Category Archives: Customs

Customs, conventions, and traditions of a group

Tourte Binchoise

Nationality: Belgium
Age: 21
Occupation: Student
Residence: Brussels, Belgium
Performance Date: April 1 2017
Primary Language: French
Language: English, Spanish, Dutch

Background of informant:

My informant YF is an international student from Brussels, Belgium. He spent the first two years of high school in Los Angeles, and the last year back in Brussels. He lived in Wallonia in Belgium, which is the French-speaking region that accounts more than a half of the country.

 

Main piece:

YF: “‘tourte binchoise’ is the food that only being made during the Carnival week, of the entire year. ‘Tourte’ normally means a sweet pie, and ‘Binchoise’ means ‘from Binche’. It’s basically a pie, with … just piecrust, made with sponge cake, as the vessel containing the cream. The filling is orange custard, with a layer of marzipan. That’s something made of confectioner sugar, you know, the really fine sugar, and almond meal. You can only find it during the Carnival. Because it is so limited in time and location, the recipe is so secretive, and it’s so hard to find one.”

Two weeks later, I asked about this pie again, and YF was trying to find a recipe of it online.

YF: “You will notice that the name of this pie is ‘Plus Oultre’. Plus Oultre comes from Latin ‘Plus Ultra’, meaning literally ‘More Far’, or ‘further in good’ in English. It is the motto in Spain, or the city where this pie is from, Binche, that is the name that backery gave its pie. [showed me a picture] This is a similar thing to ‘tourte binchoise’. This is the scandalous orange Tarte. It lloks a nit different than the one that I had in the carnival, but it has the same elements! So I believe it would taste the same!”

 

Context of the performance:

The first part was within a general conversation about the Carnival of Binche, within a interview I had with my informant YF. The second part was done two weeks later when I tried to acquire a recipe of the pie.

 

My thoughts about the piece:

After YF first talked me about this pie in our first conversation, I didn’t really pay attention to this pie. However, when I was transcribing the interview, I started to be really curious about the recipe of the pie. I then reached out to YF but he told me this pie is so rare and secretive, and it turned out that he couldn’t even find a recipe of it on the Internet, in 2017…

 

The orange Tarte recipe that YF showed me is online, here is the URL:

http://www.lacuisinedebernard.com/2010/10/la-tarte-scandaleuse-lorange.html

The recipe is in French.

Styles of Sari

Nationality: Singapore
Age: 20
Occupation: Student
Residence: Singapore
Performance Date: Apr 13 2017
Primary Language: English
Language: Hindi

My informant AM is an international student from Singapore, and her family is originally from Bengal, India. She goes back to Bengal every year, and spend most of the time in the capital city Kolkata.

 

Main piece:

AM: “For me, I only wear Sari in certain time, like in the festival ‘Durga Puja’. We have this Indian festival in Singapore and we celebrate it every year. I got my own Sari at the age of 17 or 18, and then, I learned how to wear it, since there’re certain ways and so many ways to wear it…

“There are women who wear it everyday, like my grandma and people at her age. They have home Sari, Sari for sleeping, and Sari for going out. And my mom’s generation is more modern. They have Sari, and also a more modern style of clothing.

Sari is consisted of one drape, you wrap it around the waist and shoulder. And normally, you wear a blouse and a petticoat underneath the Sari drape. While the more popular modern style is you wear a Kurta, the long top, and below is pants like Patiala, or just like straight – Kameez, or skinny pants like Churidar. Most of the time, when we’re at home, my mom would just wear normal clothes, top and panyts, but if we go out to visit someone, she will wear those. And if it’s a really special occasion, she’ll wear Sari.

As for me, I never wear Sari since I come to the State. [laugh]”

 

Context of the performance:

This is a section from a conversation with my informant AM about how Indian culture and traditions are practiced in Singapore.

 

My thoughts about the piece:

I find Indian as the culture that remains its traditional clothing the longest among many old civilizations. Two weeks ago when I went to Regal LA Live to watch movie, I saw many Indian-looking people wearing Sari (for women) or Achkan (for men) having some kind of open ceremony for a film. Wearing traditional clothing in this modern time is really new to me, especially because China has so many traditional clothing styles but people don’t wear them and don’t know how to wear them.

At the same time, modernization is again reflected in this piece, that according to AM, the younger the generation is, the less people wear Sari in less occasion. This also reflects on globalization, that people in different culture all over the world wear similar cloth, T-shirt and pants. It seems that all these traditions are dying out.

Spring Festival Gala

Nationality: Chinese
Age: 19
Occupation: Student
Residence: Beijing, China
Performance Date: April 10, 2017
Primary Language: Chinese
Language: English

Background of informant:

My informant SS is an international student from Beijing, China. She lived with her grandparents when she was little.

The conversation was in Chinese.

Main piece:

SS: “My relatives will come gather in my grandparents house every new year eve. They will arrive in different time, due to the whether they live far away or not. My grandpa is always the one who do the cooking. Oh he loves to be the chief, and he doesn’t let anyone enter the kitchen when he’s preparing for the spring festival meal! [laugh] And then when the food is being prepared, my family will start to eat and drink, oh, and we’ll all sit down to watch the Spring Festival Gala! When the meal is all prepared, the gala has already began for like… 1 hour.”

