Category Archives: Kinesthetic

Body movements

Feeding Birthday Cake

AGE: 21

DATE OF PERFORMANCE: 4/19

LANGUAGE: English 

NATIONALITY: Canadian 

OCCUPATION: Student 

PRIMARY LANGUAGE: English 

RESIDENCE: Westlake Village 

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Interviewer: What’s a tradition you and your family have done during the holidays or certain celebrations?

SA: “One small but meaningful tradition in my family happens during birthdays. I only recently learned that this is an Indian thing–but the person whose birthday it is feeds cake to the people closest to them, and they get fed cake by those same people. It’s a simple act but deeply rooted in affection and closeness.”

Interpretation

A lot of the rituals, superstitions, and other traditions that SA had described to me in her family and her culture surround concepts of love, devotion, and affection. I think it’s so beautiful that there are so many distinct rituals that surround the concept of love and adoration. The only rituals or traditions I can think of at the moment in American society is either Valentine’s Day or someone’s anniversary. But on the topic of birthday rituals, in Korean culture it’s typical that the person’s family will make them birthday soup. The next chance I get to interview SA, I would love her to expand on how she found out it was an Indian tradition and whether she would like to continue this tradition with her family in the future. Since it involves cake, did this tradition begin as the modern world developed or has cake replaced something else used in the past? Either way, what a beautiful and familial tradition.

TTRPG Dice Superstitions and Rituals

The Informant

E.T. is a long-time tabletop roleplaying game (TTRPG) hobbyist and player who has played in several games at real life tables using real physical dice that must be tossed by hand as opposed to digital random number generators. TTRPGs rely on sets of dice of various face sizes in

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Amongst E.T.’s collection of dice sets include favored dice sets such as his “pansexual dice.” He insists on carrying the dice, or else “they’ll misbehave.” He “trains” his dice, ritualistically pulling them out one at a time, grouping and categorizing them by face number. Then, all the die are placed highest number up to condition them to roll that number more in the future. He notes that he does not utilize “dice jail” that often, only when a particular dice is especially egregious for a session. Although he reports that trained dice tend not to perform that poorly, the pansexual dice notably acts up every now and then. He insists that training dice work due to the estimated measurement comparison where his digital dice underperform compared to his trained physical dice.

E.T. has a cat that passed away a couple years back, and he uses her food bowl as the “dice jail” for misbehaving dice. The cat had no quality that would help the dice rehabilitate, but it’s a sentimental use for the bowl he’s held onto since. If he’s hosting a game session with players he is not fond of, he will give them dice that have a history of poor performance. Apparently, it is necessary to keep them in specific bags along with charms for “positive vibes.” The favorite dice gets a more spacious satin satch instead of the usual velvet one. He also reports a friend and fellow TTRPG player who puts dice in a mason jar under the full moon to absorb of the power of the moon. This can be either to cleanse unlucky dice or to bless dice.

Analysis

Dice rituals and magic can be fairly easily categorized as Frazer’s sympathetic magic, particularly contageous magic that associates good luck with particular sets of dice. The process of trying to enchant dice by imbuing it with moonlight is contageous magic that attempts to rub off the cosmic force onto the statistical random number generator by association. The idea that dice can be trained to roll higher numbers simply by “conditioning” them with deliberate face placement as a ritual similarly hopes that the time spent on the face with the biggest number will persist in future uses of the dice. Conversely, dice with historically bad luck becomes stuck with the contageous misfortune until a conversion ritual is performed, such as with the mason jar and moonlight. As a fantasy roleplay game, the medium itself lends itself towards players who are inclined and willing to partake in magical and superstitious practices, if not for genuinely belief, at least for fun and roleplay.

Jiggalo – Ritual

Nationality: American
Age: 18
Occupation: Student
Residence: Los Angeles
Language: English

Ritual Dance: Jiggalo

Context: “Jiggalo is a dance I did with my high school volleyball team before every single match we played. It’s to kind of get the team hyped up and energetic for the game at the end of our warm-up. It also brings the team together as a sort of bonding thing. It starts with everyone separating off into grade levels, so the freshman, sophomores, juniors, and seniors all go off with their grade and get a few minutes to coordinate a dance. Once everyone is ready, we come back in a circle and sing ‘Our hands are high, our feet are low, and this is how we jiggalo,’ and then one at a time, each group does their little dance.

I first learned it in my freshman year at our first home game of the year, when the team captain said ‘Alright let’s go do jiggalo’ after we warmed up. The girls who had been there the year before taught me how to do it, but because I was the only freshman on the team, I had to do the actual dance alone which was kinda fun. They’re also the ones who told me that if we don’t do it, it’s basically an automatic loss, so the tradition was very important.”

