Describe what is the ritual? What are your thoughts/feelings about this ritual? Iyomante Ritual The Ainu people (an indigenous tribe from parts of Japan and Russia) are a once-suppressed ethnic minority whose religious roots are animist. Because of their worship of nature, they developed a tradition in which bears were killed in order to send their soul to heaven to bless mankind. This ritual (Iyomante) involves the slaughter of a hibernating mother bear in her cave. Her cubs are raised in captivity for two years and then fatally choked or speared in a sacramental act meant to show religious devotion. The villagers then drink the bear’s blood and eat its flesh. The skull is placed on an upturned spear which is wrapped with the bear skin. This bizarre type of scarecrow is then worshipped. The Ainu people believe bears are gods walking among humans. Unfortunately, due to a law change in Japan which revoked the ban on the ritual, it is now occurring again in some places. Living With the Dead Because funerals are an incredibly important aspect of life for the Torajan (an ethnic group in South Sulawesi, Indonesia), it can take many months for a family to raise sufficient funds to pay for the festivities. During this period of months, the dead body is wrapped in clothes and kept under the family home. The Torajans believe that the deceased soul remains with them until the burial. Torajan funerals are a grand affair which also frequently involve the sacrifice of buffaloes (the more important the deceased the more buffaloes are killed). When the person is finally ready to be buried for good, their coffin is usually placed in a cave and their effigy is placed at the cave mouth looking out (as can be seen in the picture above). Masai Spitting This isn’t just regular spitting we are talking about. The Masai tribe (an ethnic African group found in Kenya and Tanzania) have an unusual way of greeting friends: they spit on one another. Furthermore, when a new child is born, the Masai men will spit on it and say it is bad – believing that if they praise the child they will curse it to a bad life. When greeting elders, a Masai warrior will spit in his hand before offering it to be shaken – as a sign of respect. Masai tribesmen are well known through the media because of their practice of elongating their earlobes. Yanomamö Ash Eating The Yanomamö are a large tribe of people from Venezuela and Brazil. They have been largely untouched by modern life and so retain many of their ancient customs – one of which is the focus of this item. Yanomamö religious tradition forbids the keeping of any part of the body of the dead; for this reason, when a Yanomamö dies, his body is taken to be burned and the bones are crushed and combined with the ashes. These are then divided amongst the family and eaten. Because absolutely no part of the body must remain, the vessel that contained the ashes is then destroyed. The tribesmen believe that a person dies because a Shaman or member of another tribe has sent evil on him. This leads to much conflict and inter-tribe battles. Hanging Coffins The limestone caves surrounding Sagada in the Philippines are home to the region’s dead. While many people are buried in the caves, a long standing tradition in the area also means that the face of the cliffs are dotted with coffins. The coffins can also be found in other places around the world – particularly China where the nearly extinct Bo People (an indigenous minority Chinese tribe) practice this tradition regularly. The Toraja people (featured in item 9) also sometimes hang coffins of young children – though wealthy adults are normally placed in caves. Mourning of Muharram To commemorate the death of Husayn ibn Ali (a grandson of Muhammad), some groups of Shia muslims take to the streets and whip themselves with specially designed chains with razors or knives attached. Other groups slit their heads open with knives (as can be seen in the image above). This awful tradition (called matam) is also practiced by children or forced on them by parents who do the cutting (as can be seen in the introductory image to this list on the front page). Matam is mostly found in Bahrain, Pakistan, India, Afghanistan, Lebanon, and Iraq, and while some Muslims frown upon the practice, many major Muslim leaders endorse it. Thousands of mourners slit open their heads with swords, big knives and razor blades streaming their blood to signify their grief over the martyrdom of Al-Imam Al-Hussein (p) – the tragedy which caused the sky to rain blood and the earth to bleed – and thus paid rich homage to Al-Imam Al-Hussein (p) who sacrificed everything in defending Islam which is today under obligation to him Satere-Mawe Initiation Rite The Satere-Mawe people from the Amazon region of Brazil have an agonizing initiation rite for their boys. In order to become a man, the boy must insert his hand into a glove which is woven with drugged bullet antswhich have one of the most painful stings in nature. The boy must wear the glove for a full ten minutes and he must do this twenty times over the course of several months. A television reporter (Steve Backshall) undertook the ordeal and described it thus: “I put my hands into the gloves. Actually, it wasn’t that bad: pretty unpleasant, but bearable; just like the single sting, but repeated over and over again. I stuck it out for the full 10 minutes. [… M]y crew took me out of the line-up and off to get some medical tests done[.] That’s when things started to go wrong. I had suffered several hundred stings, and all of a sudden I went beyond pain. First, I started wailing, then, once that had passed, the floodgates opened — deep, guttural sobbing, uncontrollable