Monthly Archives: May 2011

Proverb- Indonesia

Nationality: Indonesian
Age: 20
Occupation: Student
Residence: Bali, Indonesia
Performance Date: April 25, 2011
Primary Language: English
Language: Indonesian, Chinese

“Ada udang di balik batu”

“There is shrimp behind stone.”

“There’s a motive behind every act.”

The informant stated that she most likely learned the above proverb from a friend in middle school. She would use the proverb specifically to “warn a friend” if she thought that someone else were “trying to use or exploit them.” According to the informant, this proverb is used very frequently in Indonesia, but she doesn’t understand “why this specific sentence is used”; for instance, she asked, “why is it a shrimp?”

While the proverb doesn’t seem to exclusively address evil or self-serving intentions, but rather makes the claim that all actions are performed by people with some purpose in mind, I agree with the informant that the proverb can be construed as cautionary; that is, as exhorting an individual to look beyond the behavior of another in order to see the cause, or potential causes, for that behavior. It could also be taken more generally, however, and not necessarily apply to human behavior, instructing us to look in all matters to what is deeper than mere appearance (the stone) so that we may find something even more true or profound (the shrimp). The imagery of a shrimp concealed behind a stone may be arbitrary, as the informant seems to believe, or it could perhaps be a juxtaposition of the small, less conspicuous nature of the shrimp with the large, easily-spotted nature of the stone; or that one provides sustenance and thus serves a practical end, while the other is very common and for the most part useless. Linking these two notions together, we might say that the proverb is also remarking that those who take the time and care to discover that which is not so easily found are rewarded for their efforts—an interpretation which, though broader, encompasses the informant’s understanding of the proverb as warning us against being naïve of other people’s motives. Two items of folklore of which I am aware that resemble this Indonesian proverb in imagery and/or meaning include: “Leave no stone unturned” and “Appearances can be deceiving.”

Annotation:

Atmosumarto, Sutanto. A Learner’s Comprehensive Dictionary of Indonesian. Yogyakarta, Indonesia: Cahaya Timur Offset, 2004. 622. Web <http://books.google.com/books?id=0PV0NSjCdFAC&pg=PP9&dq=a+comprehensive+dictionary+of+indonesia&hl=en&ei=s1G6Tb3jD4j6swOmv9DaDQ&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=2&ved=0CDYQ6AEwAQ#v=onepage&q=a%20comprehensive%20dictionary%20of%20indonesia&f=false.>

Scar Remedy

Nationality: Hispanic
Age: 21
Occupation: Student
Residence: Los Angeles, CA
Performance Date: 4/25/11
Primary Language: English

“If you have scars you have to put Vitamin E oil on them.  I don’t know why but my mom tells me to do it, and I’ve had like a billon people telling me to do it.”

The informant, Julia, was recently hit by a car.  Although she did not have any major injuries, she has scaring on her face and several areas on her body.  She performs this folk remedy everyday in order to heal her scars.  She learned this piece of folk medicine from her mother and also from friends.  This folk medicine is so widespread that she reports that at least one person tell her to use Vitamin E oil when they hear about her accident.

I believe this folk remedy to be affective.  Although I have not used it myself, I have seen several people’s scars begin to go away after using Vitamin E oil.  If so many people are using Vitamin E oil to help their scaring disappear it must be working.

Initiation Prank-Steel Mill

Nationality: American of Mixed European Descent (Polish, Irish, English, French)
Age: 58
Occupation: Land Developer
Residence: Santa Ana, CA
Performance Date: April 8, 2011
Primary Language: English

“They get 2 or 3 of them and give them an assignment on a very cold day in January.  The steel mill being on the lake means that the weather is extremely cold due to high winds.  So a single digit temperature will ultimately become sub zero.  On days like these, they the journey men (or the old guys) elect to send the new pipe fitters on a task to go out to the lake where there is a set of pipes sticking up out of the ice.  Your task is to separate a flange about the size of a medium coffee table, undo all of the bolts, replace the inner diaphragm (so it’s like a sandwich) with a new one and then close it back up.  They keep a 55 gallon drum of oil burning so that when you’re out there every tem minutes you can come back and thaw your hands out because you’re frozen.  Then, you go back out and try and finish the job.  It takes men about 3 hours a piece after coming back and forth.  Their ears are frozen.  The old men were just laughing.  I decided, while they were out there working, to see what the job really was.  So, I followed the line through the ceiling of the steel mill, down the walls of the back corners, where people don’t normally go, and I watched the pipe go through the floor and to the basement.  I went down into the basement where there are “he-man rats” (huge rats) which don’t bother you, but if you see them running, then you know it’s a gas leak and you leave them alone (the old guys feed them once in a while).  Once I flip my flashlight on, it turned out that the very end of the pipe was tied with a rag and led nowhere (it was a line that was dead for the last 30 years).  The old guys just like to send these men out in the freezing cold to teach them to think before they send them out working on any line, because if you don’t know what line you’re working on or why you’re working on it, there is a high chance that you could kill somebody.  This forces the men to think for themselves.”

