TOK

Paradigms: defamiliarisation

This ritual is performed almost daily for many people in this culture. They have a collection of wooden sticks of different lengths and sizes, with different animal hair attached to them. They also possess numerous boxes of different sizes and shapes containing different contents. For many woman in this culture, they almost always open this box in the morning after they have smeared their skin with a special paste. The animal hair is then dipped into the box in a circular manner, and the wooden stick is gently tapped on the edge of the box twice. It must be tapped but must not be tapped too many times as that would mean the process must start again. The woman must then smile to the box in order for the content to be transferred successfully from the animal hair onto their face.

 

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1 comment

  1. Very good – I am guessing make-up of some form, but I don’t know much about why one would ‘tap’ . As my wife wears hardly any, this is really outside my experience. It will interesting to see if it’s harder for the boys to guess than the girls?!

    Thank you! Hope it was fun thinking about this 🙂

    NA

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