[i习作temp] 【i习作temp】Issue207 求各种狂拍~ [复制链接]

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发表于 2011-1-18 11:33:12 |显示全部楼层

2月1号就要考试了，结果现在才开始写自己的第一篇文章，在下面改了好久，都感觉有问题又看不出来...求大家狂拍啊~

TOPIC: ISSUE207 - "Rituals and ceremonies help define a culture. Without them, societies or groups of people have a diminished sense of who they are."

Are rituals and ceremonies the only way to help the whole society or groups of people? While I concede the first half of the claim, I believe it is too haste to assert that only by rituals and ceremonies can societies and groups of people have a sense of who they are because of the rich content of the word “culture”.

Obviously, rituals and ceremonies do help individuals find a sense of identity, in other words, people find who they are, where they come from and what they can do partly because of rituals and ceremonies. For instance, westerners always celebrate Christmas, sincerely believing it is the birth of Jesus Christ, while Chinese prefer to celebrate Chinese New Year, wishing there would be a good harvest in the following year. One would argue that both of them, superficially, are merely different forms of festivals, or rituals, through which families and relatives have chances to gather to celebrate, with just various methods in different countries. But in essence, it is the culture difference between China and America results in the different ways people celebrate, i.e. different rituals and cultures, which in turn helps everybody find his or her own sense of identity. On the contrary, a Chinese may celebrate Christmas, considering it as a common festival and have a good rest from work rather than having a knowledge of why the whole nation thousands of miles away celebrate it.

Or think about another example of the rituals and ceremonies in terms of groups of people. Companies from any fields, whether they are big supranational corporations such as Microsoft, Nokia and Wal-Mart, or small companies all around the world, each of them has a striking logo and a loud slogan that is always shouted on the square before the headquarter. Actually, this is a kind of ceremony aiming to make the whole external society as well as the internal company staffs aware that the staffs are the exact members of the company, thus giving them a sense of identity and make more profits afterwards.

On the other hand, however, I could only partly agree on the second half of the claim because there exist many other elements that can help define a culture thereby helping individuals have a sense of identity. Cultures, in fact, are patterns of symbolic structures that give human activity significance, as well as the human capacity to classify, codify and communicate their experiences symbolically. Language, customs, or just simple relationships between one and the others do play a vital part in establishing a link, which will help individuals find who they are. For instance, all individuals who like to play computer games have a culture; one cannot understand what the computer fans talking about if he or she is not a member of this kind of culture—without rituals or ceremonies, computer fans establish a kind of culture easily.

In fact, in ancient times, the purpose of rituals and ceremonies amounts not to cultural identity, but rather to express some fundamental truth or meaning, to entreat the gods, to relief the psychological pressure, and to evoke spiritual or numinous emotional responses from participants. While in modern times, we put much attention on the sense of identity it brings to us, the so called “culture”, or the communal bonds between groups of people, is just one kind of by-product of rituals and ceremonies in the past.

All in all, rituals and ceremonies does help individuals to find a culture, but anyway, preserving culture identity is not the sole purpose of rituals and ceremonies; nor are rituals and ceremonies the only means to make people have a sense of who they are.