Transitions: Four Rituals in Eight Cultures

This volume is an admirably conceived and well-organized presentation of ways in which rituals--traditional and modern, religious and secular--that celebrate birth, puberty, first marriage, and death are (or were) carried out in five societies studied mainly by standard ethnological methods, and three "socialist" nations, where research has required new adaptations in method. The presentation is clearly designed for work with--and by--students at an early stage in their exploration of aims and methods of research and in their understanding of the values of cultural comparison. The Frieds have treated five cultures as primary: the IKung, a San people of the Kalahari Desert; the Muslim Hausa of northern Nigeria; the Polynesian Tikopians, including the group that moved in the 1950s to the Russell Islands; the Minnan-speaking people of Taiwan; and the Tlingit, living on the southern Alaskan coast. The contrasting socialist countries are the Soviet Union, the People's Republic of China, and Cuba.