Issue207 toheart第七次作业

leongfishUID: 2176854

TOPIC：ISSUE 207 - "Rituals and ceremonies help define a culture. Without them, societies or groups of people have a diminished sense of who they are."
WORDS：449          TIME：0:49:08          DATE：2006-1-25

It is commonly believed that rituals and ceremonies help define a culture, however, to preserve the cultural identity is not the single aim of the rituals and ceremonies; moreover, there are other ways to help define a culture.

Rituals and ceremonies in every society represent for a special culture. First, one can easily distinguish one culture from the others by observing its rituals and ceremonies, especially from the religionary ritual. Since every religion has its special way of praying and penance, we could know the belief of a group of people by watching their rituals. Also, the rituals and ceremonies are vital for people to save their own tradition in the tendency of the world-wide cultural blend. For example, the Native American tribes living among the surround of modern civilization managed to keep on their old rituals in wedding and funeral and so on. Without these old rituals the tribes could hardly avoid from assimilating by the American culture thus could hardly keep their cultural identity.

However, to help define a culture is not the constitutionally goals of rituals and ceremonies. The original ceremonies are given birth to satisfy the need of primitive people to express their esteem and fear upon the gods. And in the modern society, the rituals and ceremonies are more likely to serve for people to express their emotions (except for some religionary rituals): the happiness when they marry, the sadness when their relatives have gone. What’s more, people gather together in the rituals and ceremonies, so their sense of collectivity would be enhanced. Therefore, the essence of the ceremonies and rituals does not include preserving cultural identity, which is only one of their acquired effects.

Furthermore, other cultural elements help strengthen people's feeling of who they are, just like the dress, language, even policy and economy. As many people pursuing for the free life (especially those "world citizens" living in metropolis) would not like to be confined by many strict and verbose ceremonies, they no longer adopt the traditional ceremonies. On the other hand, the old ceremonies are being continually developed into modern, cosmopolitan ones. The instance of wedding may best prove this: in today's America, is all people still choose the church to complete their wedding in? As a result, human societies and groups of people choose other methods to hold the sense of who they are: by keeping their own native mother tongue, they could preserve their particular language culture; by adopting their national dress, they could always remind themselves which social groups they belong to.

In conclusion, rituals and ceremonies help define a culture, but without them, people can still find other way to keep the sense of who they are.

[ 本帖最后由 staralways 于 2006-2-6 12:39 编辑 ]