Communicating With Ancestors: Paired Clauses in the Buntang Ritual of the Dayak Maanyan in East Barito, Central Kalimantan, Indonesia

Abstract

This study documented the structure and meaning of the language used in the Buntang ritual, as practised among the Dayak Maanyan in East Barito, Kalimantan, Indonesia. This is a special language spoken by this group, living in the southern part of Borneo, to communicate with their ancestors’ spirits. In our documentation, we observed the Buntang ritual, the location of the ceremony, the participants involved, and the interactions between participants to obtain a complete record of the Buntang ritual. We then interviewed a wadian, “priest”, for a complete transcription of the speech used during the ritual. The language used in ritual features constructions of paired clauses. Drawing on the awakening and summoning practices for ancestors’ spirits in this ritual, we documented 2,868 paired clauses. The first clause of the pair uses words from daily use in the Maanyan language, while the second clause uses words that are only used in the ritual. Pairs are a combined form of two clauses with the same meaning in an unequal number of words. This inequality occurs because of verb, noun, or adverb reductions at the beginning of the second clause and word additions at its end.