Ancestral Northern Akulanen Culture
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1000 BCE: NE Magali, Shohai, NE Amerhan
This public article was written by [Deactivated User] on 29 Mar 2019, 21:38.
[comments] wwmakulanenculturettnmagalishohaiamerhan
4. WWM Compounding
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5. WWM Grammar
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6. WWM Noun Class
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7. WWM Text #1
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This article presents an introduction to the culture of some
WWM speakers, during the time period c. 1500 BCE to 500 BCE. This culture in particular was centered on the eastern Magalese highlands. Elements of this culture were carried by the WWM speakers’ expansion east through Shohai and north to the Magalese Dragon Sea coast. This document will first provide a sketch of common aspects of this culture. This desciption will be followed by a summary of distinctively Shohai realizations of this culture, and then describe uniquely northeastern Magalese cultural realizations.Conception of gender
There were considered to be three genders: men, women, and the third gender. Additionally, children were not considered to have gender until puberty. The third gender was characterized as intermediate between male and female while also having some characteristics all its own. Typically, they formed a small segment (less than 10%) of the adult population.
Gender-based marriage customs
Marriage between people of the same gender was prohibited. That is, marriage was only allowed between male-female, male-third, or female-third unions.
Before marriage, the woman (or third gender person in a male-third gender marriage)’s family would formally pass down possessions such as land and cookware to the new couple, which was considered a ‘dowry’. This would include a guarantee that certain land and possessions would be transferred after the parents’ deaths. Poor families would sometimes marry two siblings to the same spouse so that the family’s land and possessions would not get split again. As older children were married first, they tended to get slightly more of the land and possessions, but typically all children received something from the family.
As for men (and third gender people who married women), they would bring a share of livestock (primarily goats) from their household to the new family just before the wedding.
Gender and labor
All genders had a role in maintaining buildings and building houses, and all had agricultural roles. All genders passed down stories and oral tradition.
Men typically performed field clearing and soil processing, hunted, and cut wood. Men typically laid stones for building walls, and fastened roofing down. In contrast to earlier Ngerupic societies, men had a primary role over property ownership, though property transfer was still mediated by female moiety representatives.
Women typically prepared food, fetched water, gathered wild plants and honey, cared for family (including medicine), and passed down genealogy. Women typically mortared and maintained building walls, and crafted roofing elements. Along with third-gender people, elderly women were preferred for leadership, as they were deemed to have much life force and wisdom.
Finally, third gender people handled spiritual matters and created fabric, clothing, and doors, as well as maintaining paths from place to place. They also participated in both ‘male’ and ‘female’ activities when needed. Third gender people were also preferred for leadership positions along with elderly women, as the third gender people were believed to judge fairly between both men and women.
Gender and adornment
All genders received tattoos after puberty. Women had their ears pierced at puberty. Additionally, women received additional tattoos after each birth of a child. Third gender people who gave birth did not receive these tattoos.
The genders also had their own modes of dress. However, these varied greatly from region to region.
Other gender-based customs
The coming-of-age ritual, for people around age 13-18, included male circumcision, use of hallucinogenic mushrooms to guide third gender people through a spiritual experience, and ear piercing for women. All the rituals also included tattoos. The ritual was conducted by people from the same moiety and village of the same gender as the participants, and lasted a week for healing. This ritual occurred roughly once every three years. People who had not undergone the ceremony were not to marry.
Gender terminology
nganyat/nganyappa (1/2) meant ‘man’, rru/rrup (1/2) meant ‘woman’, and nyanyarl/nyanyarlpa (1/2) meant ‘third gender person’.
Conception of moiety
Society was divided into between two and four moieties, depending on the region. The moieties were passed down matrilineally, and members of one moiety could not marry each other- that is, they were exogamous. The moieties were associated with different animal totems. For example, the two core moieties were the ‘tapir’ and ‘bat’ moieties, and were not allowed to eat the flesh of their own totem. By 500 BCE, the animal totem associations were being lost in most non-coastal areas, perhaps accelerated by the fact that the moiety names do not sound like the animal names and only Mañi-speaking people really preserved the totemic associations.
Moiety-based marriage restrictions
By 500 BCE, sibling marriage was expanded to marriage of two non-men from the same village and moiety to one man of different moiety.
Moiety and adornment
The moieties tended to differentiate themselves through different tattoo styles, and for women, different earring styles.
Moiety terminology
A moiety was known as mangkanh (7), plural mangkanhtha (11). The tapir moiety was known as kamani (3/3, inalienable), which was also a verb meaning ‘to be of the tapir moiety’. The bat moiety was known as rtuthúni (3/3, inalienable), which was also a verb meaning ‘to be of the bat moiety’. Terms for other moieties differed from region to region but followed the same class and alienability pattern.
Conception of kinship
WIP, matrilineal
Kinship terminology
WIP
WIP
Conception of disability
Disability was believed to be the work of the Creator, often as retribution for some insult to the spirits or the Creator. However, blindness and deafness were not regarded as bad- blind and deaf individuals were treated as full members of society and had their own assigned tasks.
Disability and labor
Blind individuals generally sculpted pottery as their primary work. They also performed some fabric-related tasks such as weaving heavy textiles, and sung at religious festivals. Deaf individuals performed much the same range of work as other members of society, but were almost exclusively entrusted with the task of procuring stones for construction.
