This paper focuses on the funeral ceremony of an old man named Odchas, a Bontok who resided in Mountain Province, Northern Luzon, the Philippines. It details the process of the funeral ceremony, then discusses the cosmology of the Bontok, which gives order to the ritual process and kinship behaviors.
Although the Bontok believe in sorcery, they often ascribe such misfortunes as accidental death, epidemics, sterility, disease of livestock and crops, landslide and fire to
aníto or spiritual beings in general. The Bontok have an elaborate system of knowledge about
aníto, and their rituals for
aníto consist of many taboos, ritual seclusion, animal sacrifice, ritual head-hunting, mock fighting and prayer [合田 1976; 1977; 1979].
Until recently, the Bontok practiced head-hunting, which not only involves physical aggression between different villages but is closely related to their belief in supernatural beings. For example,
fomáfag, the spirits of beheaded enemies, are believed to cause a number of misfortunes to the villagers. In the Bontok system of belief, the living and the dead are not always clearly distinguished.
Aníto are believed to be present everywhere and to cause trouble or even to possess people.
The death of a fellow villager, especially at the hands of outsiders, is an occasion when the Bontok disclose their inner feelings of agitation, fear, hatred and resentment. This is because the death is not a single misfortune but rather the beginning of a battle of head-hunting, as well as an omen of all kinds of misfortunes. People are excited and proud when their fellow villagers win a fight with people from another village, for they believe it will bring fertility and prosperity to their village.
In this light, their ways of dealing with sickness and death can be regarded as part of the process in which they classify and interpret misfortune in order to recover fertility and prosperity.
Rituals are generally seen as a system of planned and formalized symbolic activities. This is true of animal sacrifice and recital of myth as performed by the Bontok, in which the details of the ritual are rigidly prescribed by the context. But this is not the case with funerals. During the funeral ceremony, people should observe a ritual holiday or
té-er.
When the day is declared to be
té-er, the village is closed and the whole community is cut off from the outside world. A rainbow or a hawk flying over residential space, both of which considered bad omens, bring an immediate end to the ritual holiday. Moreover, the fall of an object from a wall in the house of deceased, the cracking of a hearth-stone, or the dropping of unhusked rice from the winnowing basket during a funeral ceremony are also bad omens that need to be dealt with properly.
Aníto sometimes cause illness or possess villagers and cause them to act strangely.
Such unexpected events during a funeral ceremony may change the course of the ritual process. Thus, only the system of knowledge that classifies and interprets these incidents and ways to deal with each situation is fixed; the ritual process itself varies depending on what happens during the course of the funeral ceremony.
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