Ritual, Myth, and the Rise of “Greedy Rice”

This chapter studies the ritual conservation of archaic cultigens. Contemporary food-crop agriculture in the region is heavily focused on rice. But tribal mythology, supported by archaeological evidence, suggests that much grain cultivation was preceded by the cultivation of tubers, in particular taro. Myth and ritual depict this process of agricultural change as a contest, as political in effect; and indeed, the history of the development of rice cultivation — especially irrigated cultivation — cannot be told without reference to the rise of central states, which favored rice cultivation as easy to control and tax. State ideologies disparage systems of food-crop production that are less amenable to state control as primitive, as reflected in folk mythology that depicts the earlier forms of cultivation, for example of tubers, as demanding less knowledge. The native mythology and ritual thus represent the terms of a historical contest over rice cultivation that played out over the centuries. The “constitutive absence” of long-gone crops in contemporary myth and ritual affords people a perspective on the present, showing its apparent inevitability as historically contingent. This exemplifies the capacity for “correctives” like ritual and religion to escape the confines of “conscious purpose.”