Note 7 — Chapter XV · FUNERAL CEREMONIES

At the funeral of a woman no earth is thrown, but a ceremony is performed which is said to correspond to it. A woman goes in search of the leaves of the tiveri plant,7 the leaves being called tiveri tûr. The woman who plucks the leaves must be the motvilth (daughter-in-law) of the dead woman, but if it is a child who is dead the leaves are plucked by the mother-in-law or potential mother-in-law. If a dead woman has no daughter-in-law, it was said that her daughter might pluck the leaves, but at the funeral of Kiuneimi (3), a childless woman, the leaves were sought and plucked by Naburveli, the wife of Mushkers (28), who would have called the husband of Kiuneimi “brother,” being of the same family and generation, although only his second cousin according to our system of kinship. In this case, therefore, the leaves were plucked by a sister-in-law, or, more strictly, by the wife of the ‘brother’ of the dead woman’s husband. In this case both Kiuneimi and Naburveli were daughters of Nòdrs men, but this was probably only a coincidence.