Tag Archives: death

Día de los Muertos Celebration: Mérida, Yucatán

Nationality: Mexican
Age: 56
Residence: Glendora, CA
Performance Date: 4/21/12
Primary Language: English
Language: Spanish

The informant is 56 years old. She is Mexican and was born in Mérida, Yucatán. She moved to California when she was 6 six years old, but still remembers many of the local traditions, especially the tradition surrounding the Day of the Dead.

Before the celebration begins, people clean their houses, making sure the laundry is done and the dishes are washed. This is because if a deceased family member’s spirit comes to visit on the Day of the Dead, you don’t want them to have to do the work for you, or at least feel like they should. The celebration is supposed to be a time for them to enjoy themselves, and like awaiting the arrival of any house guest, you always clean up to make things presentable.

The Día de los Muertos celebration begins on October 31st. As the first day of the celebration, it is dedicated to celebrating the passing of the children. Any babies or toddlers that have died in the past year are honored on this day. Families set up an altar or a shrine. The altar is covered with a white tablecloth that has colorful embroidery around the edges. A green cross is placed on the altar because this is the color of Mérida. Colorful candles are set up too. Then, the deceased one’s favorite dishes are put out on the shrine. These can be anything from favorite candies to Mexican pan dulce bread. Favorite toys and games are set up too. Sometimes these are marbles, or even coloring books—it just depends on whatever happened to be the child’s favorite. Pictures are also put on the altar. After the altar has been assembled, the family gathers to say the Rosary. The altar stays up for the entire day and night of the 31st.

On November 1st, the child’s altar is taken down and another one is set up, this time celebrating the passing of any adults. The decoration for these altars is all black and white. The white tablecloth has black embroidery and white candles are placed on the altar. Pictures are put up and the adults favorite foods are placed on the altar as well. Again, these can be the pan dulce bread or tamales, even shots of whiskey or a pack of cigarettes. The altar is left up all day and night.

On November 2nd, the adult altar is taken down and the day is set aside for going to visit the grave sites of the deceased family members. Sometimes candles are burned on the graves, or flowers are set upon them. This marks the end of the Día de los Muertos celebration.

As my informant said, the entire celebration is a way to celebrate the life of a loved one. The altars are meant for families to pay their respects to the dead by presenting them with all of their favorite things from life. It is a festive way of honoring the dead, and communing with the spirits that come back for a visit.

 

Exploding Toilets and A Corpse — Senior Prank Legend

Nationality: Japanese
Age: 17
Occupation: Student
Residence: Tustin, California
Performance Date: 2/24/12
Primary Language: English
Language: Chinese, Japanese

My informant goes to high school in Tustin, California, where he is currently a junior. A few months earlier, he had heard of a legend of a senior prank that had occurred perhaps ten or so years back, where they had flushed all the toilets at the school at the same exact time to see what would happen to the plumbing.

They had these stopwatches, right, and all these walkie talkies, and they pressed the stopwatches at the same time and flushed the toilets just as the timer went down to zero. They wanted to see if a pipe somewhere would explode I guess, but then, instead, two toilets just blew up. Uh, I think one was a female staff toilet, and the other was in one of the main guys’ bathrooms. The toilets just like, blew apart, all the porcelain and whatnot. Which was fine and all, except later when they were trying to clean up the exploded toilets, the fixer-upper guy found a hole in the wall of the bathroom and looked through it and there was uh, a dead body in there, like scrunched up and still fresh-looking, like a girl just crawled in there and curled into a ball and died or something. Anyway, he thought she was dead, but then he’s staring at her and he can’t move because he’s so freakin’ scared, and she turns her head towards him kind of, and she doesn’t have eyes, like they’re just sockets on her face, and in the sockets there’s one of those millipede things that comes crawling out. Anyway, the plumber guy told everyone but nobody really believed him because they checked later and it was gone, but still. And they fixed the toilets and stuff, but man. The guys’ bathroom is a freakin’ scary place.

No one knows where this legend originated from, although my informant said that his Latin teacher, who had worked at the school for two decades, does remember a senior prank where the seniors all flushed the toilets at once–though he does not remember anything happening as a consequence. “I’m pretty sure toilets don’t explode even if you flush a whole bunch of them at once,” My informant said, laughing, “but it makes sense that the stories spread because the bathrooms are freakin‘ disgusting here, like really bad. And it smells so much that we probably wouldn’t notice a corpse for a while.”

