Reading guide for the seminar:
The text below is by no means a finished paper. I have written it as a starting point for
developing ideas about how to engage the concept of domestication from my Ifugao material.
So, when you read, look for potential interesting aspects, things I can develop and so on. I
will change the structure of the text, even perhaps the main argument (whatever that is at this
point).This is just a bunch of ideas to start off with, I guess.
Becoming humans at the margins of the otherwise: Domestication
and sacrificial rituals
Abstract for the workshop De-Centering Domestication: Exploring the Otherwise
Jon Henrik Ziegler Remme
Postdoctoral research fellow
Department of Social Anthropology
University of Oslo
j.h.remme@sai.uio.no
Abstract
This paper examines how among the Ifugao of Northern Luzon, the Philippines, humans
become humans through engaging in shifting forms of entanglements with various other-thanhuman entities. All entities that the Ifugao consider living (including ancestors) share a
common quality of having a life force, lennawa, but they are distinguished from each other
through the form of their bodies. These distinct bodily differences are however volatile.
Humans may transform into spirits, and animals may become otherwise than what they
1
apparently are. This vicissitudinous aspect of life in Ifugao makes the stabilization of the
distinct life form of humans, animals and spirits an effect of continuous relational efforts.
What is particularly interesting with the Ifugao case is that the continued life of these entities,
humans and spirits in particular, thrives on the temporary dissolution of differences, i.e. of
engaging with one’s own potential for becoming otherwise. This potential is in Ifugao most
explicitly engaged with in sacrificial rituals in which humans enter into a virtual space-time in
which their humanness is at risk only to reassert it through consecutive acts of
disentanglements. It is notable here that at the core of these entangling and disentangling
relational processes are domestic pigs. These pigs live on human lands and feed on human
food, but must also be left partly free ranging enabling them to temporarily escape into the
forest to breed with wild pigs, which are the domestic pigs of the spirits. In this paper, I use
the volatile nature of Ifugao humanness and the role of domestic pigs in sacrificial rituals to
examine that fruitful space we could call the ‘margins of the otherwise’. The paper thus
discusses what becomes of human becoming in an entangled world and how the practice of
domestication of the otherwise in Ifugao is always of question of partiality. The paper by that
also discusses how new conceptualizations of domestication speaks to new theorizations of
rituals and sacrifice.
Introduction
Current debates regarding the concept of domestication have generated valuable new insights
and understandings of human-animal relations and as a consequence forced us to rethink what
it means to be human. Today’s interest in multispecies anthropology, human-animal relations
and the concept of domestication thus enters into a long history of philosophical and
theological discussions on the mode of existence of the anthropos and its relations with that
which in one way or another is otherwise to it. The novelty of current perspectives on these
2
relations should not lead us to forget that human-animal relations are by no means new as an
anthropological theme. After all, human-animal relations have recurrently appeared on the
anthropological scene ever since the discipline’s incipiency, be it as one of the prime means
for differentiating between evolutionary stages in Morgan’s evolutionary theory, as totemic
species, symbolic abominations, or good to think with. As human-animals relations have
moved in and out of the anthropological spotlight, they have taken on different shapes and
had diverse effects in terms of the conceptualization of the human they implicitly or explicitly
imply. The contemporary development of so-called multispecies anthropology, various posthumanist approaches and their associated analytical efforts, including the rethinking of the
concept of domestication, have once again brought relations between humans and nonhuman
animals onto the table. However, while many of the previous anthropological theories on
human-animal relations, except perhaps Lévy-Bruhl’s theorization of participation, have
operated with humans and animals as separate categories that pre-exist their relations, what
Candea (2010) has termed the post-symbolic turn has entailed a change in how we envision
these relations. While animals previously have figured mainly as either material resources or
as symbols – that is as food or food for thought – both of these approaches have focused on
how animals are used by humans and by that implicitly treated them as objects (Mullin, 1999).
The most radical consequence of the post-symbolic turn in human-animal studies is, one
could argue, the rethinking of the ontological status of both humans and animals it has
generated. The recent development of concepts such as ‘symbiogenesis’, ‘becoming-with’,
‘humanimal’ and so on have challenged the earlier approaches assumptions of the prerelational separation of humans and animals and have emphasized instead that humans and
animals are entangled in relations of mutuality. Their relations are in that way constitutive for
the very being of these entities and a possibility for directing analytical attention towards the
3
processes by which these relations are enacted, transformed, stabilized and destabilized
through practice has correspondingly opened up.