shaking, writhing, convulsing. I started to drool, and suddenly I wasn’t responding to anything at all. My legs wouldn’t hold me up, and our doctor was shouting at me to keep moving and not to give in to the urge to lie down and let it take me. If there’d been a machete to hand, I’d have chopped off my arms to escape the pain.” Baby Tossing Every year in Solapur (a region in Maharashtra, India) parents get together to throw their babies off the top of a 50 foot tower. The babies are caught in a sheet held by other villagers on the ground. The parents believe that the practice will give their children long and healthy lives. This is practiced mostly by Muslims but some Hindu families also engage in it. Parents that partake are usually those who have become pregnant after praying at the Shrine of Baba Umer Dargah. Local authorities provide policing for the event despite the fact that national government is opposed to it. Eating Death The Aghoris are members of a Hindu sect who worship Shiva, whom they see as the supreme god. Because they believe that Shiva created everything – they consider nothing to be bad. For this reason they engage in a variety of sexual practices, they drink alcohol, take drugs, and eat meat. Nothing is considered taboo. But the thing that makes their ancient traditions bizarre is that they are also practicing cannibals and their temples are cremation grounds. An aghori lives in the cremation ground and is able to support himself there – his clothing comes from the dead, his firewood comes from the funeral pyres, and food from the river. When a person is cremated, an aghori will coat himself in the ashes of the body and meditate on the dead. The most shocking aspect of the Aghori life is their cannibalism. Dead bodies that are found floating in the river are gathered up and meditated on. The limbs are then removed by the Aghori and eaten raw. Cutting Off Fingers The death of a family member in the Dani tribe of Indonesia heralds a vast amount of emotional and, for women, physical pain. Aside from the inevitable emotional grief, women of the Dani tribe physically express that grief by cutting off (by compulsion) a segment of one of their fingers. Before being amputated, the fingers are tied with a string for thirty minutes to numb them. Once amputated, the new fingertips are burned to create new scar tissue. This custom, one of the world’s most bizarre cultural practices, is performed as a means to satisfy ancestral ghosts, and is rarely, but still sporadically, practiced in the tribe. Endo cannibalismThe Yanomami tribe lives in villages within the Amazon rainforest, near the border of Venezuela and Brazil. They are known for their tradition of endocannibalism: consuming the flesh of a member of one’s own tribe, usually after they’ve died (not to be confused with cannibalism, per se). The bizarre cultural practices surrounding endocannibalism involve wrapping the corpse in leaves and allowing insects to pick at it. 30 to 45 days later, the bones are collected, pulverized, and mixed into a banana soup to be consumed by all. After a year, the villagers consume the ashes, which are mixed with plantain soup. According to tradition, the ritual helps ensure that the souls of the dead find their way to paradise. Living With The DeadThe Toraja people of Indonesia practice a truly singular ritual of exhuming the corpses of their fellow villagers. But it doesn’t end there: The corpse is draped in special garments and paraded around the village. Even the bodies of children and bodies that are decades old are exhumed. The ritual is mainly carried out in order to clean the corpses, their garments, and coffins, and to ceremonially return the corpses to their home village. That is, if someone died outside the village, the corpse will be taken to the spot of death, then walked back to the village, as an act of returning home. Carrying Your Wife Over Burning Coal While not wholly specific to China, an interesting traditional Chinese custom says that a husband should carry his bride over a pan of burning coals before crossing the threshold of their home as husband and wife. According to tradition, the ritual ensures that the wife will have an easy and successful labor. Firewalking is also performed by some Chinese people as a means to prevent natural disaster. The Eskimo Funerary Ritual A rather well-known fact about Eskimos is their ritual (albeit incredibly rare and seldom practiced—if at all—anymore) of setting the elderly adrift on a floating iceberg when facing death or old age. Eskimos believe in the afterlife for the dead, and this practice is a way of ensuring the elderly are not a burden on the family by sending them off in a dignified and graceful manner. Khweta CeremonyThis Southern African ceremony is practiced by several tribes and is how a young boy proves his manhood. When they are of age, boys are sent to spend several days or weeks in a circumcision lodge during winter, where they’re put through rigorous and often dangerous tests and rituals such as continuous dancing until exhaustion, and circumcision. Bull jumpingIn order to prove their manhood in the Ethiopian Hamer tribe, young boys must run, jump and land on the back of a bull before then attempting to run across the backs of several bulls. They do this multiple times, and usually in the nude. Cannibalism and Necrophagy The Aghori Babas, who live in the city of Varanasi, India, are famous for eating the dead. They believe that the greatest fear human beings have is the fear of their own deaths, and that this fear is a barrier to spiritual enlightenment. So by confronting it, one can achieve enlightenment. There are five types of people who cannot be cremated according to Hinduism: