Word: rituals
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...Palamau. Ray judged that he could best deal with the urban mind by removing it from the complexity of the urban milieu. The men burn a newspaper to show their detachment from city life, but their modern morals have penetrated too deeply to be dismissed by such a ritual. The forest, reduced to a dizzying madness in Ray's shots from a car window, is polluted by both profane and commercialized love, burnt out by whiskey and corruption...
Italian Sausage. There is a strong sense of ritual, both religious and community, on the Hill, where 90% of the population of 6,500 is Italian and 95% Catholic. There is also a bursting pride in the rows of narrow, well-scrubbed houses and in the family-run corner stores, where links of fat Italian sausage dangle in long rows. Many residents are direct descendants of the immigrants who left Lombardy at the turn of the century to work the clay mines of St. Louis under the hill that gives the section its name. Life on the Hill...
...purpose of these ritual "impeachments" was both to affirm the unity of the people around the kingship and to highlight conflicts around the person of the king himself. Even when no prince or sub-chieftan actually coveted the throne, the ritual demanded that they act as if they did. Their attacks on the king were necessary to emphasize the contrast between the sanctity of the kingship and the human failings of the king. If a particular monarch was a corrupt or cruel despot, the people would not seek to overthrow the social order, but would simply replace the king with...
Also part of the proceedings was a black bull ceremony. In ritual fashion, a black bull would be stolen from the people by the king. This theft, which symbolized the demands of the monarchy, would make the people both "angry" and "proud"--a complex of attitudes expressive of their ambivalence about living in an authoritarian nation...
Thus, through regular reenactments of their dissatisfaction with the king, the people would acknowledge the essential rightness of the social order and the enduring sanctity of the kingship. These ritual impeachments, known to anthropologists as "the drama of kingship," were a way to handle conflicts that might otherwise have led to the demise of the tribe or nation; they provided both a vehicle for protest and a method for replacing an inept or evil leader--without a major social upheaval. But while regular impeachments bade well for the fate of the society, the fate of each king was always thought...