1.a Pollution, poison and funeral gifts

Kegare or supernatural pollution[44] is something that people acquire by participation in post-mortem rituals. Kegare is believed to be dangerous and it must be averted from entering the inside of a house (uchi). This is done by ‘purifying’ oneself and by tracing a protective boundary around the house, in the ritual throwing of salt. The idea of pollution also comprises physical dirt, sickness, and to some extent crime, uncivil behaviour and sins (Kodansha 1993). As Oue’s case shows, pollution is not a ‘substance’. It is a ‘time process of contamination’ that affects people while they are trying to break off relations with the deceased and the sick body, which is the sources of contamination. In the local perceptions of this process, isolation of the bereaved and the sick is the method imposed to ‘contain’ such contamination. The relation among auspicious/inauspicious occasions, prestations, and pollution is one of mutual exclusion. Whatever is polluting must be warded off from auspicious prestations and sacred recipients and vice-versa. This is reflected in a note from my field diary:

This morning I went to the festival in the neighbourhood of Oue, one of my friends and informant. The festival, compared with those in larger neighbourhoods and villages, was small. We were nine houses altogether. I helped to brush while the men cleaned the Shrine, set up the banners and wrapped the Shrine. The toya arrived with the prestations of food to be offered to the deity. Everybody was in high spirits, happy and in a mood for congratulations. We were sitting opposite the prestations when the kannushi arrived. He took the prestations out of the boxes and showed the men around how to place them into the trays. I took a few fruits to set on a tray, under a leaf of white paper, when the kannushi asked the men something. Everybody stopped talking and turned to look at me while the kannushi was speaking to my host. The tension was palpable. My host casually asked ‘Are you mens?’ It took me a few seconds to realise he was asking if I was menstruating. Since I was not I told him so, and everything resumed as before. The kannushi turned to me, and making a small purification gesture said that since I was not, I could touch the prestations. Blood was kegare, and it should not be brought into contact with a deity. (...) Later in the week I became a mikoshigirl (woman who carriers the portable Shrine). At the reception hall of the village, while we changed into ‘happy’ clothes, a woman gave us a wrapped sachet of salt. She would not give us any explanation, and everybody probably knew the reason. She refused to talk about it (it would bring bad luck to discuss such things). Later I verified that she had been given salt by the kannushi, to remove any pollution in case we were menstruating, or affected by any pollution we did not know about.

Villagers here, unlike in the cases of funeral gifts in N. India in Raheja’s work, do not question in an explicit manner if pollution is returned with the gifts, or if it affects those that enter in to contact with the deceased family through gift giving. Moraes in 1916 (Published 1979) argued that the custom in Tokushima was to send flowers ‘and other presents’. The return gift: ‘is supposed to have come from the dead, or, rather to say, from his spirit, the gift will be covered with white paper on which the name of the donor is written. This is the first public action of the ascended spirit in his relation with earth’ (Moraes 1979: 107). Villagers of Kamikatsu do not make explicit any connection between the return gift and the deceased person. There is indication though, from their actions of using salt, that they believe that pollution can move and can enter the house (or a Shrine). Since it is an aspect of relations rather than a core of beliefs villagers use to give meaning to their actions, it is possible to argue that it is the gifts that make the connection between the afflicted house and others. The fact that it is the gift which carries the ‘poison’ can be seen in the action of ‘sending the gifts’. One of the practices at funerals is for those who are less close to the deceased and who cannot assist at the funeral, to send their wrapped gifts through a representative. This is very common among workmates. At work, each person who knew the deceased makes an envelope of money and gives it with the rest of the envelopes to a representative who takes it to the house. The representative is given as many return gifts as there were envelopes, each of them containing salt. On these occasions the recipient throws the salt through the window and on him/herself, as one would do coming out of a funeral. Gifts, then, become vehicles of transmission of the poison that exists because of the existence of a dead person.[45] The important aspect of these gifts is that the gift, as I elaborate, helps to pay for the rituals. The function of these rituals is mostly to ‘remove the deceased’ and to ‘show him or her the way out’. Many wrapping papers, some with a finger pointing the way out, are put around the deceased’s house, indicating the way for the soul to go. The gift then helps to break off the connections, and it is the return gifts which reconnect individuals to those around who have helped. While the deceased is the source of pollution, like menstruation in festivals, what the gifts create is not pollution but inauspiciousness. The poison or inauspiciousness that gifts cause to circulate is of a different nature. The inauspiciousness it causes can not be resolved by throwing salt or other purification rituals. Villagers differentiate between the pollution acquired by contact with the deceased, and the ‘poison’ that return gifts create. They also distinguish between the pollution created by the presence of a corpse and the inauspiciousness generated in these circumstances. The poison that it creates it is of an ‘economic’ nature. The gifts returned are usually redundant and their prices escalate according to rank. Two men argued:

‘okaeshi (return gifts) are a problem. They are an expression of thanks, and people give back depending on rank, but we shouldn’t send gifts based on price and quality’. ‘When someone is in the most unfortunate situation he/she is exhausted both physically and mentally. So at that time we should have more sympathy with them without pressure (of having to return and calculate the suitable return)’.

They all agreed that gifts helped people to connect with each other, but that such connections were too based on price and status, thus making the gifts redundant and meaningless, or, as most saw it, a ‘fight for status’, for showing that one can give more than their neighbours. In a dramatic sense, gifts at funeral occasions are not about pollution, which the ritual specialist deals with, but about the poisons of rank and redundancy and the inauspiciousness, the physical and mental sadness people experience.

[44] Although kegare is usually described as both pollution and supernatural pollution. Here I present then, dirt, menstrual blood as ideas about pollution that are not necessarily supernatural, nor associated with post-mortuary rituals. I think that ideas that kegare is associated with the failure/success by the kin of the deceased to conduct the elaborate post-mortuary rituals is one that encompasses the complexity of the example above. I would add that one of the post-mortuary rituals is precisely to provide with salt for those who enter in contact with the bereaved family through gift exchange regardless or not of the actual physical presence of the giver of the koden prestation. Thus, it is the actual fact of giving a gift that brings donors in contact with kegare which is removed by a return gifts which has a sachet of salt added to it.
[45] In India salt also plays part in condolence rituals. It signifies ‘being of the same body’. Quigley,D (personal communication).