The wrist-tying ceremony is performed in the early morning of the first day of reaping, before the members of the household set out to work in their swidden. The ritual is very much a domestic one and its purpose is to call back the souls of all the members of the household back into their bodies and, as the term suggests, to bind the souls within the bodies of their respective owners.

The significance of the wrist-tying ceremony, which is performed again in the harvest season (on the first day of threshing and the second day of the New Year celebrations), cannot be fully appreciated without reference to the more important features of wrist-tying rituals in general. Ordinarily, wrist-tying rituals are only performed when a person is thought to be suffering from “soul loss” (ba’ kau’ koela).^[17] In such circumstances, a ritual specialist (soera) is called in to perform the ritual which requires the preparation of food to entice the wandering soul (or souls) back into the body of the person concerned. Divination is employed to determine whether or not the soul or souls, have returned. If the souls are deemed to have returned, the wrists of the patient are bound, followed by those of other members of the household. Thereafter, all the members of the household proceed to eat. It is clear that these rituals have as their purpose the re-establishment of the “integrity” or “corporateness” of body and souls. Here, we may note that the ritual is held when a person undergoes what is regarded to be a critical period, and that an important aspect of the symbolism in the ritual is commensalism which establishes the interrelatedness or “corporateness”, as it were, of all household members.

Both these features are integral to the rite of wrist-tying at the reaping of rice. There is, however, one important difference: the souls of rice are included in the ritual reflecting the close association between households and the rice that they cultivate, as well as a certain conception which likens rice to humans evident in the ritual ministrations that both receive. This may be seen in the prayer that is said in the ritual by the head of the household.

These opening lines are significant for they show that in the ceremony, at this stage of the agricultural season, the restoration of the “integrity” or “corporateness” of souls, bodies and rice, has a territorial aspect. That is, it is conceived of in the context of the land, or domain, which the community inhabits, and which identifies the community. The prayer continues with invitations to the souls of the members of the household to partake of the food which has been prepared for the ritual:

At the end of this call to the souls of family members, the head of the household next calls upon the souls of rice to return to the swidden. In this call, the rice is described as “rice of the thirty-three mothers”. Although the Palokhi Karen cultivate several varieties of rice in their swiddens, they certainly do not recognise thirty-three varieties in their ethno-botanical classificatory system. This particular reference is based on the belief that rice and humans are similar in the number of souls that they possess. As I noted in Chapter III (p. 105, n. 24), the number of souls attributed to humans does, in fact, vary from informant to informant. Thus, the actual number of souls credited to humans and rice is not nearly so important as the fact that rice is likened to humans in the ideology of religion and agriculture in Palokhi. It is this which gives the ritual of wrist-tying at the reaping of rice its particular significance.

The last line above deserves comment because of the wealth of the metaphors employed and its polysemous nature. Si phau literally means “comb” and it is used here to convey the image not merely of the number of rice souls that are being called upon to return, but also of the plenitude of rice in the swidden. Phau, in this context, means “granary”, but it is also the homophone of “flower” (the difference being a mid-tone and a low-falling tone). “Comb” and “flower” (si phau), however, many also mean “flowers in blossom” and, metaphorically, also “mistress” or “lover” in Sgaw Karen.^[20] What we find here, therefore, is a super-imposition of various metaphors producing highly evocative images simultaneously. The overall impression conveyed in this line is a combination of a call to the thirty-three rice souls which return in a seried rank like the teeth of a comb, and a plea to a mistress or lover, as well as a declaration of the fullness of rice in the swidden that will abundantly stock the household granary.

Having called upon the souls of household members and rice, the head of the household goes on to say:

In the last two lines above, the head of the household refers simultaneously to the souls of rice and the four members of his family. Following from this, he next instructs the souls of the family members to collect the rice souls from wherever they have wandered or were taken by predators of the rice crop which, in the text that follows, are represented by rats.

