Symbolic elements in Saribas Iban rites of padi storage
Clifford Sather (1980) examines the symbolic and ritual dimensions of padi (rice) storage among the Saribas Iban of the Paku river, Sarawak, drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted at Kerangan Pinggai longhouse during the 1977–78 farming year. The article argues that the rites marking the conclusion of the harvest season coalesce two fundamental Iban convictions about rice: its spiritual essence, embodied in the aggregate souls (semengat padi), and its material nature, expressed through the notion of inexhaustibility (jedian). Together these dual aspects make rice farming, in Sather’s words, “a profoundly religious undertaking” in which technical and religious operations are inseparable (p. 95).
Summary
Sather traces the full sequence of post-harvest procedures—from the opening rite of nanchang padi through reaping, post-harvest reaping, transport, threshing, winnowing, drying, and final installation in bark storage bins (tibang)—demonstrating at each stage how spiritual and material concerns are interwoven. The opening rites gather and immobilize the padi souls in a natural sanctuary of tied grain clumps, while the main harvest is conducted in a systematic circuit designed to ensure no souls are left behind. The storage rites, performed with extreme seriousness and restricted to the immediate bilek-family, involve feeding the bins, fumigating them with incense and dried flowers, applying coconut oil infused with family farming charms, and treating the grain with ubat jedian (inexhaustibility charms) to ensure it swells in volume and resists depletion. Protective charms are then set atop the filled bins to ward off both spiritual predators and the antu angkut, a carrying spirit believed to steal rice from rival families’ stores.
A significant portion of the article is devoted to correcting the existing literature. Sather challenges Ave’s (1977) characterization of Iban harvest staging as purely “rational,” showing instead that the Iban avoid leaving ripened grain in the field not by dividing the harvest into discrete stages but by cultivating twenty or more different rice strains that mature at staggered intervals. He also demonstrates that the premature reaping (nyumba) is ritually motivated and yields a negligible quantity of grain, contrary to earlier accounts that treated it as a significant pre-harvest. The post-harvest reaping (nyempurai), which has been entirely absent from prior studies, is shown to be a practical operation sanctioned by spiritual notions but unaccompanied by ritual.
The article’s deepest argument concerns the Iban eschatological identification of rice with the human soul. Following death, the soul is believed to turn to dew (ambun) that falls at dawn and is taken up by growing rice plants, making rice the physical embodiment of ancestral substance. This conviction undergirds the reverence with which all stages of rice handling are conducted and explains why the storage rites, which reveal a family’s relative success or failure, are conducted in a highly guarded atmosphere.
Key Findings
- The largest class of padi bin, the sengindang, holds approximately 110 pasu (bushels); the idas drying mat holds approximately 30 bushels of grain (pp. 16, 18).
- The 1978 harvest at Kerangan Pinggai yielded just over 150 pasu of grain, threshed and winnowed in six hours by an 18-person work party; the main field at Ulu Selamui comprised three acres of wet rice (pp. 5, 14–15).
- Premature reaping (nyumba) ordinarily yields less than four or five gantang (gallons) of grain per family; post-harvest reaping (nyempurai) averages four to six gallons in the middle Paku, with the 1978 figure at six gantang from two wet-rice fields (pp. 10–11).
- The Saribas Iban, numbering approximately 35,000 persons (roughly 12 per cent of the total Iban population of Sarawak), were the first regional Iban group to adopt commercial crops, beginning with pepper and coffee in the early 1880s and rubber by the end of that decade (pp. 3–4).
- The 1978 harvest was transported by lorry in 59 guny sacks, equivalent to nearly 20 pikuls of grain, from a field two miles from the longhouse (p. 14 and n. 15).
- The ubat jedian charms used to treat the bins vary considerably from family to family and include objects with no inherent connection to rice, such as a petrified cotton charm (batu taya’) borrowed from a cousin, or a node of temeyang bamboo containing a small pebble (p. 22).
Conclusion
Sather’s definitive takeaway is that despite the enormous economic transformation of the Saribas Iban—shifts to cash crops, salaried employment, and monetized exchange—rice farming remains the primary focus of social values, ritual, and belief. The Iban view of rice as simultaneously ancestor and food makes the technical and the religious dimensions of its cultivation inseparable, a point Sather grounds in Haddon and Start’s observation that “no distinction can be drawn in their daily life between technical and religious operations: they are equally necessary” (p. 95).
Context
- The study is based on three years of ethnographic fieldwork (1976–79) at Kerangan Pinggai longhouse on the Paku river, with systematic harvest data collected for the 1976–77 and 1977–78 farming years (p. 5).
- Historiographically, the article corrects significant gaps and errors in the Iban agricultural literature, particularly Freeman’s (1955) lack of botanical data on rice strain maturation times and the complete absence of post-harvest reaping (nyempurai) from prior accounts (pp. 10–11).