Category Archives: Customs

Customs, conventions, and traditions of a group

Customs – Food

Nationality: American - Black
Age: 50
Occupation: Homemaker
Residence: Palo Alto, CA
Performance Date: April 2011
Primary Language: English

On Christmas Eve every year, Kim cooks gumbo for her family and sometimes friends. Gumbo is a hearty seafood, sausage and chicken with okra made from a roux (base for sauce).  The dish is made in one massive pot and takes almost all day to make well. Kim and her sisters all make the dish differently because partially because they do not have a written recipe and they all measure mix and stir by eye.

Kim was born in and her family is from Louisiana, both New Orleans and Baton Rouge. Gumbo is a customary dish of the South and every cook has his or her own variations of the stew. Southerners cook it at other times throughout the year but it traditionally eaten on Christmas Eve.

Kim is unaware of the reasoning behind the tradition but she remembers eating her grandmother’s gumbo on Christmas Eve as a child. For her immediate family it is a way to remain connected to her Southern roots.

Holidays – Birthday – Sri Lankan

Nationality: Sri Lankan
Age: 19
Occupation: Student
Residence: Morgan Hill, CA
Performance Date: April 2011
Primary Language: English

On every member of the family’s birthday, the other family member must each feed that person a piece of birthday cake. My informant says it is a fun and lighthearted birthday activity that they always do. It is supposed to be a way to treat the birthday boy or girl more specially than they are normally treated although it turns out to be funny since it is not practiced at any other time after one learns to feed him or herself. Every birthday since she can remember her family has done this tradition.

My informant says that all her extended family members and Indian and Sri Lankan friends who live in the United States do the same ritual. There is no significant cultural meaning for the activity except to somewhat ‘serve’ the person whose special day it is.

Customs – Grace

Nationality: American - black/Mexican
Age: 17
Occupation: Student
Residence: Palo Alto, CA
Performance Date: March 2011
Primary Language: English

Grace

Before every meal eaten as a family, my informant and his family say a prayer to bless the food. The basic structure of the prayer goes as follows:

Dear God,

Thank you for this food,

We are about to receive,

In your name,

Amen

The informant and his family call this prayer grace. A different family member at random says grace. Everyone holds hands, bows their heads and closes their eyes. After the prayer each family member makes the sign of the cross. Whoever is saying grace can add additional parts to the prayer if he or she pleases. More prayer is added if one family member has a special day coming up, is going to face a challenge in the near future (like an exam or interview), also additional words are said if a visitor is present.

The informant and his family are Catholic but he does not consider himself devout. He says saying grace is a ritual done so frequently that it is routine rather than a spiritual practice. Even if it is not a deeply spiritual practice, the prayer does remind him of God and his faith. His family attends church on occasion and he sometimes prays alone but says grace is their most frequent and consistent Catholic practice.

Praying before meals is common among Christian people and it is called grace. Food is not supposed to be eaten until grace has been said. It serves as a way to symbolically make one’s nourishment clean and sacred before it enters the body. Saying grace is also a time to thank God for blessing them with food. Grace seems like a way to incorporate religion and faith

Indian Folk Belief

Nationality: Indian
Age: 53
Occupation: Businessman
Residence: Nashville, Tennessee
Performance Date: February 11th, 2011
Primary Language: Hindi (urdu)
Language: English

“In India, we believe mostly in homoeopathic medicine. After consulting my homeopathic doctor for many years I have picked up on several habits that we in India believe will elongate our life span. One of these includes not drinking water during a meal, only after one hour has passed since you ate your meal that you should drink water. When I asked for the reason for this, my holistic doctor explained by example. Cows, which are believed sacred in India, do not mix water with food. They eat grass as much as they want, and when an hour passes, they find their way to a water source and drink, and so they live a healthy, sacred life, and we should do the same. I follow that tradition to this day. “

I had learned this lovely folk tradition from Mr. Grewal when I had first met him. We were sitting at lunch and I was wondering what drink I should order, and consulting my friend, and his daughter, Ash. Mr. Grewal then explained to me that it is best not to drink anything at all when eating. When I asked why, he described the before mentioned tradition that he had learned from his homeopathic doctor. I found it very fascinating, especially since I had never heard of anything like it before. In fact, I decided to do some research on the matter to see if anywhere else there has been mentions of it and indeed I stumbled upon an article that described the impact of drinking during eating. The article was posted on a site named “The Reluctant Eater” and was written after an interview with Christa Orecchio who had a holistic medicine practice in San Diego. Christa explained, “’ drinking liquid during our meals dilutes our precious digestive enzymes that help us digest and absorb the nutrients in our food. Most Americans (especially if you are eating processed foods) are severely deficient in digestive enzymes which contributes to weight gain, constipation, bloating and overall low energy’”. This brings a more scientific, though still holistic, aspect to the tradition, but it still supports the fact that it exists.