The prayer is highly repetitive. At the end of the prayer, the parents then take up the lengths of yarn which were earlier placed on the tray of food and proceed to bind the wrists of their children. No particular attention is given to birth order in the tying of wrists. When the wrists of all the children have been tied, the two parents then tie each others’ wrists. With the wrist-tying completed, all the members of the household proceed to eat the meal from the tray after which they then go to their swidden to commence reaping.

In Palokhi, the rice that is first reaped is early ripening rice. The Old Mother Rice is not, usually, early ripening rice so that the reaping of swiddens does not always commence with the reaping of the entire crop of the Old Mother rice. Nevertheless, a sheaf of the Old Mother Rice is usually harvested and stored in the rafters of the field hut until the entire harvest is brought back to the village at the end of the harvest season, at which time the Old Mother Rice is brought back and stored above the rice in the granary. For many Palokhi households, the rice that is reaped in the early stages of the harvest season is brought back for immediate consumption because by this time their stocks of rice from the previous year have been exhausted. For other more fortunate households, the rice that has been reaped is left, bound in sheaves, on the stubble for to stooking prior to threshing at a later stage. For all households, however, the rice that has been reaped for immediate consumption is treated as the “head rice” (by kho) or “first rice”.

The eating of the head rice takes place in the evening of a day that is deemed convenient for all members of the household, for it is important that all should be present for the rite. The ritual officiant is, significantly, the oldest married, or widowed, woman in the family. There are many levels at which the ritual may be interpreted. It is concerned, for example, with the process of converting rice into its edible form through the use of fire. This is apparent from the inclusion of the hearth and hearth-stones in the ritual which includes their propitiation. It is also concerned with the propitiation of rice itself for being eaten. At yet another level, it is also concerned with ensuring that rice is not lost in the process of preparing it for consumption. However, what is most important sociologically is the essentially female nature of the rite which marks it as a domestic rite through the idiom of processing and cooking rice, quite regardless of the mimimal sexual division of labour in Palokhi. It is the only agricultural rite of significance that demands a female officiant and it expresses the ideological categorisation of men and women and their complementarity, in agricultural production, through the mediation of a general opposition between the domestic and non-domestic domains.

On the evening of the ritual, a small portion of the “first rice” is set aside, unhusked, in a small bowl while the rest, sufficient for a meal for the household, is cooked in a pot. When the rice is cooked, the pot is placed near the hearth where the family normally takes its meals. Other accompaniments are also prepared and placed alongside the pot of rice. The ritual officiant then proceeds to make the preparations that are necessary for the ceremony. Three bananas are split lengthwise along their skins which are opened up to form a sort of container for the fruit inside. The bananas are then placed on the three hearth-stones in the fireplace as an offering to fire. There is no particular significance in the use of bananas because pieces of yam, tapioca or sweet potato may also be used. A fresh water crab is then cast onto the embers in the fire-place.

The ritual officiant then unravels a bunch of vines (called ki’ko), collected earlier in the day from the forest, and proceeds to garland the hearth posts with them.^[22] As she does so, she picks up a few grains of the unhusked “first rice”, a small handful of the cooked rice in the pot and plucks a leaf from the vines and chews on them. She also picks up small pieces of banana from the hearth-stones and breaks of a claw from the crab and chews on these as well. As she does this, she says the following prayer:

The prayer continues in this vein at considerable length. As she chews and recites the prayer, the ritual officiant also spits out some of the contents of her mouth onto the hearth and around the fireplace.

There are some variations to the otherwise repetitive, indeed redundant, nature of the verses. For example, the rice is told that “people do so (that is, the ritual) for the future, people eat thus for the future” to bring about a “rising” of the “eating to fullness, the drinking to fullness”. It is, significantly, also told that “You are the father, you are the mother”. In the light of the distinction between procreativity and non-procreativity established by the systems of sex, gender and kin terms in Palokhi discussed in Chapter III, the conjunction of “father” and “mother” in this reference is clear: in the cognitive scheme that orders cultural categories, rice is treated as a reproductive entity alongside humans.

