[Big Fish]03月16日Issue187--By Sansouci

SansouciUID: 2755036

Issue No.207
207"Rituals and ceremonies help define a culture. Without them, societies or groups of people have a diminished sense of who they are."

The author claims that rituals and ceremonies are important, for the reason that rituals and ceremonies not only help define a culture but contribute to identify societies or groups. I concede that ritual and ceremony are actually significant to define a culture, including history, language, and customs and so on. However, on the other hand, there has other ways to facilitate societies and throng to identify themselves.

Admittedly, one purpose of ritual and ceremony is to define a culture at present day. At the society level, as see varies traditional festivals among different countries. It is Thanksgiving’s Day, a harvest festival celebrated primarily in the United States and Canada. It is Spring Festival routine in China every year to celebrate the upcoming New Year. Most of festivals, a fraction of ritual and ceremony, help to distinguish different societies and define a culture. At the groups of people level, such as adult ceremony which stands a maturity from juvenile to adult and means people should have independent responsibilities for his behaviors, also give identification for a person or throng.

However, some distinctive ritual and ceremony actually endow people social identity and position, which are suffered by globalization which means no boundaries and become a world widely culture at present. For instance, the Christmas Day, which represents the culture of western world, is now celebrated by a considerable amount of people from eastern countries. Just because the widely prevail culture, so that people can hardly identify themselves by a clearly sense.

What’s more important is merely depend on rituals and ceremonies are hardly to completely preserve cultural identity. Society can be identified with history, communication language, social people’s appearance and act and so on. Individuals can understand themselves through other ways such as working, taking part in social activities, receiving education or teaching and so like. Therefore, many cognitive ways are put forward a society or group of people to have a good sense of their identities.

Undeniably, rituals and ceremonies are limited. Due to many ritual and ceremony are initiated from old culture character with superstitious views which are not accord with contemporary cognition of science. Although with the development of society, some change would have happened on rituals and ceremonies, yet form have changed doesn’t mean progressed connotations. Thus, rituals and ceremonies couldn’t be a good guidance for helping people identified themselves.

All in all, ritual and ceremony is a fraction of culture and help define a culture. Without rituals and ceremonies, the culture is incomplete definition. In terms of identification about societies and groups of people not only depend on rituals, but there are other more ways to help have a good sense of who they are.