Although I have never considered myself a great believer in holistic medicine, I find facts and traditions like this captivating, and I do believe that some aspects of holistic medicine definitely do work. Yet, I am still confused by the “cow example”, as I am aware of the fact that there is a significant difference from the human digestive system to that of the cow, which makes the comparison less convincing. I tend to believe that as Indian people worship this animal, the holistic doctor saw it as a good way of conveying his message, as I believe cows tend to act this way. And if he gets healthier patients, then this way of convincing them is a blessed one.

Annotation: Wanger, Ryan. “Don’t Drink Water (or Anything Else) During Meals.” The Reluctant Eater — Remember Food? 19 May 2009. Web. 24 Apr. 2011. <http://www.thereluctanteater.com/2009/05/dont-drink-water-or-anything-else-during-meals/>.

A Chinese Chopstick Custom and Folk Belief

Nationality: Taiwanese/American
Age: 18
Occupation: Student
Residence: Room 4305B, 920 W. 37th PL. Los Angelos, California 90007
Performance Date: 2/4/2011
Primary Language: Chinese
Language: English

My informant says this about her background:

“I was born in Connecticut, left when I was two months old, went to Taiwan. For elementary school, went to Hong Kong and went to Shanghai when I was starting middle school, and finished high school there. My parents are typical Taiwanese or Asian parents who only came to America for school and they don’t know that much about American culture and aren’t that great at English. So I was raised in a very “Asian” atmosphere/family.”

One time during dinner at a shopping mall, she brought this folk belief up, reprimanding one of her Caucasian friends for sticking his chopsticks vertically into his rice:

“If you stick chopsticks in the rice straight down into the rice bowl, it’s a bad, a very bad omen. It’s disrespectful because it’s like you’re putting incense on a grave and yeah, okay.”

Before I elaborate on this custom, I just wanted to talk about my own background first. I’m a third generation Chinese Taiwanese male student who was born in Taipei, Taiwan. I speak English and Chinese. I lived in Taipei for two years before moving to New Jersey, where I lived for seven years. After that, I returned to Taipei where I finished high school.

Returning to the topic at hand, in Chinese culture, it is customary to use incense as a way of communicating with spirits or as a way of indicating something is an offering to the spirits of our ancestors. My informant reprimanded her friend for sticking his chopsticks vertically into his rice because it is similar to putting incense on foodstuffs Chinese people offer in front of graves.

I grew up in a Chinese family too so I’ve heard this “rule” before. But, varied as folklore should be, the version my parents told me was that sticking chopsticks (or anything similar in shape to incense) in my rice would invite spirits to feast on the rice, which is at once disrespectful and uncanny–you wouldn’t want spirits eating your rice at the same time you are eating it.

She mentioned another folk belief right after talking about the chopstick “rule”:

“Ok, I heard this from my mom. So another thing is, depending on how far you hold the chopsticks [she picks up her chopsticks], so depending on how far you grip the chopsticks, it depends– they say that…this is for girls, like if you hold it like here [she notions to the bottom of the chopsticks], you’re going to be married off to some guy who lives really close to you and like vice versa, like if you hold it like super far they it’s like ‘oh, you’re going to be married to like, you know, to a distant country or something like that’. Like it depends on how far you hold the chopsticks [she notions to the top of the chopsticks] , like around the tip.”

While I never heard of this belief before, maybe because I am male, this website (a sort of online journal) has a writer who brings up the same belief: thestar. This belief reveals a heavy emphasis on marriage in Chinese culture, which seems to be targeted at young women, that is passed from parent to children or in this case, mother to daughter. My informant elaborated that she heard this from her mother when she, herself, was caught holding the chopsticks near the tip. Her mother lamented that my informant was going to be married far away from home. From that background, we can see that marrying and residing far away from home carries a certain stigma-like quality to the extent where parents will warn their children that they will marry away from home (home as in the sense of city, town or country).