Eating, sharing, and mutuality of being among the mentawai on Siberut Island, Indonesia

ABSTRACT

This article examines the importance of sharing and eating in constructing personhood, reproducing social institutions, and reenacting social value. Based on 18 months of fieldwork among the Indigenous Mentawai living on Siberut Island (Indonesia), it examines eating and sharing that hint at food’s importance in the Mentawai’s idea of family, kinship, and mutuality. Eating and sharing food are not merely digestive activities; they constitute a process whereby the Mentawai redefine and remake their mutuality with others. At once material, moral, affective, and symbolic, Mentawai sharing and eating reveals how nourishment is shaped not just by food materiality or mode of livelihood but also by how they develop creative social relations with non-human entities. I argue that it is only by pursuing the Mentawai’s mode of thinking and relating with more-than-human beings that one may understand the centrality of sharing in bringing humans and non-human persons together in a shared world.

KEYWORDS:

• Food
• eating
• sharing
• more-than-human
• value
• mutuality
• the Mentawai

The ontology of sharing and mutuality

A few days after I started my fieldwork for my BSc thesis on Siberut island in 2004, my Mentawai host told me a well-known story about sharing that goes like this: One day, an elder paddled a canoe full of manau rattan from the forest to a trader on the east coast. In return, he received four fresh banknotes. Proudly, he did not spend the money. He invited his brothers, children, and relatives. He animatedly told them how he had hacked the rattan from the forest and made the two-day journey to the coast as if he had fought a big deer in the jungle and brought its carcass home. He then showed them the notes, counted how many families were present, and chopped the money into sixteen equal pieces. Fifteen pieces were given to his family, and another was offered to the spirit of the forest who owned the rattan. Granted, this story has a comic quality, but it has a certain truth. After telling the story, my host lectured me about how the Mentawai do share.

We share everything—except our spouse. Everyone has enough sago, taro, and banana. If we do not, we take them from our family’s gardens. This shared food is saraina (having the same mother). Moreover, as for meat, nobody dares to keep it for themselves. The spirits are watching and will punish us if we keep it for ourselves.

Sharing food is a fundamental act of indigenous Mentawai life and is still considered an essential part of relationships, expressing the idea that close people should provide care and mutual support. The Mentawai share certain traits with societies whose members see themselves as equals and use food sharing as the basis of everyday morality (Sillander 2019; Widlok 2017) and as a significant source of pleasure in life (Graeber 2013, 92–102). Anthropologists have identified the distinct sharing qualities that mark it as different from other forms of human relations. Spontaneity, closeness, and presence are three essential features of sharing that help connected people orient themselves in space and time and for each other (Ingold 1999, 408; Bird-David 1994). Sharing is characterized by the importance of bodily co-presence, mutual interpersonal involvement, and relatedness as opposed to the calculation of reciprocal debts between two parties (Widlok 2017; Graeber 2013, 94–102). By this definition, sharing is socio-centric rather than egocentric, an act of unity and mutual concern. Sharing binds individuals to a collective and becomes the raw material of sociality, a recognition of interdependence and social peace. It is often said that people who share food are prohibited from harming one another. More than a means of transfer of substances, sharing food represents a means of realizing important value through actions (Fajans 1997; Munn 1986). Others argue that sharing food is a fundamental social practice generating closeness and relatedness (Carsten 1995; Howell 1989; Sillander 2019).

The argument that sharing is a way to relate to each other in societies that reject any form of coercion is fairly well established (Buitron and Steinmüller 2020; Gibson and Sillander 2011; Widlok 2005, 2017). However, scholars have different explanations regarding the ultimate basis of food sharing and what causes it to be stubbornly maintained. Scholars of hunter-gatherer societies point to economic rationality and subsistence as determining factors. Woodburn (1982, 1988) and others (Layton 2005; Peterson 1993) explain that sharing revolves around the “hunting and foraging” mode of production that requires the flexibility of co-residence and moving. Slightly disagreeing with the economic bias of Woodburn’s argument, Southeast Asian anthropologists proposed the theory of “enclavement” (Dentan 1994; Gibson 2011; 2019; Kaskija 2007). The maintenance of sharing as a mode of being and an egalitarian ethos among societies living in enclave areas is an act of self-conscious rejection of the values of neighboring societies. Others claim that sharing results from broadly evolutionary processes and encase it in a definition of human nature that includes relatedness (Bråten 1998; Howell and Willis 1989; Sillander 2011, 2019). For the latter, sharing is an innate quality humans possess due to their evolution as social beings.

Each of these arguments is an example of a “reactionist” explanation (Macdonald 2011, 33), where the reaction is against either ecological conditions, dominant societies, or natural selection. Implied in reactionist arguments is the idea that humans developed the practice of sharing to cope with their external circumstances. I follow Macdonald (2011, 33-34), who vouches for preference rather than response in understanding sharing in the societies that maintain it as the fundamental social act. My motivation for looking at preference is partly personal because my Mentawai interlocutors are not hunter-gatherers but forest cultivators. They are horticulturalists and developed a property regime regarding land, the forest, and cultivated crops (Darmanto 2016; Tulius 2012), albeit a relatively simple one. According to their myths and historical accounts, they did not have direct and simultaneous predatory relations with the non-stratified Minangkabau to the east and the slightly hierarchical Niassan to the north. I argue that sharing and mutuality is not exclusively a type of transfer of food (material) and knowledge (through a social process) associated only with a particular way of life and level of technological development but rather encompass a particular mode of being in relations with and thinking about, more-than-human entities.

This article aims to contribute to a growing revival of the study of sharing, which opposes the idea that people naturally strive to maximize self-interest and tend to invest in property, enjoy competition, and develop stratified institutions (Gibson and Sillander 2011; Macdonald 2009, 2011; Sillander 2019; Widlok 2017). I complement these studies, which tend to place an explanatory locus more on the unique nature of a group’s livelihood and given economic conditions and less on their mode of thought and social creativity (Bird-David 2009; Howell 2011: 41; Barnard 2002). I aim to connect these discussion on sharing as mode of taught with the anthropology of food by exploring the sharing of food and eating together as the primary modality of Mentawai’s autonomy, sociality and mutuality of being of humans and the spirit world. Further, my ethnographic materials invite interdisciplinary dialogue between anthropological studies of food, especially the discussion around food matter and materials (Durocher and Knezevic 2023; Bennett, 2007), and more-than-human frameworks (e.g., Chao 2021).

