The preceding chapter was concerned with the interpretation of the meaning and motivation of the instrumental symbols employed in customary rituals. In offering this interpretation, I concentrated on the rituals as instrumental acts aimed at achieving specific goals. Most rituals so far mentioned precede the performance of a seasonal activity or set of activities like weeding, harvesting, threshing, winnowing of the harvested grain or drawing of water from the well during the dry season of the year. Other rituals accompany the construction of a new house or the construction of a hearth inside it. The goals of all these various rituals are quite explicit. Most Berti are able to state that the rituals are performed to bring about a good harvest, to make sure that no danger will befall those who are going to draw water from the well or to ensure the health, prosperity and well-being of those who will inhabit the new house. A ritual is, however, not only an instrumental act but also a ‘culturally constructed system of symbolic communication, that is to say, its cultural content is grounded in particular cosmological or ideological constructs’ (Tambiah 1985: 129).

In this chapter, I consider the customary rituals from this point of view. The cosmological constructs which they express are most clearly brought into focus in those rituals which are concerned, in one way or another with the crossing of the boundary between the village (hilla) and the world outside the human settlement (khalā).