Category Archives: Life cycle

Sacrifice for Deceased Osage Children

Tags: Osage, Ozarks, Funeral Custom, Sacrifice

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For the Osage, whenever there’s a death of a child/baby, dogs will be used in ceremonial practices as a sacrifice.

Informant Info

Race/Ethnicity: Indian

Age: 22

Occupation: College Student

Residence: Northwest Arkansas, USA

Date of Performance: March 2024

Primary Language: English

Other Language(s): N/A

Relationship: Friend

Context

AH, the informant, is of Indian descent. Her father practices Hinduism and speaks Tulu. He has been a very influential figure in her upbringing. She also studies indigenous peoples and their customs as a Sustainability major.

Analysis

This act of sacrifice is meant to represent the similar innocence of little dogs and babies. It is also done as a means to give the child/baby companionship in the afterlife.

Korean Doljanchi

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JK: In Korea there is a particular celebration for 1-year olds. Korean “doljanchi” is the first birthday celebration. Technically Koreans view birthdays in different times than Western cultures but the first year birthday is very important. The 1-year old is dressed in very traditional clothing and so are the guests, they wear hanboks. There is a lot of fruit everywhere and rice cakes. One of the most important things is the baby choosing an item. There are a lot of things laid out in front of the baby, money, paintbrush, stethoscope, gavel, that sort of thing. Then whatever the baby grabs or touches is meant to influence their future in Korea. For example if they grab a pencil, they’re gonna be a scholar, if they grab money they are going to be rich.

Context:

JK’s family is Korean as well and he participated in this culture as a baby. He grabbed the pencil and money. He doesn’t know if it influenced his future, but he is here pursuing higher education and “hopefully the money will come in soon.”

Analysis:

Other cultures have similar coming of age rituals that are conducted on a child’s birthday. These rituals are meant to determine a child’s future and celebration of their first milestone. Most cultures have a birthday celebration meant to recognize when a child becomes an adult, such as a quinceanera or a bar mitzvah. This specific divination ritual is practiced in other cultures as well, notably in China. Other Asian cultures have varying rituals for the first birthday. In India, the child’s head is shaved to purify them of any evil committed in a past life. This ritual is heavily influenced by the large presence of Hinduism in India.

Antelope Valley Fair

Text: 

The Antelope Valley Fair in Lancaster, CA

Minor Genre: 

Festival; Celebration

Context: 

“One of the festivals we had growing up was the Antelope Valley Fair. I think these [fairs] go back to where every year, you grow a crop and all the farmers bring in their best livestock and crops and whatever and show off what they made. It’s a huge community coming together to have a celebration.

“In Lancaster, [the fair] was basically all of the kids who did FFA and 4H and would bring their show animals. Steers, pigs, and sheep were the main livestock. One year, I had a grand champion lamb that I showed. But [in addition to the livestock], you still had all the other arts and crafts and stuff and everything else. It always happened the last week of summer before school started.

“I was there every year, but probably when I was seven or eight was when I started 4H, and that was when we got really into it. But we probably went there just for fun my whole life. My dad’s older brothers did the haybaling competition; before everything was automated, guys would go out on trucks and have to lift these hay bales with pulleys and hay forks. They had tractor races, too –– basically anything associated with a farm. My uncles were haybaling champions for many years in the 1950s.”

Analysis:

Antelope Valley’s first main industry was agriculture, with farmers crowing crops such as alfalfa, various fruit, carrots, onions, lettuce, and potatoes. The city of Lancaster emerged as a bustling city with successful farming at the end of the 19th century, and in the 1980s, had a large increase in population due to the development of new housing tracts. The informant was born in 1974 and would have experienced the Antelope Valley Fair during the period of this population boom, which may have corresponded with a popularity increase in the county fair.

The informant’s memories of the Antelope Valley Fair suggests a heavy agricultural influence in both their personal life and in the city of Lancaster. He had a history of farmers in his family –– the informant’s father raised animals, and his uncles had experience baling hay –– which likely skewed his perception of the fair to lean more heavily on its agricultural experiences, particularly because the informant himself participated in 4H. Additionally, the farm-oriented activities such as competitive hay-baling suggest that success as a farmer was a highly valued trait in Antelope Valley during the time period.