holy men, children, pregnant or unmarried women, and people who have died of leprosy or snake bites. These people are set afloat down the Ganges, where the Aghori pull them from the water and ritually consume them. The Sun Dance Native Americans are known to perform numerous rituals in honor of the Earth’s spirits. The rituals are a means of praying to the Great Spirit, and sacrificing oneself while retaining a direct contact with the Tree of Life. The skin on the chest of the participants is pierced with a skewer, and a rope connects the skewer to a pole which represents the Tree of Life. The participants then move back and forth to try and break free from the skewer—which, it bears repeating, is still lodged in their skin. This dance may take several hours before it is completed. Vine Jumping In the village of Bunlap, which lies on an island in the Pacific archipelago, a strange ritual is performed called Gkol, or land-diving—a kind of precursor to bungee jumping. The villagers sing and dance together, and some of them beat drums as men come forward to volunteer for the jump. They tie vines around their ankles, and jump from very high wooden towers constructed especially for this ritual. The participants, apparently heedless of the potential for broken bones, simply leap forward head-first. The fall is broken by the vines tied to the tower. It is said that a higher jump guarantees you a greater the blessing from the gods. Sky Burial In Tibet, Buddhists practice a strange sacred ritual called Jhator, or sky burial. Buddhists believe in a cycle of rebirth, which means that there is no need to preserve a body after death, since the soul has moved on to another realm. The bodies of the dead are therefore taken to open grounds—usually at very high altitudes—and then left as alms for scavengers such as vultures. In order to dispose of the body as quickly as possible, a specialist cuts the corpse into pieces, and spreads it around to be devoured. Dancing with the dead Famadihana, meaning “The Turning of the Bones,” is a traditional festival which takes place in Madagascar. The participants believe that the faster the body decomposes, the faster the spirit reaches the afterlife. They therefore dig up their loved ones, dance with their corpses to live music around the tomb, and then rebury them. This bizarre ritual is carried out every two to seven years Impaling The annual Vegetarian Festival in Phuket, Thailand, is host to a most extreme ritual. This intensely masochistic event requires the participants to push spears, knives, swords, hooks, and even guns through their cheeks. It is believed that gods enter their bodies during the ritual, protecting them from evil and bringing good luck to the community. Scarification A tribe in Papua New Guinea called Kaningara practices a bloody body-modification ritual that is intended to strengthen the spiritual connection between them and their environment. One of these ritual ceremonies is carried out in Haus Tambaran, or “The Spirit House.” The adolescents live in seclusion in Haus Tambaran for two months. After this period of isolation, they prepare for an initiation ceremony which recognizes their transition to manhood. An expert cutter marks their bodieswith sharp pieces of bamboo. The resulting patterns resemble the skin of a crocodile; this is based on the notion that crocodiles are the creators of humans. The marks symbolize the tooth marks left by the spirit of the crocodile as it ate the young boy’s body and expelled him as a grown man Cows Blood What would you say to the sight of a pail on the ground below a cow? The pail is not only catching the milk from the cow’s udders but also the blood flowing from a cut in its body. And the cut is not accidental either. Welcome to the diet of the Maasai people. What gets our attention is the way blood is procured. The animal is not killed but its jugular artery is nicked in a way that allows blood to flow out without letting the animal die. Well, this is called having the cow and drinking it too. The Maasai lifestyle is dependent largely on livestock- such as cattle, goats and sheep. Their economy as well as diet revolves around livestock. Not only do they consume milk, but drinking the cow’s blood mixed in milk is a common practice. Blood is also consumed raw as well as cooked Thaipusam Festival: Hindus with facial and body piercings make pilgrimage to Malaysia's Batu CavesHindu devotees in Malaysia are celebrating Thaipusam, a religious celebration dedicated to Lord Murugan, the god of war. The annual celebrations take place on a grand scale at the Sri Subramaniar Swamy Temple inside the cavernous Batu Caves, north of Kuala Lumpur. Devotees often pierce various parts of their body with silver skewers, and carry large contraptions known as Kavadi, thereby taking on a physical burden through which they beg for help from Murugan. Devotees also fulfill vows by carrying milk-filled pots up the stairs to the cave temple. Human tooth sharpening is the practice of manually sharpening the teeth, usually the front incisors. Filed teeth are customary in various cultures. Many remojadas figurines found in part of Mexico have filed teeth and it is believed to have been common practice in their culture. The Zappo Zap people of the Democratic Republic of Congo are believed to have filed their teeth. Historically it was done for spiritual purposes, with some exceptions, but in modern times it is usually aesthetic in nature as an extreme form of body modification.