Tag Archives: Island

Ritual: Burning of Sugarcane

Date of Performance: 05/01/2025

Nationality: Filipino

Primary Language: Tagalog

Residence: Manila, Philippines

My informant, an older woman in her 80s, recounts to me an annual ritual in her hometown of Bacolod, in the Philippines. The town is on an island known for its fertile, dense soil, and therefore the quality of any plant grown in it. My informant’s family had been sugarcane farmers for generations, and so she grew up around the fields. She describes to me the annual burning of sugarcane plants following a successful harvest, so that new plants might grow in their place, the ash from the burned plants creating soil supposedly twice as fertile for the following harvest season. She remembers how the children of her hometown would gather around the heavy, sweet scent of the burning sugarcane, watching the plume of smoke climb higher and higher. She follows with an anecdote about one of her friends, who, even well into adulthood, would make the pilgrimage from Manila back to her home island during periods of depression and turbulence, and says that the smell of the burning crops would cure any ailment. 

My informant is clearly very fond of her hometown – I’m sure she associates this sensory memory with her feelings of nostalgia and pride. She describes the sugarcane fields and soil with a kind of reverence that I think reflects the importance of agriculture to Bacolod’s local culture and economy.

I was quite touched by this story. The process she describes is known as slash-and-burn agriculture, and is pretty common across the globe, but I can easily relate to her feelings of sentimentality regarding specific smells, sights, and feelings. Often, I think that holidays and festivals are associated strongly with these memories – the smell of pine in the winter, the taste of candy during Halloween – and I think that these sensory recollections do a lot to endear these rituals to those who practice them. The celebration of the practice my informant describes also helps to make the town’s agriculture something close to succeeding generations’ core identities, ensuring prosperity in the future.

No Pork on the Pali Highway

Age: 19

Text: This subject discussed her experience with the Hawaiian legend/superstition that one can’t take pork across the Pali Highway in Oahu. According to her, if you were to drive across the highway with any sort of pork product, your car would mysteriously break down or some other form of bad luck would befall you and your passengers. The subject stated that this was a belief that people took very seriously, even opting to go around the long way via an alternate route – the Likelike Highway – if they absolutely want to bring pork products home or just transport them. She also explained that this superstition was based on the mythological story of the goddess Pele (the goddess of volcanoes) and Kamapua’a (a half-pig demigod) and their failed relationship. She said that the way her father explained it to her is that the two divine beings made a pact to keep away from each other after their breakup and stay on their respective sides of the island. So, if one were to bring pork across the Pali Highway, they would symbolically be bringing Kamapua’a to Pele’s part of the island, which would make her mad. As such, Pele would bring some sort of misfortune onto the traveller as a punishment.

Context: A native to Hawaii, this subject first came across this myth when she drove across the Pali Highway with her dad. He told her the story not because they were bringing pork products with them, but just because he thought it might interest her; she remembers being worried that the goddesses’ wrath would apply if someone had also recently eaten pork (as she had that day), but her dad told her that it didn’t count. She believes that this myth exists because the mythology of Hawaii and its many dieties is very important to the natives. As such, she believes the superstition is a byproduct of respect for the religion/spirituality than it would be just a mere silly explanation for why some cars happened to break down on the highway by chance.

Interpretation: I think that this myth is a way of creating a sort of graspable or tangible connection between the land and the mythos behind it – or at least to the divine beings that inhabit it. I believe it also provides an explanation that locals might connect to more as to why their vehicles would mysteriously break down along the highway. It also helps keep the mythology alive, as it blends traditional narratives of the gods with modern day technologies and modes of transportation. It’s a useful means of passing down the histories and practices associated with this spirituality/religion/culture of native Hawaiians and ensuring its continued existence and belief.

Maui Harnessing the Sun

Nationality: Cuban American
Age: 22
Occupation: Student (Fashion)
Residence: London, United Kingdom
Performance Date: April 30th, 2021
Primary Language: English
Language: Spanish

Informant Context:

James has lived in many locations internationally, including Cosa Rica, Mexico, and Nepal. His family is located in Hawaii, where he will often visit during his breaks from school. He is a student in London, United Kingdom, studying fashion. 

Transcript:

JAMES: Obviously I am not native Hawaiian, but having spent some time there—especially now that my family lives there—um, there’s obviously a pretty rich cultural… culture of storytelling, and obviously they had their own kind of mythology and stuff. And one that always stuck with me was that on oddly enough, in the hotel that we used to say at often when we would go to Maui, there was a huge massive like—oh gosh, it must have been, it was probably like 30 feet tall, 20 feet tall and like 40 feet wide—is a massive wood carving of Maui harnessing the sun. Which comes from… obviously, Hawaiian legend and myth—of how in the early days of creation, the sun raced—was obviously a personified person, and they would drive rapidly around the earth, basically, racing around the earth and… days were so short,  that people couldn’t do anything, they couldn’t get anything done. And so, they—the people, you know, cried out to Maui their demigod savior, and said, “Can you do something—[laughs]

INTERVIEWER: [joins] 

JAMES: —about this?”, as people tend to do of their deities and stories, and even in modern days, but that’s a lit—that’s a different issue [laughs]. Um… and yeah, so as far as I’ve been told the story, it’s—Maui climbed up to Haleakalā, which is the, uh… largest—larger of the two volcanoes on Maui, and cast out his fishing net—which is one of those ones that you like… yo—I don’t know like, the term for it, but you like, swing it out, and it like, spreads out. And he managed to catch the sun, and brought him down to earth, and was basically like “Hey!”… basically threatened him, which I feel like you shouldn’t do to like, the *sun*, but… he… basically threatened him—

INTERVIEWER: [laughs] You’re nice to the sun?

