Burned paddy and lost souls

Abstract

According to local belief, they travelled up a small bamboo ladder towards the invisible spirit of rice, Mbiri Koni, who was imprisoned in the skies, unable to release her fertile energies into the new erop. If, however, some of these stages are neglected or the calendrical taboos are broken, misfortune will come in the form of drought, ure or flooding. Since rice souls themselves (ndewa pare) are identified as the 'children' of Mbiri Koni, they have a quasi-human status. [...]prayers and invocations repeat botanie metaphors of growth and replenishment, speaking of descendants as the 'sprouts and shoots' (kahinye mono katulla) or 'fruit and flowers' (ha wu wallada) of those who came before. The separation in time found in the division of lunar months into the categories of 'bitter' and 'bland' creates a model of process which is also applied to rites to call back the lost souls of paddy which has died a 'bad death': while rice is given a human genealogy through the mythic traditions, its humanity must be ritually modulated in order to make the erop edible, and to return its lost souls to the cycle of production and reproduction of food and livestock. [...]while the metaphor of rice as similar to a person is consistently honoured, metonymic links of shared substance (common descent, trans- The new generations whose 'breath' comes to replace the members of the previous generation represent a renewal of life, but not the reanimation of particular persons.