Category Archives: Customs

Customs, conventions, and traditions of a group

A Typical Friday for a Young Adult in Argentina

Nationality: Argentine-American
Age: 44
Occupation: Director of Residential Services at local health center
Residence: Claremont, CA
Performance Date: April 21, 2017
Primary Language: English
Language: Spanish

9:00 a.m. – go to work, usually at a family boutique or bakery

Noon – close store for a few hours (if you didn’t get your bread at noon, it’s too late because everything is closed), have lunch with family, and take a nap.

3 p.m – go back to work

7 pm. – close the store and go home

10 p.m. – serve dinner

11:30 p.m. – get ready for your night out if you’re young (“Sometimes we’d pile into a bus after a couple of hours at a club and head to another club an hour and a half away.”)

6:00 a.m. – stay out until then and have breakfast before going home to sleep

Background Information and Context:

While talking about how the lifestyle in Argentina is completely different from that in America, I noted that we usually have dinner at 8 or even 9 p.m. whenever I’m at her house – much later than most American families – and remembered that she had told me, the first time I had dinner with her family, that “everything goes late in Argentine.” To get a better idea of this, I asked her to outline a normal day in Argentine. What she gave me was based on her experience when she went back to Argentina at age 18 and the lifestyle of her cousins back then.

Collector’s Notes:

The informant summed it up well when she explained that Argentine people live by the motto “You’ve got to work to live, not live to work.” Whereas most Americans maximize their 9-to-5 work day, barely taking time for breaks and lunch, Argentines make time for a hearty lunch, family time, and a nap. Night life for young people in Argentina seems extreme compared to even the more adventurous students at USC.

Drinking Mate

Nationality: Argentine-American
Age: 44
Occupation: Director of Residential Services at local health center
Residence: Claremont, CA
Performance Date: April 21, 2018
Primary Language: English
Language: Spanish

“Everybody drinks mate. As long as I can remember, since I was a kid, my mom and her friends used to drink mate. I think it’s made out of coconut or something. Everybody drinks it out of these cups made out of wood that basically look like coconuts. They put tea leaves in it, and drink out of a strange straw made of metal. The straw lets the liquid through without letting the tea leaves through. Basically, whoever is serving the mate has a bowl of yerva, which is the herbs, and they put it in the mate, and once you have all the tea in, you pour in hot water and sugar. The person serving drinks first because it’s usually very bitter but gets sweeter. You pass it around, adding more sugar and hot water, and everybody gets the mate out of the same container and straw.”

Background Information and Context:

According to the informant, her parents drank mate every morning and throughout the day, and her cousin drinks it by himself by the river, but the particular ritual she described is meant for a social gathering. She’s not sure if any of this is symbolic. “People will share with complete strangers. It’s really strange,” she remarked, “My cousin will be down at the beach and meet some strangers, and they’ll drink mate together.” In Argentina, kids drink it too, but with warm milk and lots of sugar. She remembers drinking it as a kid all the time, and remarked that shMare was sad that she didn’t make it for her kids when they were little.

Collector’s Notes:

Traditions reveal a lot about social relations within a culture. Based on this tradition of sharing mate, one can see that hospitality – moreover a deference for one’s guests – is an important aspect of Argentine culture and that being friendly and welcoming, even to strangers, is expected. The first time I came to the informant’s house, I was so confused by the extent to which she’d welcomed me into her home and wanted me to make myself comfortable because it was such a different experience from my own more conservative Vietnamese upbringing. A good way to see the differences between these two cultures would be to compare this mate tradition to what I’d consider a typical Vietnamese social interaction, like greeting each elder individually and bowing, a representation of the strong sense of hierarchy in Vietnamese social groups.

The Meat Tray

Nationality: Mexican American
Age: 22
Occupation: Student
Residence: Los Angeles, CA
Performance Date: 4/25/18
Primary Language: English

The informant told me about the meat tray, which is basically a platter of appetizers. At any family gathering, the informant’s grandma (on her mom’s side) will bring out the meat tray only at her house. The tray consists of cheese, crackers, some type of sausage, black olives, and mini pickles. Informant says she’s never been to an event for her mom’s side of the family that hasn’t had the tray. It’s something that has always existed to her. She told me that she knows it’s serious to the family and the get-togethers because one year, her grandma forgot to make it and everyone flipped out. Even family out of state know about this story and how important it is to the family and any family function. The informant looked nostalgic when she spoke about it. If something is missing from the meat tray, the family also freaks out about it and makes comments about how they can’t eat from it until it’s complete. The informant thinks it started when there started being more and more grandkids, when the grandma’s children started having kids. It’s her mom and her two sisters who both have kids. The grandma oversees the meat tray. It’s not a family function without it. The family are big eaters, so for the informant, it feels like family gatherings are centered around food – the beginning of the gathering is when the meat tray is brought out and that’s truly when the event starts. Informant also mentioned that extended family come to enjoy it too and that it’s on open door policy at her grandparents and a lot of friends can come too, even on big holidays. The meat tray signifies gathering and union. This is a place where you can eat and feel like you’re being taken care of as the informant explained. It’s also important to the family considering the passing of the grandpa very recently and the meat tray was still brought out at the funeral. I find this to be a beautiful way of being close to your family, it’s fun and good to eat which is always a plus.

