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0:01
Rituals. Rituals. We have a whole chapter called rituals - more than we've ever thought about rituals before in our lives. Hopefully that's the point of anthropology, right? We take something that we thought we knew about and we examine it to a great extent. So that's what we'll do.
0:26
When we usually think about a ritual or rituals, what do we usually associate rituals with? I hadn't read this chapter before, and I said we're going to talk about rituals today. What would you think we're going to talk about? All right. Some sort of ceremony associated usually with - when we say ceremonies, what do we think about? Religion. Religion, from Zoom. You're already on rite of passage. That sounds very sophisticated. Did you think that before you came into this class?
1:11
Right, right. And I mean, I guess before the reading, before you had ever read, would you ever said ritual, rite of passage? Oh, okay, good. So you're way ahead of things. I mean, we usually, I think, associate with religion, right? We usually associate rituals with religious activities. Is this thing going to go? Yeah. So it's usually associated with ceremonies. You're right. And oftentimes our religion does provide the rite of passage
1:40
itself, and especially probably in the old days or maybe in the new days. So, you know, religion can provide a rite of passage. In fact, some of you have been through religious rites of passage where you stood up in front of churches and things like that.
2:01
I think that we would usually also associate ritual with some sort of stabilizing force, like tradition, like things that have been followed for generations, right? That you have to do a certain thing, kind of like a robot. You're going through the motions of a ritual, and they're usually associated with some sort of stability in society. There are things that keep everyone in line, right? Everybody knows what they have to do. It's kind of like being
2:33
an actor in a play. Your lines are already written out for you. You're not supposed to deviate from those lines. You're supposed to do what's on the menu, do what's on the agenda. So in anthropology, there have been - obviously we have studied these things as part of religion, and we'll talk about that. We've studied them as measures of social stability. But in general, we've done a couple other things with ritual, or anthropologists have. One is just to expand
3:05
the definition of ritual. And early on in your textbook on page 249, they say that
3:15
anthropologists do not look for a singular definition, as rituals are complex and dynamic, and it is hard to define ritual. So there's various approaches. There are things that we might ritualize in our lives that maybe we just thought of as routines before, but they can become rituals. Other rituals might become routines. So it's sometimes difficult to figure out exactly what the boundaries of a ritual is and where we want to analyze it from.
3:46
The other thing we talked about in the last class is this idea of invented tradition. And because of what we might consider the ritual impulse of human beings - someone wanted to know why. Why do humans have rituals all over the place? What are your majors? History, art history, and anthropology? Yeah, I'm starting to feel like maybe you should be in philosophy or religious studies. Has anybody ever told you that? No? Yeah, I mean, you're sort of the big question guy. I feel like
4:24
we're in these sort of medium-sized questions here. I don't - I can't answer the why of this, but I can say that, you know, rituals are very widespread among human beings and they do a lot of different things. And we'll talk a lot about the how of this. The ultimate why? I'm not sure I'm going to be able to ever answer. I'm not sure the philosophers can answer either. You
4:50
might have to go out and go on a pilgrimage to figure out the why. Talk about a ritual. Anyway, invented tradition. So this is the idea that in fact, because humans are very ritual-oriented, we are also very quick to be able to establish rituals, to transform them, and to make new ones. And you might see this in your own lives. Things that you'll start doing as a family or as a person, and it only takes two or three years and you feel like you've always
5:22
done it that way. We have short memories. And this especially applies to things that are, you know, one or two or three generations old. They feel like they've been there forever. So part of it is invented tradition, and then the other thing that we'll talk about is that rituals are often stabilizing. They certainly can keep people glued together. But they also have a tendency to go off the rails, or people can do things that they aren't
5:52
expected to do, or people can use rituals in order to try to bring about change in a society or in the social group where they are. So in some ways, probably many of our popular culture examples are of rituals that kind of go wrong, right? But that's almost in some ways part of the ritual.
6:19
Well, it is really October out there. All right, finally some rain. Getting rained out here?
6:29
Yeah, there's like a flash flood warning. It might even happen in my class. At least the bees are gone. I don't have to worry about them anymore.
