Text:

“Every single year before summer break, there is a countdown, and our principal bangs on a big Chinese drum to signify the start of summer. Before that happens, we also sing four different songs: our school song, two songs about our school symbol, which is the tiger, and Sweet Caroline, which serves as our school’s theme song.”

Context:

This text was collected from a female student who attended an international school in China. She described this end-of-year ritual casually. The ceremony takes place at the close of every school year and follows a fixed structure: four songs are sung collectively — the school song, two tiger-themed songs representing the school mascot, and Neil Diamond’s “Sweet Caroline” — ending in a principal-led countdown accompanied by the striking of a large Chinese drum. The ritual is notably interesting in its cultural composition, merging distinctly American popular culture with traditional Chinese instruments. This reflects the school’s broader institutional identity as an American-style international school operating within China: an institution that consciously positions itself between two cultural worlds. The fixed, repeated structure of the ceremony — the same songs, the same drum, the same countdown every year — gives it the quality of a calendrical ritual marking the boundary between the school year and summer.

Analysis:

This piece is a good example of school lore functioning simultaneously as institutional ritual and political statement. Unlike the horizontal, student-generated traditions typical of school folklore, this ceremony is explicitly top-down, led by the principal and embedded in the school’s official calendar. Van Gennep’s rites of passage framework applies clearly here: the countdown and drum strike function as a formal separation ritual, marking the threshold between the school year and summer and releasing students from their institutional identity. The hybrid cultural symbolism of the ceremony is particularly significant. The Chinese drum and the American pop music “Sweet Caroline” are both involved in the ritual, reflecting what the course identifies as the political work institutions do through folk and folkloric symbols — the school is communicating its identity as simultaneously American and Chinese. In other words, cultural symbols are intentionally selected and staged to construct an institutional identity. The tiger songs further reinforce a shared group identity through esoteric shared symbolism, creating what Turner would call communitas, which is a collective sense of belonging produced through the shared experience of an annual liminal ritual.