Nyi Pohaci Sanghyang Sri

Nyi Pohaci Sanghyang Sri is rice in a form that can be addressed. In Sundanese and Javanese telling she dies — in some versions poisoned, in others because she cannot be married without wrecking the order of things — and from her buried body grow rice and the other food plants: coconut from her head, rice from her eyes, tubers from her body, and so on in differing accounts.

The form of food plants growing from a buried body is widely known in Southeast Asia and the Pacific and is separately classified in comparative work. What is distinctive in the Javanese and Sundanese form is that what grows is not one plant but the whole repertoire of food, so that the story explains not rice alone but the relation among everything that is planted.

The story does not stop at being a story. It grounds a number of practices still carried out: mipit, the cutting of the first panicles with the ani-ani, a small blade held within the palm so that the rice does not see it; the keeping of rice in a leuit or granary under its own procedure; and the prohibition of certain acts in the fields at certain times.

The use of the ani-ani rather than a sickle is a clear case of a practice surviving on the ground of a story, and equally of the limit of that survival: the rice varieties introduced from the 1970s are short-strawed and harvested with a sickle, so the use of the ani-ani has contracted with the change of variety and not with any weakening of belief. Cultural change whose cause is agronomy rather than conviction is a recurring theme in this encyclopedia.