Tag Archives: initiation

WATAHOTAHO

Nationality: American
Age: 19
Occupation: Student
Residence: St. Louis, Missouri
Performance Date: April 2012
Primary Language: English

WATAHOTAHO

Camp shwayder

Item: A story from camp, called WATAHOTAHO

 

Transcribed from our interview:

My informant’s explanation:

“First day of every camp session,  which is in the mountains, they take everybody to this like opening in the mountains, yeah I’m not going to remember this well but, they oh I know I remember now, there was randomly in this mountains there was a stack of rocks that was unexplainable, not from an avalanche, either some natural thing or man made, it was kind of weird. It looked like a cave with some weird rocks out fornt. This camp direct has this big walking stick and he goes up there with all the campers and every time he tells this story on Watahotaho.

 

It is a story of an Indian tribe in which there was a chief and there are three sons and one is hunting, one grows things,a nd one herds, idk, but they get ina  huge fight and they all go and their land used to be very beautiful and when they got in a fight they all left and they didn’t do well making tribes, and their old tribe didn’t do well. So chief tried to have them come back, he turns to each one and tells them they need to work together.  The cave was where it all happened. You all yell watahotaho together because the spirit is still around, and the legend is that if everybody says it in unison, you can hear a spirit calling back. They send some counselor away, and they do a delayed echo so it sounds like a sprit is calling back.

Little kids really bought into it, so it was funny by the time I was older. Every year you come he changes his story a little bit, so you realize how stupid it is. “

 

What it meant to my informant: “Well it was a good way to entertain these kids, to get them introduced to camp and get them to interact with eachother. The shouting thing was just sort of fun. I would just run around camp and to make fun of it I would just yell watahotaho because I thought it was so stupid, but the kids loved it.”

There are several key elements to this tradition, like when this happens and the interactive portion of the story. The story’s theme is teamwork and community, and since this is the first day of a summer camp for kids, this encourages the children to be more outgoing and embrace each other as a community. The interactive portion supports this, forcing the kids to work together. Moreover, by yelling WATAHOTAHO, the kids are almost performing enactive speech, their shouts in unison symbolizing the bonds they create. My informant said it was most effective for smaller children, which makes sense: they are most gullible, so the counselor’s trickery would be more effective. Regardless, Justin Elliot grasped the “silliness” of the word, which is also effective for small children; letting young children speak in a different language at the top of their lungs is exciting and liberating for them, especially because they are normally a disempowered community that must follow rules like maintain “inside voices.” Thus, immediately the campers are introduced to a new community and set of rules that sets the tone for the rest of their stay at the camp.

Bar Mitzfah

Nationality: American
Age: 20
Occupation: Student
Residence: Los Angeles, CA
Performance Date: 4/11/12
Primary Language: English

My informant was raised as a reform Jew in a household with two Jewish parents. He described to me the ritual of his “Bar Mitzfah” when he was thirteen years old. He says that a Bar Mitzfah is an age-old Jewish ritual that all young men undergo (Bat Mitzfah for females), that signifies the transition from being a boy to a man. The tradition carries back to Israel and dates back hundreds, if not thousands of years. My informant said “it used to be easy for kids raised in Israel or that grew up knowing Hebrew, but the hardest part was having to learn to read Hebrew to be able to perform the chants and prayers”. “It was a bitch to learn”, he said.

The tradition, he said, is performed very differently in different levels of the religion. He said that he was thankful that he was a part of a reform synagogue, where the ceremonies last for only an hour and a half at most. On the other hand, ceremonies in conservative temples can run up to 4 or 5 hours, and orthodox temples even longer. My informant discussed how he remembered attending a conservative Bat Mitzfah for one of his friends from synagogue, and that he and his other friends “couldn’t stand it any longer after the first two hours”.

There are a few things that all Bar and Bat Mitzfah’s have in common, he says. Everybody has a Torah portion and a Haf-Torah portion assigned to them, depending on what time of year that the person performs this ritual. That is, for the rest of their life, their Torah and Haf-Torah portion.

“The thing I was most excited about was the party that night, and all of the gifts” said my informant. He stated that it was a tradition, probably American, that the new man or woman celebrate with a party that night, inviting all of his or her friends, Jewish or not.

My interpretation of this ritual is one as an insider as well, because I am also Jewish and have gone through my own Bar Mitzfah. I believe that this has been a long-standing tradition since the time when men would be considered adults and marry as teenagers, and start their families as young as 16 or 17. Both my informant and I distinctly remember feeling too young to be passing through the gates between boyhood and manhood. My informant stated that he hadn’t even hit puberty yet! I believe that this tradition carried on so young from the old days because Jewish people saw it as a tradition and meaningful in their lives and their community. Changing it would go against old tradition.

“Journey to The Underworld” — JCL Initiation Rites

Nationality: Vietnamese
Age: 18
Occupation: Student
Residence: Irvine, CA
Performance Date: 4/3/12
Primary Language: English
Language: Vietnamese, Korean

The “Journey to The Underworld” was an event organized by the JCL (Junior Classical League) at my informant’s high school, where the freshman Latin students were forced to undergo certain initiation rites to cement their entrance into the club. My informant went through this process as a freshman and later, as club vice-president and upperclassman, even organized the event.

The rites were, of course, heavily influenced by Latin mythology and pieces of Latin folklore.  The upperclassmen had somehow procured a toilet a few years earlier, and they filled this up with all manners of things (clam chowder, peppers, raw eggs, soy milk, cottage cheese, etc.), changing it up every year to make it as disgusting as possible. They then made blindfolded freshmen root around in the mess in search for a quarter that they always “forgot” to put in the toilet bowl–the quarter an obvious allusion to the coin needed to cross the River Styx in the Underworld. The upperclassmen would then draw on the freshmen with felt tip markers, saying, “Cerberus is licking you!” referring, of course, to the three-headed dog that guards Hades. Throughout the entire event, freshmen were to be remained blindfolded and upperclassmen led them around, oftentimes in circles, pointing out various spots in the “underworld” to dramatic music and sudden bursts of screams. Although the rites changed from year to year, they were generally light-hearted and humorous, and even the freshmen were happy to go through the experience, seeing it as a way to bond as a club and get to know the other members.

Afterwards, they would hold a banquet and a bonding movie session, where the newly initiated freshmen would sit as one and the same with the other members, and interact with them essentially as equals. The food at the banquet, my informant said, was usually store-bought or home-made by the upperclassmen, in this way allowing the freshmen the privilege of being served by the same people who had scared them not an hour prior. Perhaps in this way they restored balance, and brought cohesion to the club as a group.

These rites served the purpose of something like an initiation; all the non-freshmen had gone through that event at one point in their club career, and so the freshmen weren’t fully members until they had endured the same–the same mentality that pervades fraternity and sorority culture. It was also a way for freshman to bond with each other, through shared experiences, and with the upperclassmen, whose enjoyment in the teasing and scaring had more to do with the hopeful anticipation of the coming class more than anything else.