One Way to Scratch an Itch

Nationality: American
Age: 61
Occupation: Homemaker
Residence: Southern California
Performance Date: March 24, 2018
Primary Language: English

My maternal grandpa was from the poorest part of Birmingham, Alabama. His birth father died in a dynamite factory explosion when he was two years old, and his mother remarried a few years after that. Even with a new man, their family was poorer than poor. Some winters, they’d resort to eating shoe leather out of desperate hunger. He had one pair of overalls, and later became an expert marksman out of necessity (he could hit a squirrel between the eyes from 30 yards out). He climbed out of poverty via the GI Bill which he used to get an education here at USC, and then a job as a salesman of medicinal gasses to airline companies and hospitals. He didn’t much like talking about when he was poor – it was not his proudest moment. The one thing he did enjoy talking about from back then was family. Even when you have no money, you have family. As his sister June put it, “it never felt like we were poor. We had so much love in the household.”

 

My mom imbued this same sense of family on me through different stories she’d heard as a small girl from her dad, my grandpa. I’d heard this story before, but it had slipped to the back of my mind. Driving home from lunch one sunny afternoon, I ask her and my dad if they have any stories about the inexplicable that I could use for my folklore project. My mom starts:

 

“When your great uncle – great, great uncle – had… his leg amputated, it was itching itching itching, the stump was itching.  So his family said, ‘go dig up the stump and see if there’s anything wrong with it.  And he did and it was covered with ants.  And so he properly buried it and the itching stopped.  And that was a common belief of the time, in Alabama among Christians a couple generations ago.”

 

I love this story because it plays on so many different levels. On the one hand, it’s a story of a very strange folk belief that has found its way into mainstream medicine.  Phantom pains are a common phenomenon in the paraplegic world. To stop it, many doctors put a mirror up to the intact limb, making it look like their missing limb is still there. Almost immediately, the pains stop, and even when the mirror is removed, the pains are not felt. On the other hand, this story works through the familial lens, as it provides a rather sincere snapshot into life in rural Alabama so many years ago.  In a strange way, it makes perfect sense to dig up the withered limb and clean it off to stop the itching. It’s not like there was any other information out there, they just did what they thought would work and it worked.

 

Ethiopian Wedding Traditions

Nationality: American/Ethiopian
Age: 19
Occupation: Student
Residence: Washington D.C
Performance Date: 3/26/18
Primary Language: English

Context & Analysis

The subject and I exchanged stories of our family’s traditions while sitting in a class discussion. She mentioned that she and her family were from Ethiopia, so I asked her if she knew of any unique Ethiopian traditions that westerners might not be familiar with. She provided me with an overview of traditional Ethiopian weddings gathered from the ones she and her family attend on a (mostly) yearly basis. She emphasized how many of the ritualistic parts of the wedding preparation are altered or substituted depending on each family’s preferences or personal ties to the country. The transcription is a little disjointed at times because the subject attempted to recount a variety of wedding traditions encapsulated in the ceremony. It was quite interesting to hear a younger woman’s take on these traditional ceremonies.

Main Piece

“So…for Ethiopian weddings…it’s like a, um, a couple days long process—actually it can take up to a month usually. I have 8 aunts on my mom’s side so—and I’ve been alive and I’ve missed three weddings—so every single summer someone is getting married. So like the whole summer we go back to Ethiopia or we travel back to where they are and so actually…there’s a process you do when you have your weddings. So first there’s the, uh, bride’s family celebration and they wash the bride’s feet in honey and milk and, um, they do all her makeup and beauty and stuff and they’ll like play this game there where the groom tries to break in [to the room the bride is in] and they’ll be like “No you can’t be in there!” [laughs], and that’s pretty cool. And these things are mostly ritualistic, like you’re not actually pouring milk on the bride’s feet but some people do. I’ve been to a couple of weddings where people have, um, and that is traditionally the night before the wedding. And the day of the wedding it’s—with my family it’s a lot of pictures and posing. I know with traditions they have the husband—the groom—has to kill a bull, or like a goat, and they cook it for dinner, like the wedding dinner. Like in most American ideas of [a traditional Ethiopian] wedding this happens but it’s like miming, which is like kind of a new tradition, um, but yea. There’s a huge selection of Ethiopian foods and a huge section of raw meat, that’s a thing that people eat a lot, and afterward you have a big dinner the day after which is the bride and groom’s first big party together, hosting like their friends and family. And it’s basically everyone goes over during the day—it’s not like a nighttime celebration—um, and then after that (I cannot remember the name of it). It’s just the bride and groom’s parents and they serve them dinner for the first time, like as a couple, um, in their own house. There’s a lot of ritual of, like, respecting your elders and stuff.”