6:39
So as an overall statement here, we're going to be talking about sort of expanding the boundaries of ritual and going through why and how people started to look at ritual differently and as a kind of possibility of social change. So we're going to start out - before we do that, I want to talk about sort of some classic, maybe one of the first people, Émile Durkheim, over in France. One of the probably founders of both sociology and anthropology in France, associated also with
7:17
Marcel Mauss, who we've talked about. This section on rituals as means of social integration. So again, here you're seeing the idea that rituals bring people together. They integrate society. And one of Durkheim's claims is that all societies draw a boundary, or have to have
7:39
a border between what is considered sacred and what is considered profane. And by profane, he didn't mean, you know, profanity. He just meant the secular, the non-sacred sphere of life. And so you have to have some sort of idea that you are going into the - going into a place where now something different is going to happen. Now it is going to be more sacred.
8:08
Do you need to close those windows back there? Yeah, go ahead. As you're - if you're master over your nose, you know - and in my other class of first-year students - wait, my first-year students aren't here. In my other class of first-year students, they don't seem to be able to wear a mask without - I have them sit back there and keep the windows open. But you all look good, so
8:32
close them up if you need to. How you feeling? Are we going to keep it open or closed? Can we close it? Oh my gosh, I've never closed a window before in my life. All right. Whoa.
8:51
How you feeling over there? You need to close that window? Your pool of water over there? It's like having class outside every day. All right, everybody happier now? A little bit? Yeah. I mean, we don't want to get other diseases just because - all right. So drawing a line between the sacred, knowing when you've stepped over that threshold. All kinds of rituals to make you know that - you know, spraying holy water around and blowing
9:25
smoke in the air so that you know you've crossed over the line into the sacred, that things are going to be different in this sphere. And people can come together and be socially integrated.
9:38
And along with that are kind of on a similar vein, the idea that we've seen before - if you remember the structural functionalists, we talked a little bit about them when we were talking about kinship, and I gave you the example of the mother-in-law and how that structured society in such a way that you could make sense of the society if you made sense of this particular relationship. So structural functionalism is often associated with Radcliffe-Brown over in the UK and with
10:12
Malinowski, his famous studies of the Trobriand Islands, which again have - he's come up before.
10:20
I thought Microsoft gave me a good suggestion for structural functionalism - this little jigsaw puzzle. So society is like these pieces that all fit together and they all work together, and you need them and they all have a structure and they have a function. And your job as a social scientist or an anthropologist is to start to analyze society as a whole and figure out how all the parts work and fit together.
10:48
And so for Malinowski, he talked about how you did rituals when there was a level of heightened anxiety, and so the ritual was to sort of soothe your mind as you're going on these treks or you're carrying out these activities. And so for Malinowski, he would talk about the psychotherapeutic quality of rituals. They make you feel - they tend to ease the tension or give you the strength to carry on.
11:22
So these kinds of analyses are very common when we think about ritual as serving a function in society, doing something in society, often around the boundaries of the sacred, distinguishing the sacred from the secular. But as anthropologists started to look at rituals and look at especially modern societies, the idea that everything kind of fit together and functioned in a society was
12:02
problematic in a couple of different ways. And they wanted to assume that you had these kind of bounded societies that were traditional and sealed off. And the other way is, how did things change? Like, why would anything change if all the pieces of the society fit together and function like a jigsaw puzzle? Then how do people change their society? When would you ever do that?
12:28
Some people started to think about this in terms of what Max Gluckman called rituals of rebellion, which are super interesting. You said they were interesting. Why? What are these rituals of rebellion?
12:57
People kind of found a way to minimize the urges to
13:24
rebel in a controlled setting. Yeah. So, you know, if a new king is crowned, you all get to pelt the king for a while and humiliate the king for a while. This is often seen in such rituals as annual carnivals, where for one day or maybe a whole week, you know, men dress up as women,
13:45
the women start drinking, the rich people have to give the poor people money. And a lot of people have analyzed these as a kind of pressure valve, a way of blowing off steam. You know, if you have these rituals of rebellion a few times a year, you get to go crazy. As you said, if you don't get to have something, you just - you get to have it a little bit, right? You give them what they want
14:10
for a little bit, and then it takes the pressure off and people can go on with their normal life. So that's kind of - in some ways you might consider to be a structural functionalist explanation for the rituals of rebellion, right? Society is still working. You have these annual - or, you know, every so often you get to really blow off steam so that society can keep on working. But the issue is, or what happens with these rituals of rebellion is sometimes they get out
14:40
of hand. Sometimes people start pelting the king pretty hard, and the next thing you know they're saying, "Hey, why do we even have a king?" And so rituals of rebellion can also be used to bring about change, and you can incorporate protests and social movements. You can have a ritual of protest in order to try and change your society. And they can also be - some of these rituals can be very intense.
