Four overlapping social groups may be identified among traditional Teduray: the neighborhood, the settlement, the household and the nuclear family. The family is determined by kin ties, the household and settlement are spatially identified, and the nuclear family [neighborhood?] is a matter of ongoing social ties related to cooperation in day to day subsistence work.
The neighborhood or inged is the largest social unit with discrete boundaries. A neighborhood consists of a number of families, usually living in several settlements, which regularly assist each other in their farming activities and rituals.
The inged is basically a subsistence cooperative group. It is not a distinctive attribute of a traditional Teduray neighborhood that its members should all be linked by kinship ties, but it is often the case that such ties pervade the inged.
Neighborhoods vary widely in overall population and in the number of settlements, households and families that they include. Persons living in any household do not normally reside in a single central village but in settlements called denowon—small dispersed hamlets of one to ten or more households.
Every swidden farmer must necessarily associate his family with others in a neighborhood to be part of the needed cooperative work group, but he need not live in company of other families in a settlement. In general, any family is free to establish its residence in any settlement it wishes, and no rules exist to structure a settlement according to any kinship principle. Nonetheless, some relationship, either by blood or affinity, will commonly link the families that settle together on the same hamlet.
Settlements are generally situated near the source of water and are regularly named after prominent nearby geographical features. A neighborhood generally takes its name from its principal settlement. If asked where they are from, a Teduray always replies with the name of their neighborhood, not that of their settlement. The latter does not have the stability of location or family composition that a neighborhood has, and tends to shift around as the people look for better spots or abandon a location which have come to be associated with illness or death. Neighborhoods, not settlements, are the important and relatively stable territorial units.
Much sharing goes on among the households of a neighborhood. Fish caught in the river in any number are always shared with all other inged families, as are snack foods such as fruits or roasted corn. Chickens, eggs and rice, on the other hand are not shared, except in ritual meals or with visitors, as they symbolize the discreetness of every household. In contrast, the flesh of a deer or wild pig caught in hunting is always shared with the entire neighborhood, with each household receiving a carefully measured equal share. This signifies the cooperative unity of the neighborhood, a unity also expressed in the rice exchanges characteristic of neighborhood ritual feasts.
Relations between household may be by kinship or bride price or swidden cooperation. But the households are generally independent, self-determining units. Aside from his membership in such social groups as the family, household, settlement and neighborhood, every Teduray is the center point of a personal kindred which, reckoned bilaterally, includes all the descendants of his four pairs of his great-grandparents and reaches laterally to include all second cousins. Spouses married into one’s kindred are not included in it. The kindred have important responsibilities, and members are mobilized on one’s behalf in disputes, in the establishment of a family through marriage, and in its dissolution through death or divorce. The kindred on the other hand are not involved in any direct way with subsistence activities.
The largest social unit is the inged, which usually comprises several settlements. The household belonging to the inged render mutual assistance among themselves in all swidden related activities as well as in all the community rituals. Ordinarily, almost all members of the inged are linked to one another either by blood through marriage ties.
The Tedurays communities [sic] are also organized in settlements of five to ten families called dengonon. These are actually small, dispersed hamlets, spread out over an area.
The basic residential unit is a nuclear family, composed of the iboh (father), ideng (mother) and the inga (children), unmarried or married, who have not yet put up their own dwellings. In some cases, unmarried and dependent elders would form part of the household, which also includes the other wives of the household head. The Teduray word for family is kureng, which means “pot”, i.e., a family is deemed as a group of persons living together and eating from the same pot.
In earlier times, members of a neighborhood shared a single large house. This seems to have been the rule in periods of political instability, on account of tribal wars. Starting from the American occupation, with the territory more or less pacified through military control, Teduray families started living in individual houses. The term setifon, which means “of one house” is still used to refer to all members of one neighborhood. The one large house in the inged is where the kefeduwan normally stays.
The head of the kureng follows the strict code of responsibility for feeding and provisioning the household, whether he is monogynous or polygenous [sic]. All property, money and crops are jointly owned by the household, with the wife seeing to it that economic tasks, responsibilities and rights are properly adhered to within the kureng. A polygynous marriage can be allowed if the first wife gives her consent. Furthermore, the senior wife becomes the “first among equals”, acting as chief spokesperson for all the other wives with regard to their rights and duties within the household.
In Teduray society, marriage takes place when the man’s relatives have succeeded in accumulating the bride price called tamuk, delivered to the parents of the bride. During marriage, relatives of the groom are called upon to contribute their share of items making up the bride price. The kefeduwans and their families are enjoined to assist in performing the marriage rites. The role of the bride’s relatives is to help in the determination and distribution of the bride price.
The kinship terminology follows the generational structure and is reckoned bilaterally from the father’s and mother’s lineage. The kinship terms used are eboh (father), ideng (mother), ofo (older sibling), tuwarey (younger sibling) and inga (children). After marriage, brothers are likely to combine or join their families together into one household. The same practice holds true for sisters who get married. In the old days, child marriages were common.
Inside the kureng, the closest relationship possible is that between husband and wife. Their children will eventually grow up, have their own spouses and set up their own kureng. So long as their marriage lasts, they will live permanently together in the same “pot”. The closeness of man and woman in marriage is partly explained by the division of labor between man’s work and woman’s work in the Teduray swidden. It becomes very necessary that every farmer has an active wife and that each adult and active woman is wedded to a worker husband. This is why selamfa, eloping with a married person, is considered a grave transgression against Teduray society; the very fabric holding it together is threatened.
It is acceptable to have a duwoy, a co-wife, which could be more than one. There are several reasons for a polygamous relationship. The most common is the death of a relative who lives behind a widow. The man is allowed to accept the widow into his kureng. Or, a man may decide to add on to their social prestige by taking on an additional wife, particularly a young woman. Another acceptable reason is the need to sire children, if the first wife cannot bear him any. The one condition is that the tafay bawag, the senior or first wife, must give her consent. While she can always prevent her bawag (husband) from marrying another wife or any number of wives, in practice, it is in the woman who often suggests that her man take in a duwoy, because of the advantage she perceives in the arrangement. She will have another person with whom to share the burden of so much work in the house and in the swidden. The tafay bawag exercises clear authority over the other wives. She assigns to them a share of the work in her husband’s fields. Everything that they produce is shared. The first wife sees to it that all of the duwoy’s pots receive an equitable share of food.
Socialization for the children starts at an early age. They are suckled by their mothers up to the age of two or three, or as long as no new baby has arrived. But once they are able to walk, they are allowed to play around the village, without any supervision from the elders. When they reach the age of six, they become little helpers in the swidden fields. Boys are assigned the tasks of gathering firewood, tending the farm animals, hunting wild birds with their little blowguns, and guarding the fields from marauding monkeys. The girls on the other hand help in pounding the rice, weaving rattan baskets, fetching water and washing clothes. In working, the Teduray children learn all there is to know about surviving in their society so that by the time they are adolescents, they can do the same work as their parents and have absorbed the skills they need to function as Teduray adults.
(Blogger’s note: This post is the eighth part of a nine-part series on the Teduray people. Each part is posted every Monday starting October 6, 2014. The text is copied as it appears in Defending the Land: Lumad and Moro People’s Struggle for Ancestral Domain in Mindanao. The book, published by a consortium of non-government organizations, has an “anti-copyright” notice and may thus be freely reproduced.)
No comments:
Post a Comment