Abbots (2017, 2) calls for food to be examined as food, not as a metaphor for social life. Others encourage food research to look closely at the agency of food, “an active inducer-producer of salient, public effects, rather than a passive resource at the disposal of consumers” (Bennett, 2007, 134; see also Jane Fajans 1988). While I generally agree with these calls, I see food as a thing that never acts and becomes involved in cause and effect but works in and through relationships. Food does not act in isolation but always with other things (Abrahamsson et al. 2015, 14). To understand the impact and agency of food, one has to approach not solely its attributed and inherent materiality but also question its capacity to act in interconnected networks of relationships (Fajans 1988; Mol 2013; Yates-Doerr 2015). In this paper, I analyze the agentivity of food material mediated and enacted through Mentawai acts of sharing and eating together and social processes (rituals, kinship formation) that operate in the more-than-human realm.

I begin this article by outlining the Mentawai’s understanding of their world, the others, and how they relate. Specifically, the others are non-human beings who share the world with humans but occupy a different domain. An integral part of such an approach is the indigenous concept of personhood, which, in this case, includes animated conscious beings. I then describe how relations with prominent spirits provide what Howell (2011; 45) describes as a “cosmo-rule,” a set of principles expressed in the prescriptions and proscriptions of everyday life. Analysis of the taboo against eating meat alone can illustrate how food became a medium for enacting the cosmo-rule. The practice of sharing food and eating together is presented at length to show how the Mentawai generate mutuality and relatedness that encompass human and non-human relationships. The two domains of food sharing and eating examined are: 1) the domestic institution through everyday family meals and 2) the clan (uma) institution, on special occasions, through a communal ceremony (punen). I then show that eating together and sharing is how the Mentawai continually reproduce their sociality and mutuality.

The material I present in the article is derived from 14 months of fieldwork (November 2013–January 2015) undertaken for my PhD thesis and a month-long field visit for a new research project on the native idea of food insecurity. I have lived among the Mentawai, shared meals with them, and participated in household activities since I conducted research for my BSc thesis (Darmanto 2006) and worked on a conservation project between 2005 and 2011. I have thus gained a particularly intimate picture of sharing and eating inside Mentawai houses and their transformation over the last two decades. My own experience of sharing food and becoming part of the family of a particular group and household lies behind some of the key terms I employ, such as kinship and relatedness. My conversation primarily involved adult men and women and older women whom I knew in the villages of Madobak, Maileppet, Muntei, and Katurei in South Siberut and eight other villages across the island. Although the places, my gender, and positionality might have influenced the responses of my interlocutors, nothing I know about these villages leads me to suspect that they would deny the information I present.

Sharing the world with spirits

There are currently about 73,000 Mentawai living on the Mentawai archipelago (700,000 km²) off the west coast of Sumatra (Figure 1). On the largest island of Siberut, they are sparsely settled in a valley surrounded by lush tropical forest. Although some Mentawai now work as teachers, fishermen, nurses, traders, or laborers in the tourist industry, they consider themselves forest people (sipumone). They clear and cultivate sago and tubers (taro, banana, yams) (Figure 2), keep gardens, and tend pigs and chickens. In the coastal villages, people combine forest cultivation with fishing on the shallow shore. Women collect small fish, sago grubs, frogs, worms, shrimps, and mussels for daily protein (Figure 4). Cassava, wild ferns, and taro leaves are occasionally gathered, especially if there is no meat, but vegetables are a rare meal component. Fruit trees are an essential source of seasonal food in the forest garden (Figure 3). Cocoa, bettlenut, coconut, and cloves have been cultivated for the market for the last few decades. The market, alongside state intervention, has also brought rice, instant noodles, chili, biscuits, and other industrial foods to the island. These imported foods are considered tastier and more prestigious, especially for younger generations, who have developed a taste for modern food. Still, older generations prefer roasted bamboo sago with fish, clams, or shrimp.

Figure 1. The map of Siberut Island and Names of settlements where the ethnographics materials are collected.

Figure 2. Sago, taro and banana are the most important staple available in the complex sago and taro gardens.

Figure 3. The fruit garden. Member of the Samekmek group from Muntei village harvest rambutan fruit.

Socially, the Mentawai organize themselves in autonomous, patrilineal, and exogamous groups called uma that structure rituals, political decisions, and land-owning units. An uma may consist of one or dozens of self-sufficient nuclear families (lalep), totaling anywhere from two to about one hundred individuals. Uma has many characteristics of “open aggregation” relations (Gibson and Sillander 2011, 1; Sillander 2019, 72), such as perpetual membership change and constant diffusion and fission. Social ties between members of an uma are primarily egalitarian, which is also applied to the relations between uma. There is no political hierarchy among the members, apart from variations based on age. Men tend to focus on the forest garden and forest while women work in the taro garden, but the division of labor is minimal. Neither do the sexes cooperate in their work outside the institution of the family. Autonomy and political equality are the norm. People do not evaluate each other’s abilities, and adults never tell each other what to do. The only exception is the shaman (here), who performs specific tasks concerning human relations and the spirit world. The introduction of government villages has reconfigured Mentawai political relations, but regarding land, food, and rituals, the uma is still an essential form of social organization.

Simple forest-based living and loosely defined and ephemeral social organizations mirror Mentawai’s relations with the more-than-human world. From the viewpoint of the Mentawai, all beings – from a rock to a tree, animals, and the sea – have souls and consciousness. Existentially speaking, all conscious beings are equal, with identical personal attributes and qualities. From a deer to a rainbow to a waterfall, they all have a soul (simagre) and a body (tubbu), emanate power (bajou), and have a perspective (patuat). Each is distinguished by its “cloak” (its body) and the quality of invisible perspective, which perceives the same object differently, albeit with the same intention. This generalized anthropomorphism of non-human beings assumes ontological equality between humans and non-humans. The Mentawai world has the general features of venatic animism, in which the universe consists of intentional subjects and persons capable of will, intention, and agency (Arhem, 2016; Descola, 1992, 2013; Bird-David, 1999; Howell, 1989). The primary reference point is not humans but a humanized form of all species (Viveiros di Castro 1998, 483). This perspectival elaboration is captured in the Mentawai notion that all beings with simagre have patuat, which defines their perspective on the world, and tubbu, which distinguish each human and non-human from all the others. In this horizontal cosmos of ontological equals, kerei (shamans) and spirits stand out as compelling persons, epitomized by their singular capacity for “double vision” (Howell 2016, 68).

