Word: customs
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Suttee, the old Hindu custom of widow's suicide on the funeral pyre, has been banned in India since 1829; today it occurs rarely and then only in inaccessible villages in backward regions. No one had expected to see the rite performed in the large, well-kept Rajasthan capital of Jaipur (pop. 175,000). One day last week Shroff Ballabhdas, a prosperous banker and coin appraiser of Jaipur, died. His fair and dainty widow Chhimi, 35, mother of five children, put on her many jewels, donned her finest mauve silk sari and announced that she would throw herself...
...Rome, Cinemactress Anna (Open City) Magnani went to court to explain why she had not paid the Italian custom duties on a 1948 Buick which she has been driving for three years. She bought the car, Anna said, thinking everything was in legal order, but "I was swindled...
...threat of further church action has made the slaves angrier still. Last week, as is their custom, they marched out to hold their weekly meeting on Boson Common. There were 50 of them, almost all under 35, the men dressed in black suits and black ties, the women in black dresses and short-visored black caps. As a small crowd of spectators watched, they set up a portable platform with a painting of the Madonna and a crowned figure of the Infant Jesus...
...nothing mysterious about Santayana's line: he was a psychologist rather than a philosopher. Like the early Greeks, he was a strict materialist who used philosophy to organize the world in a practical way. He had the profound Spanish belief in the vital part to be played by custom. What he aimed at was the discovery of a civilized and permissible attitude toward life. So he saw religion as a useful myth, not because it makes men moral, but because it civilizes them. He enjoyed mocking American. English and German Protestants for their rigid dismissal of superstition and their...
...unable to see people except in relation to himself or his ideas. In his volumes of autobiography, Persons and Places, on the other hand, which describe the spiritual history of his wandering, split-up family, the life in Avila at the turn of the century where sorrow, rigid custom and a melancholy religion absolutely ruled the population, and the strange contrasts offered by the earnest Boston of William James and the raffish England of Lord John Russell-in things like these Santayana is a master...