Word: rituals
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...Southeast African ritual chant, from Max Gluckmann's Custom and Conflict in Africa...
...CHANT THE Swazi tribespeople, dancing, circling, shaking in the magic glow of age-old ritual fires. In the center stand the king, the queens, the elders and the sub-chieftans--all the ranking leaders of the tribe--humbled and ridiculed by the insults of the people. A young prince steps forward, his head held high, his shield and spear in hand: "Follow me," he beckons to the people, "this evil king betrays his sacred trust." More princes and military captains mimic his example, defiling the name of the monarch and calling the people to rebellion. Then, remarkably, these same slanderers...
HOWEVER, except for its infrequent use in the United States, impeachment is a process that by its nature should promise stability and the continuation of the status quo, not chaos and disaster. It is a political ritual that has been present in the constitutions of organized societies since their beginnings--a ritual whose purpose and effect has been to affirm, not undermine, the unity of the people and the moral rectitude of the prevailing order. The parliamentary "vote of no confidence" is an oft-cited example of modern impeachment sans desastre, but impeachment rituals were also held by our "primitive...
...conversation begins to crumble Caul's rigorous defenses, and threatens the careful distance that he preserves between his profession and his conscience. Harry's misgivings are refracted in a series of visual metaphors: the confessional, for instance, becomes not only a tentative purging but also another ritual of ruptured privacy, of secrets overheard. Outside Harry's apartment window, a power shovel digs, an image that will be deepened and expanded at the film's end when Caul becomes the victim of his own technological virtuosity...
...presence of these active forces of anti-life, as well as the passive bystanders-Martha's relatives-Miss Douglas refuses to write a happy ending to her fairy tale. Martha and Lucas go up in the sort of gorgeous ritual blaze of self-destruction that besets Southern-Gothic houses in Southern-Gothic novels. But Martha and Lucas qualify, in Miss Douglas' phrase, as "celebrators of life"-and so does she, dramatizing with all the reason and passion at her command the bland and heinous modern crime of burying one's ancestors before they are dead...