Nevertheless, the Mentawai ontology also differs from Amazonian perspectivism (Viveiros de Castro, 1998) or Southeast Asian venatic-type animism (Howell 2010; Arhem, 2016) because its intersubjective relations are not centered around predatory human-animal relations but a perspective of exchange with human-spirit mediated by offerings and sacrificed animals. This may be connected with the absence of predator animals on the island. Both humans and spirits have domesticated animals, but because their bodies are different, their animals are different. Social relations among humans and between humans and the spirits are defined through those animals. Pigs and wild game are, therefore, the prototypical social objects. Where humans see monkeys, the spirits see pigs. Where humans see domesticated pigs, the spirits see wild game. Another difference is that shamans in the Mentawai culture are not immortal and do not experience a bodily metamorphosis as they do elsewhere (Arhem, 2016; Howell, 2011, 2015; Fausto and Rodgers 2012). Shamanic knowledge and abilities neither enhance the status of a kerei outside the context of ritual healing nor form the basis of political authority.

The autochthonous spirits living in unsocialized spaces (Reeves 1994, 78), especially the forest and water, stand out among conscious beings. They precede humans, are important sources of blessings, and live in non-human space. Sikaleleu guards the forest and has its own “culture” (Schefold 2002, 445–6) with houses and livestock. As with the forest, all waterscapes, ranging from rivers, streams, and small lakes to beaches and waterholes, are guarded by an autochthonous spirit, a sikoinan. Fish, eels, clams, mussels and shrimp in the water are the livestock of sikoinan. Sikaoinan and Sikaleleu are like “the supernatural owners of nature” (Arhem, 2016; Costa and Fausto 2008;), including the land, wild animals, and plants. They are shape-shifters and can take the shape of animals. The importance of these spirits is woven into various myths that not only describe the origin of the cosmos but also demonstrate the necessity of sharing and developing a shared perception of the universe, providing several rules that govern human behavior. This article is not the place to discuss these myths extensively, but I will briefly describe how some myths portray the morality of being equal and the origin of sharing.

The origin of the spirits¹

The myth of the sikaleleu describes the origin of humans and the spirits in a mythical time before there was any death. Once, humans and spirits were immortal and shared the concern that the population would grow indefinitely. Afraid of hunger and scarcity, humans and the spirits made a primordial pact with the help of a black chicken. They divided themselves into two parties, occupied different spaces, and became mutually invisible. The spirits would live in the forest; humans would settle in the socialized space. Not seeing each other meant they were no longer in competition or at risk of subordination. Each lived, as it were, in a different dimension. Following the primordial agreement, humans give offerings to the spirits of the forest to this day and ask their permission when taking something out of the forest. They are also obliged to share the meat of the game they have killed with the spirits. The myth acknowledges differences and marks the original separation of humans and sikaleleu. It also solves the ontological problem of death and life by sharing spaces and exchange. The myth can be read as a Mentawai study of the nature of life, values, relatedness, sharing, and connections. It also defines a form of equality in which humans and spirits are bound by a primordial pact where no parties feel subdued or subordinated.

The myth of the sikaoinan is enmeshed in a complicated story in which the ideology of sharing and equality is explicitly emphasized. It revolves around the story of an abandoned boy. A crocodile came out of the water and took pity on this boy. It gave him food and taught him how to sing. They became friends. After a while, the animals sent the boy home. The boy asked for food from his family and shared it with his friend in the water. The boy’s friend occasionally stepped out of the water. The family and people did not see it, but the boy insisted that his friend would always be around him. The boy said it had long hair. It wore a big robe. Nevertheless, people never saw it. Then, the boy started singing and doing something his family could not understand. The crocodile taught the boy to do magic spells, dance, construct a longhouse, and farm pigs. The family ridiculed the boy. Growing up, he became a shaman, teaching people how to perform a ritual, construct the longhouse, and share meat equally. His family was envious and disliked him. When he erected the main pole of the longhouse, his family killed him and buried him under the pole.

Schefold (2007) argues that the sikalelu and boy-crocodile stories entail the binding and the separation of the human and autochthonous spirits. The orphan boy belongs to the primeval autochthonous spirits of the water (sikoinan), whose association with the non-human world is underlined by the boy’s connection with the crocodiles. The orphan boy impersonates the primordial pact of the humans and the spirits, as the crocodile provide a “gift” to humans in the form of esoteric knowledge (songs, dance, rituals, and invocations) and communal institutions (longhouses, pigs) and imposed the moral order. The gift is collective property and knowledge that unifies the Mentawai as a society. Without these communal institutions, the Mentawai would not have a cultural order (Hammons 2010). Furthermore, people would have no reason to share food and enact unity. The assassination marks the primordial separation of the underworld spirits from the forebears of today’s human population. The orphan boy was a messenger who sacrificed so people could learn his lessons about having a proper community and developing social unity. The spirits (in the form of the crocodile) laid down the fundamental moral code that describes how to enact mutuality.

The wrath of the spirits and the taboo of eating alone: sharing as moral order and source of mutuality

The myths explain succinctly that humans and the spirit worlds share a moral universe and values. The forest and water are not hostile domains to be conquered and subjugated; instead, they constitute the limits of Mentawai’s social and cultural world. Every Mentawai – man and woman – has free access to knowledge about the myths and workings of the universe. The stories are not exclusively narrated in a special event but are told alongside the many different kinds of stories people share in the evenings after returning to their houses from a long day in the gardens. The younger generation might not fully understand the myths, but they can certainly hear adults recall them when a social act breaches the moral order. People continuously confirm adherence to a common ontological understanding through daily actions and behavior. In this way, the Mentawai’s view of the cosmos and the spirits has survived and remained firmly rooted even though they have formally adopted one of Indonesia’s official religions after vicious government intervention (Persoon 1994; Singh, Kaptchuk and Henrich, 2021).

Spirits are always the source of explanations when something goes wrong, or somebody suffers a misfortune. When a man gets ill after working in the forest, he might have encountered a spirit who has enormous power. He might curse or speak inappropriate words that invoke the anger of ancestor spirits or have a quarrel with his wife that angers the spirit of the house. In this worldview, humans and the various species of conscious personages interact according to the cosmo-rules that govern behavior and are a prerequisite for maintaining order (Howell 2011). Nothing happens coincidentally, and everything has a reason. In a society that did not develop stratified social institutions, no fellow human may seek retribution against another; this is always done by non-human beings who are enabled to do so by the human infraction.

