Within the wider riverine society, ritual formed the main arena, for both men and women, in which personal accomplishments were traditionally translated into socially acknowledged status. For the Iban, ritual also gives evidence of spiritual favour and provides the chief means by which participants may enlist further spiritual aid in their quest for still greater power and renown. “It was in this testing milieu”, as Freeman (1981:40-41) observes,

that Iban leaders emerged. They were required, initially, to be men of substance and prowess in action; yet, much more important was the securing, in their ritual and spiritual lives, of the approval and support of the gods, for it was from this … that their special charisma stemmed.

Not only was the status of the Gawai sponsor valorized within this ritual arena, but precedence among its participants was also given overt representation. At the heart of every gawai is a complex allegorical invocation (pengap [or timang] gawai) performed by a company of bards (lemambang) comprised of a lead bard, answering bard and chorus (Sandin 1977:6-14; Sather 1994:62-63). In this invocation, the gods — at the invitation of the spirit-heroes and their messengers, acting as intermediaries — descend to the earthly world to join the Gawai, bringing with them charms (pengaroh) and other spiritual gifts with which to repay the hospitality of their hosts. Here, on the latter’s behalf, they are welcomed and entertained by the Orang Panggau, the Iban spirit-heroes and heroines. Both gods and spirit-heroes inhabit an unseen world of extraordinary deeds of valour, wealth, fame, spiritual power and honour, characterized by a finely graded hierarchy of achieved precedence and social standing. The chants of the bards both invoke and depict this world. Thus, they follow the journey of the gods as they travel through unseen regions of the cosmos, gaining wealth and spiritual power, clearing farms, or defeating enemies, echoing in these deeds the journeys of Iban men of reputation, on bejalai, migration, or as they travel to war or to fell the forest for new farms.

As the gods and goddesses descend to this world, they arrive, one-by-one, in inverse order of status. The last to arrive and be received is the principal god and his wife for whom the gawai is being held. Thus, in the case of the Gawai Burong, the principal deities are Singalang Burong, the Iban god of war, and his wife, Endu Sudan Berinjan Bungkong. As the human hosts validate their reputation and seek spiritual favour by feasting their guests, so the spirit-heroes and heroines, acting as hosts in the invisible world, feast the gods and goddesses on behalf of the human celebrants and sponsors. In the Gawai the human participants thus emulate (nunda’) the actions of the spirit-heroes, heroines, gods and goddesses, making visible the unseen world invoked in the songs of the bards.

During the performance of a gawai, a major task of each household is that of digir or bedigir, meaning literally, to seat or arrange the celebrants within its section of the longhouse gallery “in order”, “to line [them] up”, arranging them in a linear ordering in emulation of the gods and heroes, according to their age, sex, generation and achieved ranking. Thus, at major junctures in the proceedings, for example, before feasting and oratory, sacrifice, or ritual processions, the tuai gawai, or principal sponsor, waves a cock along the longhouse galleries to signal to the individual bilik hosts that it is time to bedigir, to arrange the seating of the guests “in a line” according to their age and achievements. Thus, for each bilik, someone must be delegated to lead the guests to their seats and to arrange them in their correct order, beginning first with the oldest and most distinguished guests. At times during a gawai, guests and hosts are free to move from one gallery to another, mingling with other celebrants, and sitting wherever they please to gossip and joke with their friends and relatives, but at major ritual junctures, this order of precedence must be recreated, especially when food and drink are served (nyibor), for oratory, offerings and processions. Thus, for seating, the most honoured male guests are seated along the upper gallery (dudok diatas). The most honoured of all visitors are seated at the gallery belonging to the gawai sponsor (tuai gawai), while others are seated at other family galleries. The highest ranking sit at the middle of the sponsor’s upper gallery and are flanked on each side, moving outward in both directions, by guests of descending age and achievement. Men of the host longhouse sit in a line along the middle gallery facing them, with the gawai sponsor seated at the centre of his middle gallery facing opposite his highest ranking guests. Women sit behind the men on the lower gallery or are received by their female hosts inside the family bilik. In this ordering, an idealized world of precedence is thus given concrete representation, as a finely individuated array of visitors and hosts, as celebrants are ranged along the galleries for feasting, or as they are called upon for oratory, to make offerings, or to circumambulate the longhouse interior in ritual processions.

Each time a gawai is held, an individual’s achieved status is thus open to reassessment, and, with the passage of years and the birth of children and grandchildren, his or her age and generational status thus also change, and these changes are similarly registered, so that, through repeated participation in gawai, a continuous re-ordering of status relations takes place and is publicly acknowledged.

