Environmental Uncertainty and Augural Contingency

This chapter focuses on the omen-taking by which the Dayak ascertain if spirits are seeing them as wild pigs. The Dayak have a complex sign system based on the behavior of jungle birds, which warns them of potentially perilous collisions between their everyday reality and that of the spirits. The context for most Dayak bird augury is agriculture and its success or failure. The environmental variables that determine agricultural success are not empirically linked to any bird omen, nor is the character or heeding of any omen correlated with agricultural outcomes; the meaning of augural signs is thus completely arbitrary, like the roll of dice. The history of omen-taking is associated with rice cultivation, in particular its precarity: the uncertainty of rice cultivation is mimetically reflected in the uncertainty of omen-taking. This augural system falls into the ethnographic category of practices like the poison oracle of the Azande of northern Central Africa, a means of constructing contingency as a valuable cultural resource.