Issue207 迟来的作业

myown5891UID: 181125

Issue 207
"Rituals and ceremonies help define a culture. Without them, societies or groups of people have a diminished sense of who they are."

“仪式和礼仪有助于来界定一个社会的特色。没有了它们，社会或人类群体就会越来越难以意识到他们究竟是什么样的人。”

:@
This statement actually consists of two claims: (1) that ritual and ceremonies help
define a culture, and (2) that we know who we are through understanding our ritual and
ceremonies of our culture. I strongly agree with these contentions, for two reasons, as
discussed below.

On the one hand, ritual and ceremonies are part of a culture. To start, the words
ceremony and ritual are often used to describe the same thing: a formal act or set of
a wedding or other formality. And culture is consists of formal part and informal part.
Ritual and ceremonies consists of the formal part of a culture. Secondly, the words
ceremony and ritual describe the process by which we observe something that we want
to honor as important and sacred. Also, the important and sacred things are the
essence of a culture. Ritual and ceremonies preserved a large part of essence of a
culture. Thirdly, the words ceremony and ritual tend to be stereotyped and repetitive.
Through the iterative process, history and time clean out the rubbish of a culture and
maintain the core of a culture which is also the quintessence of ritual and ceremonies.
For example, wedding is one of the most formal and sacred scenario of both the groom
and bride's whole lives. Wedding rituals in western countries involve the exchange of
rings, the tying of the bride and groom’s garments together and the bride wearing
white wedding clothes in church before a priest. Those are distinctive characteristics of  
western culture.

On the other hand, ritual and ceremonies are largely constitutive of who we are--or, to
put it another way, that who we are is significantly a matter of our ritual and ceremonies
for groups of people within a culture or a community.  My own view is that what we are
getting with the idea of a sense of community is not an emotional attachment but
something a bit different, something to do with question of who we are. What makes a
community a community is that participation in those ritual and ceremonies with others
is generally indicative of a central feature of who each participant is. In other words,
what distinguishes one communities from another community is that in certain ritual and
ceremonies, people feel that they are expressing or realizing an important aspect of
who they are, and that they do so in some sense with others who are also expressing
or realizing important aspects of who they are. In order to make this point clearer, let
me go to the religion example. One of the hallmarks of religion is their long tradition of
ritual and ceremony.  And, all religious ritual and ceremony are about understanding
who we are and our connection to the Creator, as well as understanding the way
humans have interacted in the world throughout history. For example, Christians would
pray to God in a church while they affirm that they are all sons of God; all adult Muslims
are supposed to perform five prayers, preceded by ritual cleansing or purification of the
body at different intervals of the day while they assert they are believers of
Mohammed. So to be a member of a particular religion and to participate some ritual
and ceremonies is to say something important about who one is.

In sum, the speaker correctly asserts that ritual and ceremonies are part of a culture
and an imperative factor for people within the community to understand who they are.
Indeed, understanding ritual and ceremonies means connecting to the history and
essence of a culture, which enable us to think through the answer of " Who we are?"

[ Last edited by myown5891 on 2005-7-22 at 13:38 ]