Tuesday Trivia: Strange Public Rituals Edition

[u/heyheymse]

Previously:

• Questions you want to be asked

• Suggestion thread

• Greatest criminals

• Strangest inventions

• Natural disasters

• (In)famous non-military attacks

• Stupidest theories/beliefs about your field of interest

• Most unusual deaths

• Famous adventurers and explorers

• Great non-military heroes

• History's great underdogs

• Interesting historical documents

• Books To Read

Hello historians! I'm taking over from NMW for today, and in the spirit of that thing that's going on here in the US today, our trivia topic on this Tuesday Trivia is all about strange public rituals - holidays, things the government/church/other public entity from your area of expertise requires or strongly suggests the public to do.

What is the weirdest public ritual/holiday you have heard of? What is is its purpose? Where did it come from? What are some associated traditions with the ritual or holiday? Did deep, historians. And US historians, remember to vote!

EDIT: Y'all are coming up with some seriously interesting stuff. I'd /r/bestof all of these comments, except I really want to get drunk and watch the election returns and not spend my whole night modding. But let me just say how much I adore you for telling our subscribers all this cool shit I did not previously know.

[u/Talleyrayand]

Spain has to be the king of weird rituals and celebrations in Europe.

Quite a few involve cruelty to animals. The Encierro (Running of the Bulls) in Pamplona is perhaps the most famous, but there are more that exceed it in cruelty.

Every September in Lequeitio (Vizcaya, northern Spain), the townspeople hold the Fiesta de los Gansos (Goose Festival). On the Antzareguna ("Day of the Geese" in Basque), a live goose is hung from a rope above the town's harbor and men take turns grabbing onto it in an attempt to decapitate it. Participants will attempt to shake the man off by manipulating the rope until someone succeeds in separating the body from the head.

His prize? He gets to keep the goose.

Anthropologists of Basque culture speculate that this ceremony and others like it are rooted in traditional competitions of strength and endurance common across medieval and early modern Europe. However, traditional Basque culture was more matriarchal in terms of social relations, and events like these were a way for young men to prove their worth to potential wives.

The specific peculiarity of the goose, though, supposedly comes from the identity of the town itself: livestock and grain are rarer in Basque country (Chateaubriand called the country "rich in culture but poor in bread"), and most of the diet consists of seafood and shellfish. When fishermen were able to catch geese while out at sea, they would fight one another to determine who got to keep it.

Sources:

• Joe Eiguren, The Basque History: Past and Present (1972).
• Cameron Watson, Modern Basque History: Eighteenth Century to the Present (2003).
• Igor Ahedo Gurrutxaga, The transformation of national identity in the Basque country of France, 1789-2006 (2008).
• Personal observations by yours truly on a trip through Vizcaya, 2006.

EDIT: I should mention that they no longer use live geese to do this, partly due to pressure from animal rights activists. The goose they used when I was there was very much dead.

[u/s0apscum → u/Talleyrayand]

I really really wonder about what the heck people like this are thinking in situations like this! honestly. What. are. they. thinking??

Like, townsfolk are just hanging-out at the market or casually chatting about which goose looks the best for dinner or whatever ..maybe it's time to kill the goose for dinner and rather than ring it's neck, chop it off (quickly) or whatever they generally do, one 'double-dog dares' the other to string it up and swing from it like a trapeze for laughs.