Although human-animal relations also figure centrally in other debates in
anthropology, the theoretical developments mentioned above have not all been integrated
within them. It is particularly interesting to note that the recent rethinking of human-animal
relations in anthropology has occurred more or less concomitantly with another revisit to a
classical debate with the discipline. I think here of what has become known as the New
Animism debate in which relations between human and nonhuman animals also figure just as
centrally as in multispecies anthropology and post-symbolic human-animal studies. While the
concept of animism for a long period remained associated with Turner’s notions of primitive
thought, it was revived by the end of the twentieth century by people like Bird-David (1999),
Ingold (2006), Viveiros de Castro (1998), Willerslev (2007) and Descola (2013) to name a
few. Heavily involved in the controversies generated by the claim for an ontological turn in
anthropology (Henare et al., 2010), the notions of animism, totemism and – the new
newcomer of them – perspectivism, have been mobilized in an attempt to revisit
anthropological engagements with the problems of radical alterity and comparison. At the
core of many of these new studies of animism are relations between humans and their otherthan-human consociates, a thematic field they thus share with the above mentioned humananimal approaches within the discipline.
However, despite the obvious common interest of these two branches of anthropology,
there has so far been little cross-fertilization between them. In this article I attempt to amend
this situation by discussing how the anthropology of animism can contribute to thinking
domestication otherwise and how the recent rethinking of the concept of domestication can
inform our understanding of relations between humans and other-than-human beings within
animism.
4
I will do that by grounding my discussion in ethnography from Ifugao, the Philippines,
which demonstrates that, on the one hand, domestication must be understood in relation not
only to human-animal relations but in relation to a wider ecology of relations that also
includes other other-than-human beings, for instance those beings the Ifugao call bā’i. I will
also argue that a proper understanding of Ifugao human-animal-bā’i relations necessitates the
contextualization of these relations within a particular ontological dynamic that engenders a
tension between stabilization and destabilization of these entities. The aim is here to
demonstrate how domestication and human-animal relations can be thought otherwise if we
situate it within a relational field that extends beyond both humans and animals and which, in
the Ifugao case, is – and must be – highly transformational and dynamic in terms of the states
of being of these entities. The background for this is that human-bā’i relations are enacted and
transformed to a large extent through relations between humans and animals, most
importantly through domestic pigs. Certain practices of domestication are crucial for ensuring
proper enactment of the human-bā’i relations, and since these latter relations are constitutive
for the condition of being a human, the ongoing domestication practices of pigs are closely
related to the relational efforts of becoming human, of remaining stable in one’s human state
of being.
While these ideas demonstrate the potential fruitfulness of thinking domestication
through animism, we could also benefit from thinking animism through domestication. This is
so particularly because recent theorizations of domestication that conceptualize it in terms of
notions such as ‘symbiogenesis’, ‘becoming with’ and so on provide us with a broader and
much more complex understanding of relations between humans, animals and spirits than we
find in even in conventional theories of animism. Much of the ethnography mobilized in
theoretical discussions within the anthropology of animism has been derived from societies
that are if not hunter-gatherers than at least engaged in extensive hunting. The result has been
5
analyses in which relations between humans and wild and hunted animals have figured
centrally. This ‘predator and prey focus’ is of course useful when discussing animism in
societies where hunting is done, but we should not forget that animism also appears in
societies where the prime mode of contact between humans and animals is not in the predatorprey mode, but depends on quite different forms of relations1. In Ifugao it is domestic pigs
that are of greatest importance for the enactment and transformations of relations between
humans and bā’i. Domestic pigs are in many was a core medium of communication and
interaction between them, and these pigs are absolutely central as sacrificial animals. Much
anthropological theory about sacrifice revolves around the relation between humans and the
(most often) domestic sacrificed animals, and it is my suggestion that the efforts of thinking
domestication otherwise engaged in here (the workshop/book) might have potential fruitful
consequences for thinking sacrifice otherwise as well.
Hence, the target of this is article is to re-think domestication in terms of its operation
within animistic ontological dynamic and examining the consequences of thinking
domestication otherwise for our understanding of sacrifice. However, there is a twist here on
the connection between domestication and the notion of the otherwise in the title of this article.