These prescriptions are essential in explaining the obligation to share food. When a person is ill without an apparent reason (pangoringen), people believe that one member of the family or uma has breached the social taboo against eating alone. Pangoringen is a message sent by sikaoinan. The spirit enters the perpetrator’s house and resides in the beam. It watches the family, and its presence causes the person to fall ill. A communal healing ritual (pabetei) must be enacted to cure the ill person, during which a shaman offers a plate consisting of a pinch of meat and a magic charm (gaud) to persuade the spirit to forgive the transgression. The patient confesses his or her mistake and promises not to repeat the act of eating alone. The spirit will eventually leave the beam, descend to the plate, and be brought to the river by the shaman to be set afloat and drift away with the current, returning it to its place in the water. Sikaoinan might choose a severe punishment by dragging someone into the water. The spirit might also transform into a crocodile and attack humans. When a person is drowning, or a crocodile appears unexpectedly, kills livestock, and even attacks people, the message could not be clearer: the people have broken the primordial pact with the spirit.

The wrath of the sikaonan constitutes the importance of food sharing to Mentawai’s sociality. The myth of the sikaoinan links the act of sharing explicitly to the emergence of Mentawai society as it is known today. The myths narrate the sharing of food by the boy and the crocodile, the embodiment of the water spirit. The myth also evokes the connection between sharing and social unity. Humans were taught to share all gifts from the spirit. Skill, powers, and individual prowess are sources of autonomy but can also provoke jealousy and tend to subvert equality and instigate rivalry, eroding social solidarity. Envy of food is particularly dangerous. Food, in the form of living animals and plants, as well as meat and cooked items, is a source of selfishness and leads to the danger of uncontrolled autonomy. So, by integrating two seemingly unrelated themes – sharing and mutuality – in one origin myth, the Mentawai are, in fact, showing how sharing and society are inseparable.

While sharing food is a fundamental aspect of Mentawai’s sociality, this does not prevent people from elaborating strategies of food deception. When a man returns from a garden and brings a basket full of fruits, they normally say they have “nothing” (tak anai) or too little (boirok lai). A man goes to great lengths to cover his canoe full of fish with a plastic tarpaulin. “Only enough for one meal (sanga kopman)” is a standard reply when a woman asks how much fish or clams he has brought home. “Too little” or “nothing” are common words to express a devious way of ensuring that food is not exposed for others to see. My interlocutors claim that exposing food to others is dangerous, especially if they cannot share it. When someone sees and wants food but does not get any, his soul feels slighted and envious (siksik baga). A person with siksik baga is vulnerable to jealousy, leading to silent violence, generally in sorcery. So, whoever sees others bringing food from the garden gets a fair share of what he or she asks for. This share is called bela mata, literally “a thing to close eyes” but figuratively a thing to prevent envy. Despite the strategy of hiding food indicating that people often deceive one another, no Mentawai secrets have been revealed. The Mentawai understand that the meaning of “we have little” is not related to the control of greed found in Melanesian society (Kahn 1986, 44) but the prevention of envy. The moral obligation to share and the various strategies to conceal food indicate that the term “demand sharing” (Peterson 1993; Widlok 2021) might not be the correct term for Mentawai. Demand sharing implies a focus on the recipient, while the moral obligation of Mentawai sharing lies with the owner or producer.

Sharing encompasses the Mentawai sociality that operates in the human realm and beyond. When a human kills game or sacrifices a domestic animal, he has to give them to the spirits, although giving away food to the spirits is not always termed sharing but rather exchange (panaki) and reciprocity (Schefold 1980, 1988). The Mentawai always share the flesh of the game they kill with either sikaoinan or sikalelu, usually the left ear of a forest animal or the tail of a larger fish or dugong. These items are a kind of gift exchanged to transmit inter-species perspectives according to rules of inversion: small for the human, significant for the spirit, left for the human, right for the spirit. By returning part of what they have taken, they ensure the replacement of the killed animal, not in the sense of rebirth but as a source of future fortune. These relationships between parallel and overlapping worlds display moral connotations and contribute, I suggest, to feelings of mutuality and solidarity.

Relations with the spirits are slightly different from human-to-human relations. Whenever people slaughter domestic animals (Figure 5) or hunt game, the meat should be chopped into tiny pieces and divided equally (otcai) among families and individuals. The materiality of the meat is critical, as game and domestic livestock provide a regular and necessary source of protein for many people. However, the Mentawai never elaboratively discuss pork or killed game in numerical or caloric terms. People say, “Any meat is good as long as it is not rotten and enough to be shared with others.” “It nourishes the soul of the people and makes us sit together happy,” others explain. Principally, meat embodies the unity of society. The materiality of meat is beyond nutrition. In having pigs and killing monkeys, the Mentawai see the meaning or importance of individual creative energies, skills, knowledge, and someone’s capacity as socially autonomous. In this capacity, the animals can generate social prestige for an individual – either the hunter or the owner of the pigs – in intersubjective relationships (Darmanto 2020, 183). Nevertheless, they also embody collective purpose, the ultimate object of people’s desire.

There is a connection between not sharing food (especially meat), the danger of individual prestige, and the need for social unity. The Mentawai highly regard individual prestige but view the group’s unity as the most vital principle (Hammons 2010; Schefold 1991). The two principles can sometimes contradict each other. Having as many pigs as possible becomes the ultimate goal of individual actions, but sharing pork to enact the unity of society is the communal goal. This principle generates its contradiction: any pigs needed for a communal ritual risk promoting conflict and disrupting the social order. A pig owner always has a dilemma: whether to keep pigs for his autonomy and prestige at the cost of disrupting communal harmony and creating social conflict or give them away for communal meals. Sharing food manifests how the Mentawai balance the tension of autonomy and relatedness (Fajans 2006) and serves to enact social unity and solidarity as “the dominant political values of a society” (Gibson 1985; Woodburn 2005). The principles observed in sharing meat operate throughout social life, either in daily life at the family level or in a ritual at the uma level, as discussed in the following sections.

Figure 4. A taro garden is gendered space where women cultivate, manage, and harvest taro and occasionally gather small fish, shrimps and frogs.

Figure 5. Pigs and chickens, the most important domestic animals, are prepared for a ritual feast (punen).