15:08
And so I was reading through - we're reading through this spirit possession in an Ethiopian Orthodox ritual. You talked to us about this a little bit. What happens here?
15:31
Christian Orthodoxy is like not
15:35
so - uh, orthodox. Pastors - I forget the guy's name - but they started
15:45
claiming that people that were converting to broad Protestantism were affected by Protestant spirits, and they would perform like exorcisms on them. Like the Protestant spirits were like
15:58
not even like Western exorcisms, but it was like a mixture of like different things that they would be possessed by. But it was all under the name of like Protestant spirits.
16:10
But I just found it interesting that it was like - it's mostly like a church, like political struggle between the Orthodox Church and the Protestant Church, but it's like disguised as like a spiritual struggle between like Orthodoxy and like evil.
16:29
So yeah, I mean, I think I guess I hear what you're saying. So you have these - the Ethiopian Orthodox Church, which is already, you know, probably kind of out there for some of us, and then you have these Protestants coming in. And as I said, most people were fine with, you know, listening to some Protestant stuff. I mean, you know, in life people are usually pretty tolerant of things. But it turns out these Protestants are
16:55
getting a little too powerful. And so your interpretation of this ritual is it's just kind of an overlay on a political struggle between the Protestants and the Orthodox. Am I saying that? It's like a power struggle and they're ritualizing it. And I guess I - you know, I think I do hear where you're coming from, but I just want to read you a passage from here of how this ritual was playing out - the exorcism - and you tell
17:24
me that this is just political power at work. Like, would this happen in any place that you know? So this is Memehir Girma Wondimu - yeah, hard name to remember, right? So Memehir Girma interrogated those chosen with a microphone - maybe that's what I need. Unlike traditional exorcisms, the ensuing conversations were lengthy and thorough. He would grab the possessed individuals by their clothes, make them kneel, and hit their foreheads with
17:58
the palm of his heavy hand. Always very useful in teaching to do this - to take a microphone, engage you in conversations, and hit me with the palm of the heavy hand. He whipped them repeatedly with his microphone until the spirits revealed their motives and plans through the mouths of their human hosts. The kin of possessed people were often invited on stage to untangle the plot of complex family dramas. Sometimes they too fell into a trance, and entire families were exorcised.
18:35
Oh, you can always count on [a student] for a good laugh. Yeah, this is pretty intense, right? And I mean, I agree that there's probably a political struggle going on, but the way in which this stuff is working out is like, whoa, which way is this going to go, right? And so I guess what I'm leading up to here is this idea from Victor Turner. And Victor Turner is sort of a key figure in all of this, as we see pretty soon, in the idea of ritual as
19:06
symbolic action. And what Turner talks about is that rituals don't just do one thing. They're often doing many different things, or they speak to different people in different ways. So he says that rituals are ambiguous, just like signs or symbols. Just like symbols can be interpreted differently by different people in a society, so he says that rituals are multi-vocal. And I think we see that here in this ritual. On the one hand, we consider it to be - some people,
19:40
I think, is a legitimate interpretation - there's a struggle for power here, and this ritual is simply dramatizing the struggle for power. But for other people, when you're getting hit by a heavy hand and possessed by a spirit and somebody's screaming at you through a microphone, you might have a slightly different multi-vocal interpretation of this. This may really seem like good versus evil being played out on a cosmic scale.
20:06
So again, Turner is in some ways taking us beyond this idea of the structural functionalism, because he's drawing our attention to, you know, in some ways like language, rituals are more complex than they would need to be if we were simply just trying to hold society together and make people do the things that they should be doing. We probably wouldn't need to do all this stuff. We wouldn't
20:32
need to have all this symbolic activity going on. So there seems to be something deeply human, deeply linked to our symbolic need to understand the world, to ask those why questions, to tell ourselves stories about this, which makes rituals so interesting and multi-vocal.
