Word: ritualization
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Zaire's President Mobutu Sese Seko seldom misses Sunday Mass. It is a ritual he has faithfully observed during his nearly 30 years of absolute power, a tenure marked by the torture and killing of his opponents and corruption that has funneled much of his nation's wealth into his private pocket. Now 62 and in robust health, Mobutu governs from his native fiefdom of Gbadolite, a jungle village close to the equator. Surrounded at all times by heavily armed troops, he remains impervious to the growing clamor among 35 million Zairians for an end to his disastrously autocratic rule...
...much more curious about other cultures -- particularly those of Latin America -- than it would be 25 years later. Lam had a strong common interest with American painters who became his friends, such as Arshile Gorky, Jackson Pollock and Robert Motherwell: namely a fascination with totemism and the imagery of ritual...
...uncommon but annoying fire- alarm ritual of getting out of bed and shuffling outside into the bitter cold has become all too familiar to the irate residents of Dunster and Mather houses in recent weeks...
...gust of wind. A dog barks." And finally he is the writer, changing history by anticipating it. But this Chinese-puzzle-box movie has a deeper message inside. It says that most folks' lives are like Phil's on Groundhog Day: a repetition, with the tiniest variations, of ritual pleasures and annoyances. Routine is the metronome marking most of our time on earth. Phil's gift is to see the routine and seize...
...mistake of taking fanciful literary tropes seriously. Ovid's Ars Amatoria is often cited as a major source of misreadings, its instructions followed, its ironies ignored. Other prime suspects include the 12th century troubadours in Provence who more or less invented the Art of Courtly Love, an elaborate, etiolated ritual for idle noblewomen and aspiring swains that would have been broken to bits by any hint of physical consummation...