The Living and the Dead Who Have Crossed the Sea

Mortuary Customs, Migrations and Kinship among the Asi (Lau) in North Malaita, Solomon Islands

Abstract

This paper examines characteristic mortuary customs that used to be practiced among the Asi (the “saltwater people” or Lau) in Malaita, Solomon Islands, as well as their historical transformation. The Asi have constructed and inhabited artificial islands in the shallow lagoon along the northeast coast of Malaita Island. This paper shows that their mortuary customs are inseparable from their maritime dwellings and migration history across the sea.

Ever since a classic study by Hertz, mortuary customs in the Austronesian world—secondary burials in particular—have been the subject of numerous anthropological studies. Those studies have pointed out that Austronesian mortuary rituals function as a process of the collectivization of the dead and the reproduction of social groups through it. They have also emphasized that, in those rituals, affinal relations of the dead or their parents are the primary object of ritual settlement and cancellation in favor of the collective unity of social groups. In that regard, the mortuary customs of the Asi demonstrate a marked peculiarity, in that affinal relations through intermarrying women are reconfirmed and foregrounded rather than negated in rituals.

The pre-Christian mortuary system of the Asi centered on a practice called toloraea, in which the skull of the dead was severed and deposited, and later transferred across the sea to the collective grave of each clan, which was usually located several kilometers away. That system was composed of a three-staged treatment of the corpse. In the case of a dead male, he would first be buried on the island where he had lived before his death, after which his skull would be cut o and deposited in the men’s house. Finally his skull would be carried on a canoe by a priest to the burial place of his clan along with other dead people (both males and females) from the same clan. The frequency of the final collective burial is estimated to have been once every twenty to thirty years for each clan.

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