As I shall elaborate below, the transformational ontological dynamic of the Ifugao requires
that the stabilization of the condition of becoming human must temporarily be de-stabilized.
Humans must risk losing their own particular perspective – which I will show happens in
sacrificial rituals – in order to regain and sustain it. This means that they have to temporarily –
and not without risk – engage with their own potential for becoming otherwise, for becoming
metamorphosed into that which they are not, (or that which they will become in a potential
future), namely an ancestor bā’i. This means that the ongoing process of becoming human
(and sustaining it) entails approaching the margins of one own perspective, playing with the
1
See Allerton (2009) on agricultural animism.
6
potential to become otherwise (in another article I call this the ‘otherwise within’) so to speak.
If humans are in a becoming with-relation with other-than-human beings (animals and bā’i) –
and I will argue that they in many ways are so – this becoming-with relation implies also the
potential to become otherwise2.
Hence, what I want to argue is the following. First, the enactment of human-bā’i
relations could be understood as a form of domestication. Second, the domestication of pigs
must be understood in relation to the domestication of the bā’i and these forms of
domestication must be further related to the relational efforts of becoming human. Third, both
of these forms of domestication are of a ‘slippery’ form. Pig domestication is not about full
control (just another way of criticizing Clutton-Brook) but about partially letting go, keeping
the pigs in such a way that they can move back and forth. The becoming-with relations of
humans and bā’i are also of such a slippery character. Humans must keep them at a distance
but that distance cannot remain too long and one must at times make sure that humans and
bā’i meet (i.e. in rituals). Such encounters are potentially dangerous since bā’i may lure the
life force of humans with them and thus transform them into bā’i.
Insert the structure of the argument
1. The chase: an ethnographic prelude showing the slippery character of domestic pigs –
hard to get a hand on, slipping into the forest, but being tied down (stabilized?) and
carried on a pole to be given as bride wealth and sacrificed to the bā’i.
2. Ifugao animism and ontological dynamic
a. Humans, pigs and spirits: who are they, animal classifications and practices,
spirit world.  Relations between them.
b. Perspectival differences: metamorphic potential. Practices stabilizing
perspective differences. About the need to engage in perspective shifts. Vitality
I.e. to have one’s potential for becoming otherwise actualized and thus become transformed
from becoming human to becoming bā’i.
2
7
of human beings, reproduction, and continued life as a human being
necessitates enacting relations properly: ritualsspirits and humans come
together – risky: may loose perspective differences.
c. Ritual destabilizations of perspective differences: creating a perspective of the
in-between (partly human, partly spirit perspective of the ritual – see the
Deleuze paper)
3. Domestication and sacrifice
a. How recent conceptualizations of domestication forces us to rethink sacrifice
and sacrificial animals
b. Decentering the substitution issue?
The chase – the slippery character of pig husbandry
It was in the wee hours of the morning when eight men and I gathered under the pillared
house of Mahhig, one of my neighbors in the Ifugao village where I stayed. The warmth of
Mahhig’s newly brewed coffee soon blended with the heat from the rising sun and displaced
the early morning chill. A bottle of gin was passed around, heating us up even more before we
commenced our task for the day. A male cousin of Mahhig was about to get married to a
woman in the neighboring village of Cambulo, and we had been summoned to catch a pig that
would be given as part of the madāwat, the long series of bride wealth prestations given by
the groom’s parents to the parents of the bride. The pig seemed to understand what was going
on, at least it put in a lot of effort evading our attempts at grabbing it. We tried spreading
around in the courtyard, but as soon as we came close to encircling it, the large hog rammed
right towards us, and we had to jump away to avoid getting hurt. We gave it another try, but
also this time the pig slipped between our fingers and escaped out and into the forest, hiding
behind thick bushes. After a good hour of chasing it in, around and out of the yard, Tazar
8
eventually ran over to his house next door to fetch a net that we threw over it once we
managed to corner it under the house. The pig squealed loudly as Tazar and Daniel jumped
upon it, kept it still just long enough for two others to tie its feet together. Having thus
successfully captured the pig, they stuck a bamboo pole between its feet and lifted it onto their
shoulders.