20:55
I wanted to bring your attention here to the idea of rites of passage, because this has been perhaps something that has been so rich in anthropological thinking, or I would say is something that you can use to interpret your life. And so it's been one of the most useful ideas, I think, that anthropologists have had in terms of analyzing how we live our lives and how a society lives their lives. So one of the leaders on this was a - I believe he was a Dutch anthropologist
21:40
writing in French [van Gennep is usually described as French; he was born in Germany of Dutch paternal descent], long time ago, back in 1909. Finally got translated into English in 1960, but a lot of people were already using his work - Arnold van Gennep. And he was the one who kind of surveyed the societies of the world and said that the rites of passage typically fell and had these three phases. You had a phase of separation in which the people who
22:05
are going through the rite are separated from their normal lives. Then you have this phase of transition. And then finally, a phase of - they call it in the textbook incorporation, but it's sometimes called re-aggregation or re-integration. So you have these three phases, and he went through all these examples across the world where these things took place.
22:30
Later on, Victor Turner would develop this framework further. We've heard about Victor Turner is talking about these rites or rituals as
22:41
multi-vocal and ambiguous. And he really started working on this transitional stage, and the way he started to think about it is that the transition always involves what he called liminality - being somewhere betwixt and between. That you would cross a threshold and then you'd be in a sort of an ambiguous state. He also called it the anti-structure. So if society is
23:10
marked by structure, this transition phase is an anti-structural phase. And he kind of contrasted the structure of society with the communitas that could happen during this period of liminality. So during the period of liminality, often the rules are somewhat relaxed. People's social roles - you might experiment with other roles. And by going through this together, you develop this sense of community. So that when you come out on the other side
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and are re-incorporated into society, you have a new role, but you also have people that you've gone through this together. And so Turner saw social life as kind of this alternation between the regular structure and these times of communitas when it could be created. And so we see this a lot in things - you know, baptisms, weddings. Weddings are a great example. The wedding party, when everybody's dressed up and going all communitas crazy,
24:16
and then they're reintegrated into and have to get busy being just regular married people. So we can use this to see - to talk about kind of things that happen, ceremonies that we see. But we can also use it in different kinds of ways. And so
24:39
I was trying to kind of provoke you into thinking about could we also see it as a way that we structure our everyday life. So there's an interesting article that I assigned once for an anthropology of work course back when we were trying to do success summits and stuff like that, get employed. And it was called "Able to Fly." And basically what these researchers did - they were hired actually by airplane companies. And so anthropology can be useful in this. And they were
25:10
looking at how do people who have disabilities - how did they encounter the air flight process? What is done in different ways? And the airlines were trying to figure out ways in which they could
25:28
enhance this or make it more possible for people with differing abilities to board the plane. And they started to analyze this, the airplane flight itself, in terms of this idea of the rite of passage. That people were separated from their normal life. You have to go through that security thing, and you sort of get in some - sometimes quite stripped down. And then they come onto the plane, and the rules are slightly different, maybe weirdly now. And then you're reintegrated
26:00
into society at the end of things. Which is, you know, I mean, it's probably - this is probably a little extreme to think of the airplane flight as a rite of passage, but there it was. And what was interesting is when they gave their results to the company, and they asked, you know, they had all this footage of people with different disabilities going into the airlines, and they wanted - they asked the company, like, well, you know, how much of this can we publish
26:30
academically and how much of it do you want us to keep private? And the company was like, "Ah, all that ethnographic stuff, those videos, you can put that out there. But don't tell anybody about that rite of passage stuff. That's cool, and we want to keep that for ourselves." Which is kind of funny, because rite of passage analysis is pretty much something that we learned in a basic anthropology
26:55
class. It's one of those first lessons. But it turns out to be something that outside of anthropology, people think it's often cool or interesting or a good way to analyze things. I think we can - and some of you mentioned various things - we can see college as containing
27:17
various rites of passage. So some of you talked about certainly when we do commencement here at Hartwick College, we try and run everybody through the faculty and separate them from their parents. And then put you all in blue shirts, and you do this thing. And then you're supposed to then
27:39
become or come out on the other side as college students. And then at graduation, there's kind of the mirror of that, where you again - well, then you're in those robes, and everybody gets in their graduation robes. The faculty dress up in their funny robes. And then you run through the faculty again, walk through the faculty again. And you're reincorporated back into life as a college graduate, ready to do your success summit and all that stuff.
28:10
So we can see these kind of rite of passage things framing the experience of college. I sometimes try to convince people, usually unsuccessfully, that each class should be considered a rite of passage. That you come into class and the bell rings, and there's this period. And then we're in this time of liminality and communitas when you can make new relationships and the usual rules are suspended
28:40
and you can analyze society in a new way. And then the bell rings and you go out there with new knowledge and you're really happy about that time that you spent in the classroom and the community that develops. And everybody looks at me like, "You're out of your mind." But anyway, it's a good thought. Try. I always try to aim for it, aim for that level of communitas. Usually nobody has
29:06
communitas from a classroom. It's very rare that people can name two people in the class other than people they already knew. You know anybody here? Yeah, okay, good. I won't make you name.
