Greetings from Arabia

Wereldmuseum part 2

The Wereldmuseum had really interesting displays on Chinese and Japanese culture, primarily on religion.  They had rooms set up like temples, with tapes of Buddhist/Shinto/etc. monks chanting in the background.  It was an interesting way to display all of the stuff they had, instead of just looking at shelves and shelves of stuff.  One things, of which I was not aware, is that many kinds of Buddhists use "skull cups" as parts of rituals.  These are cups made out of the top of people skulls.  There is one particular sect of Buddhism that is especially into using bits of people in their worship (or perhaps it is Buddhists who have achieved a certain level of enlightenment, I wasn't quite clear on that).  They use the skull cups.  And rattles, knives, and other implement made out of femurs and other human bones.  And they drape human skins and intestines over their alters.  I wasn't entirely soothed by the official museum notation that the use of these things was "merely ritual."  I am not sure that that really speaks to my concerns about this practice.

There was a large section on Oceana and Indonesia.  There was one section that I thought was particularly entertaining.  There was one group of Indonesians who used to carve statues of those who died and then erect them around the town as temporary habitations for their ghosts, until the ghosts got used to things and headed off wherever the ghosts went, after which the statue would be buried.  Apparently, the length of time that it took for the ghost to head home was more or less tied to the length of time it took his family to pay for the giant funeral dinner everyone had.  The longer that it took to pay for the dinner, and the longer the little statue was out where everyone could see it, the more embarrassing it was and, also, the more likely it was that the ghost would get annoyed and start making trouble.  That seems like a pretty effective way of making sure people paid their debts.

They had a large display on Headhunters.  Let me just start this by saying that they did not have one single, soletary, shrunken head.  Let's just all say together: "EPIC FAIL."  That is all there is to say about that.

They had a really nice display on Headhunter carvings.  Apparently, it was traditional for them to chop down a nutmeg tree and then carve giant, elaborate totem poles out of the trunk.  They had one 12 foot long pole which was suspended from the ceiling and it was pretty impressive to think of people doing all that detailed work out of a whole tree trunk.

In case anyone is wondering why a museum exhibit entitled "HEADHUNTERS" spends a significant majority of the exhibit displaying giant carved tree trunks, then we are on the same page.  I was definitely expecting more shrunken heads and less carved aromatic nutmeg trees.

Apparently, the Headhunters used the totem poles to honor their dear departed and to appease their ghosts.  The headhunting comes in to play with regard to the spirits of the un-departed.  Now, in a lot of the world, people didn't used to sleep on pillows.  They had hard (really uncomfortable looking) neck rests made out of wood or other hard materials (if you remember Egyptian tombs, they usually had those kinds of neck rests).

 

These are some versions of African native headrests which are currently up for auction.  They appear to be quite plentiful and fairly popular.  These all seem to be priced around $300.  I think, though. that I might just stick with my fluffy squishy pillow.

In any case, most folks were satisfied with wood, or maybe some ivory.  These headhunter fellows were not.  They believed that the head was the center of psychic energy/enlightenment/good juju or something like that.  And, since they worried that, while they slept, their souls would wander away and forget to come back, they liked to have as many skulls around as possible, to lure their souls back home.  So they used skulls for their neck rests.  The museum did have some of these skulls on display (they were, sadly enough, normal sized, although that was probably more convenient for the purpose of sleeping on).  They were decked out with feathers and stuff.  'Cause no one likes to sleep on a boring old un-decorated skull, after all.

You may be sad to know that these poor fellows are no longer allowed to pick up any new skulls.  Headhunting is now illegal.  It has been since the 1960s.  Fortunately (the little audio guide told me) the Headhunters are still able to perform their rituals, just without the headhunting.  But just answer me this, how is all the ritual in the world going to get your soul back if you don't have some extra skulls lying around to lure him back in?

3 October

Every 3 October, there is a huge party in Leiden, celebrating the city's relief from a Spanish Siege in 1574, during the Eighty Year's War.  It is a massive party and everything is shut down for the day.  I didn't go.

Mostly this is because I have class on Mondays.  I think I might have been able to convince a history teacher of the need to participate in this shared cultural memory (if it was my other class, I really might have tried because that class is all about cultural memory) but my Monday class is more of an International Relations study and I don't think they would have been too moved.

The rest of the reason I didn't go was because of herring.  It is traditional to eat herring and white bread, first thing in the morning, because it was the first food that the Leideners got to eat when they were released from the siege.  And I bet if you're starving, herring tastes pretty amazing, too.  They hand out the herring and white bread for free.  It seemed like, had I gone, it would have been really culturally awkward to refuse to eat the herring and I decided that the better part of valor might be avoiding situations in which cultural sensitivity necessitated me eating raw herring at 7 o'clock in the morning.

The local Leiden paper, the Leidsch Dagblad, included a bunch of pictures of the festivities.  If you click here you can see them.  When the page opens you will see a rather scantily clad woman who participated in the parade but if you scroll about half way down the page, under a label that says "Leidens Ontzet 2011, de dag in foto's" (Releif of Leiden 2011: the day in photos), you will see the picture and you can either let it do a little slide show or you can click on the little "+" sign under the picture to go through them at your own speed.  Looking through the first pictures I was feeling kind of bad.  Here were all these people singing patriotic songs together (even if rather early in the morning); it is apparently a big rite of passage with baby bibs commemorating it; and here I had decided to skip it.  After all, I thought, if I had gone over early in the morning I could have returned in time for class and I could have at least sung some songs and seen the parade and been part of something larger than myself.

And then I got to the pictures of the herring and I didn't feel the least bit bad anymore.  This year, apparently, Leiden set the record for the most herring eaten at a public event in 4 hours (or something like that).  They had officials come to weigh baskets of fish before and after every one had eaten and then estimated from that how much herring was eaten.  It was a lot.   And they looked gross.  And, I bet, they smelled strong at 7 o'clock in the morning.  If you click here you can go to a page with a video about the herring.  It is worth watching, even if parts of it are in Dutch.  The Guiness World's Record guy appears a couple of times and speaks in English and there is a woman demonstrating the approved way of eating a herring (at 7 o'clock in the morning!).  Also, you can see Leideners queuing in their pajamas, waiting to pick up their floppy herrings and you can also see inebriated Leideners (at 7 o'clock in the morning!) singing patriotic songs together.  It appears that good times were had by all and my qualms at missing what is most probably my only opportunity for participating first hand in the Leiden Ontzet Festival are almost entirely assuaged by the fact that I didn't have to get up at 4 o'clock in the morning and spend $20 on a train ticket to eat raw herring.

I did, however, eat stampot, out of solidarity, and that worked out quite well.