Word: ritualism
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Ritual & Blunder. Moving to order the political disorder left in the Middle East by the withdrawal of France and Britain, the U.S. briefly seized the initiative by proclaiming the Eisenhower Doctrine of aid to any Middle Eastern land asking for help against Communist attack. The President's pledge and the Sixth Fleet's presence gave Jordan's spunky young King Hussein heart to eject ministers talking of Soviet alliance and to line his country up in the ranks of the West. But when the Soviets countered with a coup that put proCommunists on top of Syria's army...
...these necessary jobs at the embassy was the ritual burning of each day's decoded dispatches. At first the attache in charge carefully supervised Francesco's performance of this daily chore, but after a time (and after Francesco had thoughtfully filled the furnace with damp paper to ensure the production of clouds of steamy smoke that stung diplomatic eyes) the attache let him go it alone. Francesco burned a few of the papers and took the rest (for a small fee) to the Italian military intelligence. "I was certainly not qualified," he writes modestly, "to select the material...
...Remembered is less moonlit than footlighted, and is most rewarding-in fact, is great fun-when it is a stylish theater piece, full of little acting doodads and knickknacks, of interpolated flourishes and roulades: a trio practicing orchid-eating, a wild snatch of Swan Lake, a bit of supper ritual, a quite mad hunting scene. As the flighty duchess, Helen Hayes -if not wholly French-is very often wholly delightful, alternating an actress' skill with a vaudevillian's liveliness. Richard Burton plays a prince who is more bored than bereaved with a fine sullen dash; and his verbal...
Through the use of symbol-studded poetry, music, and dancing, Yeats tried to build a ritual pattern, every part of which must be fully apprehended before the play can be understood. Even then, the story of a poet who chooses a mysterious queen as the ideal figure of his verses, only to be beheaded by her jealous husband, is open to a multitude of different interpretations. But Liam Clancy, the poet, and Lew Petterson, the king, do violence to Yeats' poetry by speaking in a falsely declamatory manner. And John Lancaster's music usually conceals the playwright's words rather...
...Gruesome Ritual. The Fore people, estimated to number 10,000 and only now emerging from the Stone Age, live in a 240-square-mile area 90 miles west of the famed World War II battlefield of Lae (their existence was unknown until 1932). Kuru was first noted in 1951. The disease has not only decimated the Fore, but has become an obsession in their sorcery beliefs. When a kuru victim dies, the kinsfolk pick out a sorcerer suspected of responsibility for the death, do away with him in a gruesome ritual murder called tukavu, in which they pulverize his muscles...