29:23
You can also see the college - but I think I'd ask you to think about the college experience itself
29:31
as a time of liminality. And so if you look at on page 269, you can think about this not simply as these little rites that are, you know, these small-scale rites of passage that happen to frame college, but you can look at the whole three, four, or five years of college as this time in which you're kind of in this midpoint. And oftentimes the rules are a little bit different and the consequences for doing
30:02
things are a little bit different. And there are things that you start to question, like, you know, being neither male nor female. You know, these things kind of come up and people start thinking about things in different ways. And so we could think about this as a time in which people come out on the other side of this as having communitas with their fellow people in college. And I was thinking about this in terms of your essay topics.
30:35
This is something that you could write about if you wanted to. You could have - this is my hypothesis - the COVID, the coronavirus, severely weakens the idea of college's communitas. It makes it very much more difficult to do all this liminal stuff which we expect from college.
30:55
Of course, every good hypothesis comes with the opposite idea, which is you could see how perhaps COVID could strengthen communitas, because now you'll be on the other side and you're like, "I did college together with those people and we survived the worst times ever," you know? So it could strengthen it. But my general hypothesis is making it more difficult to do college.
31:27
Another possible - oh, before I do another possible paper topic, I meant to do that
31:36
a second ago. I want to talk about this rites of passage and gender section, or the "Emerging from the Chrysalis" section on pages 272 to 273. And basically what Bruce Lincoln was saying here is that maybe when Victor Turner and Arnold van Gennep were talking about the rites of passage, they did not explore enough how different it is to do a coming-of-age rite as a woman and a coming-of-age rite that makes you into a man.
32:19
And so there's a really interesting chart here on page 273 where Lincoln is trying to give us what happens with women's initiation and what happens with men's initiation.
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And actually, there's a classic - there's a classic rite, or maybe not a classic rite, that turns a young girl into a woman. What is it?
32:48
Yeah, what happens there? It's basically a coming-of-age for a -
32:58
coming-of-age for Latinx women, which has been appropriated by some other people we know that. Yes, you're shaking your head. They should never do that. But yeah.
33:08
I was trying to think about this in terms of this chart here on page 273. So, you know, Bruce Lincoln says here that in women's initiation - or in men's initiation, you have this association with territorial passage, going from one place to another, whereas with women there is an absent or much-reduced
33:34
notion of territorial passage. And I guess I would have to say I don't remember anything happening in a quinceañera where there is territorial passage. So we might be right about that. Here's another one. Women usually remain in or near their domestic dwelling. Men do not remain in or near their domestic dwelling.
33:56
I was trying to think about this. At least the few quinceañeras that I've been to have always been in somebody's house. You can have them outside too, right? But are they often in a house?
34:07
They're usually in a place where everyone from both sides of the family - they are like she is in her basic domestic - oh, and they're domestic. So so far we're two for two, okay?
34:27
Rituals for women's initiation rituals often involve dressing and decoration. We're three for three on that one, we know that. Whereas in men's initiation, nudity is common, humbling, getting participants ready for their new status. That's definitely not part of the quinceañera. Okay, now here. Men's initiation involves new skills or information learned, and there are new areas of public or political life to become involved in. Versus women's initiation, where
35:02
there is no practical knowledge gained. Married women must learn how to do such mundane tasks as cooking and caring for children willingly. I would have to say that I have never seen any practical knowledge come to us from the quinceañera, right? It's all about getting dressed up. And then finally, men are usually initiated together, which encourages bonding and solidarity, whereas women are usually initiated singly. There's no opportunity for bonding or shared
35:33
initiation. I think we're five for five on this. Good thing you didn't do it. Yeah, don't want to do that. Well, actually, I don't know if it's a good thing you didn't do it. You had ambivalent feelings about that. You wanted to do it, yeah? Well, how about now? Are you more relieved? You don't have to answer them. Yeah, that's a bad question.