I feel like the legend is significant because it pits teenagers, most of whom think of themselves as invincible, against death, even if it is a very unrealistic and cinematic depiction of it. School is a place for boredom, for homework and tedious routine–to introduce a corpse into such a scene is jarring, and sets the entire nature of their everyday lives off-balance. That the legend became so widespread, however, is not surprising; people like a good scare, and school is a place of boring routine. Although my informant and his classmates probably thought this legend was very original, there are probably many, many legends of something similar to this in schools all across the world.

 

Promise from Blessed Margaret Mary Alacoque

Nationality: Irish/Italian
Age: 85
Occupation: English Professor
Residence: Massachusetts
Performance Date: March 13, 2012
Primary Language: English
Language: Italian, Spanish

My informant told me of an old Irish belief that he knew called the Promise from Blessed Margaret Mary Alacoque:

“If you go to Mass and Communion on nine successive first Fridays of the month you will be allowed to repent your sins on your deathbed.”

My informant made a point of making sure that I knew that Margaret Mary was “Blessed” and not a “Saint”. He told me that he personally had never done what the belief said, but that he still has some time left to do so before he plans on dying.

Again, the connection between Irish superstitions/beliefs and religion is very clear. This, like many others, is also linked to fear. In this case it is the fear of dying and not being forgiven for your sins.

A version of a similar belief in which going to church nine fridays in a row will grant you the ability to repent your sins appears in authored literature in:

Kippley, John F. A Catholic Prayer Book. Lulu, 2005. Print.

Comic Culture

Nationality: American
Age: 20
Occupation: Student
Residence: Houston, Texas
Performance Date: March 16, 2012
Primary Language: English

Jonathan “Scotty” Miller

Houston, Texas

March 16, 2012

Folklore Type: Joke

Informant Bio: Scotty is my good friend from high school. He is a twenty year old Sophomore and Physics major at the University of Houston. Everyone in my group friends is smart, but we have labeled Scotty as the super smart one among the boys because his major sounds the hardest. It is however extremely debatable as to whether or not this is true. Scotty is one of the nicest and calmest people I have ever met. His house is the one we always go to hang out.

Context: There was a group of four of us at Scotty’s house playing the latest version of Super Mario. I asked my friend Isaac about gaming lore, and then I asked Scotty about Comic Book lore as he is our comic book expert.

Item: No one in comics stays dead. One of the old sort of comic thing was like… I think it was like. You know Captain America, right? Well he had this side-kick named Bucky, but he died. They would say no one in comics stays dead except Jason Todd, Bucky and Uncle Ben. Jason Todd is one of the old Robins, but he died. But then they brought Jason Todd. So it was no one stays dead in comics except Bucky and Uncle Ben. Then they brought back Bucky so it was just no one stays dead in comics but Uncle Ben.

Informant Analysis: I don’t know comics are just kind of like ridiculous. They aren’t really any hard rules you know?

Analysis: This is a way for comic book lovers to laugh at their medium of entertainment. It is also a way to connect to each other through their medium that is usually read solitarily. For Scotty and probably other it is also a way to deal with and point out the fact that there are no rules for what they love to read. It is a medium that one just has to roll with its punches and randomness.

 Alex Williams

Los Angeles, California

University of Southern California

ANTH 333m   Spring 2012

Thai folk belief: Butterflies carry souls

Nationality: Thai-American
Age: 18
Occupation: Student (Fine Arts)
Residence: Northridge, CA
Performance Date: April 2012
Primary Language: English
Language: Thai

My informant had a personal experience with this folk belief while attending her grandmother’s funeral in Thailand. She and the other funeral-goers were kneeling in prayer in front of the Buddhist temple where the funeral was being held, when she noticed a black butterfly fly over her grandmother’s coffin as the monks chanted a sutra to help the soul pass on.

When my informant mentioned the butterfly to an aunt afterwards, the aunt told her that butterflies are containers for souls, and that they carry souls away. The timing of the butterfly’s flight, as well as the fact that she’d never seen a butterfly in Thailand before, convinced my informant of the validity of this folk belief.

My informant suggested that it may be comforting to someone mourning a death to equate their loved one, and maybe death itself, with a butterfly, which is almost universally considered to be beautiful and graceful.

The main religion in Thailand is Buddhism, which rejects the idea of an unchanging self or soul, and so the soul’s flight in the butterfly could be considered the luminal stage between death in one body and reincarnation in the next. Also, while human/alive, we can’t fly—it could be exciting to think that in death, we are able to rise beyond the limitations of our past human bodies.