[1] Bathroom Ban of Tidong Tidong wedding rituals are this sweet. the bride and the groom aren’t allowed to use the bathroom for three days after the wedding. It sounds a lot like the newlywed couple are being punished for an unknown reason. But the custom is very normal and natural for the people of the Tidong tribe, who now inhabit the city of Sandakan, in Sabah, Malaysia.They believe that not practicing the three-day and night ritual would bring terrible luck to the couple – a broken marriage, infidelity, or death of their children at a young age. So the couple is watched over by several people, and allowed only minimal amounts of food and drink. After the three days are up, they are bathed and then permitted to return to normal life. Foot Binding Footbinding was a custom practised on young females for approximately one thousand years in China, beginning in the 10th century and ending in the early 20th century. In Chinese foot binding, young girls’ feet, usually at age 6 but often earlier, were wrapped in tight bandages so that they could not grow and develop normally; they would, instead, break and become highly deformed, not growing past 4-6 inches (10-15 cm). Today, it is a prominent cause of disability among some elderly Chinese women. First, each foot would be soaked in a warm mixture of herbs and animal blood. This concoction caused any necrotised flesh to fall off. Then her toenails were cut back as far as possible to prevent ingrowth and subsequent infections. To prepare her for what was to come next the girl’s feet were delicately massaged. Silk or cotton bandages, ten feet long and two inches wide, were prepared by soaking in the same blood and herb mix as before. Each of the toes were then broken and wrapped in the wet bandages, which would constrict when drying, and pulled tightly downwards toward the heel. There may have been deep cuts made in the sole to facilitate this Self-Mummification Sokushinbutsu were Buddhist monks or priests who allegedly caused their own deaths in a way that resulted in their being mummified. This practice reportedly took place almost exclusively in northern Japan around the Yamagata Prefecture. Between 16 and 24 such mummifications have been discovered. For three years the priests would eat a special diet consisting only of nuts and seeds, while taking part in a regimen of rigorous physical activity that stripped them of their body fat. They then ate only bark and roots for another three years and began drinking a poisonous tea made from the sap of the Urushi tree, normally used to lacquer bowls. This caused vomiting and a rapid loss of bodily fluids, and most importantly, it killed off any maggots that might cause the body to decay after death. Finally, a self-mummifying monk would lock himself in a stone tomb barely larger than his body, where he would not move from the lotus position. His only connection to the outside world was an air tube and a bell. Each day he rang a bell to let those outside know that he was still alive. When the bell stopped ringing, the tube was removed and the tomb sealed. Chick Liver Tradition: Inner Mongolia, China
To select the wedding date the bride and groom are required to take the life of a baby chick while holding the knife together. The date is then divined by the good appearance of the chick’s liver. If the liver has an unfortunate appearance, they must keep killing chicks until they find a satisfactory one. 1. Tell me what you see in the picture?
2. What do you think are some values or beliefs of the picture. 3. Is anything culture shocking to you why and explain? 1. For each picture below, describe what you think is going on in the scene.
2. Describe the material and non-material aspects of what you think is evident from the picture. 3. What do you think are some cultural norms or values you think is depicted? 4. For pictures A, B, C, D what do you think are the dangers of viewing these pictures with ethnocentrism? http://star.spsk12.net/socialscience/whI/religions/index_files/Page323.htm
As a small group, read and discuss these questions. BE READY TO SHARE WITH CLASS:
Why were these groups treated differently during this time? What were the stereotypes surrounding their discrimination? In what ways were they discriminated against? What were the actions against them? Do you think the same treatment occurs today? EXPLAIN? Independently: Write an I Am Poem for a person during this time- Find at least one picture to help visualize the mistreatment of the minority group. When you find a photo to use, have the teacher look it over first. You may use additional sources. Japanese internment in the 1940’s http://www.pbs.org/thewar/at_home_civil_rights_japanese_american.htm Chinese racism in the 1800 and 1900’s http://history.state.gov/milestones/1866-1898/chinese-immigration Italian discrimination in the 1800 and 1900’s http://www.loc.gov/teachers/classroommaterials/presentationsandactivities/presentations/immigration/italian8.html Irish discrimination in the 1800 and 1900’s http://www.loc.gov/teachers/classroommaterials/presentationsandactivities/presentations/immigration/irish5.html African American Discrimination- Civil Rights http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/USAjimcrow.htm http://academic.udayton.edu/race/02rights/jcrow02.htm German discrimination in US after WWII http://www.loc.gov/teachers/classroommaterials/presentationsandactivities/presentations/immigration/german8.html http://www.pbs.org/race/000_General/000_00-Home.htm
.2.1 – Answer each 3.2.1 thoroughly
Three new thoughts that you have gained from studying the social classes, social mobility and how those affect individual lives? Two areas of concern that you have seen for people who live below the poverty line, explain your concerns. One question that you may still have about those living blow the poverty line, explain your question. |
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