Word: ritualization
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...Watching the action was an annual ritual for the student, Matthew P. Silverman ’98, an avid baseball...
...beyond the effects for individual patients. Broadly speaking, these surgeries may meet the World Health Organization's criteria for female genital mutilation as "procedures that intentionally alter or injure female genital organs for non-medical reasons." This kind of cosmetic surgery can interfere with advocates' ability to fight forced ritual mutilation in places like Africa, where the practice is still common, says Taina Bien-Aimé, executive director of international women's rights watchdog Equality Now. Designer vaginas "are considered reasons for not throwing stones, so to speak, at other cultures," she says...
...that's another important ritual. Former Presidents tend to rise to the occasion when the call comes from the Oval Office, even if the caller is an adversary. It is an act of patriotism and perhaps pity by men who, knowing what the job entails, are uniquely positioned to help. Obama will take office with at least this advantage: he will have four predecessors with very different skill sets to call on. It's by no means certain who would be the most useful, since the history of these ex-Presidents is full of plot twists. There's Jimmy Carter...
...first settled agriculturalist communities from which our records begin seem far removed from the cave-dwelling, fur-clad hunter-gatherers whom we imagine to be mankind's ancestors. The discovery of a shaman this ancient offers a startling glimpse into this little-known past, a portrait of prehistoric ritual belief and of clear lines of social hierarchy taking shape...
...Grosman speculates that the elaborate ritual behind the shaman's burial probably helped bind people together at a time of great social transformation. The Natufian culture, she says, was "transitional," moving from the era of the nomadic life of hunter-gatherers into a more stable, sedentary mode. Their descendants were likely the inhabitants of West Asia's great kingdoms of antiquity. Somewhere beneath our vision of sceptered monarchs in their pillared palaces, it can be surmised, rests a hobbled woman upon a bed of tortoise shells...