SH: What is that?

SS: “That’s the activity that people always do, like every year, with no exception, on New Year Eve day. It’s a huge showcase rehearsed by CCTV, consigned by Chinese government [SS changed her tone]. [laugh, keep using the flat tone] It’s usually consisted with dancing and singing performance, short plays, magic shows, and so on. And normally, while the show is entertaining the audience, there are central ideology penetrated in the show to educate people [SS made the hand gesture of quote when saying “educate”]. But since the Gala has been operated every new year eve for dozens of years, watching Spring Festival Gala on CCTV has become the habit for middle-age to elder Chinese. I’m thinking most younger people also have the habit to open the TV to watch it…while comments on Weibo (a popular social media in China) at the same time… It’s like we are all so used to watch it. And I do think Spring Festival Gala brings people together, it attracts the family to sit in front of the TV, comments on the show, eat some sunflower seeds, and … just… be together!

 

Context of the performance:

This is a section in our conversation about Chinese Spring Festival.

 

My thoughts about the piece:

Regarding to the fact that China has huge population dispersed in different parts of the country, people live in different regions really have drastically different customs and habits. For example, when talking about what do people eat on New Year Eve, my informant SS provided me a list of food that I never had in my home (I’m from southern part of China while she’s from the North). However, after hearing so many differences of what people do on this country-wide festival, watching Spring Festival Gala is the only habit that can be found in almost every family in every part of China at that dat. And since Spring Festival Gala, as SS pointed out, is a show consigned by Chinese government, this common custom is an example of how institutional products gradually become and being transformed into folklore.

Bird, Horse, Muffin

Nationality: American
Age: 20
Occupation: Student
Residence: Los Angeles
Performance Date: 3/4
Primary Language: English

I asked the informant to retell a way of classification that was very important to the informant’s friend group as a way in which they bonded with each other.

“Ok, so bird horse muffin is a way to classify people as either bird horse muffin and they can be a mix of the two, um but they can’t be all three, roughly, although this a very rough sketch is that a bird would be more reserved, a little weird, kinda flighty, a horse is very out there, controls the room uh, big type of person, muffin is very sweet and nice and has like no edge to them, um, that’s the rough outlines. Uh, I first learned it from my friend Nanase who learned it at camp, but it’s also like a real thing that you can find on like the internet. And apparently, like my friend Anna told me that it’s used uh, that it’s used in corporate team building stuff to find out what type of worker you are, and so like a horse who really drives it, but like, a horse can be hard to work with but when they’re on they’re really on. A muffin is so nice to work with but they’re not necessarily going to lead like a horse will, and then like a bird is going to be quiet but then give one really brilliant idea, and then like not do anything else, and so they were saying that you, in your company, you need a balance of these, like if you have too many horses everyone’s just going to argue all the time, if you have to many birds there’s not consistent work, if you have too many muffins like, it is fine, but you’re not doing anything brilliant if you just have muffins. and you can like explain all of world history and interpersonal relations and everyone’s family and how like bird horse muffins interact and how like, and if you’re two, if you’re bird horse in different situations your horse would come out, in different situations your bird would come out, uh, to help or hurt you in different ways”
Analysis:
Bird, Horse, Muffin is a real classification that is used in corporate world, as the informant told us, however, in my research I was not able to find a definitive source for the creation of the classification. This furthers it’s folkloric aspect, a non-authored work. The definitions are relatively the same but have definitely been changed in this case to fit the informant’s friend group. The informant would describe himself as a bird.

Naming Pets in Rural Mexico

Nationality: Mexican-American
Age: Middle-Aged
Occupation: Teacher
Residence: Los Angeles, CA, USA
Performance Date: April 23, 2017
Primary Language: English
Language: Spanish

“Actually, when we had little chicks, too, we didn’t like, like, you name your pets here, like ‘little Peter,’ or ‘Johnny,’ or ‘puppy,’ whatever you want to call them. There, we didn’t name our pets, you know. We just name them Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday. [laughs]

 

Not to feel bad when it was like time to slaughter them… ‘cause we grew pets for eating, you know? It was, it wasn’t like we were just playing with them, it was actual food on the line! [laughs]

 

Was that a common practice, did everyone name their pets something like that?

 

More or less, something like that. Very, very like, crazy names, like you know, like May, July, June, those. [laughs] Because they were going to slaughter them that month. [laughs]

 

There was a little rooster named father’s day [laughs] because they knew they were going to do that, ‘where’s father’s day, where’s father’s day,’ ‘donde esta dia del papa,’ you know, in Español, ‘oh you know he’s there, he’s there, and this and that,’ and sure enough, you know, time came and… cut some necks there. That was crazy.”

 

Analysis: This is a fairly straightforward but interesting and widespread folk practice in rural Mexico. Whereas pets are normally seen as members of a family in the United States, pets were instead viewed primarily as food sources in rural Mexico. As such, the cultural norms surrounding the animals are substantially different from what an American may expect. Naming animals after the date that they will presumably be slaughtered is a very efficient way of keeping the age of a pet on hand. It is worth nothing that the informant’s repeated use of the term “crazy” may be revelatory of a culture shift upon moving to the United States and owning two pets.