Kaguru 4 Rites Of Passage Essay

In regards to the environment beyond each house lies a series of spheres by which external and domestic relations are fused. As a result, the porch is an area where visitors and neighbors can eat and talk with the residents of a house without violating the household’s integrity. Outside that is the luga, the space immediately in front of a house where many non-intimate household chores are performed. In addition, the Kaguru build simple, unwalled shelters in their fields where they stay while guarding crops from wild foragers and where they can cook and shade themselves during a day of cultivating. (The Beidelman article)
The Kaguru’s four basic rites of passage are those related to birth, initiation, marriage and death. The various people involved are controlled in relation to domestic space. For example, when a woman gives birth both she and her child are confined within the house for the first four days after delivery. Another example is when a couple gets married and the marriage is being consummated, the couple is confined within the house for four days. The house protects nascent, fragile social statuses. (The Beidelman article) …show more content…
In the past the need for defense led most Kaguru to reside in fairly large, stockade settlements of several dozen adults. Today, lone homesteads inhabited by a couple or even by lone women are not uncommon. Today few settlements contain more than four or five married couples and most are homesteads of one family and its children. Additionally, the Kaguru describe any settlement as a Kaya, which means both settlement and home. It can refer to a cluster of houses or to a single homestead. Kaguru settlements often appear to contain far more persons than they actually do. This is because Kaguru custom requires that each adult woman should have her own house and hearth and that initiated boys and girls are forbidden to reside in the same house with their parents. (The Beidelman