Tag Archives: death

Dreams Mean…

Nationality: Jamaican American
Age: 19
Occupation: USC student athlete
Residence: USC
Performance Date: April 1, 2015
Primary Language: English

The informant was born and raised into the American culture and way of life. Her mother’s side of the family is in touch with their Jamaican culture and heritage and as the informant grew older she was able to become more into with the beliefs and customs of Jamaica.

Jamaican Dreams

Informant…

“In the my culture deaths and marriages are often predicted by ones close family members. It is believed that if a family member dreams about someone in their family’s wedding the person being dreamt about will die soon. I think we believe in being able to predict deaths because life and death is a big deal in our culture. Marriage is also an important aspect in my culture as well and is ritualized. When a person dreams about a family member’s death that is consider a prediction of that family member’s wedding.”

I asked the informant if she had ever had a dream like this or known someone who did and it became true. She told me that she didn’t know anyone who had ha a dream like this and she personally  has never had one. I asked where she learned this belief from snd she said that she remembers her grandma telling her about it when she was younger before she passed away.

Analysis…

Being able to predict someones death could be a blessing and a curse. Knowing that someone you love is going to die soon has to be difficult to handle. However on the other hand being able to predict a wedding is exciting. Death and Marriage are two major stepping stones in most cultures and they are ritualized because of that. Marriage you are become one with someone else and you are able to start a family, but death is the end of your life and the start of your after life whatever you believe that may be. I think that is why they are both made such such a big deal out of and ritualized with customs and rituals and why cultures have so many beliefs centered around these two major life events.

CHRISTMAS STOCKINGS

Nationality: Irish-American
Age: 54
Occupation: Environmental Government Employee
Residence: Boston, MA
Performance Date: 3/25/15
Primary Language: English

ABOUT THE INFORMANT:

My informant is a mother of three who lives just outside of Boston with her husband of over 30 years. She is originally from Cape Cod, the part of Massachusetts that is full of beaches and is a world known tourist destination. She is a lover of all thing water; she has worked extensively in water policy and water pollution as an environmentalist.

EXAMPLE:

Interviewee: My dad never did any Christmas shopping for anybody. He always left it all to Mom. As he got older, I guess he got much more free time. He would spend all year going to flea markets. Just searching for Christmas gifts. Sometimes something would catch his eye and he would not even know what it was. The year I ruptured my Achilles tendon playing tennis, I got Tennis For Dummies.

He would just give everyone a massive bag full of stuff. A bag for each person. All this cheap stuff he found at these yard sales and Salvation Armies; sometimes it was thoughtful, but most of it was crap.

It was the worst for the people dating into the family. When Lynn, my sister-in-law, first starting coming to the family Christmas, she got all these random things that no one knew anything about. Weird pieces of wood. A styrofoam ball. But she just took it and said thank you, trying to be polite, while he was just laughing because he knew that he gave crap. But then she surprised us all one year when she turned around and glued it together and created a figurine. Then she gave it to him.

We would come home with so much crap, we couldn’t keep it all, but I do have a farting Santa doll.

Interviewer: What about when he got sick?

Interviewee: When he passed away, we wanted to keep it alive. It was so much fun. We couldn’t all give everyone presents; that was just too much. But we all picked names and gave personalized stockings with funny and outrageous, sometimes nice, gifts to the person.

Interviewer: And you still do it?

Interviewee: Yeah, I mean, no one wanted to give it up. It is hard though. It is all tailored to them. There are no gift certificates. You have to really go out and think about them. It’s nice, even if it is crap. It’s crap tailored for them. Thoughtful crap.

ANALYSIS:

There is so much stress around Christmas. It clearly has become so overwhelmingly commercial and impersonal, that I feel like what her father was doing was almost the anti-version of that. Not to be a hipster or part of a counter culture or whatever, but because that’s what he wanted to do. He wanted to give hand picked crap. Just for the joke or shock. Because he was such a strong figure in this family and because he would not stop doing it, it became a tradition.

When he died, that is when it took on a whole new dimension. Not wanting to give him or it up they modified it, so that people kept getting these personalized stockings. Even though he was gone, the stockings and laughter did not have to go. That is most likely the sentimental aspect of it. On a practical level, it is a really good way to make sure that people get gifts for Christmas that feel as though they were personally chosen for them. An added benefit.