36:00
So, you know, I mean, I think that I guess I would say that I think this is really interesting. I think it's an interesting thing to do to compare and to do this. I wouldn't necessarily - there's something that I can't put my finger on it that I think is like too schematic about this, and that I don't think this applies to all societies. But I think just because you go through something like a
36:23
quinceañera doesn't mean you're about to be like, you know, you're about to emerge from a chrysalis and become this - you know, how to say - a mundane person who will cook and care for children willingly. Don't necessarily think there's a one-to-one correspondence there. But it's an interesting idea, and I think that Lincoln is on to something, that anthropology - we should always pay attention at least to the gendered character of the potentially gendered character of rituals.
37:01
Which is a great lead-in to what our next chapter will be - chapter 10 on gender. Although we're not actually reading that until 10 days from now, but that's where we'll be.
37:15
At the end of this chapter, I want to also point out to you a small section at the very end, right before the conclusion, called "Football and Rituals of Modernity." And drawing on the work
37:31
of Eduardo Archetti about - actually, this would be called soccer - but this is football in world football in Argentina. And I bring that up because again, it's a potential essay topic, which is that you could take this little section - and I know a lot of you do some sort of sport or might know about a sport - and you could use it to examine a lot of the different things that we've been talking about in this section.
38:04
So in this section it talks about football, soccer, and the rituals that are involved, and you could certainly do rituals and sports. But, you know, I mean, he's also talking here about how different sports are used in organizing society. We could talk about their economic potency. A lot of things have happened, for example, around college football,
38:30
college American football, and the economic aspect of it. You could talk about how it's part of people's identity and how they identify or become a person through sport. And obviously one should never forget or overlook the role that gender plays in gendering our different sports. So I bring this up as a kind of idea here. You might have not gotten to that part or might have by that point just read the conclusion of the chapter.
39:03
And this is a little box here that could help guide a paper, an essay topic, if you wanted to. So it's one of those things that can be very helpful in its analysis.
39:21
The other thing I wanted to bring up from this chapter is, as I mentioned in the last class - and there's one of you put a while ago on the discussion board - this is one of the times when on page 261 our authors referenced the work of Clifford Geertz and the Balinese cockfight. So there's a very famous article by Clifford Geertz called "Deep Play: Notes on the Balinese Cockfight." It used to be at one point it was probably the most famous
39:59
article assigned to anthropologists. It's a little bit long for today's world, but in the old days, I think people probably still assign it. They would talk about this article. It's just in some ways very famous because he's analyzing this cockfight in terms of the symbolic action. And it led to a whole book edited by Alan Dundes - that talked about the cockfight in various parts of the world. And Dundes was actually a folklorist who looked at the cockfight from various places.
40:35
And he eventually decided that Geertz had not gone far enough in his analysis. That if you look at the cockfight from various ways, that you could say something different about it. I once taught this book in a class called Cockfights and Casinos. So Dundes here, in his concluding chapter, talks about testing a hypothesis that the cockfight - in his essay he would test a hypothesis - the cockfight is a thinly disguised symbolic homoerotic masturbatory phallic duel.
41:23
I've always wanted to say that sentence on camera. It's been so long since I've been able to say it. It's been a long time since I taught this class. So he's testing a hypothesis that when you do this cockfight thing, that it's a thinly disguised symbolic homoerotic masturbatory phallic duel.
41:46
That's some heavy-duty stuff right there. And the winner emasculates the loser through castration or feminization. Hmm. Yeah, interesting. This often happens, I think, a lot in your sports. You could see if this works, you know, when you're playing a sport, if they're actually - and I think it applies to more than just cockfights. But the cockfight especially, and Dundes goes into all the ways in which, you know, all these metaphors about cocks and those can - you know,
42:23
the stroking and the way that the men play with them is, you know, pretty pretty suggestive.
42:32
So I put that up there for a couple of reasons. One is that it's part of this - we see the cockfight here in this chapter. Two is it's a ritual. Three is that it talks to us about gender, which we're going into, and we always want to know what's going on in the world of gender. We'll read about gender more next week.
42:57
But also I'd like to just - in the next class we're going to be talking about thesis statements, those things where you're trying to tell us what your paper is about. And I'm obviously - probably this is probably one of the best thesis statements that has ever been written in the history of the world, and then he goes on to try and prove or test this hypothesis. So we probably won't be
43:25
able to get to that level, but it's kind of a goal for us to think about. Hey, could I write an essay in which I test my hypothesis that - I won't read that sentence again, but boy, it's good, right?
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