Читать книгу Primitive Time-reckoning. A study in the origins and first development of the art of counting time among the primitive and early culture peoples онлайн

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The agricultural year is most clearly defined among the rice-cultivating peoples of the Indian Archipelago, by whom the seasons are determined according to the state of the rice. It is said, for example, in speaking of an event, that it happened at the blossoming or harvesting of the rice[313]. Among the Bahau, a Dyak tribe of Borneo, the year is divided into eight periods according to the various kinds of labour carried on in the rice-field:—the clearing of the brushwood (to prepare the fields for cultivation), the felling of the trees, the burning of the wood felled, the sowing or celebration of the seed-time festival, the weeding, the harvest, the conclusion of the harvest, the celebration of the new rice-year[314]. The Bontoc Igorot, as has been mentioned, divide the year into two parts, the period of rice-culture and the other period. There are however other periods which vary in different villages as regards name, number, and duration, but are everywhere called after the characteristic occupations that follow one another in the course of the year. Eight of these together make up the calendar, and seven of them have to do with the rice-cultivation. Each period receives its name from the occupation which characterises its beginning, and keeps this name until the beginning of the next period, even when the occupation that characterised it had ceased some time before. To cha-kon belong:—(1) i-na-na, the first period in the year, the time, as it is said, of no more work in the rice sementeras, when practically all the fields are prepared and transplanted; in 1903 it began on Feb. 11 and it lasts about 3 months, continuing until the time of the first rice-harvest in May, in 1903 till May 2; (2) la-tub, the time of the first harvests, lasts about four weeks and ends about June 1; (3) cho-ok, the time when most of the rice is harvested, fills about 4 weeks, in 1903 till July 2; (4) li-pas, the season of ‘no more palay-harvest’, lasts for about 10 or 15 days. To the half-year ka-sip, belong:—(5) ba-li-ling, which takes its name from the general planting of camotes and is the only one of the calendar periods not named from the rice industry: it lasts about 6 weeks, or nearly to the end of August; (6) sa-gan-ma, the time when the sementeras which are to be used as seed-beds for the rice are put into condition, the earth being turned three several times, lasts about 2 months: on Nov. 15, 1902 the seed was just peeping from the kernels; the seed is sown immediately after the third turning of the earth, which thus ended early in November; (7) pa-chog, the period of seed-sowing, begins about Nov. 10; although the seed-sowing does not last many days, the period continues for 5 or 6 weeks; (8) sa-ma, the last period, in which the sementeras are prepared for receiving the young plants, and in which these seedlings are transplanted from the seed-beds, lasts nearly 7 weeks, from about Dec. 20 to Feb. 10. The Igorot often say e. g. that an event occurred in la-tub or will take place in ba-li-ling; they therefore keep these periods in mind just as a European thinks of some particular month in which an event has happened[315]. The greatly varying length of the periods is once more to be noted, and also the fact that a vacant season is made into a period (see e. g. under (7)), it being necessary to fill in the gaps so that the circle shall be continuous.