on 5th December, my family having this "gawai antu"..spiritual festivals..i dont really know wat this festival about. my mum said, it's about to remember the person dat already die. erm..this festivals remind us about my kazen grandfather's. a bit sad but i really enjoy the day.
Apa yang penting, itu kerjsama -wonderpets
Im included some info about " gawai antu ". Maybe it could giving some new knowledge to everyone..
The final secondary rites of the dead are the most complex of all. These rites, called the Gawai Antu, constitute major memorialization rituals and are ideally performed by each longhouse roughly once in every generation. Requiring several years of preparation, they memorialize all of the community’s dead (orang ke parai) whose deaths occurred since the last Gawai was performed by the longhouse. The head of the bilik having the oldest dead acts as the ‘Gawai elder’ (tuai gawai). The Gawai Antu feasts the dead and completes their final transformation into spirits (merantu). This transformation is effected primarily by erecting, at the conclusion of the Gawai, tomb huts (sungkup) over the graves of the dead. These elaborately carved huts are made of ironwood and are equipped with miniature furnishings and garong baskets, the latter symbolizing the personal achievements of each individual dead . In the Otherworld these huts represent full-size longhouses or, in totality, the parts of a single longhouse. The Gawai Antu thus establishes the dead in a longhouse of their own, thereby providing them with the means for a self-sufficient existence independent of the world of the living. For this reason, the Gawai is sometimes described by the bards as a rite of berumah (house construction). In this sense, the final rites of death are, significantly, house building rites. But unlike ordinary berumah, construction takes place, not in the visible world, but in the Otherworld of the dead, as the sungkup, at the conclusion of the Gawai, are reassembled in the cemetery, ritually separated and physically removed from the world of the living.
At its beginning and end, then, the main rites of Gawai Antu are bracketed by major stages of ritual house building. The Gawai opens with the gawai beban ramu, the ‘ritual fashioning (ban) of construction materials (ramu)’. This is followed by ngeretok, the preparation of the parts of the sungkup huts, which are then carried from the forest and assembled by each family for temporary display on its tanju’. Finally, immediately following the main Gawai rituals, the sungkup are removed from the longhouse and carried to the cemetery where they are reassembled, away from the longhouse, over the graves of the dead.
On the day that precedes ngeretok — the preparation of the parts of the sungkup — families repair or replace their panggau platform and make ready their gallery to receive guests. In the late afternoon, the women begin to soak glutinous rice in the river, while the men construct the bamboo rugan altars in which each family feeds its dead. These are attached to the passageway pillar representing the family’s tiang pemun . This feeding begins at dusk on the evening prior to ngeretok and continues each night until the conclusion of the Gawai. At dusk, the first welcoming of the spirits of the dead (ngalu antu) is performed on the longhouse gallery. From now until the end of Gawai Antu, at dusk and at dawn, the spirits are welcomed and seen off, as they arrive in the world of the living and temporarily depart again. The Gawai emphasizes the complementarity of male and female roles, as on the following day when the men perform ngeretok, fashioning the sungkup huts, and the women plait the ritual garong baskets. The work of plaiting is called nganyam and is performed by the women inside the bilik apartments, while the men work on the upper gallery. Both these tasks are generally completed in a single day. Afterwards, several days of preparation elapse before the main Gawai rites resume.
Kindred (
kaban) generally arrive the day before the start of the Gawai proper in order to assist the host families with preparations. They bring with them fowls, eggs, fruit and garden produce. Beginning soon after dawn on the first day of Gawai Antu, guests (
pengabang) begin to arrive. After bathing at the
penai’, they are ceremonially welcomed into the house. Among the first to be received are the principal warriors who will later drink the
ai’ buloh, the main ritual rice wine served from the
garong containers plaited by the women. They are followed by a second group of warriors who will later drink the
ai’ timang jalong wine which is carried by the bards as they sing (
nimang) the Gawai invocation. The welcoming of guests continues throughout much of the day. The principal guests comprise the house’s cofeasting allies (
sapemakai); they generally arrive and are received in groups, as longhouse communities.At dusk no further guests may be received. Instead, the hosts and guests combine to welcome the gods, spirit-heroes and spirits of the dead. After the latter have been welcomed and feasted with offerings, hosts and guests sit down to the first of a series of feasts consumed in emulation of their spiritual visitors.
The ritual organization of longhouse space also underscores distinctions between the living and the dead and between human beings, the gods, spirit-heroes and spirits of the dead. After the human guests have arrived and been welcomed with rice wine at each family’s section of the
tempuan, they are shown to their hosts’
ruai, where the male guests are eventually ‘arranged in order’ (
bedigir) along their hosts’
panggau. At dusk, the gods (
petara) and returning spirits of the dead (
antu sebayan) are invoked by the bards and welcomed to the house by the Gawai hosts and guests through a series of ritual processions (
ngalu antu) that circle the upper and lower gallery . But before the bards begin their invocation, the warriors who are to drink the
ai’ buloh wine prepare a pathway for the dead along the gallery floor (
ngerandang jalai). Dancing along the
ruai with drawn swords, they cut invisible ‘undergrowth’ and clear the way of spiritual obstructions . After this, the warriors who are to drink the
ai’ jalong wine, make the path prepared by the first group of warriors ritually secure by metaphorically ‘fencing it with an invisible handrailing’ (
ngelalau). The arrival of the dead is anticipated in other ways as well. While living guests are welcomed into the longhouse by way of its upriver entrance, the dead are believed to come from downriver, retracing the route of their · original departure. Thus, before the spirits arrive, all the mats covering the gallery floor are taken up at the direction of the Gawai elder, reversed, and laid down again, so that their edges now overlap in the opposite downriver-to-upriver direction. This is said to prevent the spirits of the dead from ‘tripping’ as they walk along the gallery floor, their actions emulated by the processions of human guests.
to be continue...
Source : http://epress.anu.edu.au/austronesians/inside/mobile_devices/ch04s12.html
