ABSTRACT
Malanggan is one of the rare ethnographic examples of a funerary ritual that culminates in the production, display and death of figures. The most prominent Western example that comes to mind has been described by Kantorowicz in his The King’s TwoBodies, in which he describes the importance given to the king’s figure in the funerary rites of fourteenth-and fifteenth-century England and France, which matched or even eclipsed the dead body itself. Walik is a source whose theme emphasizes the relation between the eye and the fire, between life-force and its recapturing in a skin of malanggan. Together with Varim and Tangala it is the wune with the widest regional distribution. A prominent image within Malangantsak is called Lasisi, which is concentrated in the locality of Notsi and is virtually absent in the islands of Tabar.
