I love traditions. Family traditions, national traditions, all that is traditional in the true sense of the word. I suppose it's because they give me a sense of continuity in a rapidly changing world; a sense of my roots, a sense of who I really am and where I came from really. For example, in my family, as in many other close-knit English families, it is traditional for us to talk to each other every Christmas, the birthday of another family member, or during a family wedding or funeral. Call us soft and sentimental if you like, but that's just the way it is.
Many national traditions were passed down through the generations for hundreds, even thousands of years. Some have remained more or less the same as they were back in the day, while others have changed dramatically over time. Weddings, rites of passage and death, among other human milestones are marked with ceremonies in almost all cultures around the world -. And some are cute and others are downright painful
There is a wedding tradition in Indonesia which, without exactly painful, must surely involve a lot of discomfort. After a man and a woman Tidung people of Borneo northeast to marry, they are not allowed to use the bathroom for three days and three nights after the ceremony. It is believed that to do so would risk bad luck, divorce and death of offspring at a young age. I guess the wedding festivities are amended accordingly because I know for a fact that if this tradition was introduced into the English marriage, no marriage would have happened at the reception.
Probably the best-known tradition in the English marriage is one in which all unmarried adult females present gather behind the bride and she throws her wedding bouquet on the head. According to folklore, the woman who catches the bouquet will be the next to marry. In the 80s, someone tried to introduce a male equivalent of this tradition at weddings, where unmarried men present were supposed to form a group behind the groom and he threw the wedding garter for the bride on her head in their direction. Unfortunately, it never took because all single men were either too drunk to catch anything, too busy chatting newly identified single women, or hiding in the toilets do not want to show even this basic level commitment to a relationship.
The Chambri tribe of Papua New Guinea boys into men through scarification ceremony involves the use of a piece of sharpened bamboo to carve elaborate designs into their coffers , back and buttocks to leave scars that make their skin look like the brave and ferocious crocodile. It is believed that this method allows a reptilian divinity to consume the youth of the child and to leave in place the mind of man / crocodile that every boy should become Chambri. We have a similar rite of passage to England teenagers are forced by their peers to consume large amounts of alcohol causing considerable damage to their livers and significantly increasing the risk of liver disease in later life. They are considered to be real men in their local pub until they marry.
The Dani tribe of Papua also used to have a funeral ritual rather bizarre. When a family member dies, the other family members, usually women, used to have one of their fingers cut off in the second phalanx, and trim would be burned and buried near the corpse.
The pain of this exercise was said to be representative of pain they felt at the loss of a loved one. Again, we have a similar ritual in England. At the funeral, it is customary to drink as much alcohol as possible in order to induce a severe hangover, pain that is representative of the pain we feel at the loss of a loved one.
I think it's safe to say that I would not enjoy the "tradition" as if I Papuan.