Conception of ethnicity
Most Ngerupic-speaking peoples were treated as the same ethnicity, even in cases where their language was clearly very different or their culture had many different practices. However, many peoples with very different language or appearance were treated as separate peoples, but were able to assimilate to mainstream WWM-speaking culture easily. In larger settlements in Magali, there lived underclasses which were not allowed to intermarry with mainstream society, but the structure of these people was a microcosm of larger society, with similar gender roles and moiety structures. Some of these people had settlements of their own. These underclasses typically spoke both the mainstream language (a WWM dialect) as well as a speech variety of their own. These speech varieties had usually grammatically converged with WWM but often preserved earlier strata of vocabulary from before the Ngerupic expansion, as well as distorted and/or invented words.
There was no autonym, as ethnicity was not considered important for most people. However there were various terms for the underclass, which varied heavily by region.
Ethnicity and labor
In Magali only, animal processing such as skinning, butchering, and leatherworking was considered a ‘dirty’ profession, especially as people who performed these tasks also handled funerary rites and corpse processing. The members of the underclasses tended to perform these tasks.
In parts of Magali, tea growing and processing was considered a specialized task and valuable enough that some groups survived with this as their primary work. These groups tended to think of themselves as separate ethnically by about 500 BCE, and stopped marrying with outside groups.
Meals
Generally the day began with a small meal of roasted mashed tubers and nuts, usually accompanied by tea. A midday meal would consist of more tubers with nuts and beans, and often fruit. Finally, dinner would include more tubers, beans, and vegetables, as well as fruit.
Meals were taken at roughly the house level (everyone living in a house together would eat together), although in cases where people worked for the whole days in the fields without returning home, the meals would be eaten separately by those at home and those at work.
Beliefs about food and health
Cold beverages were believed to cause imbalances in the body’s health and only hot liquids were served. Actual tea and ginger tea were believed to stimulate physical energy, and fruit and herbal teas was believed to treat excesses of energy.
Chili peppers were highly valued and spicy food was regarded as having a good effect on the health.
Cosmology and divinity
Nature and the world was viewed as a gift given to all its inhabitants by the Creator an extremely long time ago. The Creator lived in a separate realm entirely, but could hear prayers and control happenings on Earth. The survival of humanity was viewed as dependent on the good grace of the Creator. While some groups on the western periphery believed that all natural happenings were fated, being told as a story by the Creator in the mythological past, most groups believed that the Creator was currently in the process of dictating all happenings. The Creator’s form was deemed incomprehensible to humans and no direct representations of it were created as a result, which was also accompanied by the belief that trying to fashion a representation of the Creator would being bad fortune.
Spirits which were created by the Creator to facilitate good behavior and more efficiently convey messages back and forth from the Creator’s realm were also believed in. These spirits were particularly believed to inhabit locations of unusual weather, rocks of strange shape or prominence, mountaintops, caves, and the sky. Additionally, ‘houses’ for the spirits were located in the center of each village. Unlike the Creator, many representations of the spirits were created, but their role was primarily to indicate that a certain space was theirs to inhabit.
There was little belief in an afterlife. Although funerary rites were important, their function was largely to celebrate the individual’s life and pay thanks to them for their good works as well as strengthening community bonds, rather than ensuring the individual’s passage to an afterlife.
Practices
Constant prayer was deemed necessary to ensure good fortune through divine intervention. While all members of society could pray, in particularly important circumstances such as during erratic weather patterns and acute sickness of an individual, third-gender people were asked to pray particularly hard by recruiting spirits to send the messages straight to the Creator or act on their own to remedy the situation. These strong prayers often involved rituals involving spirit possession and hallucinogens.
Another common way to increase the power of a prayer was to sing and dance, either alone or as a community. As the lungs were said to be particularly sacred, singing was believed to imbue the singer’s words with particular power.
Finally, another way to increase the power of a prayer was to ‘feed’ the spirits by burning food to them. The food was typically made incredibly spicy so that the spirits would be charged with energy. In many areas, only a small portion was symbolically burned, and people would eat the rest of the food after a short waiting period for the spirit to ‘eat’ the food.
Upon a person’s death, their body would be left in a secluded location for a couple months, and their bones would be burnt and placed in a small black jar, which was then buried on the family land.
Art was not considered separate from crafts and material culture on one hand, and magical practices on the other. That is, embellishments and decorations on homes, pottery, clothing, and other practical objects were considered to be simply part of the object, providing more enjoyable function. Magical items such as spirit representations were considered important, but there wasn’t mention of artistic quality per se; rather ‘quality’ was deemed to be whether the object could perform its function.
String games were an important part of these ancient cultures, and knowledge of different figures was passed between villages along with goods and other cultural information like songs. Often, string figures would consist of many patterns in sequence which would go along with a story.
In Shohai, the radically different natural environment caused a difference in means of procuring sustenance, with oasis cultivation supporting a more limited variety of crops, and consequently a greater emphasis on animal husbandry. This change also translated into differences in gender roles. Men cared for livestock and traveled between oases, while women stayed by water sources and engaged in agriculture. In turn, this led to a linguistic situation of one massive dialect continuum, as women passed on their speech to their children, and when men married outside their village, they tended to only settle a few oases down from their place of origin.
The wet season was when most agricultural activity took place, and men would work on their spouses' land and eat meals in their spouses' houses, culminating in the midsummer New Year's celebrations celebrated by both moieties together. During the lull of the dry season, however, many men would spend the days with their original family (same moiety) and spend less time with their spouses' families (opposite moiety).
Because of this movement, the wet season became known as the time when the moieties mixed more and an individual would see more 'wet season people' - people of the opposite moiety. The dry season was when the moieties stuck to themselves more and so 'dry season people' came to mean people of the same moiety. ✎ Edit Article ✖ Delete Article
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