Category Archives: Festival

Text:

The ‘Joota Chupai’ ritual is a playful custom at Indian weddings where the bride’s female relatives, often sisters and cousins, spiritedly steal and secrete the groom’s shoes. This lighthearted heist is enacted during the ceremony when the groom is required to be barefoot, setting the stage for a spirited negotiation for their return.

Context:

Recounting the jovial antics from his brother’s wedding last year, my friend narrated the high-spirited ‘Joota Chupai’ episode. As tradition dictates, the bride’s kin seized the opportunity to hide the groom’s shoes, demanding a sizable ransom for their safe return. The situation escalated into a humorous turn of events at sundown when the need for a picturesque sunset photo session led the furious bride to intervene, overturning the ritual’s usual outcome and the groom’s shoes were returned without the customary financial exchange.

Analysis:

The ‘Joota Chupai’ ritual transcends the mere act of playful mischief; it is emblematic of the cultural fabric that interweaves familial bonds, societal expectations, and the negotiations between tradition and modernity. This practice, underscored by Deirdre Evans-Pritchard’s analysis of authenticity in cultural expressions, suggests a complex interplay between established customs and the evolving dynamics of contemporary weddings. While the ritual typically concludes with the groom acquiescing to the monetary demands, this narrative reveals an intriguing deviation. The bride’s insistence on retrieving the shoes to capture the perfect wedding moment underscores the adaptability of cultural traditions in the face of practical circumstances. It demonstrates a shift from the ritual’s traditional financial objective to prioritizing the aesthetic and emotional value of the wedding experience. This incident not only reflects the fluidity of cultural practices but also highlights how individual agency can redefine traditional roles and expectations. The negotiation process inherent in the ‘Joota Chupai’ serves not just as entertainment but as a microcosm of the give-and-take present in familial relationships, where cultural rituals are subject to reinterpretation in response to immediate personal and collective priorities.

Text:

On recounting familial traditions, my brother illuminated a practice our grandfather adheres to during Diwali, the quintessential festival of lights in Northern India. Amidst the festivities, a peculiar custom is observed: the search for lizards on the exterior walls of the home. These creatures, typically mundane and unnoticed, are sought after on Diwali night as harbingers of good fortune and wealth.

Context:

This ritual, as my brother narrates, unfolds each year without fail, where our grandfather would lead us on an expedition to discover lizards clambering on the walls. The belief holds that spotting these reptiles during the luminous celebration signifies impending prosperity. Intriguingly, this auspicious omen is exclusively tied to Diwali night — it is as though the lizards emerge from their concealment solely for this event, or perhaps our perception of their presence is heightened by the belief’s gravity. On all other nights, these lizards retreat into obscurity, going unnoticed by my brother and the rest of the family.

Analysis:

The practice of seeking lizards on Diwali night can be classified as a folk belief, deeply ingrained in the cultural fabric of the celebration. It’s a manifestation of the principle of sympathetic magic, particularly homeopathic, wherein the appearance of a creature is symbolically linked to prosperity. Just as Frazer discussed the symbolic use of objects in rituals to influence outcomes, the spotting of lizards is a physical representation of welcoming abundance. In Larry Danielson’s exploration of religious folklore, he notes that such traditions often emerge within communities, not through institutional decree but via the organic spread among individuals — a sentiment that resonates with our grandfather’s personal endorsement of this custom. The lizards’ nocturnal visibility on Diwali may be seen as a confluence of belief and tradition, where the collective spirit and heightened energies of the festival could cast everyday occurrences in a mystical light. The specificity of the timing underscores the contextual significance of the belief — it is not the lizards themselves but their association with the festival that carries weight. This belief, ephemeral as the festival itself, is a reflection of hope and the human tendency to seek signs of future prosperity in the world around us, an embodiment of collective optimism that momentarily transforms the mundane into the auspicious.

