Word: rituals
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...appearance of umbrellas at these parades is like some ancient ritual. In the beat of the music, a dance will sometimes throw his umbrella on the ground--handle pointing skywards--and writhe around it in a riotous, sensual dance. If you ask him where he learned to do that with his umbrella, he will say, "Man, they always done this at parades!" or "My daddy done that!" It is a remnant of some long-forgotten rite. An astute observer once described that scene as "some vanished ritual grandeur of humanity that has been lost in the stones, the jungle...
...leisure-time activity. So are mushroom-picking expeditions and visits to the banya, the traditional Russian bathhouse built in czarist times and still found in many districts. It may or may not be kulturnost, but a visit to the banya's steam rooms, barbers and masseurs is a ritual that can take half a day and restore the soul...
Another example is Negro eating habits. Unlike white Americans, who tend to dine with their families at certain ritual hours, many blacks eat whenever they feel like it, taking food from pots and dishes that always seem to be simmering on the kitchen stove. In Africa, tribesmen still leave food on a fire in the middle of the village for everyone to sample. Another Afro-American characteristic is the habit of eye rolling. Typically, blacks roll their eyes upward when they are daydreaming; preoccupied whites gaze vacantly into space...
...Seel, who has studied 919 cases of stomach cancer at the Presbyterian Medical Center in Chonju, South Korea, described the annual ritual of making soy sauce and soya paste. Each winter, virtually every household makes loaves of soybean mash and stores them in a cool, dark place, often under the eaves, so that they will get moldy. To make sure that the mold develops, some Koreans buy a pure culture and spread it on their loaves. By early spring, a furry black or gray growth covers the mash. The Koreans scrape off this "exuberant fungus," as Seel described...
...scheduled events. It is the impromptu cocktail parties scheduled in the yard during hours of extended parietals. It is actually being at the inevitable, notorious events which accompany the weekend. It's over 1000 people forgetting papers, exam pressures, and jobs. It's a whole class celebrating a spring ritual and soaking up the spontaneous merriment of each moment. The augment this, there are always the normal attractions of Boston, Cambridge, and Harvard...