Word: rituals
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...assigns cleaning duties, the treasurer and the president. The committee of the longhouse is selected by unanimous decision at a house meeting so as to represent every major faction in the village. There are no special portfolios. Instead, the committee jointly takes responsibility for corporate house activities. On major ritual occasions they must ensure that food is assembled for the throng and the proceedings are orderly. The great annual festival is called "cleaning the house," although the pollution removed at these ceremonies is spiritual rather than literal...
...earlier bout, we scoffed when Baron Mikel Scicluna (a bad guy) reached elaborately into his trunks for a small peice of hard plastic (the "foreign object" as the TV announcers call it) with which to rake his opponent's neck. We recognized this as one of professional wrestling's ritual gestures, like the stunned, stylized way the wrestlers react to punches, with the dazed expression and wobbly walk they have all learned. The bad guy pleading for mercy with a fist clenched behind his back, the resounding stomp of the foot on the mat as each punch is delivered--these...
There is a stage within a stage. On a thrust platform a troupe of black actors perform their nightly ritual "murder" of a white woman; a white audience (actually black actors wearing grotesque white masks that in no way disguise their color) comments obnoxiously from their box seats set above and behind the action...
...grand volumes and rhythmical, steely incision of these Tlingit house posts and Eskimo masks into the world of American neoclassical sculpture is to shift to provincialism. It is also to descend from necessity into sentiment, and, in a sense, from confidence into anxiety. Compared with the pressure of ritual meaning in the best Indian art, the search for a language of classical form and Roman gravitas conducted by the professionals who rose to commemorate the American ideal after the Revolution-Horatio Greenough, Hiram Powers and Thomas Crawford-looks curiously wistful. Hiram Powers' The Greek Slave was the first internationally...
...Chesapeake's fauna. Despite their feisty dispositions, crabs can also be considerate. Most marine creatures follow the love-them-and-leave-them tradition. But male blue crabs, or "jimmies," take good care of their mates. After car rying them in a soft embrace during the mating ritual, jimmies form protective cages around the "sooks," or mature females, as they shed their old shells and wait for new skeletons to form...