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ADOLESCENCE The procession returned home and the guests were entertained with plays and dances to celebrate the fact that Made Rai, the little girl that a few days before roamed unconcerned all over the bandjar, had become a beautiful woman of fourteen. The custom of filing the teeth has a deep significance among primitive peoples, usually as a form of initiation ceremonies at puberty. Others tattoo or scar their bodies, and even Westerners, who are horrified at the absurd customs of savages, practise initiation tortures in the form of sabre duels, beatings, featherings, or simply breaking their noses at college football games. The Balinese file their teeth when a boy or a girl comes of age; not in sharp points like some Africans, or down to the gums like the Sumatrans and other Indonesians; but they simply file off a small portion of the upper incisors and upper canines to produce an even line of short teeth, also wearing them down to smooth their outer surface. Undoubtedly the custom of filing the teeth (mesangi, mepandes) had its origin in initiation rites. As we have seen, the teeth are not only filed to make them beautiful, but also blackened, and it is possible that, like the custom of cutting the rice stalks at harvesting-time with a small blade carefully hidden in the palm of the hand, the filing and blackening of the teeth may in some way be connected with the fear of offending, or hurting, the rice soul. Today, as I have said, young people are giving up chewing betel-nut, and the custom of blackening the teeth is disappearing. It is mostly elderly people who display black caverns for mouths, oozing with blood-red betel juice. The filing should be performed preferably at puberty, but the ceremony is expensive because of fees, guests, banquet, offerings and so forth, and usually only the well-to-do can afford it then. Although it is not longer regarded as essential, many people have their teeth filed later in life if they were not filed during youth. It
is believed that a person may be denied entrance into the spirit world
if his teeth are not filed, and often the teeth of a corpse are filed
before cremation so that he will not look like a demon, a raksasa, the
long canines of whom stick out through the cheeks like a wild boar's. |
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