Category Archives: Folk Beliefs

Tapping

Text: My grandma has an exercise where she taps on different parts of the face and body (as demonstrated by the picture she drew.

She says it’s sort of a three part process:

These points are meridian end points. She says that when you tap on them they stimulate these points (and your body) and your cortisol level is brought down, which you produce when you get stressed, anxious, emotional (there’s another thing it produces but she couldn’t remember). Cortisol isn’t good for your immune system, it makes it work harder.

When you tap for 5 minutes, it starts to bring it down. When you tap for more than 5 minutes, then it starts to train it to stay down a little bit further.

My grandma says in her practice (and she said there’s a lot of ways people do it) when she taps, someone might be really really, really sad or really angry. So they get to talk about it and get to bring that energy up so now they’re feeling the sadness. With that feeling you tap on all that sadness, feel it and it brings things down. You don’t have to tell your story or talk aloud, though sometimes it helps to hear it aloud. But when you tap on that sadness, what it does (and she said she was simplifying things) is it allows that frontal cortex to open up so it’s not clouded with cortisol.

Then skipping ahead she personifies it, and she talked me through personification. When you talk to your body your body feels validated, it’s saying” Oh, you hear me? I am sad. Let me tell you why I’m sad.” Even though we personify it, that energy comes up, because it’s been going around and around in you, so in your intellect you keep it there. But as your tapping what happens is, as said before, your frontal cortex opens and it starts to integrate your nervous system with your thought process. 

So now you can acknowledge that sadness, honor it, but you don’t have to hang onto it. When you’re ready then you can tap and say, I choose to allow this sadness to release, or I choose to transform this sadness. 

Context: My grandmother is 75, white, and living in Idaho. She works as a spiritual life coach, working to bring people’s lives into balance. She is in the herbalist community and learned a lot of what she knows through classes she took. She still operates in that community and shares knowledge with her friends. She learned this in a class around 21-22 years ago where a woman came to talk about tapping.

She says tapping is an old ancient system from a lot of places, but she’s gonna pull some Chinese traditional–and maybe five element Chinese uses it too but she’s not sure. What it is, is you tap on meridian points that come out of the chakras, which are like spinning vortexes of energy. The meridians are part of the network that carry that energy. This network is invisible, like the blood vessels in your body are part of the circulatory system, the meridians are part of that energy/chakra system in your nervous system.

Analysis: Tapping is a type of folk healing that rejects the Cartesian Dualism separation of the soul and body, instead grounding yourself and what you’re going through in both the body and the soul. It has more of a focus on the mental and spiritual aspect, in some ways leaning more towards therapy than other medical practices but still recognizes the body’s part and the importance of grounding a person through the physical tapping of the meridian endpoints. Tapping also seems to loosely act out Rappaport model of ritual referenced in “Placebo Studies and Ritual Healing”: evocation, enactment, embodiment and evaluation. Evocation: This one’s a little optional depending on if you’re leading or doing taping informally, but for my grandma’s patients starting the session and trusting her to lead them through. Enactment: The actual act of tapping, letting it bring down the cortisol levels, the five plus minute duration you tap for. Embodiment: Personifying your feelings, integrating your body and nervous system with your thought process, sometimes saying it out loud. Evaluation: Allowing your feelings to release or transform.

In this we also see what might be cultural appropriation and probably a little white washing, though folk healing is an interesting thing to examine through the lens of cultural appropriation: Is it just a recognition of systems that helps to heal thus everyone should use it? or is it people taking and reshaping (presumable) something that belongs to another culture?

Citations: Kaptchuk, Ted J. “Placebo Studies and Ritual Theory: A Comparative Analysis of Navajo, Acupuncture and Biomedical Healing.” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, vol. 366, no. 1572, June 2011, pp. 1849–58. DOI.org (Crossref), https://doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2010.0385.

New Years Grapes

Text: Every New Year’s Eve before midnight, you sit under a table and you eat 12 individual grapes, and supposedly it’s supposed to make it so that you find love or you make like a wish that comes true. The informant thinks you have to eat them all either before it hits midnight or as it hits midnight. 