Eating together, creating relatedness: daily meals in the family

The Mentawai do not consume elaborate meals daily (Darmanto 2020; Schefold 1982) (Figure 6). Typical family meals involve roasted sago, boiled taro, rice, or a combination of these, with condiments and vegetables boiled in coconut curry or meat in bamboo. Small fish, shrimp, and sago grubs are sources of protein regularly gathered by women. In coastal villages, saltwater fish are the most desirable source of protein. If there is cash available, fish is purchased from local markets. The amount of food, especially staples (kat), is always more than enough for the expected participants.

Figure 6. A typical family meal. People gather together in a circle enjoy taro dumpling (subbet), roasted sago and steamed fish in bamboo tubes.

Figure 7. A woman prepares taro dumpling rolled in grated coconut (subbet).

A family meal is a microcosm of the society. It represents implicit rules (Bloch 1991) on how the person’s autonomy and the family’s unity should be performed despite the lack of explicit verbal explanation. Food is placed on the floor with family members sitting in a circle. All the members of the family are expected to sit down together. Nobody ever takes his or her portion and walks away from the circle. If a family member has not returned in time for a meal, the other members wait until they are back. The equality is evident from the absence of any privilege enjoyed by the parents, as the food producers, in relation to the amount and type of food they eat. A very young child can sit closer to a desirable item (especially fish or meat) and have as much of it as an adult. A pregnant mother may receive the best portion and consume more meat, but anyone can take any served food. The togetherness represented in such family meals shapes family relations. Eating is not only performed by all family members; a family member is also not allowed to eat away from the house. Thus, there is a great reluctance to eat meals in other people’s houses. Eating everyday communal meals with another family is strongly discouraged, even for children. This commensality is a prime focus of what it means to be an autonomous family.

The ideal family meal is frequently disrupted by the reality that younger generations go to school and spend time away from the house. Schoolchildren eat meals later, when they have returned home, or prefer to have meals on their own. People often refer to the changing behavior of their kids, who now eat elsewhere and have little time with the rest of the family. When a family member does not join a meal, their absence generates sadness (goak baga). To assuage this emotion, the parents give a portion of the meal (musibla) to the absentee and call on the soul of the absentee not to be sad and lonely. Another form of disruption is the emergence of a new habit of dining in local restaurants. This recent development has seen some people obtaining non-farm jobs and the purchasing power to have ready-to-eat meals. Typically, they are the subject of public gossip. Those who frequently eat out in local restaurants are accused of stealing public money. As Bai Alex, a woman from Muntei village, put it, “These people, their pockets are full of money, and they eat delicious things (kat simananam), but their families are hungry at home. Their appetite for non-mentawai meals makes them thieves.” An adult woman who enjoys restaurant food is considered not a proper wife. Eating separately or outside the home is still perceived negatively and thought to threaten the very principle of the family relationship.

Food, women, and kinship

The family (lalep) is the basic social unit in which the Mentawai realize the ideal form of social relations in which two autonomous persons develop mutuality and share emotional and physical activities without losing autonomy. It is organized according to a principle of mutual dependency and co-productive work and through relations between men and women from different groups and relations between parents and their children. The family is also the primary institution that produces kinship relationships, as it is necessary for the continuation of life formulated generally in biological and genealogical terms (Loeb 1928), which implies some basis in sexual reproduction.

A marriage starts with an emotional relationship between a mature man and a woman. Maturity here is defined in terms of the ability of an individual to engage in sexual intercourse, to work in a garden, and to provide food for themselves, even though most married persons start sexual relationships as early as their teens, a long time before they are self-sufficient. The couple will figure out the relationship long before they inform their parents. Forced or planned marriage is unknown. Marriages are entirely based on freely terminable relations between individuals. Both parents may intervene when the relationship is severe and becomes publicly known. In other circumstances, a couple may approach their parents and inform them of their intention to marry. When the couple and the parents share the same view, the bride and groom’s families prepare for the marriage. A proper marriage requires elaborate rituals and a complex arrangement of the bride-price payment. The process is complicated and takes several months, even years, to complete.

The most crucial step in the marriage process is the formal induction of the woman into the man’s uma through the ritual of paruruk simagre (inducing the souls). The ritual is often referred to as alak toga, literally meaning taking the kid, but in English, the term should be translated as “adopting the kid.” The term illustrates the relationship between adoption and siblingship that is found in the institution of marriage in Southeast Asia (Carsten 2000) and indicates that the “exchange of women” (Levi-Strauss 1969) is not a universal concept. The ritual entails informing the ancestral spirits of the man’s uma and the autochthonous spirit living below the ritual house (taikabaga) that the bride is now a member of their uma. The central feature of the induction ceremony involves the groom and the bride eating together from the same wooden plate (lulag). This is the first time the couple shares a meal in public. Consuming food together symbolizes the convergence of the couple’s souls. The food is also given to autochthonous spirits, including taikabaga and sikaoinan, who are summoned to occupy the heirloom in the ritual house’s central pole (Reeves 1994; Schefold 1991). The blessing of these spirits ensures the fertility of gardens and women, manifested through the blessing of the earthquake spirit that signals a good harvest from the fruit trees and the ability of women to produce more children (Schefold 2007).

In the marriage, sexual relations and eating are intimately connected. The couple is referred to as people who are “eating together” or “eating each other,” which are euphemisms for having sex. It is said that both father and mother contribute equally to creating a fetus. The mother contributes to the blood of the fetus while the father’s semen (suat tigei) produces the flesh. After the woman ceases to have periods, her blood flows to the fetus. The quality of food is directly related to the quality of the blood of the mother, which in turn is directly related to the quality of the milk and the blood of the fetus, illuminating the argument that the basis for kinship involves the transmission and transaction of substances (Carsten 2000; Fajans 1988; Tomas 1999). This is why pregnant women are given the best food available. The term for the fetus is suruket, meaning those who need protection. From this moment, the parents should protect the fetus by eating certain foods and engaging in certain activities. More crucially, it is taboo for a married couple to eat and live separately. Breaking this taboo is considered a severe mistake (masoilo) that will anger the sikaoinan.

The Mentawai states that sexual relations and marriage primarily form kinship ties. However, biological relations are not seen as the primary purpose of family and kinship relations. The purpose of the family is to produce autonomous social actors through the mutuality of an adult woman and an adult man (Darmanto 2020), as in non-stratified societies elsewhere (Gibson 2015; Buitron and Steinmüller, 2020). The father provides land and various gardens, while the mother cares for the kids. Both contribute to the labor of care. Sharing land and labor is crucial to developing children who are not considered social actors capable of asserting autonomy. Feeding the children with good food will ensure they become healthy people who can develop mental and physical strength and eventually become healthy and autonomous social actors. The ties that bind different generations together in the family are just as dependent upon the provision of the right kinds of food as they are on parents engaging in sexual relations and giving birth.

