CHAPTER EIGHT

RAFTERS AS PATHS

In discussing the now obsolete house type of the Tanimbar Archipelago we found that the bargeboards sometimes served as a means of communication between a person swearing an oath or pronouncing a curse and a deity invoked as a witness. Bargeboards being arranged somewhat like , this custom makes us aware that there may have been ethnic groups that regarded certain rafters as spirit ladders leading down from a ridge beam. After all, rafters have an older history in construction than king posts; the latter were usually introduced when a traditional house type had come to be built in larger dimensions and the larger roof needed additional supports. Rafters were also particularly well suited as spirit ladders because they were distributed over the whole roof, so that in combination with a ridge beam or ridge they could lead from a end to almost any place at the base of the roof. In Tanimbar, for example, some people might have marked a certain to lead spirits down to offerings on the seaward floor or even to the tavu, if they no longer made a spirit hole in the thatch; but evidence supporting these ideas seems to be lacking. We have, however, met the case of the Galela of Halmahera who would hang a loincloth or a sarong of a deceased person to a rafter where they were going to make offerings to the spirit of that person (Chapter 7). In such cases the offerings may have been placed on a wall plate or in a basket suspended from that rafter, so that in either case the rafter could have served as a pathway along which the spirit could descend to the offerings. In most instances where offerings used to be placed on a wall plate or on a shelf running along the base of the roof we lack sources, however, which would suggest that spirits were thought to use a rafter as spirit ladder. In many other cases the place for depositing offerings may have been shifted to a new location, so that the spirits were then thought to follow a different path. In this way the concept of rafters as means of communication may have got lost in time or become newly associated with other ideas. For example, in certain round houses of Manggarai in West Flores the horizontal rings formed by the circular ‘’ of the conical roof were symbolically associated with various levels in the political hierarchy. The bottom ring represented the common people and the top the king, while the rafters running over these rings were interpreted as representing ‘the voice of the people that goes straight up to the top, bypassing all the other levels, to the king himself’ (Erb 1999:112). In that case the rafters symbolised a means of communication between the base and the top of a conical 324 CHAPTER EIGHT roof, but the symbolism regarded communication with a king as leader of a political system, not communication with spirits. If the idea of rafters as spirit ladders ever existed in Manggarai, it had probably been abandoned in favour of regarding the central kingpost as a spirit ladder. Theoretically, it is also possible that certain rafters still functioned as spirit ladders related to the individual family apartments at the periphery of the round house, but our sources only tell us about the kingpost because this was the main place of offering for the whole house community (Chapter 9). A situation of this kind was indeed typical of the traditional house on Roti. According to our interpretation in Chapter 6, the main post of the Rotinese house had once been ritually addressed in a way which suggested that it was regarded as a spirit pathway, but, as we shall see in the present chapter, the rafters played an important part in offering rites of individual inhabitants. Nearly half of this chapter deals again with the Rotinese house. After a brief discussion of several house types and the possible diachronic relations between them we turn to the peculiar ‘path system’ that on Roti was defined by the rafters and was used to invoke good influences. Next we shall take a comparative look at a closely related house type of Sawu, an island to the west of Roti. Later in this chapter, we shall also deal with two traditional house types of Sumatra, in which certain rafters also seem to have functioned as spirit pathways in the past.

The house types of Roti island: from narrow to wide

The traditional Rotinese house represents another complex house type that in all probability has been formed by repeated enlargements of simpler prototypes. In this case the diachronic formation of the larger standard type is evident from the fact that the lower parts of the roofs were added with a lower pitch so that they overlapped the roof of the core house. Historically, even the core house without these added parts was apparently the result of earlier changes that had involved extensions and additions. Salomon Müller who visited Roti in the first half of the nineteenth century characterised the houses there as rectangular and ‘often quite long but narrow’ (1857:271). Later, ten Kate (1894) published a drawing that shows a house with eight posts and an open sitting-platform between the four central ones (see Fig. 185). The author calls it an ‘open’ house, which suggests that it may have been a dwelling-granary in which the ground floor with the low platform was the main dwelling space, while the attic served as a granary and occasionally as a sleeping room.1 Other houses were enclosed by walls, rested on posts, and were divided into three rooms, the largest of which was in the middle

1 For a discussion of dwelling-granaries, see Domenig 2003b and 2008c:489-93.