188 ANNALS NEW YORK ACADEMY OF SCIENCES 



to a perfunctory wail. If a man is to be buried, the wife or 

 daughter sits down on the floor at the precise moment when some 

 male relative is picking up the lid of the coffin, and as he lowers 

 it to the box she places her right forearm horizontally across her 

 eyes in the customary attitude of grief, and begins to wail in that 

 high-pitched, plaintive tone peculiar to Bagobo women and little 

 girls. The wail seems on the border line between genuine grief 

 and a cry meant as a feature of the occasion. While this wail 

 goes on, an old woman, mother or grandmother, makes a ritual 

 exhortation to the spirit of the dead, her eyes fixed steadily on the 

 coffin, her glance following keenly every movement of the men 

 and directed toward the exact place where a nail is being driven. 

 Precisely with the placing of the last nail, the old woman ceases 

 speaking, and the young woman's grief closes abruptly. 



If the funeral takes place in the early morning, breakfast is 

 served to family and friends immediately after the coffin is closed, 

 but before anybody receives a portion of rice the first handful 293 

 is taken out to put with the onong for the dead. Someone near 

 of kin to the deceased wraps the boiled rice in a banana-leaf and 

 puts it into the dead man's carrying-bag, before joining the rest 

 to eat rice and to chew betel. At the (dose of the meal, they 

 gather up the things that will be needed at the burial - petati - u 

 to lay in the grave, and the food and other conveniences that the 

 soul is to take along on its journey to Kilut. 



In the mountains, a burial-box is hollowed out from a section of 

 tree trunk or a log split lengthwise; but Bagobo families living 

 near the coast have formed the habit of shaping out a coffin, after 

 the manner of foreigners, but it is made barely large enough to 

 sqeeze the body into. Measurements taken by myself onthecoffinof 

 Obal, ;i fairly tall Bagobo whose body was enormously swollen by 

 disease, gave an extreme length of 5 i'rvt H'/ 2 inches; a maximum 

 width at the head end of 1 foot <» inches, sloping sharply to a 

 width of 8 inches at the top of the lid; while the foot of the box 

 had a maximum width of 1 1 inches, with a slope to 4 3 4 inches 

 at top. 



I was told that in former times the Bagobo made no coffin of 



""This custom was noticed by Father Mateo. 'When anyone dies, they never bury 

 him without placing for him his share of riee to be eaten on the journey." Mi.aik and 



Robertson: op. rit., vol. 18, p. l'ist. 1906. 



J0 * Professor Boas tells rae that this is a Mexican word. 