Birthday Breakfast & Dinner Ritual

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K: “Okay so another one that we have is when it’s somebody’s birthday, in our family, uh, for- for breakfast, they would get a choice between, um, cinnamon rolls for breakfast or donuts for breakfast, like, specifically dunkin’ donuts or like the pillsbury cinnamon rolls that you would buy at the grocery store. And then every night for dinner they got to choose a place to eat out, or like, choose what we eat for dinner.”

Interviewer: “That’s awesome! Where did the food selections come from? Like, who kind of decided that those were the food selections?”

K: “I think my mom, uh, because cinnamon rolls for breakfast or donuts for breakfast, those are like- like a big deal in the house. Like, that’s not something we do, we would normally- I mean I don’t get really hungry around breakfast time, but whenever, like, whenever we would eat breakfast it would just be waffles or a bagel or like, a piece of you know, toast. So like making cinnamon rolls or ordering donuts is like a special occasion. They’re like special breakfast foods.”

Interviewer: “And for the choosing, um, where you wanna go for dinner, is that something that’s discussed beforehand or is it like, the person no matter what is like ‘we’re going here’?”

K: “It’s pretty much your choice. Like, whenever I choose dinner, I go to, um, Potbelly’s, which is this sandwich chain that started in like Chicago and they just got a couple in North Carolina. So I just- I choose there, and I mean, someone can not like it but you don’t really have a choice because it’s not your birthday, so everyone just has to go with whatever the um, the birthday person wants to do.”

Context
K is a current student at the University of Southern California. They spent most of their childhood in Chicago, Illinois before their family moved to North Carolina, where they currently live when not in school. In addition to birthday breakfasts, K stated that theri family would sometimes also have donuts after Mass and typically have cinnamon rolls for Christmas breakfast, which they thought contributed to the idea of these foods being for “big exciting occasions.” They also described that they would typically consider and eat these foods as dessert foods. For dinner, K added that their family goes to Potbelly’s outside of K’s birthday celebrations, but that they really like the food there. Now that they’re in college, K says they see it as an extra special opportunity, since they have a summer birthday and the Potbelly’s chain has no locations on the West Coast, where they go to school.

Analysis
Both K’s family’s breakfast and dinner birthday rituals seem to showcase some form of ritual inversion. In the case of breakfast, foods that are typically only had for dessert are instead the main focus of the meal in order to emphasize the special nature of the occasion. In the case of dinner, what restaurant to go to or what food to each, which would perhaps otherwise be a group or family decision, is handed over to the birthday person, attributing them extra power and special status on their birthday. This ritual seems to have taken on an added meaning for K now that they attend college on the West Coast; by almost always eating at Potbelly’s, a restaurant they enjoy, K is able to reaffirm their identity ties to Chicago and North Carolina.

Text:

The ‘Joota Chupai’ ritual is a playful custom at Indian weddings where the bride’s female relatives, often sisters and cousins, spiritedly steal and secrete the groom’s shoes. This lighthearted heist is enacted during the ceremony when the groom is required to be barefoot, setting the stage for a spirited negotiation for their return.

Context:

Recounting the jovial antics from his brother’s wedding last year, my friend narrated the high-spirited ‘Joota Chupai’ episode. As tradition dictates, the bride’s kin seized the opportunity to hide the groom’s shoes, demanding a sizable ransom for their safe return. The situation escalated into a humorous turn of events at sundown when the need for a picturesque sunset photo session led the furious bride to intervene, overturning the ritual’s usual outcome and the groom’s shoes were returned without the customary financial exchange.

Analysis:

The ‘Joota Chupai’ ritual transcends the mere act of playful mischief; it is emblematic of the cultural fabric that interweaves familial bonds, societal expectations, and the negotiations between tradition and modernity. This practice, underscored by Deirdre Evans-Pritchard’s analysis of authenticity in cultural expressions, suggests a complex interplay between established customs and the evolving dynamics of contemporary weddings. While the ritual typically concludes with the groom acquiescing to the monetary demands, this narrative reveals an intriguing deviation. The bride’s insistence on retrieving the shoes to capture the perfect wedding moment underscores the adaptability of cultural traditions in the face of practical circumstances. It demonstrates a shift from the ritual’s traditional financial objective to prioritizing the aesthetic and emotional value of the wedding experience. This incident not only reflects the fluidity of cultural practices but also highlights how individual agency can redefine traditional roles and expectations. The negotiation process inherent in the ‘Joota Chupai’ serves not just as entertainment but as a microcosm of the give-and-take present in familial relationships, where cultural rituals are subject to reinterpretation in response to immediate personal and collective priorities.