its congealing properties, as a liquid,referring to it either as 'ook 'water' or noom 'urine': rwaay- derived spiritguides are also thought to materialise in the spirit-medium's hand as a wateryliquid (kahyek).Remaining questionsThe above discussion raises as many questions as it answers. Thereremains, for example, the problem of where the child's-cum-parents' soulstuff is thought to come from. I f it is formed by differentiation-plus-mergerof the parents' soul, then the 'dangers' are understandable. But we still need toask how the soul-stuff is thought to grow - what feeds it, and what is the'substance' in which it is transmitted to the child?Also, it should be noted that blood has the property of clotting, which makesit suitable as a trope of 'unrestrained solid / constrained liquid', like theprimordial mud (Lim bang) out of which, in Temiar myth, the cosmosdifferentiated itself into being52 . This suggests a further cosmic connection:perhaps babies are imaged as being formed, like the world itself, out of theclotting of bloodCmud). A closer examination than I have been able toprovide here of Temiar notions of cosmogony, the 'fate of the soul',dreaming, physiology and reproduction might provide some answers to thesequestions.

Benjamin, Danger and Dialectic in Temiar Childhood

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