Chinese Fire-cupping

Text:

HG: “I remember one time, I came home from school and in the living room, I see my grandmother on her back while this random stranger is there. And he has these cups, it’s fire-cupping. It’s a pretty common thing, but at the time I did not know what was going on. The thing with fire-cupping is that you light a fire in the cup and then you immediately pat it on the person’s back and you let it sit there and then you take it off. I think it’s supposed to do some balancing, some sucking out something.”

Context:

The informant is a 20-year-old Chinese-American college student from Baltimore, Maryland. They lived with their grandparents in China for a period when they were around six, which is when they saw her doing fire-cupping. HG does not think that their grandmother “goes and sees a doctor in the Western sense,” and described how she tends to her body using traditional Chinese medicine. “She’ll always have a lot of herbs or whatever that are supposed to help you with this, or this, or this. You eat it rather than taking pills or something,” they said.

Fire-cupping has recently become a popular practice for treating pain in Western countries, but when HG first saw their grandmother doing it, they did not understand what it was. The process involves lighting a fire inside a cup to create suction and then placing the cup onto a person’s skin for a few minutes. The process often leaves bruises on a person’s skin. HG recalled that their grandmother told them that fire-cupping did not hurt.

Analysis:

Though practices such as fire-cupping and using herbal remedies could strike people who are used to Western medicine as strange, I understand why their long history of use, natural composition, and transparent impacts make them trustworthy in the eyes of people who use them.With fire-cupping, like many forms of traditional medicine, the person undergoing treatment knows exactly what is happening to their body. Unlike many Western medicinal practices, the effects of fire-cupping on the body are direct and immediately sensory. One feels the cups on their back and sees the marks they leave behind. This may be more comforting than ingesting factory-produced pill comprised of unknown chemicals and waiting to see if and how the body responds. 

I think that a major reason why people trust traditional medicine is that it has been given credibility through generations of practice. People trust the wisdom and practices of their ancestors. Thus, it can be used not only to alleviate ailments, but also as a mode of connecting with one’s familial or cultural past.

Proverb: “It’ll make hair grow on your chest.”

Text:

AL: “It’ll make hair grow on your chest.”

Context:

The informant is a 20-year-old college student of Ashkenazi Jewish descent who currently lives in Los Angeles. He said that his grandmother would say this phrase in response to someone having to do something difficult. For example, AL said that if he were to complain to his grandmother about having to write a challenging essay, she would tell him that it would make hair grow on his chest. She also said this when someone ate something spicy.

Analysis:

This proverb promotes the belief that suffering makes an individual stronger. However, the contexts in which AL describes it being used suggest that it is not used to pacify the grievances of someone experiencing serious hardship. In chapter eight of Elliott Oring’s ‘Folk Groups and Folklore Genres,’ F.A. de Caro describes how metaphorical proverbs use imagery to illustrate a point more concisely than would be possible with a literal articulation. When boys undergo puberty, they grow hair on their chest, which is a biological signal that they are transitioning to manhood, the stage of life where one confronts expectations that they be strong, self-sufficient, and to provide for others. That this saying would be used to console someone undergoing something difficult or give a tongue-in-cheek justification for bad luck or misfortune reflects the widespread cultural association of masculinity with strength.

Sources:

Oring, Elliott, and F.A. De Caro. “Riddles and Proverbs.” Folk Groups and Folklore Genres: An Introduction, Utah State University Press, Logan, UT, 1986, pp. 175–197. 

Día de los Muertos

Text:

AG: “In the Mexican culture, they believe that our ancestors that have passed come back to the land of the living for two nights. We build ofrendas, which are little, a shrine is not the right word, but you put all their favorite foods, pictures of them. Alter is a more colloquial term. 

In our culture, we believe that people die three deaths. The first is when we physically die, when our bodies just stop working, our hearts stop, whatever. The second is when we’re lowered into the ground and buried, so we’re out of sight, or cremated, I guess. And the third one is when there’s no one left to remember us. There’s three deaths or three phases of death.

Usually, my parents put up an alter and we put up pictures of people who have passed in our family with a bunch of flowers, candles, because the candle represents their spirit, essentially. Sometimes we’ll go to, they have a cemetery, called Hollywood Forever Cemetery, and they put a bunch of marigolds up. They do a bunch of alters, ofrendas all over, and you can just visit and pay your respects, and just really reflecting on the lives of the people who have come before.”