After a couple of hours of walk up and down the steep, narrow trail following the river
upstream, we arrived at the house of Mahhigs cousin’s future parents-in-law. Here the pig
would later that day be slaughtered in a ritual in which the mumbā’i, the ritual experts, would
invite the ancestors of Mahhig along with a host of other various types of bā’i. The animal
would be cut open and during the ritual, the liver would be carefully inspected and its color
and shape interpreted to see if the bā’i authorized the continuation of the marriage process.
The pig we chased in and out of Mahhig’s courtyard was a pig of the kind referred to
by the Ifugao as native pig. That term differentiated it from two other kinds of pigs: the wild
pigs that are found (although decreasingly so) in the forest surrounding the village and the
commercial pigs that are for sale at the Saturday market in the Banaue, the commercial center
of this part of the province. Although commercial pigs are valid as madāwat, this particular
occasion called for a native pig. The bā’i would not accept a wild pig since these are the
bā’i’s own domestic pigs. Commercial pigs too are unsuitable as sacrificial animals since they
have not been fed products from the swiddens and have not roamed around relatively freely as
have the native pigs. It had to be a native pig, and that pig had to be domesticated in a
particular way for the bā’i to be able to communicate their acceptance of the marriage through
them and thus for the relative of Mahhig to continue with the marriage process.
The pig we chased and caught at Mahhig’s house had lived in and around that house
for its entire life. When it was born, Mahhig and his wife had, just as they had done when
their own children had been born, stuck grass tied into a particular knot on to the gate into the
9
courtyard. This knot signified to others that the house contained newborns and that they
should not enter the house to avoid injuring or hurting the newborns. Throughout the years,
the pig had been feed sweet potatoes and vegetables that Mahhig’s wife had cultivated
through her hard labor of clearing the swidden and cultivating it in this precipitous landscape
and carried on her back down steep, muddy and slippery trails. At daytime, the pig had been
allowed to roam around freely, run along the paths and enter into the forest as it wished, but
Mahhig would always make sure that it returned by evening time when it would be locked
into the pigpen at the corner of the yard. Insert something here about the particular necklaces
that pigs wear that let them walk around freely but at the same time hinder their movement
just about enough to keep them within reasonable distance from the house.
As most other households in the village, Mahhig combined cultivating his terraced wet
rice fields and vegetable swiddens with keeping a few pigs and some chickens. While the rice
and, sweet potatoes, taro, fruit and vegetables were consumed in a daily basis, the pigs and
chickens were kept for occasions in which they would be slaughtered as part of sacrificial
rituals. The health and well-being of Mahhig and his family as well the eventual success of
their agricultural efforts depended on their relations with the bā’i. Negotiating these relations
are in Ifugao primarily done through rituals in which the bā’i receive pigs, chickens and other
things like money, eggs, cloths, spears, betel nuts and rice wine. To sustain a life of good
health and well-being requires enacting relations with the bā’i in a proper way for if these
relations are in some way distorted, the bā’i could easily cause illness by stealing away the
life force, lennāwa, of humans. The separation between lennāwa and body thus generated,
would make the human ill and set in motion a gradual transformation of the human into a bā’i,
most commonly into an ancestor, a nun’apuh, a process which could only be reversed or
hindered by giving pigs – domestic pigs – to the bā’i.
10
Another reason for keeping these animals was for occasions like the one above, for
providing madāwat for his kids or relatives. Also in this case the matter of keeping and giving
pigs had potential transformational consequences. The number and sizes of pigs in the
madāwat prestation were discussed elaborately in negotiations between the two families prior
to the engagement. The number of pigs and their relative sizes should reflect the prestige of
the family of the bride, but one’s prestige is not easily measured and is in fact constituted by
such prestations in the first place, although it is partly tied to the amount of rice terrace land
one owns. So even though agreements had been made, the close relation between giving and
receiving pigs and the prestige it generated would often result in envy and dissatisfaction.
These feelings of discontents could easily turn into active sorcery attempts or into pāliw, a
form of envy generated witchcraft. In both cases, the victim would get ill and eventually die
and become transformed from a living human being into an ancestor, a nun’apuh. To properly
enact his relations with both fellow villagers and the other-than-human bā’i, Mahhig had to
engage in these domesticating practices; keeping pigs in a particular way, sharing his life,
house, and food with them. To continue living as a human being and avoid becoming
transformed into a nun’apuh, he had to engage in a particular form of domestication, enacting
a particular form of relations with his pigs as an inevitable part of his enactment of relations
with both his affinals and the bā’i3.
