Re: OT: Chinese zither

> > Greek woman at our Church gave us some sheep
> > intestine soup this Pascha,
> > but we couldn't bring ourselves to eat it),
>
>So you've never eaten sausage?
Somehow, it *seems* different....

(As a matter of fact, I just got finished eating a pair of sausages.)

> > >Of course, there's plenty of room for sacred
> > >drums made out of the skulls of beloved
> > >ancestors.
> >
> > Sorry, not these people!  They are so concerned
> > about not defiling a dead
> > body that they won't even undress it to put on
> > new clothes for burial.  A
> > person is buried in whatever they happened to
> > die in.  And in war, they
> > consider it their duty, as civilized people, to
> > keep guard over the bodies
> > of their slain enemies and prevent the bodies
> > from being defiled by carrion
> > beasts until a delegation from the enemy can
> > come and claim the
> > bodies.  It's a rather maladaptive strategy in
> > warfare, but it is important
> > to them to act in a civilized manner.
>
>Wow. Daine don't see it as defilement to clean up
>and dress their beloved dead appropirately. And
>unless they're in a hurry, would see it as
>something less than dignified to bring an end to
>the body in tatty, blood-n-guts spattered
>clothes.
The idea of them refusing to undress a body after death was one that came
to me sort of off the cuff as I was writing some stuff on them one day, and
I may yet change it.  But one reasonable explanation for the custom may be
that in warfare it has always been *absolutely* forbidden to strip a dead
enemy naked.  It is just fine (and quite normal) to remove anything of
value from the corpse.  This can include weapons, shields, belts, jewelry
or other ornaments, outer garments such as cloaks or jackets, even footwear
(though that is less polite), but the body *must* remained clothed and not
be further mutilated.  Now, those are the customs for dealing with the
enemy's dead, not one's own.  However, approximately 400-550 years ago, the
Cwendaso were subjected to a century and a half of nearly uninterrupted
warfare.  In addition to being nearly uninterrupted, it was also unusually
brutal.  It got to the point that every girl and woman became trained in
the use of weapons, which had not been the custom before.  (The women and
children did not actually go out to battle with the men, but they didn't
need to -- the battle was nearly guaranteed to come to them at home in
their villages, sooner or later.)  So it got to the point where a state of
peace was outside of living memory, and all anyone had experienced was
being at war.  Most of their dead were war dead, and they became used to
dealing with the dead under the pressures of war; they were almost always
in a hurry to bury their dead.  At times, they were in such a hurry and had
such a large number of dead that they did not even rebraid the hair into
the funeral braid -- and that is a very essential part of the funeral
rites.  If a village had been attacked and the casualties were high, often
times, the best choice that the survivors could make was to carry all of
the bodies into the village barrow, seal the stone door of the barrow, and
then permanantly seal off the barrow by mounding earth up over the
door.  Then the survivors took what they could carry and fled to another
village as soon as they could be on their way.  They stopped burying a
warior's weapons with him (or her) because they needed the weapons too
badly.  Fresh clothing to replace the torn and bloodstained clothing that a
person had died in might well be difficult to find in the disorder, and, as
a matter of practicality, the living needed the clothing more than the dead
did; there was less time for the making of clothing because of the war, and
less material available.  I think that some of the taboos about not
stripping an dead enemy naked got transferred to their own dead because in
those days all dead, your enemy's or your own, were war dead.  It was *far*
more likely, even for a child, to die at the hand of the enemy than to die
of disease.  After a few generations of this, they began to fail to
distingush between the treatment of their own dead and that of their enemy,
and so didn't feel right about removing the clothing from their own dead,
even to reclothe them, even if there was clothing to be spared.

I think that the culture never really got back to normal again after that
episode.  One relic from that time are that warriors are to this day not
buried with their weapons, although they used to be as a matter of course.
(Very little is sent into the grave, and there is another funeral custom
that *may* account for this.)  If a girl wants to compete with the boys in
archery, or wrestling, or javelin throwing, or she wants to learn to hunt
or fish, she is not discouraged from it in the least.  When she comes of
age, it is expected that she will stop, or at least do less of it, and once
she marries such activities will stop.  Such pastimes were not permitted to
girls before the wars.  When the king of a village is elected, he is
elected by all the adults, male and female, in the village.  This custom
also began during the wars, when women had become warriors just as the men
were, and all were in danger of their lives, soldier and civilian.

So how does that sound for a plausible excuse for why they treat their dead
in what any other culture would consider a rather shocking manner?  (I'm
actually interested to know whether it sounds reasonable.)  Of course, if
they *know* that someone is going to die, they try to get them into good
clothing before they die.  (Thus a sick person is always dressed
nicely.)  And if someone dies in the hunt and is brought back in torn and
bloodied clothing, they will do all they can to clean him up.  I think that
another relic of their wartime mindset may be that if a person goes to the
grave wearing the bloodstained clothing that he died in, it is a
demonstration that he was a warrior and died fighting, and thus is not
unfitting.

They don't consider it defilement of the body to handle the bones, as long
as it is done respectfully.  Their favorite method of burial is for the
village to have two barrows, one for bodies and the second for bones.  The
former is pretty yucky, since the bodies of the dead are placed in it for
burial and they lie there and rot.  Interring the body is by far the worst
part of a funeral due to the other decomposing bodies in the
barrow.  However, once the flesh has decomposed, the bones are removed and
washed and then placed in the second barrow together with the bones of all
the other members of the comunity.  At least one of the neighboring
cultures -- the one that they were at war against -- is simply scared to
death to touch bones, unless they have been rendered safe by the proper
religious rituals, and even then, they have the bones interred and don't
really want to touch them or see them ever again, whereas Cwendaso are
usually pleased to have the chance to go into a bone barrow, which isn't
open very often.

Isidora
Isidora

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