guest he offers a piece of pork and asks if he intends to do the
Rangsikam ceremony, which is voluntary. To accept the pork means that
the answer is in the affirmative. To refuse it means that the answer is
in the negative. Early on the morning of the next day, which is emung,
the villagers go and see if a wild cat or other animal has taken away
the chicken which had been left at amungkampen. For it to be taken away
forbodes ill for the village.
[The Rangsikam ceremony.] In Akuk no one may do the Rangsikam ceremony
till after the Lanvung “genna,” but in other villages it may be done
either before or after. The ceremony, which is also known as Likam, is
performed as follows. The master of the house having slept apart from
his wife the night before and eaten apart from her in the morning,
though she may cook his food, kills a pig, and taking the cooked meat,
“madhu,” boiled rice, a live hen and a new pot, goes down to his
field-house—a shed built by each man in his fields where he can shelter
from the rain or eat his mid-day meal with his wife and family. Having
made a fire with a fire-stick inside the house he holds the hen by the
wings with his right hand and walks round the outside of the house,
swinging the hen and calling out the names of all the different
varieties of rice he knows, whether he has sown them or not, and asking
Rangsi to give him a good crop of them. He then strangles the chicken
and takes the omens exactly as the Puthi does in the Amungkam ceremony.
It is worth noting that this is the only occasion on which anything is
killed in the field-house. Otherwise it is forbidden to bring raw meat
of any kind into a field-house, or kill anything or have sexual
intercourse in it. This is why the approaches to field-houses near
paths are often “panjied” as a gentle reminder to passers-by that they
must not run in to shelter from the rain if they are carrying raw meat.
To resume, the hen is plucked, and cooked in the new pot. It is not
eaten by the sacrificer, but is taken back to the village and given to
an old man of his clan. The entrails are put in the pot, which is
covered with a leaf and buried up to the rim behind the field-house.
The little bamboo basket in which the hen was brought is stuck all over
with its feathers and put, together with the fire-stick, beside the
pot. All then wash their hands and the proceedings end with a meal from
the provisions brought down. From the time when the preparation of the
“madhu” for this ceremony is begun till the ceremony is over, sexual
intercourse is forbidden and no member of the household must touch a
corpse, meat from a tiger’s kill or the flesh of cattle, dogs or goats.
On the day of the ceremony no man from another village may enter the
house before the family go down to the field-house.