The family symbolizes the necessity of sharing and companionship and the moral universe of unity. Regarding unity, the care of women and the house is central to kinship (Figure 7), illuminating the family’s dependency as a social group in Southeast Asia on women and the physical house (Carsten 1996; Fox 2006, 1). Those who sit together and share daily meals can be defined and considered family (sara ina) in the same way as those who share the blood and milk of the same mother. Further, the presence of women determines the reproductive cycle of the lalep as a physical and social space. The word for women (sinanalep: those who guard the house) is derived from the word for a house (lalep). A house never has two sinanalep and practically ceases to be once the mother dies or returns to her clan. The existence of the lalep as a physical building and social institution is maintained by women’s reproductive powers, both natural and cultural. Through their bodies, women naturally produce new kin and food for nourishment. Women mediate the ties between ascending and descending generations and nurture relationships through feeding (see Carsten 1997). Mentawai notions of kinship have links to sexual reproduction, but they are not entirely biological or sexual and, more importantly, are social processes involving feeding, care, and protection (Carsten 1997; Counihan and Van Esterik, 2013) that operate beyond the realm of humans.

Sharing and eating: producing social value in the ritual meal (Punen)

Sharing and eating food together are elaborated through a communal religious ritual called punen.² Punen may be conducted for many different reasons or with a specific aim and have different durations, but are mainly carried out for two reasons: following the completion of collective work, such as the construction of a long house, and as a response to misfortunes such as the illness or death. Other events, such as purifying a house, initiating children, and opening a forest garden, are usually integrated into Punen. Generally, the more important and successful the collective work, the more prolonged and extensive the punen. The greater the misfortune, the more animals must be sacrificed. The causal link between the sacrifice and fortune/misfortune (Gibson 1988) means that the instigator of the punen (sibakkat punen) does not gain any prestige. Punen consists of a series of performative and coordinative acts that reinforce the relations between the souls of living humans, the spirits of the ancestors, and the autochthonous spirits and ensure the convergence of the perspectives of all animated social beings. It is carried out typically in a long house (also called uma). Preparing food, slaughtering sacrificed animals, cooking food, and giving offerings are acts to establish communion between these beings.

Another feature of punen is that it requires collective sacrifice. The initiator provides sacrificed pigs, but all participants expect to contribute food, labor, and other possessions (though this is not compulsory). Allies and close neighbors are invited to attend, usually a few days before the ritual, after the pigs necessary for the pen have already been secured. This enables them to contribute a chicken or a tiny piglet. During punen, particularly at the lia stage, all members of the uma must attend along with allies and close neighbors. The participants are prohibited from walking away from the ritual house until the proceedings have been completed. They also must abandon productive work such as cutting trees and clearing weeds in the garden. When the animals are about to be slaughtered for the offering, and a gong is beaten to start the lia, participants must gather together and are banned from consuming raw food, including uncooked water. Participants are also forbidden from having sexual intercourse. Schefold (1982) provides an excellent interpretation of the role of food and sex taboos in the communal ritual. He describes how eating sour and raw food (malagak) is associated with the sharpness of hunting weapons for collecting hunting. Unprocessed and uncooked foods have a sharp taste and can cause injury in the mouth, so they are associated with the sharpness of a machete. Sexual intercourse is a private relationship and, as such, contradicts the collective goal of the group. Transgressions of taboos cause the spirits of the forest or water and spirits of game animals to go into hiding and avoid attending the ritual.

While I generally support Schefold’s analysis, I observed that the taboo complex is not merely acted out symbolically. Firstly, food and sex taboos mark punen as an entirely social and cultural affair. Raw food is a natural product. Sex is a natural activity that all animals engage in. Uncooked water and raw food are deemed to belong to natural or wild spaces – remember that water and the forest are associated with the domain of the sikaleleu and sikaoinan spirits. Anything that comes from the wilderness is denied. Food and sex taboos do not merely enact a symbolic explanation of the disorderliness of everyday life, as Schefold (1982) argues. However, they aim to transform the disorderliness caused by the selfishness of individual interests – which instigate competition, rivalry, and social tension – into collective solidarity by getting everyone to share the same substance and social labor. All taboos in punen manifest the denial of individual acts, motivated by an ultimate collective purpose, given that sharing and eating together are at the core of communal identity.

Feeding the souls and the spirit

The ultimate objective of punen is the communion of spirits – the souls of the living humans, the spirits of the ancestors, and the autochthonous spirits in the forest. All these entities must be summoned and enticed to come closer together. The shaman typically uses honorific terminology for autochthonous spirits, indicating the reluctance of humans to be close to them. In the first phase of feeding the soul and the spirits, the focus is on the ancestor spirits and living humans. The invitation and enticement of the spirits require a magic charm (gaud). Gaud comprises diverse leaves, flowers, and food. Coconuts, chickens, and pigs are the most critical gaud during the ritual. When the lia is about to be enacted, the shaman begins the process of food offerings (Figure 8). The shaman then comes to the house’s heirloom (bakkat katsaila) and offers gaud. The bakkat katsaila is a kind of “the ritual attractors” (Fox 2006, 3) where people believe that the spirits are present (remember the killing of the orphaned boy). A whole coconut fruit is the first food gaud to be offered to the ancestors and autochthonous spirits. During the invocation, the qualities of the coconut are metaphorically associated with the aim of the ritual: protection of the group from negative external influences (Reeves 1994; Schefold 1982). The shell of the coconut symbolizes a protective shield that will prevent the presence of external powers and bad spirits. It also symbolizes the power of life, bearing many offspring and sprouting a new generation. Chickens are then slaughtered and offered to the ancestors’ spirits. The shaman takes the chicken and gently swings it over the head of the participants, touching their bodies with its tail feathers.

Figure 8. Shamans open a punen and invokes to the spirit of the sacrificed animal.