 

Death Means…

Nationality: Jamaican American
Age: 19
Occupation: USC student athlete
Residence: USC
Performance Date: April1,2015
Primary Language: English

The informant was born and raised into the American culture and way of life. Her mother’s side of the family is in touch with their Jamaican culture and heritage and as the informant grew older she was able to become more into with the beliefs and customs of Jamaica.

Jamaican Death Means…

Informant…

When I asked the informant about different believes in the Jamaican culture this was the first one to come to her head. She said that “death signifies the end of someones physical life, however if someone dies and is said to have “unfinished business” their spirit will not rest. Instead, the spirit roams the earth until it is able to finish it’s business.”

I was then really intrigued by this so I asked her if she had ever witnessed this or knew someone who did and he informant said that her grandmother passed away and a few weeks later the informant’s mother saw her grandmothers spirit or ghost. This was important to the family to know this because it told them that she hadn’t passed on and would watch over them until she was able to continue on. This is a normal thing in there culture, so it is safe to say that this culture believes in ghosts  and spirits waling the earth. This is interesting because it clashes with other beliefs in society.

Analysis…

This culture does believe in ghosts and spirits roaming the earth with unfinished business. This kind of collides with other religious beliefs that the culture may have about God. I didn’t get a chance to ask the informant how that works, and how they deal with the collision of beliefs, but it is definitely a part of my thought process while analyzing this specific aspect of their culture. It seems like Jamaicans are in touch with their ancestors whether that is doing rituals to please them, or seeing their spirits roam, they have a close connection to their families. Maybe Jamaican culture is big on family, I just have to assume this because I didn’t ask the informant this question either.

Czech Funeral

Nationality: American
Age: 20
Occupation: student
Residence: Los Angeles, CA
Performance Date: 2014-04-29
Primary Language: English
Language: Spanish

“I went to a funeral recently for my Czech nanny who passed away recently. Hana practically raised me, so her death was very, very difficult for me. I thought that I wouldn’t even be able to handle going to the funeral, my emotions were so high. But it was unlike any funeral I have ever been to. Most funerals are miserable, everybody crying, everybody in black. They’re awful experiences, and I hope you never have to go to one. But this one was different. This one was exactly what I needed to help grieve. So it was actually a celebration of her life. Whenever anyone spoke, they were just to recall fun times they had had together. Her favorite music was playing. Everyone was wearing bright colors. The old and the young were all mingling and engaging with one another. It was beautiful. I think that’s how a lot of the world celebrates death, or at least they should. I think I heard someone say that it’s the Czech . . . or I guess Slavic people in general have a healthier outlook on death than most.”

The informant has never lived outside of her hometown in Orange County. The experience was so novel to her that it began to represent much of her understanding of modern European culture, as she now believes that such funeral practices are more common in Europe. The informant really stressed the communion of the old and young at this funeral, as no one was segregated into groups based on age or gender. Given the deep Catholic and Eastern Orthodox traditions of the Baltic regions of Europe, such an funeral seems very uncharacteristic, given traditional Christian death rituals. Perhaps this informant’s experience is indicative of changing times in which, as she said, a healthier outlook on death has become the norm.

The Killing Doll

Nationality: Korean
Age: 20
Occupation: Student
Residence: Mission Viejo, CA
Performance Date: 3/14/2014
Primary Language: English
Language: Korean

The Killing Doll

The Informant:

My friend, was born in South Korea. She came the States at a young age, before beginning elementary school. She told this story near a campfire that my friends and I held before spring break.

The Story:

I heard this when I was in elementary school, in the third grade I think. A family friend told me this story, she was a couple years older, in middle school as I recall.

“When I was younger, my family was taking care of a friend’s dog. A day before the dog came, my sister and I visited a garage sale down the street. My sister decided to purchase a doll. It looked like a regular doll except for the fact that it had four fingers straight and the thumb was curled toward the palm. We didn’t think much of the strange hands and brought the doll back home. The next day my whole family decided to go out and locked the dog in the room, and it happened to be in the room with the doll, so that it would not tear up the house. When the entire family came back the dog wasn’t breathing so we took him to the vet and it was pronounced dead. It was only later when we came back home that we realized the doll only had three fingers outstretched.

We had a weird feeling about the doll so the next day we decided to return it.”

The Analysis:

I questioned her about this story because I personally heard a similar one in my childhood. The story centers on the strange doll and implies that it somehow kills a living force a night after someone or something is spent in the same room as it. How the death occurs remains unknown.