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anointing: A communal religious healing ritual common in evangelical Protestant churches. Based on biblical Scripture ( James 5:13– 16), an anointing is led by a church pastor and elders who apply holy oil to the ill congregant and ask the congregation to pray together for healing by the grace of God. Appalachian mountain religion: The unique religious heritage shared by natives of the southern Appalachian region. Avoiding institutionalization , Appalachian mountain religion remains closely aligned with a Calvinism tempered by the Wesleyan emphasis on God’s grace and relies on the crucial role of religious experience emerging from the plain-folk camp meetings of the Great Awakening. arbor: An outdoor sanctuary used by families that annually assemble to form a summer retreat/holiday community focused on shared religious beliefs. Families often occupy cabins called “tents” surrounding the arbor. These outdoor traditions are related to religious frontier “camp meetings” and “brush arbor meetings” of the nineteenth century in which the preacher and congregation erected a temporary shelter for a makeshift sanctuary in the open air. Today’s arbor is a wooden, open-sided structure covered by a permanent roof, with a sawdust ®oor and movable pews. Battle of Flowers Parade: The original event of Fiesta San Antonio. A women’s voluntary organization dedicated to preserving the memory of the Texan independence movement, the Battle of Flowers Association , began the parade in 1891. The association modeled the event on French and Mexican parades in which women threw ®owers at each other in a mock battle while riding in carriages. Although no Glossary longer involving ®ower throwing from ®oats, the parade remains an important part of San Antonio’s Fiesta. Battle of San Jacinto: The battle that won Texan independence from Mexico on April 21, 1836. Fiesta San Antonio was originally established to celebrate the ¤fty-¤fth anniversary of this battle in April 1891. Cajun: Usually refers to European-American residents of Frenchspeaking Louisiana in distinction from their African-American “Creole” neighbors, although sometimes people of African descent self-identify as Cajun. call and response: Antiphonal style of singing in which the leader “calls out” a line and the group responds. Derives from African singing styles. Also appears cross-culturally in other spoken, rather than sung, forms in a speaker’s interaction with an audience—as with the Mexican grito. carnival: Spring festival with origin in Roman rites such as the bacchanal . The period of feasting and festivity preceding Christian Lent. Mikhail Bakhtin has de¤ned carnival as a time when the rules of everyday life are suspended, when of¤cial culture is inverted or parodied. Thus, carnival time provides a ritualized opportunity to question and rebel against the dominant forces shaping public culture. cascarones: Eggshells ¤lled with confetti. Often San Antonio Fiesta participants carry cartons of cascarones to break over other participants ’ heads during the week of street fairs and parades. celebration: A public performance of ritual; a gathering in commemoration of an event and/or of familial, community, or religious heritage. cognatic descent: A system of reckoning kinship through both male and female descendants of a common ancestor. The cognatic descent group is the group that assembles for a family reunion, or would ideally assemble if all the members were to be present. commodi¤cation: The transformation of a dimension of social life from a gift economy organized around the give and take of personal 284 / Glossary relationships to a cash-based commerce between strangers. Such an exchange is taken out of its historic, social, and often spontaneous context and placed in another in which expressive culture relates less to community life and more to the expectations and the gaze of outsiders. communitas: A sense of unity that a group of people may experience through gathering, celebration, and ritual when participants believe they share common purposes, values, a heritage, or experience. A term coined by anthropologist Victor Turner. Conventicles: Outdoor religious services of the Lowland Scottish “Covenanters” who formed a 1638 “Covenant” with God in rejection of Episcopalianism. When Conventicles were outlawed by the British monarch, Covenanters met in secret and came armed against the government forces who often disbanded them. courir (run): When costumed groups travel from farmhouse to farmhouse in rural Louisiana to ask for food at Mardi Gras in exchange for performances. Similar to Christmas mumming or Halloween trick-or-treating. Creole: We most commonly think of Creoles in terms of language. Serving all the functions of a language, a Creole replaces a pidgin, the form of communication in...

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