Household Hierarchy, Authority, and Purity and the Cipa System

We have discussed the city-wide assignment of roles and their arrangements into hierarchical levels in chapter 5, and we will discuss the com-

plex of ideas and actions concerned with purity, impurity, and purification in chapter 11. Hierarchy and purity are also used within the household—and as in the larger system primarily in relation to eating and drinking—to define and order household status. The hierarchy, and some assent to it, is also indicated by the use of respect gestures and language.

The male head of the household is called the "leader," the naya :. On his death, or absence from the household, the succession for the new naya : proceeds among males by age within ranked generations. That is, the title and role would pass from the head of the household through his progressively younger brother living in the household even if that younger brothers in the father's generation were younger than one of the previous naya :'s sons in the succeeding generation. Generation here takes precedence over relative age.^[8] The actual leadership of the household is informally taken by someone else when old age, youth, or incompetence make the nominal leader unable to lead the household. The nominal leader would, if possible, however, maintain the ritual roles of the naya :. The female religious leader of the house, the naki (n ), will ordinarily be the wife of the naya :. She will retain this title and its ritual functions even after the death of her husband, however, so that the wife of the new naya : will not necessarily become the naki (n ) if a senior wife (as ranked by the order of the husbands) is still alive, active, and competent.

Hierarchy in the daily life of the household is indicated in the way orders are given and accepted, and in a rough way in usages of respect language and gestures. Hierarchically arranged relative purity, the central idiom of the macrostatus system, is constantly signaled and enacted in the family in regulations regarding cipa (chap. 11). The term "cipa " designates food or drink that has become polluted because it or the utensil in which it is prepared or served has come in contact directly or more likely through the medium of fingers with a bodily pollutant, particularly saliva. That is, while a woman of the proper status level (and who is not temporarily "ritually" impure) will not pollute food while she is cooking it (as would a man or woman of lower level simply through touch), she would pollute it if she touched it after tasting it or if she put it in a utensil from which she had previously eaten and that had not been properly and traditionally cleaned. Most generally in practice this becomes a question of the sequence in which people are served and eat at each freshly prepared meal.

If someone of higher status in regard to cipa takes cipa from someone of lower status he or she is polluted and must purify himself or herself, albeit in a perfunctory way (chap. 11). In parallel to the pollution ideology of the macrostatus system, it is not polluting for a lower-status household member to eat a higher person's cipa , but on the contrary it is desirable and proper, particularly in the case of wives who should eat some of their husbands' cipa . Less prescriptively, more "naturally" the junior members of the household eat and are fed the cipa of their superiors. This, as such intake generally does (chaps. 5 and 11) indicates the sharing by the inferior person of the superior person's substance and his or her dependence and incorporation in a larger and superior "body."

The family cipa customs have a strong form among the more "orthodox" families (that is, "strict" Brahman families, and families in other thar s who emulate them), primarily among the upper two status levels, and a weaker form among less orthodox families in those levels and among all families at lower levels. The key restraint that persists through the very lowest levels is that a husband will not eat his wife's cipa , but she will eat his. In the more orthodox families the constraints are more extensive. We may summarize the stronger regulations as follows: (1) each "ritually adult" male of the family will accept the cipa of all those of either sex older than he is, but not that of any younger member of either sex; (2) women (and girls) generally in the family will eat anyone's cipa , except (a), some very strict upper-status women will try to avoid eating their sons' or daughters' cipa (but this is rare) and (b) very generally at all levels, all women in the household will not eat the cipa of the wives of their sons or younger brothers; and (3) boys, before receiving their initiation into their thar s, can eat the cipa of still youner boys and girls, and thus such boys—like girls whose younger brothers are unmarried—in fact have no cipa restraints.

In the weaker form of the system the father still will not accept his wife's cipa , but he will accept his children's cipa ,^[9] and all other members of the family will accept cipa among themselves. As noted, however, even in such households when the sons begin to marry and bring brides into the family, now at all levels, older siblings of both sexes as well as members of the older generation will not accept the cipa of the brother's or son's wife.

It is clear that the cipa system insists throughout on marking women who are brought into the patrilineal family from "outside." They become insiders to the system only to their own children, and to their husband's younger siblings to whom they have a quasi-maternal role, as

he has a paternal role. In upper-level families a further hierarchical ordering of family members is added.

When we go beyond the case of the introduced wife, in the weak form there is no further family cipa discrimination. In the strong form, and if we exclude the case of the introduced wives—except for the most strictly "Brahmanical"—there is an internal gender asymmetry. Men and women accept the cipa of elder women who, in turn, accept theirs. Men and women accept the cipa of elder men , who do not accept theirs. There is probably a different significance in these two cases. The acceptance of superior women's cipa in the family reflects the position and meaning of the mother—in part shared by all elder household women—who is due honor, respect, and deference, which takes some of its sentimental meaning from its contrast with paternal, patrilineal, and macrostatus systems of order and deference. It is only the men who do not take inferiors' cipa , and thus follow the conditions that carves out status in the larger urban social system. In this sense it is really only the men, and among them those who have been initiated into thar , whose status is differentially defined by the system in the course of their accepting cipa from both men and women above them and rejecting it from those below. While everyone, like lower thar s in the macrostatus system, must be careful to avoid the moral error of contaminating those above them and compromising their superiors statuses, for the women this is within the family (introduced wives aside) their only status concern. Thus the familial cipa system can now be said to (1) mark outside wives during the long period of slow integration during which they maintain their alien aspects, (2) honor mothers and maternal roles, (3) teach everyone how to conform to status generating behaviors, and (4) teach men how to assume differential status.