The jacales are without semblance of furnishing, beyond an occasional
ahst and a few loose pebbles used as hupfs; though the nooks behind
the bows and tie-sticks sometimes serve as places of concealment for
paint-cups, awls, hair bobbins, and other domestic trifles. There is
no floor but earth, and this remains in natural condition, except for
trampling and wearing into wallows, recalling those of fowls and swine,
which afford a rough measure of the periods of occupancy; there is no
fireplace—indeed, fires are rarely made in the jacales, nor for that
matter frequently anywhere; and there are no fixed places for bedding,
water ollas, or other portable possessions, none of which are left
behind when the householders are abroad.
* * * * *
Little is known of the actual process of jacal building, especially
in Seriland proper; but the observations of Señor Encinas and his
vaqueros on the frontier corroborate Mashém’s statements that the
houses are built by (and belong to) the matrons; that several women
customarily cooperate in the collection of the okatilla and erection of
the framework; that the only tools used in the processes are hupfs and
miscellaneous sticks; and that the placing and fitting of the beams and
tie sticks are accompanied by a chant, usually led by the eldest matron
of the group. The same informants support the ready inference from the
structure that the shrubbery and other material forming walls and roofs
are gathered and placed from time to time by the women occupying the
jacales.
The Seri building chant is suggestive. Neither Señor Encinas nor
Mashém regarded it as religious or even ritualistic, but merely as a
work-song designed (in the naive notion of the latter) to make the
task lighter; and it seems probable that the local interpretation is
correct. If so, the simple chant at once offers rational explanation
for its own existence, and opens the way to explanation of the
elaborate building rituals of more advanced tribes. The work-song is a
common device in many lowly activities, ranging from those of children
at play to those of sailors at the windlass, and undoubtedly serves
a useful purpose in guiding, coordinating, and concentrating effort;
to some extent the vocal accompaniment to the manual or bodily action
apparently expresses that normal interrelation of functions manifested
by secondary sense-effects (as when the sense of smell is intensified
by exercise of the organs of taste), or, in another direction, by the
habit of the youthful penman who shapes his letters by aid of lingual
and facial contortion; yet it is a characteristic of primitive life—one
doubtless due to the interrelations of psycho-physical functions—to
not only employ but to greatly exalt vocal formulas associated with
manual activities, so that words, and eventually _the_ Word, acquires
a mystical or talismanic or sacred significance pervading all lower
culture—indeed the savage shaman is unable to work his marvels without
mumbled incantations ending in some formulated and well-understood
utterance, and his practice persists in the meaningless mummery and
culminating “presto” of modern jugglery. So, viewed in the light of
psycho-physical causes and prevalent customs connected with vocal
formulas, it would seem probable that the conventional features of the
Seri jacales are crystallized in the tribal lore quite as effectually
through the associated work-chants as through direct memory of the
forms and structures themselves. And the simple runes chanted in
unison by Seri matrons engaged in bending and lashing their okatilla
house-bows apparently define a nascent stage in the development of
the elaborate fiducial house-building ceremonies characteristic of
various higher tribes; for the spontaneous vocal accompaniment tends
naturally to run into ritual under that law of the development of myth
or fable which explains so many of the customs and notions of primitive
peoples.[289]
[289] The law of fable in its relation to primitive surgery is
formulated in the Sixteenth Ann. Rep. Bur. Am. Eth., 1897, p. 22.