The human-animal relations enacted through the practices of pig husbandry must
therefore be seen in connection with the enactment of a wider set of relations, including interhuman relations and relations between humans and bā’i. Ifugao domestication practices are
3
May come back to this: these relations are again enactment of different sets of relations on a
smaller scale: the enactment of relations of humans with the bā’i has effects in terms of the
relations of which humans are constituted, i.e. between the lennāwa and body, and when the
humans enact relations with nun’apuh properly they enact also their own proper relations
between lennāwa and body as well as the proper relations between the lennāwa of the
nun’apuh and his or her human body (i.e. the bones in the burial caves). However, while these
relational effects are integrative on the part of humans (keeping lennāwa and body together),
the effect on the part of the nun’apuh is disjunctive (keeping the lennāwa and body separated).
11
part of these wider relational practices. They operate within an extensive field of sociality that
includes other-than-human beings in addition to and in a particular relation with humans and
animals.
Ifugao human-animal relations become more complex if we take into account the wild
animals that populate their forests. As mentioned above, the forest surrounding the village
contains some wild pigs, but these are not hunted very much. In fact, during my stay in the
village I never heard of anyone hunting wild pigs, although some of the elderlies narrated
stories about how they used to hunt wild pigs before. In these cases, the success of the wild
pig hunting depended on the hunter having received permission by the pinādeng. These form
of bā’i are the owners of the wild pigs, and in fact due to perspectival differences between
humans and bā’i, the pinādeng see wild pigs as domestic pigs. Hunting them requires thus
their permission and I was repeatedly told that even the most skilled hunter would be unable
to hit a wild pig without having such permission.
Pigs, humans and spirits
Mahhig inhabits the village of Batad in the province of Ifugao in the northern highlands of the
Philippine island of Luzon. Famed in the Philippines for their extensive system of irrigated
rice terraces, the Ifugao are also known for their complex form of animism, which, despite (or
perhaps partly due to, see Remme 2012) the presence of the Catholic Church and conversion
by some to Pentecostalism, is a tradition that is still practiced. Ifugao share their world with
the bā’i, but at the same time, there is a dimensional difference between them which makes
them at times imperceptible to each other. The bā’i are a multiplicious pack, however. There
are the remaining souls of formerly living humans, i.e. the ancestors, nun’apuh. Then there
are the place specific pinādeng who inhabit large stones, tall trees, river creeks, and other
specific places in and around the village. And thirdly there are the myriad of mythical
12
characters and other bā’i (which is also a generic term for all of these other-than-human
beings) who are related to meteorological phenomena or who have the ability to inflict illness,
offer protection, and guard against theft.
Although humans and bā’i live in the same world, there is, as mentioned above, an
important difference between them. In most non-ritual contexts, humans cannot see, hear,
smell or interact with the bā’i as actual persons. The bā’i exist then in a different dimension,
which is a dimension that is both spatially and temporally separate from humans but also
separate from them in terms of being sensorially inaccessible. In that condition, the bā’i are in
a state of being that I describe as potential. They are held to exist, but they do so more as a
potential in the world than as actual, living consociates4. At times, however, the bā’i emerge
from this potential state of being and become – either ritually induced by humans or by their
own will – actualized as individual, living persons with whom humans can (and must) interact
in a particular way. Such actualizations can take place when for instance a bird is experienced
as flying and twittering in a particular manner or when a snake crosses one’s path. Usually
these experiences are interpreted as bā’i attempting to get in contact with them through these
animals. A whole range of different wild animals are associated with the bā’i as such omen
agents (bumāun). According to myths, these animals are products of a once fruitful, but at the
same time dangerous marital union of a human and a bā’i5.
Insert here references to Alfred Schutz’s phenomenology of the social world in which he
distinguishes between Vorwelt, Mitwelt and Folgewelt as well as Willerslev (with reference to
Heidegger) on spirits as ready-to-hand.
5
This myth relates how the marriage of a bā’i called Būgan and a human named Kinggaowan
settled down in the human domain. They had a son, Balitok, and their rice terraces were
abounded with rice to such an extent that it generated envy among their human co-villagers.