After the chickens, pigs are sacrificed (teinungakek) and offered to the souls of the participants and the ancestor spirits (Figure 9). The shaman brushes the katsaila stalk against the pig’s body and asks permission to read its entrails (lauru). The invocation is aimed mainly at the autochthonous spirits and the spirits of hunted animals. The entrails, especially the lungs and the pig’s heart, are then read. The carcasses of the chickens and pigs are brought out of the house to be singed and later butchered, sorted, and divided. As the shaman of the ceremony splits up the bamboo and places slices of liver on the dumpling, an invocation is uttered to the spirits of the ancestors by the bakkat katsaila. The placement of the liver into the intestines mimics the position of coconut flesh relative to the coconut shell. The liver is safely positioned on the right half of the hearth. When the chicken is cut into two halves, the liver is protected. The liver’s power to protect the souls of living humans is activated through the shaman’s speech. Other slices of liver and dumplings are then offered to the humans’ spirits and the spirit of the game animals, and the spirits guarding them. The liver is food for the ancestors.

Figure 9. Pigs are killed, sacrificed and then to the spirits of human and non-human entities.

The feeding of living souls and the spirits of the ancestors and autochthonous conscious people illuminates the general feature of what James Fox calls the “flow of life,” which is familiar to Austronesian anthropologists (Bloch and Parry 1982; Fox 1980; Janowski 2007; Tsintjilonis 2004) in constructing relatedness. The “flow of life” among the Mentawai emanates from wife givers, ancestors and autochthonous spirits (Schefold 2001). Sharing food and feeding the ancestor spirits maintains kin ties between the living and the dead that start with biological relations. Giving meat to ancestors does not symbolize dependency but unification and mutuality. The symbolism of coconut and “round” chicken embodies the blessing from the spirits that make the production of successive generations of people possible, and the key to successful reproduction is successfully channeling the life force to the next generation. Enticing the spirits and feeding them makes the ancestors and autochthonous spirits give their blessing for worldly good fortune (Bloch 1993; Telle 2000; Schiller 2002). One feature of the Mentawai notion of the flow of life that contrasts with those of other Austronesian societies is the collapse of the distinction between autochthonous spirits, ancestor spirits, and the souls of humans living in the ritual (Schefold 2001). They are different beings but share the world as indicated in the sikaoinan and sikaleleu myths. They are bound by a cosmo-rule explicitly invoked through sharing and eating together.

Eating together: the transformative quality of food in punen

The main event of the later stage is a communal feast. The mood is more upbeat. It recycles the features of the earlier stage, but the focus is on a communal feast with the autochthonous spirits. The defining feature of the second set of offerings is that they feature only cooked meat, marking a fundamental shift in the proceedings. The shaman takes more mashed taro rolled in grated coconut (subbet) from the wooden platter and breaks up the cooked chicken liver and tail fat, uttering phrases similar to those accompanying the opening of the coconut. He then offers a pinch of cooked pork to the bakkat katsaila, which serves the same purpose as the presentation of the coconut: the protection of the group from nefarious influences. While the shamans perform offerings, the participants prepare firewood, heating up a few large pans and boiling meat for the communal meal. The women prepare sago and taro dumplings. In this penultimate stage of mulia, the cooked meat is sorted and divided into muscle meat (akula), fat (lainang), skin (kulit), and entrails (siribaga). An equal share (otcai) is put aside for each family.

Cooking and eating are crucial to understanding the state of lia (mulia) in which food is the transformative agent that permits the resuscitation of the internal unity of the group and social renewal (Reeves 1994; Schefold 1982). Cooked food manifests a social process in which human labor transforms raw food from the natural space, and the transformation becomes an agent for social unity. Cumulative social relations are entailed by the pile of food on the lulag. Cooked meat is served alongside taro dumplings and roasted sago. Each family takes a spot and eats together. The communal meal in punen resembles daily family meals (Figure 10). The food is laid on the lulag platter or a large metal plate (talam), with members of the lalep sitting around it. The family performs it undividedly, simultaneously marking the boundaries and symbolizing the unity of each family. In this context, meat and sago or dumplings do not produce equality. This might be the defining feature of Mentawai sharing, as otcai is typically not given to individuals in other societies (Woodburn 2005; Peterson 1993; Gibson 2010) but to family.

Figure 10. A ritual feast. Each lalep has its own plater (lulag).

At the end of the communal meal, the shaman punen offers the upper thigh of the chicken, which is round (simuine). He calls upon the spirits to ensure that the group will be “round” and that the participants will be united. If the uma intends to complete the punen with ritual game hunting in the sea or forest, a small ritual is organized the following day. A pig is slaughtered, and the uncooked meat is offered to the spirits of the forest and water and the spirit of the game animal, whose favors are no less essential for human physical well-being and prosperity. The meat of the game is the visible symbol of these favors; it is interpreted as a sign that the forest spirits approve of the offerings made to them. The successful hunt indicates that the communal ritual has succeeded in its entirety. Not all punen, however, are completed by hunting. Nowadays, people do not go hunting for various reasons, such as the scarcity of animals, their distance from the forest, or the time constraints of modern life. Instead, people use domestic animals to substitute for game.

Punen provides a platform to understand the importance of food and sharing in Mentawai sociality. During punen, all members of the group – the living and the dead, as well as the autochthonous spirits – are aggregates of people, while cooked food consumed together is an aggregate of human actions. While there is an arrangement differentiated according to gender, age, and form, punen commemorates an ethos whereby the only possible excuse for autonomy and the assertion of social prestige is to acquire the ability to give it all away to the social whole, including the spirits. No matter how much the initiator and any particular lalep contributes, each family receives an equal portion of the meat. A family that contributed all the pigs will be given the same amount of food as other families. Otcai and eating together illuminate the definition of sharing: “the asymmetrical relations between giver and recipient in parallel the relations of the whole and the other a part of it” (Gibson 1988, 175). Each producer of food (lalep) is obliged to give only to the uma of which it is a part, and is entitled to receive only from the uma, or as an undifferentiated part of it. The recipients of meat do not become indebted to the sponsor of the moment; their obligation is only to the group as a whole. In punen, the Mentawai apply what contemporary anthropologists somehow claim is anarchic solidarity in the sense that value is produced by society as a whole, and all members of the uma should be regarded as shareholders, so everyone has a right to a share of the total social product (Ferguson 2015; Gibson and Sillander 2011).

Sharing and eating together activate the value of food and enact the agency and power of food, bringing humans and non-human beings together. Pigs and chickens are just as imperative to rituals. The meat of pigs and chickens is not only a product of labor and skill but also invisible potency, such as a person’s magic and ability to transcend the perspective of the spirits. Sago, taro, or pork have specific properties associated with their symbols or character (growth, sprouting, abundance). However, they do not “cause” effects nor “act” for equality all by themselves (Abrahamsson et al. 2015, 14). The agentivity of food is activated through motherhood in the domestic sphere and through gaud, the invocations of shamans, cooking, and sharing in the public sphere. Meat represents a communal desire and value that can only be realized through sharing and eating. More importantly, its ability to transform events and social processes (Fajans, 1988, 1997) ensures that food is central in helping Mentawai social actors redefine and even remake their sociality and mutuality.

