Word: ritualization
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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What he learned bore out his suspicions. Says Hull: " 'Dropping the flag,' or quitting, is considered almost a capital offense." Every gang has a de- initiation ceremony that usually involves a vicious ritual beating -- occasionally to the point of death. Ex-members who stay in the neighborhood -- and few can afford to leave -- are subject to repeat beatings by their former comrades and by rival gang members who don't know or care that they've quit. "It takes an unbelievable amount of courage to walk out," says Hull...
...convention showed that the activist tie-dyed Democrats who wrested control of the party in 1968 are grown up now with children and mortgages. Middle America, with its ritual and sentiment and well-tended lawns, is less to be derided on Saturday Night Live than emulated. Four years ago, Clinton could not have been sure that when he recited part of the Pledge of Allegiance in his speech the audience would spontaneously join in and finish the final phrase with...
...merging shows itself everywhere in the remnants of Islamic Spain. The architects of ^ the prayer hall of the Great Mosque of Cordoba, for instance, designed its sublime forest of columns and horseshoe arches as a communal space without the hierarchical orientation of a Christian basilica, as befitted Islamic ritual -- but they also based its double-arch system on the design of Roman aqueducts. "You have taken something unique and turned it into something mundane," the Emperor Charles V is said to have remarked, on seeing the mosque converted into a Catholic church after the reconquista...
...from Virginia Commonwealth University who perform outrageously raunchy heavy-metal music while dressed in gargantuan papier-mache costumes that make them resemble dinosaurs from outer space. They sport Iudicrously enlarged phalluses as well as leather, spikes, whips and chains. The band puts on an elaborate stage show, complete with ritual tortures, eviscerations and decaptitations, and squirts gallons of phony blood and semen into the audience. Responding to charges that they are sexist they retorted, "We're also racist...
...title of Bill Buford's first book is disturbingly apt. The ancient Hindu practitioners of thuggee strangled their victims amid much ritual and in so doing attained a state of religious ecstasy. Surprisingly little direct killing occurs at the hands of Buford's modern-day thugs -- the soccer hooligans of Britain who consecrate their Saturdays to violence. But their battles are ritualistic in their choreographed precision, and the effects on the participants are mind bending as the adrenaline pumps, the fists fly and the boots drive into the sides and skulls of the fallen. "They talk about the crack...