The couple were forced to move from the human domain, but when they were about to climb
the ladder into the Skyworld, Kinggaowan could not make it. They decided to separate and
divide their son in two and take one part each. When Būgan reached the Skyworld, she could
smell the stench of the decaying body of Balitok from the human domain. She descended
again but was unable to resuscitate him. Būgan instead took the body of Balitok and shaped it
into a series of animals: owls, rainbows, dragonflies, snakes, butterflies and the īdaw bird.
4
13
Another important arena for the actualization of the bā’i is sacrificial rituals. After
having seen or heard a bumāun such rituals are held, but there are also other reasons to
arrange such rituals, for instance when one is experiences an illness thought to be induced by
the bā’i, when one celebrates having finished planting the rice fields, when one moves into a
new house, and when an old and soon-to-die person wants to ask the bā’i to bless his
descendants. The actual composition (the inclusion and exclusion of various sub-ritual
elements) of the ritual differ slight according to the reason for arranging it, but the general
pattern is as follows. The family arranging the ritual invite two or more ritual experts,
mumbā’i, to officiate the ritual. These are men who have trained for years to memorize an
immense number of myths, chants, and names of the different bā’i. They have also gone
through a ritual in which they have been authorized by the bā’i to perform their invocations.
These mumbā’i gather in the house6 of the family arranging the ritual and begin to invoke the
names of the bā’i in a pre-defined sequence, including the ancestors of both the husband and
wife of the family. The invocations effectuate a spatial, temporal and ontological
transformation of the bā’i. As mentioned above, in their potential mode of being the bā’i are
held to be separate from humans by belonging to a different dimension. They also live
somewhere else, which is not always very specified, and belong to a different temporal
dimension. When the mumbā’i invoke the bā’i, they tell them to leave their place, where to go
in order to find the house where the ritual is held, and eventually the bā’i will arrive at the
house where they are served rice wine. They are thus transformed into the here and now of the
ritual and become actualized as actual, present beings with whom humans can interact. At this
In a similar fashion to the distinction between ‘native pig’ and ‘commercial pig’, there is
here a distinction between ‘native house’ and ‘modern house’. The former is of the traditional
kind, built on stilts, with only one room with a hearth in the right hand corner and an attic
under the grassed roofed house where rice is stored. The latter is usually built by a
combination of wood and cement, and often covered by iron sheets. Those who have built
modern houses often keep their native house and in these cases the native houses is where
rituals are performed.
6
14
point, a couple of chicken are killed and cut open so that they can inspect the shape and color
of their bile sacs as well as the pattern formed in the coagulated chicken blood that drips into
a plate. As with the pig liver mentioned earlier, the bā’i communicate through the chicken bile
sacs. An auspicious bile sac interpretation is necessary for the ritual to continue. An additional
parallel here is the requirement that the chickens used for this purpose are ‘native chickens’.
As with pigs, the Ifugao distinguish between native chickens and commercial chickens, a
distinction which is often seen in color differences (the former brown/black and the latter
white) but which is also related to what kind of food they have eaten and their freedom to
move around7. The chickens are allowed to walk around freely during daytime, and they will
trip around the yard picking up rice chaff left there after winnowing. At times they will also
be fed corn that has been gathered from the swiddens. In the evening, the chickens are put into
enclosed wooden baskets (ubi) that are attached under the eaves of the house to keep them
safe from potential predators.
In the case of an auspicious bile sac interpretation, the ritual will continue early in the
morning the next day. While the mumbā’i in the first part of the ritual performed their
invocations inside the house, they will now move down the ladder and gather in the stone
covered area called kolhoddan on the ground beneath the house door. Here they repeat the
invocations performed earlier and by that effectuate a movement of the bā’i down from the
house above. During this stage the mumbā’i become possessed by the bā’i and with various
ritual paraphernalia – different kinds of spears, rice bundles, a ritual headdress and backpack
– they dance from the kolhoddan and over to the sacrificial animals, the pigs that lay in front
of the house. By these movements, the mumbā’i transfer the bā’i further on from the
7
I should add here that the distinction between native and commercial variants of pigs and
chickens does not mean that only the latter are for sale. Many ritual occasions call for more
pigs than what a usually household keeps, and they must therefore often buy additional pigs.