JAMES: [voice broken by laughter] You know? Like, you kind of… be polite, [or(?)], diplomatic, but—

INTERVIEWER: [laughs]

JAMES: Anyways, I guess you can do whatever you want if you’re a demigod. And uh, yeah. But he harnessed the sun, brought him down, and basically [showed him(?)] like, “Hey! You—we need like, more… we need longer periods of light. Because otherwise, the food isn’t gonna grow, and if… we can’t just keep working at night, because you know, electricity isn’t a thing. And so, please go slower.” And then he released him, and that is where they believe the day comes from. The… uh, as far as… in its longevity, um… and its consistency, I suppose, being where they are at—near the equator. Um… but yeah! That one always stuck with me, mostly because we would just see this massive woodcarving over, um… in the foyer of this restaurant. [unintelligible] is always… like, like right in the middle of the hotel. Um… but I always… I always loved the Hawaiian myths, I suppose. I think they’re very…  mythology in general, I mean, is just fascinating…

Informant Commentary:

James has a general interest in religious folklore, especially the folklore of those places he has personally visited. He expressed a positive view of folklore in Hawaii, citing institutional efforts of preservation and respect, such as laws surrounding burial grounds and other sacred land, as well as the consistent invocation of traditional Hawaiian symbolism around government buildings and tourist areas (e.g., the statue mentioned in the transcript). When countered on this idea, James acknowledged that many of these efforts are, in his words, “performative”. 

Analysis:

This story is best categorized as a myth, as it is a creation story and an explanation of a natural phenomenon: the length of the days. Based solely on the narrative of the story, the myth of Maui harnessing the sun seems to reference a fundamental trust in deities to intervene on behalf of man, even capturing one of the (if not the single most) powerful natural force.

Otok Daksa (Daksa island)

Nationality: Croatian
Age: 68
Occupation: retired
Residence: Dubrovnik, Croatia
Performance Date: 4/17/2017
Primary Language: Croatian

NK is my grandmother who was born and raised in Dubrovnik, Croatia. Being a local she knows a lot about the city and its folklore. She first told me this story in elementary school for a project on islands near Dubrovnik.

“Daksa is a small island near Dubrovnik. For years after World War 2 access to this island was forbidden. The island is haunted and even the owners of the island don’t live on it and have tried to sell it couple of times now. The island is haunted because there were 48 people accused of being Nazi sympathizers and were brutally executed in 1944. Locals say it’s haunted by their ghosts looking for justice.”

 

What’s the real story behind it?

 

“Yugoslav partisans celebrated their victory over the Nazis by rounding up anyone they thought corroborated with the enemy, including the village priest and mayor,

The ‘guilty’ were then rowed out to the island where they were gunned down in cold blood and left unburied. The locals were told that the same fate awaited them if they intervened, so the corpses remained uncovered for decades and it wasn’t until recent years that they were finally laid to rest. So the legend has it that spirits of the dead men haunt the island, demanding justice against those responsible.”

 

The ghost story obviously has some true facts. I’m guessing that because of the tragedy that occurred on the island, the locals had to cope with it some way and said the island was haunted.

The Magical Wolf Island Riddle

Nationality: Mexican
Age: 22
Occupation: Student
Residence: Los Angeles
Performance Date: 4/12/14
Primary Language: English

This informant is a senior at USC in the Marshall School of Business.  He told me he had a riddle for me that he was asked in an interview for consulting, but then later said it could have been an investment banking interview as well he didn’t remember.

Out in the middle of the ocean there exists a magical island with only grass.  There are 120 wolves and 1 sheep on the island.  The wolves can live off the grass but they would rather eat sheep.  Every time a sheep is eaten that wolf turns into a sheep.  Now the wolf has to worry about being eaten by another wolf.  All the wolves are rational and smart and want to survive.  Given that there are 120 wolves and 1 sheep on the island, will the sheep be eaten?

The answer is: No the sheep will not be eaten.  This can be shown much simpler with smaller numbers.  If there is 1 wolf and 1 sheep the sheep will be eaten.  If there is 2 wolves and 1 sheep the sheep won’t be eaten, because each one knows the other will eat him right after.  So with this reasoning, whenever there is an even number of wolves on the island, the sheep won’t get eaten.

I definitely didn’t know the answer off the top of my head, but once I heard the answer it seemed like a pretty simple concept.  This shows how much people working in high finance value critical thinking and problem solving skills.