Ani-ani rice harvesting knife

Wood. Using the ani-ani, each head of rice was cut individually, head-by-head. The blade was shielded by the hand of the harvester, so that semangat padi or spirit of the rice grain would not be offended. With the advent of modern rice methods, it was replaced in most areas by sickles in the 1970s and now by mechanized harvesting. When modern varieties of rice were introduced from the later 1960s, these were regarded as not imbued by the semangat padi, permitting the use of the bare blade of the sickle and thus transforming harvesting.