| dc.description.abstract | Based on fieldwork conducted in a village in Ifugao, Northern Luzon, the Philippines, this thesis takes a closer look at how persons are constructed through the relations established and managed in Ifugao sacrificial rituals. In these rituals, spirits and deities are called to participate in feasts where pigs are butchered and sacrificed. The meat of these pigs is cut into pieces and distributed to the relatives and friends of the sponsor. I suggest that these meat exchange practices are to be understood as objectifications of the relations between the sponsor and the recipients. Through the meat distribution the sponsor makes manifest what relations he wants to activate and thus manages his own relational network. In a society where the concept of person is relationally defined, this meat exchange is central to the construction of the person. A particular relation between the sponsor and the sacrificed meat is thereby identifiable. A notion of identification is found in certain phases of the ritual, while a separation combined with a continued participation in each other s construction is operative in other phases. Participants and recipients must subsequently observe a series of taboos. I suggest that the observance of these involves an acceptance and incorporation of the established relations. The taboo observance thus also participates in the construction of the person. Jars, gongs, and pigs are considered prestigious objects and also participate in the person, as they add a notion of prestige and hierarchy to the relations. These objects are used within the ritual context, and I therefore include an analysis of how that context is brought about. Through various means, such as formality and redundancy, a ritual context is produced. The perspective developed to understand Ifugao sacrificial rituals is then used to analyse Ifugao death rituals. In addition to presenting ethnographic details of the Ifugaos and a theoretical analysis of these, the thesis is intended to operate on a more abstract level as well, addressing such issues as the relation between subject and object, person and things, individual and society, and the meta-analytical distinction between semantics and pragmatics. I propose a semiotic perspective that understands the ritual actions and objects as signs that stand in a constructive relation to what they signify. I suggest that the signs that are operative in Ifugao rituals, are two-directional, having symbolic-semantic and indexical-pragmatic references at the same time. This perspective is thus able to account for the interconnections between the semantic and pragmatic aspects of the described rituals and link these actions and objects directly to the construction of the person that takes place in them. | nor |