Between Life and Death: on the tomb house and the tomb abandonment ceremony of the Jarai tribe of the Vietnamese Central Highland

This paper explores the tomb house and the tomb abandonment ritual of the Jarai tribe of the Vietnamese Central Highland. Specifically, it explores the link between the material and the ritual, their significance within the context of Jarai culture and life as well as their meaning to the study of mortuary rituals and anthropology in general. This paper begins with contextual information on the Jarai, including their environment, social and spiritual life, and their views on death and the underworld. The tomb house and tomb abandonment ritual will then be discussed, with specific focus on how the house reflects Jarai beliefs, and enhances the ritual experience, serving as a way for the living to make sense of death and the world around them. Throughout the paper, I use materials from archaeologist Mike Parker Pearson (2002) and anthropologist Catherine Bell (1997) as a framework to categorize and analyse the ritual. The source material comes from on-site accounts, photographs, and ethnographic researches/books. This paper seeks to introduce the idea of the transformation of the soul from a thing of the mortal world to that of the underworld, as opposed to the cycle of material decay and regeneration, the idea of rituals that are associated with the liminal period, and challenge the assumption that funerary rituals either immortalize the dead or erase them. It also seek to raise awareness on the Jarai as well as pre-modern Vietnam as a topic of research that has largely receive little attention from scholars from various disciplines of the English-speaking world.