Analysis: Not many people think about sports teams as folk groups, but they can definitely be considered as such. The main focus of sports is the athletic competition, and it’s clear why, but the communal aspect of it is often overlooked as a result. The entire world of sports is home to countless rituals that are only understood by the participants and/or fans of a select sport, and my informant’s description of jiggalo illustrates this perfectly. When she first said the word, my knee-jerk reaction was “what the hell is a jiggalo?” but that just proves my point. To me, it’s just a silly sounding word that could mean anything. To my informant and her team, it’s a sacred pre-game ritual that is important enough to where if they don’t do it, it immediately condemns the entire game. A common thread in folklore is the lack of understanding by outsiders, and while this pre-game ritual may not fit the traditional ideas of folklore, I believe it absolutely fits under the umbrella.

Bring Em Out – Ritual

Nationality: American
Age: 18
Occupation: Student
Residence: Los Angeles
Language: English

Ritual Dance/Entrance: Bring Em Out

Context: “‘Bring em out’ is an entrance tradition I do with my high school volleyball team. It starts with all of the girls lining up in pairs, captains in the front, then seniors, then juniors, etcetera. We line up by the main doorway that leads to the main part of the gym, and they play the song “Bring Em Out” by T.I. plays over the speakers in the gym. When it gets to a certain part of the song, every pair runs out one after another, jumping up and slapping the arch of the doorway as they pass it. The JV and frosh teams are lined up on the endline and sideline as we enter, so we high five them along the way and then high five our partner over the net before running a few drills and high fiving them on the other side of the net. It’s a really fun tradition for every home game, it serves the same purpose as like a wrestling entrance so the crowd gets hyped up and all the players ready to go.”

Analysis: This is the second of two pre-volleyball game rituals given to me by my informant, and I think it shows just how prevalent folklore is in places and situations where you wouldn’t expect it. I don’t think a single person on the planet thinks of folklore when someone mentions sports and vice versa. And yet it is featured so prominently, in ways that don’t jump out as being folklore but can absolutely be considered as such after learning about the ritualistic and symbolic significance behind it. I found the comparison to wrestling entrances especially funny, but it absolutely holds true. The entrance is an extremely important part of a performance, and what is sports if not an athletic performance? The whole process of “Bring Em Out” can be compared to some of the ritualistic practices of theatre troupes, which most would agree fall under the category of folklore. I had always seen things like this and enjoyed them without ever analyzing through the lens of folklore, and I think doing so can reveal a lot.

Harvard River Run – Ritual

Nationality: American
Age: 28
Occupation: Author
Residence: Long Beach
Language: English

Ritual: Harvard River Run

Context: “As a Harvard freshman, after living in what’s known as the ‘Freshmen Yard’ for a semester, we had to choose a ‘blocking group’ which was basically a group of 1-5 other people who you were agreeing to live with in one place for the rest of your time at Harvard. After choosing your group, you’re entered into the housing lottery, which determines where you and your group are housed. There are river houses, which are the most coveted because they’re much grander than the boring yard houses, and they sit right next to the Charles river, hence the name. So, in an attempt to appease what everyone called the ‘housing gods,’ freshmen will do the river run the night before housing day, which is when everyone finds out what house they got. For the river run, you get together with your blockmates, suit up, and some people will wear ridiculous outfits but most people just try to look as nonchalant as possible because if the security guards catch you trying to do this, they will kick you out. The goal of the run itself is to go from river house to river house, taking a shot in each house, usually in the room of an upperclassman you know who opens the door for you, but as long as you take the shot on the house’s premises you’re fine. The legend has it that if you successfully take a shot at each house without getting caught, you guarantee yourself a river house. My block successfully completed the run and was placed into a river house the next day so I guess there’s some truth to it.

Analysis: College is weird. Every school has their own traditions and rituals that seem utterly ridiculous to just about everyone other than the actual students of a given school. And maybe I’m wrong, but based on everything I’ve heard about various schools, it seems like the prestige of a school is directly correlated to the strangeness of said traditions and rituals. Ivy leagues, generally being in the upper echelon of prestige, always seem to be the weirdest, but I think that adds to the overall mythos they possess. Why are a bunch of highly intelligent and ambitious students running from house to house, drinking an ungodly amount of alcohol along the way? To appease the housing gods, of course. It’s a completely absurd idea, but at the same time, it’s hilariously fascinating. The fact that nearly every freshman participates in such a strange ritual speaks to the universities’ culture, as just based on what I’ve heard from my informant, Harvard has a very unique and unified culture among the student body. And for the ritual to be conducted yearly by every incoming class illustrates just how strong folklore like this can be.