I appreciate the opportunity to read Ceremony. It is full of subtle inflections and deeper meanings, and I hope to get better at recognizing them as the year progresses.
One thing that I'm having a hard time with is all the superstition associated with the Native American culture. I'm a very rational person who likes proof before 'believing' in something; I'm becoming "hard-nosed, literal, precise and accurate," in the words of Tom Miller, a rather brilliant practitioner and instructor in rational psychology. These are great as personal qualities, but they don't help much in analyzing literature from someone else's standpoint when my brain is throwing a running commentary of "there's no proof," "how can someone believe that when this piece of science explicitly contradicts it," and so on. This is one of the reasons why I identify with Rocky, and yet this is not what the author of Ceremony intended, nor is it the point of the book.
I will use this as an opportunity to style-flex, ignoring what I consider irrationality and seeing it instead as a piece of culture unique to a certain viewpoint. Whether or not it's right is not the question. The question here is how the author uses culture in the meanings of a work.
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