I love Holi! If you get to see the movie, "Outsourced" there is a segment on it. In fact, after my whole week in India (sarcasm, as if I could really get more than a superficial blink in that amount of time), I thought the movie captured much of the culture quite well, but it will be up to others to correct me on that.
I love the idea of Holi so much that it motivated me to do a 5K run in San Diego called the Neon Run which is a night run where they use powders similar to those used in India for Holi, very colorful and fluorescent and then each K you run through black lights to show off your colors. Of course, it all washes off :) Now the relation to psychology: Cross-cultural traditions and how they develop. Apparently, from the Wikipedia reference below, which verifies what I had heard about it in India (we arrived just a couple of days after! sigh; so the streets were still colorful and people were still selling powders at all the market stalls) this celebrates the end of winter, celebrating all of the colors of spring. It also has very strong religious themes and the name itself refers to religious tradition; it seems to me that in many countries culture and religion are difficult to separate. I know this as coming from a European culture (Polish) in which cultural traditions and religious traditions are tightly interwoven. There is very little purely "Polish" that is not also tied to Catholicism in some way. I know this is even more obvious in other cultures as well. Where we don't see this tie so much is in the US where religious freedom is very important so our traditions tend more towards the secular. However, there is still much about US culture that is tied to christianity and the judeo-christian tradition. For example, the wikipedia reference suggests that Thanksgiving was more closely tied to the judeo-christian tradition at least until the early 1900's. Annette Annette Kujawski Taylor, Ph. D. Professor, Psychological Sciences University of San Diego 5998 Alcala Park San Diego, CA 92110 [email protected] ________________________________________ Subject: Happy Holi! From: "Mike Palij" <[email protected]> Date: Sat, 30 Mar 2013 09:41:59 -0400 X-Message-Number: 4 For Hindus, there is a spring religious celebration known as "Holi" which is celebrated in different parts of the world, including NYC. For details about the holiday/celebration, see the Wikipedia entry: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holi There are various rituals associated with Holi, one of which is the throwing of colored powder or mud. The NY Times has an article on how this holiday has been observed in Bollywood movies; see: http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2013/03/29/nyregion/29holi-traditional-songs.html NOTE: Word to American: please don't snort the powder. ;-) -Mike Palij New York University [email protected] --- END OF DIGEST --- You are currently subscribed to tips as: [email protected] To unsubscribe click here: http://fsulist.frostburg.edu/u?id=13534.4204dc3a11678c6b1d0be57cfe0a21b0&n=T&l=tips&o=24647 or send a blank email to leave-24647-13534.4204dc3a11678c6b1d0be57cfe0a2...@fsulist.frostburg.edu --- You are currently subscribed to tips as: [email protected]. To unsubscribe click here: http://fsulist.frostburg.edu/u?id=13090.68da6e6e5325aa33287ff385b70df5d5&n=T&l=tips&o=24656 or send a blank email to leave-24656-13090.68da6e6e5325aa33287ff385b70df...@fsulist.frostburg.edu
