One of the main functions of rituals is to inverse status. Rites of passage highlight oppositional relationships of past and present, high and low, male and female, life and death. It is this cultural reversibility and inversion of opposites through the enactment of ritual that informs the Annang to see death not as the termination of Life but as Life-Source through life-planting in the womb of mother earth. This paper goes to demonstrate that meaning is only revealed through the relation between things. What this means is that things have no meaning independently, especially ritual performance. Funeral rites in Annangland then, attempt to overcome the predicaments of life.
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