My dad was eighteen years old when he started working in a steel mill. He’s from Hammond, Indiana, a town where most people work for the steel mill. His father worked at one steel mill, his brother at another, and he at yet another. Beginning work at the steel mill in this town very nearly coincided with reaching maturity, at around eighteen years old. Being new at the steel mill was a liminal time between childhood and adulthood for most males in that area, and so pranks were used for initiation purposes.

My dad explains that this particular prank was more of a test to see whether or not the new “men” could handle the dangerous situations they would be likely to face during their careers at the mill. He notes that the older men wanted to force the younger “men” to think for themselves. At this point, thinking for oneself equates adulthood, and so I see this ritual as forcing an end to the liminal period between boyhood and manhood so that the men of the mill could work as a cohesive unit in which everyone could rely on everyone to think before acting in a potentially very dangerous environment.

Proverb-Mexican

Nationality: Mexican
Age: 20
Occupation: Student
Residence: Los Angeles, CA
Performance Date: April 22, 2011
Primary Language: English
Language: Spanish

“Al que madruga, Dios lo ayuda.”

To he who wakes up early, God him helps.

God helps he who wakes up early.

“Something similar to “the early bird gets the worm” that my parents say is “al que madruga, Dios lo ayuda,” which translates to “God helps he who wakes up early.” This actually makes sense if you think about it because if you start something early, things tend to go well.”

Daniel was born in the United States and lives in Los Angeles. His parents are from Mexico. He studies occupational therapy at the University of Southern California. Daniel hears this variation through a Catholic tradition. Because waking up early does not signify anything in particular as far as I am aware in this tradition, waking up early is equated to beginning something early. This makes this expression similar to “the early bird gets the worm” because it emphasizes the advantages inherent beginning something early.

I have heard this expression growing up in a Muslim household, as well. A good Muslim is theoretically supposed to pray five times a day (or condensed into three times if you’re Shi’a). The first time is early in the morning, before the break of dawn. In my opinion, this expression’s emphasis on God’s help makes more sense if viewed in this light.

The fact that this expression exists in Muslim and Hispanic cultures provides the possibility that the terminus post quem for this proverb is the Arab invasion of Spain.

Joke/Blason Populaire- Singapore

Nationality: Indonesian
Age: 20
Occupation: Student
Residence: Bali, Indonesia
Performance Date: April 25, 2011
Primary Language: English
Language: Indonesian, Chinese

“What do you call Indians in an orange boat?” Answer: “A papaya.”

The informant states that she learned this joke from a friend, when she was probably around 15 years old, while at dinner in an Indian restaurant in Singapore, where she was currently studying. She would tell it to friends when making jokes about Indian people, which she claims commonly occurs since there are “so many” Indians in Singapore. Her opinion of the joke was that “it’s funny and kind of true.”

The joke given above clearly relies for its humor not on an abstract property or stereotype of Indians but on a very basic, phenotypical attribute—their skin tone—which according to the joke, is so dark that they look like the dark seeds of a papaya fruit, which are enclosed by an orange layer (i.e. “the orange boat”). It also seems worth noting that the informant correlated the prevalence of such jokes about Indians with the large presence of that group in the region where the jokes were told. Similar to dead baby jokes, which seem to arise during periods where there is an extraordinary number of births and focus on infants, such as during so-called “baby booms,” the prominence of these sorts of Indian jokes, which seem somewhat mean-spirited like their dead-baby counterparts, may be a counter-reaction by another competing cultural sub-group, or perhaps the dominate culture itself, which feels threatened by the growing presence of the group that is mocked. This trend of portraying “the other” in a negative way, which has undoubtedly characterized the dynamics of the myriad groups of immigrants that have arrived to the “melting pot” of America as well (particularly during the peaks of immigration), thus carries over the frustrations—economic, cultural, or otherwise—of one group with another into the realm of that group’s folklore, which its members share with one another.