Ritual Decalogue

For this assignment, I chose to focus on Navajo culture and after watching the video in our course materials, I was intrigued by, and therefore chose to research the Kinaalda ceremony to learn more about it. Across many cultures, coming of age ceremonies are intended to mark the transition of an individual’s new status within the society. As such, these ceremonies tend to highlight the key cultural values that the individual should embrace as they move forward in their new role within society.…

Every culture develops rituals of initiation into adulthood. These rituals could include retreats, individual reflections, or physical examples like getting a tattoo or cutting hair. Some cultures in particular, may have more drastic measures of initiation. For example, circumcision is a surgical procedure in which the child is transformed into an adult. An initiation ritual that has stirred up quite the controversy is female genital cutting, as it is not a traditional ritual that most people…

As an adjective, ritual simply means “in compliance to religious rites,” which are the sacrosanct habitual ways of acclaiming a religion or culture. Different societies have different ritual practices, like meditation in Buddhism or baptism in Christianity. We also call the ceremony itself a ritual. Although it comes from religious ceremonies, ritual can also be used for any time-honored tradition like the Super Bowl or Mardi Gras, or Sunday morning breakfast (www.vocabulary.com).…

Jaandheer Dance by Aziz Osman does a great job of showing a joyful time in the Somali culture. We see two man performing the jaandheer dance while many people watch and cheer them on. There is not much going on in the background implying that these people live simple lives. Also, all the people smiling and laughing with each other which shows how close of a community this is. Osman used bold warm colors to add another layer of joy and happiness to this painting. In this painting it appears the…

increasingly popular dance form practiced in every country. Belly dancing can be found all around the world; nearly every ancient culture practiced some variation of the dance. Many believe that belly dancing began to participate in a ritual that honored the Birth Magic Ritual. In Palermo, Sicily, rock engravings…

meanings surrounding space and time differ from one culture to the next. That geographical location, historical instances, and how individuals are include or exclude highlight the varied cultural meanings that exists within space. In addition, how rituals like rites of passage and liminal space are symbolic constructions surrounding different concepts and experiences of time. Space, and the meaning cultures give to it, is not static. Every culture defines space differently. To westerners it…

this was a learning experience that I will not forget. I know it sounds cheesy but this class was different in comparison to the other classes that I had previously taken before; in this class I was able to learn about several cultures their art, rituals, places of worship and music. I said this class was different because I had never actually spent that much time looking at other cultures nor taking the time to actually understand them, but for this summer class I was given the task to do it,…

affected by them. When someone close to a woman is killed, several of her knuckles on her fingers will be cut off with a stone ax. As Victor Turner wrote, symbols can be objects, activities, relationships, events, gestures and spatial unites in a ritual situation (Turner 2013, 273). The action of cutting off part of their fingers is symbolic of the loss that a woman has experienced. It serves to communicate their loss to the rest of their community. This symbolic action is one of ways in which…

We learned about stories and the historical concept behind some of the words they use. One of the words that we learned about was oli (chants) or rituals and how they are used throughout their religion. For example there warriors are used in ritual type manor when it is necessary. I believe based on what I have read and what we have discussed in class that oli can also be used to remember important information such as births, deaths, good times…

jumping rituals and a group of men doing a Balinese monkey chant, while in Japan, we see a group of Butoh dancers. I would argue that most of this learning could be considered observational learning. These rituals seem to be specific to culture and an individual most likely grows up watching others perform them. Through observation, the individual can gain the knowledge of how to perform the desired behavior when needed. Furthermore, there seems to be a reason or a purpose behind each ritual.…