Context: Informant in 20, half white half pacific islander, born in Washington and now going to school in Southern California. She herself has never practiced this tradition. She saw it on TikTok and was like what is this? And then she saw more TikToks and was like, now I know.

Analysis: This tradition no longer has roots, it isn’t traveling in the same way other traditions used to before the internet, as we’ve talked about before in class. The brothers Grimm and other proponents of ethnonationalism would have a stroke. My informant is still a passive bearer, but not in the usual way, she didn’t learn it from a group she’s in and doesn’t know where it came from originally. But weirdly if you think about it she does still have a group and that group is TikTok, a large nebulous group but a group all the same. I, who does not use TikTok, did not know this tradition, or I wasn’t in the right algorithm to see it when it came to Instagram. The algorithm opens up a whole other part of the interaction between digital orality and folklore groups. Folklore no longer can be tracked by location but what you know does tell us things about how you interact with the digital space.

Weddings & Banana Plants

Text: A pre-wedding tradition where a representative from the groom’s family will cut down bamboo plants to clear the way for the marriage. Everyone there is also dressed up in traditional clothes.

Description of the tradition–Informant: “they’ll be like… depending on, you know, if the brides and groom’s parents are alive as well, um, there’s usually a representative from the groom’s family, and we have like this thing where we go and there’s the–there’s 3 per, um, parent, basically. So like the bride has like 3 and the groom has 3 and it’s, the actual thing itself is these banana plants. And they’re really tall and they kind of look like bamboo almost, but they’re really tall. And, um, like a representative from the groom’s family will come around and we have this very traditional knife called a Pichangatti It’s like a hooked knife. And basically, my dad has done this for a specific wedding, but you go around and you take this knife and you’re like cutting down these banana plants and it’s kind of showing like that there’s no obstacle that’s gonna like get in front of this marriage and like you’re you’re like metaphorically like cutting down obstacles or anything that like has to do with the like the transition into marriage.”

Context: The Informant is from Coorg, India. Their ethnicity is called Coorgi or Kodava and they speak Kodavathuk (it is a South Indian Dravidian language). Weddings last three days and this is a pre-wedding ritual. There they have huge emphasis on ancestry, so this tradition is a way to honor their ancestors. Many of their ancestors were warriors so this tradition is very symbolic with cutting down things, showing strength and power and ancestry, but also just giving wishes for the new couple. 

A Pichangatti is a knife used in agricultural and traditional cultural contexts. It is known for its unique shape as a curved blade and tends to be heavily decorated. 

Analysis: This is a ritual that is preparing the couple for the wedding, the time of transition into marriage, a time of liminality which can be uneasy. While also preparing the couple for the resulting state after the wedding: marriage. Within this ritual we see a performance element, as people are dressed up and someone is using a ritualistic element, the knife, to perform this ritual calling upon their ancestry and past as warriors. The informant said it but we really do see how in this important ancestry is, especially at a right of passage. Having three from both the bride and grooms side can be seen as honoring the two separate ancestors of the bride and groom while also preparing to merge the two families through this clearing of obstacles This ritual also involves magic superstition and slightly falls into the realm of sympathetic magic, specifically the law of similarity. The bamboo plants are tall and literal obstacles. In this ritual the participants externalize what are normally internal obstacles turning them into something that can be physically cut down, through representation like calling to like. This is done to create a good outcome for the marriage thus magic superstition. 

Drinking Whiskey Cold Medicine

Text: Remedy for a cold or tickle in the throat. They say, you mix really boiling water with whiskey and you’ll get cleared out in a day or two. 

Context: Informant is from a part of South India. Where she says they are well known for drinking whiskey. She says there isn’t really an age range, and was served alcohol at a bit of a young age, though with kids there is definitely more water than whiskey. 

