issue207 飞跃dreams小组 第六次作业

Marvelous_czUID: 2451875

The speaker asserts that rituals and ceremonies help define a culture. And societies or groups of people have a diminished sense of who they are, without them. I concede that study the rituals and ceremonies would help people to know a culture which they do not familiar with. However, these would not help people to see the soul of a culture.

Admittedly, rituals and ceremonies can embody a nation or a culture, which would increase sense of who the people of a nation are. On the one hand, people would be proud of these rituals which can represent one part of their culture’s spirit, since these ceremonies are the tradition from their ancestors. They would like to obey the custom such as people in Japan would dress kimono to celebrate when the festival coming. Japanese consider it is a conventional way and it would represent the respect to their ancestor. On the other hand, people who come from other places would study and know a nation and culture through these rituals and ceremonies. When people contact a strange culture at beginning, the better and convenient way to know it is join in the rituals and ceremonies. In this way, people would feel the custom of a strange nation by themselves, and the impression would be very deep to them.

However, rituals and ceremonies just a surface layer of a culture. If people want to know more internal things, they must catch the soul of a culture, since rituals would not help people to understand it. There is a compelling example which can make this point more evidently. The Chinese marriage is very special, especially to the people in western countries. In the ceremony of marriage, the bride must step over a fire bason or the groom cannot finish this ritual with his bride and people would not avow they have been a couple. Many people already know this ritual of marriage, but few people know this ritual means exorcising, which is the soul of a culture. There are lots of people hear about these ceremonies, but they do not familiar with the legend and reason of them. Without the support of these spirits and contents, these rituals and ceremonies would be meaningless for people.

Furthermore, for the inheriting of culture, the more important thing to us is the spirit and soul of a culture rather than rituals and ceremonies which only a surface layer. To increase the sense of recognizing ourselves, we would better read more history of our nation and learn more knowledge about our ancestor. And then we could get back something has lost in the modern society from the action, spirit and ideology of ancestor. Such as the archaic building is famous for the historic story which happens in it rather than the bricks which construct it. There are many mediums which can transmit the culture to our later generations and ritual is just one kind of them. While we keep the ritual and ceremonies for inheriting our culture, we must pay attention to the meaning of them so that our progeny can get the spirit of the culture.

To sum up, we should keep our traditional rituals and ceremonies since they are the bequest of our ancestor. However, we would know the spirit and soul of a culture so that we can get the essentials, which can make we know our custom and culture more deeply.  

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