Word: ritualization
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...glaziers of Jerusalem will be rich if the intifadeh goes on like this. They charge $1,500 to install car windows that are shatter-resistant. People are paying. The Palestinian uprising is 2 1/2 years old. It has hardened into a dreary, bitter ritual. The reciprocal stoning and beating obey Newton's Third Law of Motion -- for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. Each side has found its threshold of acceptable suffering and cruelty...
Some American Plains Indians in their late 19th century twilight took to ritual "ghost dancing" in the hope of ridding themselves of the white man. The intifadeh is either ghost dancing or nation building, and sometimes it is both simultaneously. It has crystallized the Palestinians' sense of themselves as a nation, but it is a phantom nation still, incandescent but insubstantial...
...Muslim pilgrims, a high point of the hajj to Mecca is the trek to Jamarat al 'Akaba in Mina, one of the three stoning points of Satan. Each passing pilgrim must cast pebbles at this rock pillar in a ritual that symbolizes the faithful's struggle against evil. At 10 a.m. last Monday the believers suddenly faced a more earthly trial...
...American reporter visits Berlin in the year 2006. He finds himself in the midst of an environmental conference being conducted in the traditional Berlin style. "Masked demonstrators from the eco-anarchist milieu clashed with officers of the environmental police. A representative of the chemical industry, who made profuse ritual protestations of humility and reassurance, was shouted down." Going to look at the onetime Berlin Wall, the reporter finds that it is now a nature preserve. "A unique biotope," says an official. "There are wild rabbits here, hedgehogs, opossums." The problem is that the environmentalists' efforts...
Some of the tourists are here with a more serious mission: they are teenagers with their parents on the ritual trip to visit colleges. Yesterday they stopped at Wesleyan and Yale; tomorrow, there are interviews scheduled at Amherst and Williams. The parents always look nervous; the kids either look nervous or bored...