When the preparations for a ritual begins, one must survey what pigs are available in the
village, and if no pigs are available, one can buy one at the weekly pig market in the lowland
Ifugao town of Lamut.
15
kolhoddan to the pigs in the yard. Having done that repeatedly, the pigs are killed by cutting
their throat while some of the men present hold them still by their legs and tail. When the pigs
are dead, there are placed side by side in the kolhoddan, and the mumbā’i perform another
series of invocations and chants in which they move the bā’i back from the yard and to the
kolhoddan. The pigs will subsequently be singed with burning rice straws, which makes it not
only easier to remove the hairs, but also produces a particular smell that the bā’i receive as an
offering. After that, the pigs are butchered – again, this has to take place in the kolhoddan –
into specific pieces. The meat of the pigs are divided into three general parts; one that is
cooked and served at the communal meal towards the end of the ritual, another that is cut into
small pieces that are thread on small bamboo sticks and distributed to the participants in
accordance with the gifts they brought to the household upon arrival, and a third part which
contains pieces given as remuneration for services offered by friends and family (gathering
firewood, cooking rice, carrying pigs etc.) and pieces that the family give to their relatives as
acknowledgement of their kin relations.
Before the communal meal is served, the mumbā’i ascend into the house again, and
while everyone else must wait outside, the mumbā’i once again call the bā’i to join them, to
eat the fried pork they are given. Having finished their meal, the mumbā’i tell the bā’i to leave,
and the rest of the participants are served rice, a piece of boiled pork and pork stock. This
ends the ritual for most of the participants, but the mumbā’i will in the evening perform
another series of invocations in which they sit inside the house and tell the bā’i again to
refrain from contacting the family and leave them alone.
Domus, movement, partiality
Here I’ll discuss the significance of the house and especially the movement of humans,
mumbā’i, bā’i and pigs in and out of the house. Say something about the particular
16
significance of the kolhoddan, the threshold of the house, as a space in-between. This is where
spirits often gather also outside ritual contexts, and it is from here the ritual re-establishment
of the world takes place.
The ritual effectuate a dissolution of the spatial, temporal and dimensional differentiation
between humans and bā’i. This is an ontological situation which is both potentially very
fruitful (even absolutely vital for the sustainment of human life) – cf. the myth about Būgan
and Kinggaowan – as it allows interaction between humans and bā’i and by that the ability to
provide them with pigs. But this is also a very dangerous situation because it set up a world in
which the differentiations that define and sustain human life are temporarily dissolved. It
represents thus a potential risk of losing one’s humanness. As pointed out earlier, such an
ontological conjunction of the human and the bā’i dimension is necessary at times.
 What role does domestication play here? What is the significance of the domestication
practices of the pigs? Their slippery character? This slippery character is not restricted
to these animals, however, but characteristic perhaps of the ontological situation
human find themselves in during these rituals – risking losing their humanness and
become transformed into spirits.
Allerton, Catherine 2009 Static crosses and working spirits: anti-syncretism and agricultural
animism in Catholic West Flores. Anthropological Forum, 19(3): 271-287.
Bird-David, Nurit 1999 "Animism" revisited: personhood, environment, and relational
epistemology. Current Anthropology, 40: 67-91.
Candea, Matei 2010 "I fell in love with Carlos the meerkat": Engagement and detachment in
human-animal relations. American Ethnologist, 37(2): 241-258.
Descola, Philippe 2013 Beyond Nature and Culture. Chicago: The University of Chicago
Press.
17
Henare, Amiria, Martin Holbraad, et al., (red.) 2010. Thinking Through Things: Theorising
artefacts ethnographically. London, Routledge.
Ingold, Tim 2006 Rethinking the Animate, Re-Animating Thought. Ethnos, 71(1): 9-20.
Mullin, Molly 1999 Mirrors and windows: Sociocultural studies of human-animal
realtionships. Annual Review of Anthropology, 28: 201-224.
Viveiros de Castro, Eduardo 1998 Cosmological deixis and amerindian perspectivism. The
Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 4(3): 469-488.
Willerslev, Rane 2007 Soul Hunters: hunting, animism, and personhood among the Siberian
Yukaghirs. Berkeley: University of California Press.
18