Jewish Tradition for Passover

Text: During Passover, which lasts for eight days, there are a couple dietary restrictions observed by Jews. Foods containing leavened grain products such as wheat, rye, barley, oats, and spelt are prohibited, as these items could become chametz if they come into contact with water for longer than 18 minutes. Ashkenazi Jews also abstain from eating kitniyot—foods like rice, beans, legumes, and corn—during this period. Traditional Passover meals include matzah, which is unleavened bread made simply from wheat flour and water and is prepared so that it does not rest for more than 18 minutes to prevent leavening. Other staples of the Passover diet include matzah ball soup, various meat dishes, and fruits. The origin of these practices dates back thousands of years to the biblical Exodus from Egypt. According to the story, after God inflicted the tenth plague on the Egyptians, killing the firstborn sons, the Israelites had to leave in haste. This urgency meant they did not have time to let their bread dough rise, resulting in the creation of matzah. The dietary laws observed during Passover serve to commemorate this pivotal event in Jewish history and the haste with which the Israelites fled their enslavement.

Context: The informant is half Jewish and has been doing this ever since he is a kid. He doesn’t keep up with some Jewish traditions but he does do this one since, in his words, “it is only once a year”. He believes in god but does not believe traditions like this holds relevance in gods eyes and he does it just to maintain his culture.

Analysis: The Jewish people are a small group of people throughout history but they have also maintained much of their culture over a great many centuries. The informant participating in the tradition and seeing the importance of carrying it shows the cultural value in judaism of preservation and survival. The jewish people have undergone suffering throughout much of their history and it is very important to remember these time periods and honoring it like in the story of exodus. this can also be seen in Hanukkah which was persecution under the greek Seleucid empire.

Family Reunion (life cycle celebration)

“Growing up [my family and I] always went to [our family reunion]. We usually met in a church. Mom’s dad and all his brother’s and sisters, and all of us, we’d gather to eat and see each other – fried chicken, cream corn, corn bread, green beans, etc. We’d all just catch up and [my mom] and her sisters would sing for everyone – something folky – and then we’d take pictures. So me and granddad and grandma and mom and dad and me and my brothers, and all my first and second cousins were all in one picture, and then other sides or groups of thee family would take their own.”

My informant told me all about the family reunions he attended annually as he was growing up. He doesn’t attend them anymore, as many of those family members have passed away or become busy with their own families.

When I asked him what the reunion meant to him-

“We did it every year, in the summer – usually August. It was nice out, it was nice to see each other. We’re usually all scattered about. I love my family, I like talking to them, catching up with them.”

He is from North Carolina, part of the southern United States, he recounts, but couldn’t specify folk music shared among his family, and the food he described distinctly stuck out as traditional southern comfort food. As his family is not normally all together is this larger collective, it must feel quite nostalgic to come together and share these songs and classic food together.

He also speaks about the photos they always took, and though he didn’t speak on this himself, I wonder about how each picture changes through every passing year and how the image of their family dynamics change. It sounds like his family, whether it is intentional or not, were preserving this knowledge and part of their families history through photography.

May Day Dance Performance

Ritual Dance Performance:

At the informant’s elementary school in Hawaii, every May Day there is a celebration where the students perform traditional Hawaiian song and dance.

Context:

The informant went to elementary school in Hawaii and moved to California in the fourth grade. Within her four years of elementary school in Hawaii, this annual celebration was a very big deal, and she spent one day each week practicing Hula throughout the year in preparation for the May Day dance performances. 

Analysis: 

The performance of traditional Hawaiian song and dance on May Day in the informant’s elementary school, as well as the largeness of the May Day celebration, is a clear example of a folk group actively keeping their culture alive. Especially in places like Hawaii that have become part of larger countries like the United States, it is evidently very important to find ways to keep cultural practices thriving. It is clear that celebrations like these are done with the intention to pass culture along to the youth, as well as to celebrate said culture together. Performances of traditional song and dance provide community members with a sense of shared identity as well, likely aiding in making the informant’s school’s May Day celebration so excitedly anticipated throughout each year. Celebrations involving song and dance are very good ways of keeping culture alive and celebrated, because in music and dance performances, everyone involved can participate to some extent, whether they are the performers or audience members.