Category Archives: Rituals, festivals, holidays

A fraternity family trick

Nationality: American
Age: 22
Occupation: Student
Residence: Los Angeles
Performance Date: April 28
Primary Language: English
Language: Russian

Background on informant: Informant is a senior at USC, studying international relations. He is from the Bay Area and lived and studied in Russia for a year.

Informant: Whenever a new member of our family gets initiated, we’ll tell them that there’s a really special handed-down object that only people in the family know about and have seen. And we’ll basically bring some kind of bag or container and be like, alright we need to do this practically. And now that you are officially initiated you can see it. And we’ll open it up and it will be an ICE.

Analysis: The interesting thing about this initiation is that it asks the participant to engage with the initiation — the participant knows that the initiation is taking place — but then it turns out to be a trick, and a good trick, of course, if the participant happens to like Smirnoff ICE. Moreover, the initiation has a clear frame but seems to change every time it is performed — with a different bag or container, as informant says “some” bag or container. It also has all the other aspects of an initiation; it serves as a rite of passage for the participant, who once he has done the initiation has passed through the liminal space, is in on the trick, and is thus a full member.

Initiation for a Final Club

Nationality: American
Age: 20
Occupation: Student
Residence: Boston
Performance Date: April 29
Primary Language: English

Background on informant: Informant is a sophomore at Harvard, from Los Angeles, and studying psychology. He is also involved in an outdoor club and intramural crew.

Informant: My friend at Harvard was telling me about initiation for an exclusive male “final club.” For initiation, the newly minted members were told to chug beer–the nasty, watered-down college type of beer. However, the beer these members chugged contained goldfish. Not the “snack that smiles back” cheese-flavored Peppridge Farm kind, but the living, gill-containing, fish-flavored animal goldfish. Through a beer bong, these members apparently chugged live animals, often multiple at a time. Apparently one kid got 12 in one go. There are a lot of stories at Harvard, about it’s history, about it’s students, about it’s weird institutional traditions, and I think most of them aren’t true.

Analysis: This initiation story, as the informant tells it, assumes a sort of fantastic quality. There is a shock value to it, and it’s rather hard to believe. In this way, it could also perhaps be classified as a legend. It also operates in the liminal space. In order to be a member of the fraternity, you must do something thought of by the society in which you live as repulsive. It’s, in fact, one of the things that makes you different, distinguishes you and therefore perhaps makes you a member, in a strange way, of the particular group. I found this story to be outlandish, at first. “There’s no way this happened,” I said to myself. But then later in the day, I was talking to about it with a friend at USC who is active in Greek life. He said it was hardly outlandish and that he too had heard of something similar once. Therefore, this folklore not only distinguishes people within the subgroup but also students involved in social clubs and students not involved in social clubs.

Four challenges

Nationality: American
Age: 20
Occupation: Student
Residence: Boston
Performance Date: April 29
Primary Language: English

Background on informant: Informant is a sophomore at Harvard, from Los Angeles, and studying psychology. He is also involved in an outdoor club and intramural crew.

Informant: There are four challenges you’re supposed to do at Harvard. I don’t know the origin of these challenges but I know they are important, from a sort of personal pride perspective and maybe a bit of peer-pressure. The first is to urinate on the foot of the John Harvard statues, a popular tourist destination–it is a tradition for tourists to rub the foot for good luck. It’s not good luck; it’s just unsanitary. The next is to have sex in the stacks of the library. This one’s pretty self-explanatory, but you don’t want to get caught obviously, so there’s some strategy required. Next up is jumping off the John Week’s Bridge which connects Cambridge and Boston over the Charles River. The Charles is notoriously nasty and until quite recently, it was too unclean to be safe to even swim in. But given the 25 foot drop off the bridge, this one is a good one for adrenaline seekers. The next and last is to participate in the Primal Scream, a biannual event in which a huge cohort of naked students sprint a lap around the yard.

Analysis:  The informant’s phrasing of “four challenges you’re supposed to do at Harvard” is interesting because it suggests that these initiation practices are integral to claiming an identity to the institution. In this way, they operate in a liminal space, serving as a rite of passage. Interestingly, as well, all of the challenges require that the participant take a risk or give something of himself or herself. In order to be a part of the community, in might suggest, the participant must make a sacrifice that is tangible and could potentially have real consequences.

Ecuadorian Monigotes

Nationality: American
Age: 23
Occupation: Coordinator for a medical team in Ecuador, former Peace Corps volunteer
Residence: Salt Lake City, Utah and Quito, Equador
Performance Date: 4/27/204
Primary Language: English
Language: Spanish

The informant is a 23 year old female, originally from Salt Lake City, who recently was a Peace Corps volunteer in the city of Guayaquil in Ecuador. While in Ecuador she lived with a host family and observed and participated in many Ecuadorian customs and traditions.  One tradition she was exposed to and participated in was the tradition of burning ‘monigotes’ on New Year’s Eve.  She describes her experiences and this folk ritual below.

“One period of the year when there are a lot of traditions was at the close of the year, so New Year’s Eve.  The tradition that I enjoyed the most was a tradition of immolating the monigotes. Monigote*, uh muñeca means doll, so monigote is a “large doll”. So they are paper-mached objects that came in a variety of forms.  You could typically, especially in bigger cities, you could buy them for popular cultural figures whether that’s like famous soccer players or a lot of just recent movies from that year or famous cartoons, historical figures from like comic books or the history of the country, all just this huge variety.