Conclusion

This article describes eating and sharing patterns that hint at the importance of food in Mentawai’s sociality and mutuality. My ethnographic material indicates that sharing in a non-stratified society is not determined by the mode of the economy and people’s livelihoods (Woodburn 2005, 1982) and supports the argument that agricultural societies provide the key to a deeper understanding of sharing (Gibson 2005; Gibson and Sillander, 2011; Sillander 2019; Buitron and Steinmüller, 2020). The Mentawai create a social life with the obligation to share, although they develop property and participate in “delayed-return activities” by cultivating the forest and tending livestock. The difference between the Mentawai and other horticulturalists (Gibson 2019; 2015; Gibson and Sillander 2011) might be that the Mentawai emphasize autonomy, equality, and relatedness within the family (lalep), not specific individuals. Sharing is organized through vertical relations of feeding in the domestic sphere and horizontal relations of donor-initiated meat distribution in communal rituals. Daily sharing in the family and ritual sharing in the uma is the ultimate way for the Mentawai to balance autonomy and relatedness by transforming individual actions into collective structured ones. Mentawai sharing evokes the way other societies navigate the tension between self and other (Myers 1986; Woodburn, 1988) and recalibrates the dialectical problems of autonomy and relatedness (Carsten 2000; Fajans 2006; Widlok 2017, 2021), constantly resolving the tensions arising from this dialectic.

The Mentawai also offer a different explanation for the very reason a society shares. Their behavior does not support refusal and other reactionist explanations (Gibson and Sillander, 2011; Dentan 1994; Kaskija 2007). Their origin myth (Bakker 1999; Darmanto 2020) indicates that they and the mainland people are siblings who share similar attributes and characters and have no hint of a predatory relationship. My analysis supports the argument that sharing is predicated on a “metaphysical and ontological understanding” (Howell 2011, 4). The Mentawai creatively formulate their relationship with the more-than-human in a universe with a single moral order that ensures the absence of subordination of humans and non-humans. Their relationships have moral connotations and help generate feelings of companionship and the obligation to continue relationships based on autonomy and mutuality. Here, I argue that sharing is not only constituted by the mode of production but also by the mode of thought and especially the construction of personhood and the mutuality of conscious people, making the practices more resilient (Barnard 2002, 6). Recent ethnographic surveys in Siberut (Singhs, Kaptchuk and Henrich, 2021) strongly indicate that the Mentawai mode of relating to and thinking about the spirits is being sustained. The Mentawai mode of thought can be traced to a shared perception of the universe and primordial pacts between human and non-human entities that govern and sanction behavior well established in Southeast Asian anthropology and beyond (Bird-David, 2017; Howell 1985; Buitron and Steinmüller, 2021). The importance of sharing and eating as key activities in the Mentawai mode of thought echoes what von Poser terms “moral foodways” (Von Poser, 2013, 74), in which food and the way it is cultivated, shared, and exchanged generates and creates material and symbolic interdependence between humans as well as between human and the more-than-human world (Chao 2021).

The notion of interdependence thus highlights the importance of situating food materiality in a broader social context (Mol 2013; Yates-Doerr, 2015). I describe how all foods – milk, blood, roasted sago pork – are materially crucial for the quality of the human body. They are active agents in the physical development of a person and the social construction of personhood. However, these foods’ importance, power, and agency do not solely rely on their quality, quantity, or attributes. Digested food does not act by itself but is enacted through the multiplicity of the process of evolution from raw plants or living animals to cooked meals to offerings for the spirits. The whole range of activities involved in food transformation defines the agentivity of food, both for the producer and the consumers. All these transformations require the actions of other agents and take place through relationships (Mol 2010). Abbots (2007) argues that human actors and social processes mediate food agentivity through eating and digesting. The Mentawai specifically emphasizes the agentivity of meat by eating together and sharing. Furthermore, my ethnographic materials draw attention to the multiplicity of food relations. At once material, moral, affective, and symbolic, sharing food highlights how nourishment is shaped not just by the materiality of food but also by how humans think about and relate to the more-than-human (Chao 2021). Sharing and eating together transforms pigs, sago, and chicken into meals and offerings and shapes life’s spatiality and temporality, bringing humans and non-humans together, imbricating them fully and irrevocably in a shared world (Slocum et al. 2016, 1).

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

The work was supported by the StrategieAV21, Czech Academy of Science and GCAR (Grantová agentura České republiky) [24-13058S].

Notes

1. Anthropologists, colonial officers and missionaries have recorded Mentawai myths (Bakker 1999; Kruyt 1979; Loeb 1929a; Spina 1982; Schefold 1988;). My collection has similarities with the collection of Schefolds and others working in the area (Hammons 2010; Reeves 1994). Most myths, especially the origin of the water spirit and forest spirit, relate to, for example, the myths of Maligai and Pageta sabbau recorded by Spina (1982) and Loeb (1929b). My interlocutors have told me variants of the myths recorded by Reimar Schefold (1973, 2002) during my long-term fieldwork, which has spanned two decades (2004–2024). The two myths presented here are brief and concise versions of the myths recorded by Schefold and those told to me.

2. Mentawai anthropologists use different vocabulary and terms to refer the communal rituals. Working in the southern islands, Loeb (1929a) employs two terms, punen and puliaijat, to distinguish them according to the scale, the cause, and the place of the ritual. Punen is held at a community level (uma and village), while the puliaijat is organized at the family level. Anthropologists working in Siberut rarely employ punen but prefer lia or puliaijat (Hammons 2010; Reeves 1994; Schefold 1973, 1985; Schefold, 1991). Those anthropologists also have different views on the ultimate purpose of punen and puliaijat. My interlocutors indicate that punen refers to the whole ceremonial event, including the process of preparing food, inviting guests, and making ornaments, while lia or puliaijat specifically alludes to the sacrifice of pigs and chickens, the enactment of invocations and offerings to the spirits, and the communal feast. Lia or puliaijat occurs when all participants are present in a ritual house, the animals are ready to be killed and offered, and a series of taboos are in effect. Punen and lia or puliaijat are often conflated. However, they have never been used for ceremonial events in a church or state ceremonies.