Analysis: This is an example of folk medicine. Where they use a substance that is known to be an assault on the senses to clear those senses. K said the whiskey is usually strong, which makes me think that the burn of the alcohol is important and quite likely part of the point since this remedy seems to be for sicknesses relating to the throat, almost like how rubbing alcohol is used for wounds. By adding the hot water it connects to other forms of folk medicine like tea or inhaling steam. Temperature is usually important when caring for the sick, a cold is quite literally called a cold, thus hot water is the opposite.

Fideo

Text: Recipe for a soup made when your sick.

Ingredients: 

  • Noodles; Traditionally you use Fideo noodles but they can be any noodles
  • Oil, usually like vegetable oil
  • Tomato sauce – Informant’s family specifically swears by Del Monte tomato sauce, the mini ones, which you can get at smart and final for 99 cents.
  • Chicken broth
  • Optional: Bouillon cube
  • Large amount of garlic salt – informant’s family usually uses McCormick
  • Pepper
  • Worcestershire sauce
  • Optional Lemon juice and Tapatillo

Recipe: Traditionally you use fideo noodles but they can be any noodles. You put noodles in a pan with oil and fry the noodles a little bit, so they’re a little bit browned, and then you add tomato sauce enough of that to cover the noodles. You stir it, to make sure all the noodles are coated, and then after that, you eyeball an amount of chicken broth to add. It’s like vaguely double the amount of noodles that you have, like it has to cover noodles, but however much broth you want, you add the chicken broth. If you want, you can add a Bouillon cube that makes it taste really good. And then you add an eyeballed large amount of garlic salt. The Informant’s usual rule of thumb is to put in a decent amount and then when they think that it’s enough, then they add a little bit more and then they’re done. And then also pepper, and you stir it all together. You wait until it boils, and then once it boils, you shut off the heat, you cover it, and you leave it for 15 minutes. After that, it’s ready to serve. Their family traditionally serves it with worcestershire sauce in it. The Informant also thinks it’s really, really good with lemon juice and tapatio. That’s usually what they make if I’m sick and then it clears out my sinuses. 

Context: The Informant, 21, white with Mexican heritage, lives in Southern California, learned this recipe from their mom and grandmother. Though they’re pretty sure people in their family have been making it longer than that and assume it came from their great grandmother, their grandmother’s grandmother, who was the matriarch of the family and and from Mexico, where the informant assumes she learned it. The informant remembers “making it as a kid. My grandmother used to pick me up from preschool and she would take me back to her house and I would help her make Fideo, and then I would go, and I would sit, and I would watch Sesame Street, and then when it was done, she would bring me a bowl of, uh, a Fideo when I would sit there and watch PBS kids. So like Sesame Street and Zoboomafoo and Bob the Builder and all of the like. All the, all the old uh, things. And so, yeah, and then anytime I was sick, my grandma or my mom would make it for me. My grandma calls it Mexican penicillin. Um, cause it makes you feel better whenever you’re sick.”

Analysis: This soup is folk medicine and the process of making it can be thought of as a low context ritual. Rituals, especially in regards to folk healing rituals often include a narrative, I believe part of the narrative that gives this medicine it’s power is the process of someone lovingly making it for you, it is the heartwarming memory that the informant has of their grandmother or mother making this soup by that gives it its power. Even if they make it by themselves it still has that memory association, to the process and the taste. As Kaptchuk says, it has a ‘could be’ dimension to the healing through this tradition and memory.

Taking a closer look at the ingredients of this recipe the base ingredient is chicken broth which has its relation to the to chicken noodle soup, a very common recipe to bring when someone is sick. The addition of garlic salt is also interesting given garlic’s preestablished presence in folklore. We repeat these ingredients in folklore because they are familiar. We also see bricolage in the optional ingredients, lemon juice and tapatio, that the informant adds in at the end, this is a traditional recipe but it also gets personalized.

Citations: Kaptchuk, Ted J. “Placebo Studies and Ritual Theory: A Comparative Analysis of Navajo, Acupuncture and Biomedical Healing.” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, vol. 366, no. 1572, June 2011, pp. 1849–58. DOI.org (Crossref), https://doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2010.0385.