Wik Mungkan - Religion and Expressive Culture



Religious Beliefe. Culture in its broadest senseā€”land and its sacred sites, languages, totems, rituals, and body-paint designs; technology; and the fundamentals of social relationsā€”is not the work of creative human agents in the Wik view but was "left" by culture heroes. In the coastal regions, these heroes are two brothers, whose exploits form the basis of ritual cults that over-arch clan totemism and bind clans in regional associations. For the inland Wik, the clans' founding heroes are as a rule also their major totemic species. This Creation time of heroic exploits is represented as being just Beyond living memory of the oldest people, but its power is brought into the present through the performance of the rious rituals. Also populating the Wik cosmos are spirits of the dead and various other nonhuman beings and spirits, some of whom are malevolent. Like people, however, they have Language and are territorial. Many Wik are nominally Christian today, but beliefs and their modes of expression show strong elements of syncretism with traditional Wik ones.

Religious Practitioners. As in the past, there are ritual specialists, although their numbers are now few and the knowledge of many of the ritual and initiatory cycles is greatly attenuated. Ritual leaders are not necessarily secular ones, Especially in the settlements.

Ceremonies. Minor ceremonies included those performed at totemic increase sites, but the major ones were those surrounding birth, male initiation, and the complex cycle of mortuary practices. The totemic ritual cult cycles figured prominently in the latter two. Land and its sites, along with individual and corporate-group relationships to them, were at the core of ceremony and other social practices. Many rituals were and are relatively public and had both men and women taking part in specific roles, while others traditionally were restricted, though this is seldom the case today. Women had their own specific rituals in the mortuary cycles, as well as in certain increase ceremonies at particular clan totemic sites, but there was no autonomous domain of women's ritual life as such, apart from certain ceremonies surrounding birth. Mortuary rituals, transformed to a degree from precontact forms, continue to be major features of settlement life, but initiation and formal birth rituals are no longer practiced.

Arts. From the 1950s on, carved and painted ceremonial objects relating to totemic figures of the major ritual cults have been produced by the Wik for use in public and semipublic ceremonies. Prior to this time, they were evidently much simpler, more abstract in form, and used for secret Rituals. There are various body-paint designs that are a form of clan corporate property and today are seen only in mortuary rites. There have been some small-scale art workshops developed over the past few years, producing screen-printed cards and clothing.

Medicine. Sickness and misfortune are assigned ultimately to human causality through the medium of (always male) sorcery, or they are attributed to ritual infringements of various kinds, such as approaching a ritually dangerous site to which the individual did not have the right of access. Healers, who counteract the sorcerers' work through their own ritual interventions, are referred to today as "murri doctors." Remedies such as bark poultices and infusions are used for such conditions as wounds or diarrhea, but these treatments are not just the province of the healers and hence their application is somewhat idiosyncratic.


Death and Afterlife. For the coastal Wik, there are at least two spiritual constituents of a person. Immediately after death, what could be regarded as the "life essence" goes west, over the sea. The "earthly shadow" of the deceased remains, infusing the places and objects owned and used by him or her, and purification rites are performed over time to resocialize them. The totemic spirit is dispatched to the clan spirit-sending center a few days after death (though inland Wik do not perform this particular ritual). Since mission times, burial has replaced cremation and a Christian service is used for this segment of the mortuary ceremonies.

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