The ritual officiant continues to refill her mouth with more unhusked rice, cooked rice and so on, and next addresses the hearth directly.

What is being expressed in the second and last line above are difficult to translate because of the polysemous nature of the term for “eat” in Palokhi, and as it is employed in these lines. The expression pgha moe ‘au’ na, for example, also means “people use you to eat” (that is, to prepare food). There is also the idea that fire — as it is used to prepare food or to burn off the fur of animals prior to cooking them — “eats” the food or animals. “Burning”, to give another example, is spoken of in terms of “fire eating” (me’u ‘au’) something. All of these ideas and associations present in these lines express the propitiation of fire and hearth, and the fact that they are regarded as co-eaters of human food. This is, thus, yet another example of the importance and power of idioms of eating, and their applications, in Palokhi.

Beyond the purpose of the ritual, in these two stages, obvious from the declarative sentences of intentionality in the prayer, it is possible to propose a further interpretation on the performance. They key feature is the mastication of food together with unhusked and husked rice. The food and rice, however, are not swallowed by the officiant. Instead, they are spat out around the hearth when it is propitiated, and again around the room later. A major theme in the prayer, however, is the shared eating of food with rice itself, fire, the hearth and “the doing of the steps, the doing of the xae” (see below), that is, the household and ‘au’ ma xae respectively. Accordingly, I suggest that the mastication by the ritual officiant is in fact the symbolic acting out of the consumption of food by rice, fire, the hearth and the domestic group at one and the same time.

After propitiating rice, fire and the hearth, the officiant chews some more rice and food and circumambulates the room. As she does so, she repeats the prayer but this time, however, she spits out the contents of her mouth on the walls and corners of the room. There is a variation in the prayer which reveals still another aspect to the ritual.

When she returns to the hearth, the officiant then proceeds to tie a ki’ko vine around the pot of rice, saying as she does so:

At the end of this prayer, the ritual officiant or a married daughter takes a length of the ki’ko vine outside the house and binds the mortar in which rice is pounded to remove the husk. This is accompanied by a perfunctory prayer which acknowledges the use of the mortar and asks that one pip of husked rice be obtained from one pip of unhusked rice.

When this is done, rice from the pot containing the cooked “first rice” is spooned out onto two eating trays after which the women and girls of the family eat from one tray while the men and boys eat from the other.

That this is a pre-eminently domestic ritual is clear; but, where it differs from other domestic rituals marked by commensalism is the way in which it is almost entirely focused on the process of transforming unhusked rice into husked rice, cooking (indicated by the role of fire and the hearth), and the commensalism with food itself. Given the structural position of the rite in the cycle of agrarian rites and the cultivation of swiddens, that is, when the first of the harvest is brought back for consumption, the rite is undoubtedly concerned with marking the passage of swidden rice from its cultivated state to a state in which it may be domestically consumed.

Another important difference lies in the organisation of the familial commensalism that takes place at the end of the ritual, namely, the segregation of males and females during the eating of the “first rice” which is not present in other forms of commensalism, ritual or otherwise. The undoubtedly female nature of the ritual and its focus on the transformation of rice establishes all too clearly that the two are associated through a play on the process of preparing rice and cooking.

Cooking, as Davis observes (1984:176) in discussing the symbolic representations of the opposition between male and female among the Northern Thai, is perhaps the one proto-typical cultural activity almost universally associated with females. In Palokhi, however, there is only a minimal sexual division of labour and men actually do cook and, occasionally, pound rice. The rite of eating the first rice, therefore, does not assert or reflect the reality of social relations in this particular sense. What it expresses is the opposition and complementarity of the roles of female and male, as general cultural categories, through a ritual sexual division of labour resting on an implicit opposition between women and men, the domestic and non-domestic, and settlement and forest. It is a complementary opposition that is mediated by the symbolic transition of rice from its cultivated state to a domestically consumable one.