Word: rituals
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Track co-captain Randull started vaulting to combat boredom when he was ten years old and living in Ghana. Randall and his older brother used bamboo sticks and buried themselves over neights of four and five feet. This sybling competition soon moved from rivalry to ritual and when his family moved to Newton, Mass., Randall joined the Newton North track team to begin supervised vaulting...
First, there was his religion. Most present day Americans must have trouble appreciating the peculiar horrors of turn-of-the-century Prague for a Jew. "Anti-Semitism," a phrase now used to describe segregated country clubs, meant frenzied riots and accusations of ritual murder. And since the Kafkas were doing their best to assimilate, feeling a meaningful religious identity was (until relatively late in his life) almost impossible for Franz. Second, there was his nationality (German), making him an outsider twice removed while in Prague. And then there was his father. Hayman stresses Kafka's relationship with his father...
...tour de force of cultural displacement. The New Hebrides slitgongs and the row of towering, slender Asmat mbis totems, some of them 21 ft. tall, seem to inhabit a world of pure form, primitive Apollonianism heavily inflected by Roger Fry. Even the crust of old blackened blood left by ritual libations on some of the African idols is politely referred to, on the museum's labels, as "sacrificial material...
...image of a three-foot yellow pig with a 17 on its side. Individuals begin drifting toward the spot, until about 16 Harvard, Yale and MIT students are huddling around the drawing. Groups of bleary-eyed visitors, sporting green sweatshirts, green pants and hangovers, openly gape at the ritual. As if on cue, the huddlers turn and flash their t-shirts, each displaying a yellow pig on the front, and the number 17 on the back...
Everywhere, Warner casts her spell, literally. Her mother's ritual for boiling an egg becomes just that. In a piece on folk recipes-a pint of warm beer stirred with a hot poker will cure backache, a slab of raw beef will rub away a wart-the reporter edges deliciously close to magic herself. Even the inventory of the purple velvet handbag of Mme. Houdin, ten-year-old Sylvia's French tutor, becomes a litany of talismans to ward off disaster: smelling salts, two thimbles, a photograph of M. Houdin, the number of madame's life-insurance...