Context:

AG is a 20-year-old Mexican-American college student from Los Angeles. She celebrates this holiday, which falls on the first two days of November, with her family every year. On this holiday, the living reunite with the spirits of their deceased ancestors. AG said that in comparison to melancholic death rituals like funerals, Dìa de los Muertos is a happy event which celebrates the people who passed away rather than mourning their deaths. She explained that according to Mexican belief, the first two deaths, physical death and burial, are inevitable. However, the third death, which she describes as “dying in the land of the dead” where individuals “fade into oblivion,” can be avoided by remembering individuals who passed away. Dìa de los Muertos functions to prevent this final death, as AG explained, “you preserve their memory through storytelling, through folklore, thereby keeping them alive through their spirits.” 

Analysis:

I find the Mexican folk belief in a realm between life and obsolescence very compelling. Many ideologies delineate life and death as two incompatible states of being which never intersect, so that once a person has passed away, the living have no way of accessing them. This boundary blurring view of life and death places power into the hands of the living, so that there are specific things that they can do and practices that they can carry out in order to come into contact with their lost loved ones again. This power of being able to reconnect with the dead comes with responsibilities, however, where one must continually honor and memorialize their loved one’s lives if they want to maintain this connection. The insistence upon keeping a person’s memory alive after their passing, which prevents the deceased from entering the third stage of death and disappearing, conveys how deeply one’s ancestry and elders are valued and respected in Mexican culture.

Dìa de los Muertos exemplifies the ritualization of liminality, where specific traditions and extraordinary practices are carried out at the time that the realm of the dead and the realm of the living overlap. That the holiday is comprised more of celebration than of mourning shows the comfort found in the belief that physical death doesn’t mean spiritual death.

What comes at the end of a rainbow?

Background: The informant is a 22 year old college student. They have a silly personality and love to tell jokes, and this is one that they have been telling their entire life. 

Informant: Let me tell you a joke. What comes at the end of a rainbow? What you ask? A “W”. Ahahahaha. 

Me: Where did you hear this joke first? Who told you it?

Informant: It is from, um, the internet. I looked up: “great jokes” and I found this one and nobody laughed at this joke so it’s been my life mission to make someone chuckle. 

Me: Who do you usually tell this joke to?

Informant: I tell this joke to all audiences because it’s very friendly. You can tell it to 5-year-olds, you can tell it to 85-year-olds. So I tell it to my grandpa, I tell it to my best friend, my grandma who has passed, unfortunately. So, I tell everyone these jokes because no one laughs and it puts a smile on their face because it makes them feel awkward. 

Reflection: Beyond hearing the joke itself, I think this interaction with the informant shows how jokes are used by people to determine who is in their ingroup. The informant said that when they tell this joke they are trying to make others laugh, and that most don’t find it funny. However, if someone does find this joke funny then the informant feels they can be close to that person. 

Lilith

Background: Informant is a 19 year old, Jewish American college student from New Hampshire. They shared this story about their family and how it relates to their Jewish tradition and culture. The informant has been through Jewish education and experiences the holidays every year.

Informant: So, one really bizarre story is the story of Lillith. So, Lilith is rumored to be the first wife of Adam, and so it’s very controversial in Judiasm because Orthodox Jews follow what I’m about to share. So, Lillith escaped the Garden of Eden to gain independence so in some ways it’s been adopted by feminist Jews who see Lillith as regaining her independence. But, largely she’s seen as a sort of she-demon. So basically Lillith left the Garden of Eden and was not allowed back in because she was replaced with Eve. So we commonly know Adam’s partner to be Eve. So, she returns and is furious with men. So for this reason Orthodox Jews do not cut boys’ hair for an extended period of time because the idea is that in the night, if Lillith passes over and sees a child with short hair they see it as a man, so then Lillith will kill the baby boy. So, it’s this really intresting thing where she steals the children of Adam and Eve because she’s jealous and also a feminist twist. 

Reflection: This story was so intresting to me. As the informant told it and inserted some of their own opinions on it using a modern lens, I saw how folklore changes over time. This piece of folklore reflects people’s changing opinions on women, as Lillith is a woman who was demonized. Today, however, Jewish feminists have adopted the story as a story of a woman who they can look up to. It’s really compelling to see how folklore can change over time in it’s meaning while the content of the story is actually very much the same.