“And they came in all different sizes from the size of a normal doll more or less all the way to like a story high – you would have to strap it onto the top of your car.  You wouldn’t be able to fit it into your vehicle or carry it.  And so everyone bought what they wanted or you also had the option of making a monigote.

“So you could make one of either – it worked both ways – it could either be someone you liked or someone you disliked or you could do it for yourself, if you wanted good luck in the New Year, if you wanted to destroy and turn into ash the memories from the past year if things had not gone well.  People would often make them for their friends or people in their community.  People would do them of the president.

“So this all accumulated – they would be prepared for often months in advance, starting in October or September, and some of them were incredibly detailed, the paper mache was painted elaborately, and others were more crude and some were just the heads of figures or yourself or your friends, your enemies.

“However, on the 31st of December, all of them are collected together and set into the cross-centers, the cross section of the streets in large piles and filled with fireworks. Then, as the year turned over, you would set them ablaze and they would of course explode and catch everything that wasn’t protected on fire in a kind of glorious sort of heralding in of the New Year”

*Pronounced, using IPA [mu’njegotas]

The informant noted that she was fully welcomed to participate in this festival as a foreigner.  She even contributed two monigotes of her own, a minion and a giant giraffe.  She also mentioned that people of every age participated in this tradition.

“Everyone was welcome into it. It brings the community together.  I lived in a fairly large city and everyone, even if you weren’t close with your neighbors or with people who lived in the apartment you would all get together and it was a unifying activity.”

When discussing her interpretation of the tradition:

“I think there is a lot of symbolism in burning things, in immolating things.  We use them both in the US culture and in Ecuadorian culture to symbolize celebration as well as destruction and purification. It is encompassing of many different emotions.

 

Analysis:

There are many elements to this custom/festival.  The most obvious one, whose meaning the informant summed up pretty well, is the burning away of the past while simultaneously lighting fires of hope for the future.  In the West, some of our earliest tales involving fire and burning things have they element that fire should be used to burn offerings of good will and hope.  Thus, burning large dolls at a calendrically significant point is an offering of hope for the year to come.

Another interesting aspect of this tradition is its possible connection to harvest rituals, such as those documented by Mannhardt.  The informant says that preparation for these dolls begins in September/October which is a common time around the world for harvest festivals and their accompanying rituals.

Another interesting element of this ritual is the significance of the the fact that the dolls are piled up in the middle of a cross roads, or cross section.  Cross roads often symbolize decisions or the intersection between two significant forces.  New Year’s Eve is the cross section between the old year and the new year.  The association between cross roads and decisions could mean signify either that you are hoping that the burning of these dolls will bless your decisions for the coming year or it be a nod to the fact that it is not all about luck and that your decisions play a role in how the next year will turn out.

 

Images:

Ecuadorian Monigotes - photo by Alexandra Yost

Ecuadorian Monigotes – photo by informant

Burning monigotes - photo by Alexandra Yost

Burning monigotes – photo by informant

Ecuadorian Dia de los Muertos tradition

Nationality: Ecuadorian
Age: 19
Occupation: Student
Residence: Los Angeles, California
Performance Date: 4/27/2015
Primary Language: Spanish
Language: English, Italian

The informant is a 19 year old Ecuadorian student studying Architecture at the University of Southern California.  Her family is from Quito, Ecuador and she grew up there.  She moved to Southern California in early 2015 to go to college.

“We have in the Day of the Dead, we have a custom of making these dolls out of bread and like decorating them and making this delicious like, its called “colada morada”.  And the bread dolls are called “guaguas de pan”. “Guaguas”  is a Quichua word that means children – “Children of Bread”.  And then the drink is called “colada morada” because it is this mix of different berries and stuff like that and it looks purple.

“At the beginning, it was for the indigenous tradition in which they made these things to represent the blood and the body of their dead relatives.  They went to the cemeteries and ate them, and ate it there in the tombs with all the family.  But now they don’t normally take it into the cemeteries, they just like sell it everywhere.  All families always come together for colada morada and guaguas de pan and it’s something that the children make, and it’s really nice. It’s really pretty.”

 

The informant said that she made guaguas de pan when she was little and said, “Since you are little you always do it and in school it’s really typical”

 

Images:

photo from: laylita.com found here

photo from: laylita.com found here

 

Analysis:

As the informant explained, this tradition has its roots in indigenous traditions.  These “bread babies” and the purple drink were supposed to represent deceased relatives.  Similarly to “Dia de los muertos” traditions in other countries, there is an object that represents or memorializes a loved one. In other cultures, it is often an image of the loved one.  In this case, it is a food item.  This adds several symbolic elements to the commemoration of the loved one: 1. Making the commemorative item is a family event where children, who may not even have known the deceased, participate.  This emphasizes that both the dead family and living family members are important and time with the living should be treasured. 2. The memory of our deceased loved ones literally sustains us.  We can grow and be sustained by their remembered lives and wisdom.  3.  Shows that life is perishable.  They do not have a photograph or image of a loved one, which could last forever, past when everyone who knew the person is dead.  Instead they commemorate the dead with something that is perishable (bread) and will not last forever, just as their life did not last forever.

Now that the element of eating this food at the graveside is no longer present, this custom has become more of a living-family building event and some of its other elements have been reduced in importance.  The fact that it is beautiful and that an effort is made to make them beautiful adds the element that, even through sadness and loss, bits of beauty and happiness can be found and should be sought after.