Major gawai rituals, although sponsored by a single individual [the tuai gawai], and hosted by the separate households that make up the sponsor’s longhouse,^[21] activate a much wider sphere of relations, bringing together as guests (pengabang) and supporters (kaban) a far larger group of related longhouses and bilik, whose members are allied to one another as pesamakai or “co-feasters”. In the absence of chieftainship, or of a formal hierarchy of supralocal political offices, gawai rituals played in the past, and continue to play, an important role in Iban society, helping to maintain its wider social and cultural cohesion. All major regional groups of Iban share a basically similar gawai tradition, although with important differences of detail, and through ritual feasting, inter-longhouse ties are reinforced and personal achievement is given recognition within a larger regional sphere composed of neighbouring longhouses arrayed along the same river or tributary system. In the past this same regional society also formed the primary social field within which the influence of tuai menoa and tau’ serang was acknowledged and from which war parties were recruited and provisioned. Thus traditionally those who feasted together, as well as competing with one another for status, also fought together, intermarried, and settled their differences by arbitration. Unlike the essentially egalitarian longhouse, it was here, within this wider social field, that differentiation was given public expression.

While achieved rank and generational seniority are thus subject to constant ritual reassessment throughout an individual’s lifetime, at death a final stock is taken of each person’s accomplishments and, on this basis and in terms of the age and generational status he or she has attained, an adat mati or death adat is awarded by the deceased’s kindred and community elders. This adat is figuratively reckoned, like a fine, in terms of grades of prestige wealth. Adat mati determines the details and duration of mourning observances and the type of garong basket that is woven for the deceased during the Gawai Antu, the final memorial rites for the dead held roughly once in every generation (Sather 1993:95ff). In the Paku region of the Saribas, there are eleven major grades (ripih) of adat mati represented by different garong basket designs. Five of these are reserved for children and for young men and women who have not yet married or attained parental status. The remaining six are awarded to adults. Gender is not distinguished, but the four highest grades are awarded on the basis of predominantly masculine achievement. The weaving of the baskets, and the collection of building materials for the construction of tomb huts, together open the first stage of Gawai Antu (Sather 1993:94). Following the main festival rituals, during which the collective dead of the community are recalled to this world, the garong baskets are removed from the longhouse and installed in the tomb huts erected during the concluding stage of the Gawai over the graves of the dead in the longhouse cemetery (pendam). Thus, for the Saribas Iban, achieved rank is not only fixed at the time of death but, on this occasion alone, and during the mourning and memorial rites that follow, it is specifically registered in adat distinctions which differ according to achieved rank.

In death, however, an individual’s accrued status is also removed from the living world and transposed to the Otherworld of the dead (menoa Sebayan), a transposition symbolized by the transfer of the garong baskets from the longhouse to the cemetery, where they are placed in the tomb huts, together with furnishings such as miniature sunhats, carrying baskets and fish traps, meant to serve the spirits of the deceased in the Otherworld. This transposition also applies to any marks of precedence, such as praise-names and honorifics (julok). These, too, are believed to be taken by the deceased on his or her journey to the Otherworld, where they remain attached to his person and therefore unavailable for inheritance by his descendants. In a sense, the relationship between the living and the Otherworld reverses, for the Iban, that of their Malay neighbours. Unlike the Iban, the latter live, in life, in a highly stratified society, but in death, they are stripped of all marks of status and buried in a plain white shroud, so that they enter the Otherworld, without distinction, as equals, much in the same way, conversely, as the Iban believe that the newborn enter the living world as undifferentiated equals, to begin, like undyed cotton thread, their social careers. For both, death may be said to transform the relationship that exists between egality and hierarchy, but in opposite ways.

This removal of the deceased’s achieved ranking from the social world of the living — and its transposition to the Otherworld of the dead — is of utmost social significance. Here the ritual transformation effected by the Gawai Antu reverses, in a critical sense, that of the Gawai Burong and other major gawai celebrations, including the Gawai Ngar. For the Saribas Iban it completes a symbolic economy by which inequality and ritual are inter-related. Rather than replicating an unseen spiritual hierarchy in the human world, human hierarchy, in death, is given a final transposition to the Otherworld of the dead. Removed from this world, the deceased’s rank, his praise-names, fame and other intangible marks of his or her status are thus rendered uninheritable. They remain attached to the individual who achieved them and therefore cease to have any living presence in “this world”. As a consequence, the deceased’s sons, daughters and other descendants, must begin life anew, like all others, equal and undifferentiated, and must win a place for themselves in the visible society of the living by their own efforts and through projects of their own devising.