Description
For your final project, you are asked to create a holiday. As we have studied holidays, we know that there are cultural assumptions and societal values attached to almost every ritual, tradition, food dish, and rite of passage in a given holiday. Your job will be to reverse engineer a holiday based upon the values you hope to teach society. Consider the following questions: 1) What are the values or assumptions that you seek to promote? What do you hope society will learn from your holiday/festival/rite? 2) What is your artifact/event? What symbols will you use to express your ideas or the norms/mores/values 3) What are the assumptions about humanity that your festival/holiday/rite celebrates or promotes? Are there values that you seek to suppress or subvert with your creation? 4) Why is your creation a good thing for our culture? What do you hope Dear bornites/Michiganders/Americans gain from your creation? This is not an exhaustive list…only a start. A good outline of such a project might look like this: 1) An introduction that gets the reader interested in reading on and explains the overarching vision of my holiday. 2) An explanation of what assumptions my holiday is based on and what values it hopes to teach. 3) An explanation of how my holiday is going to teach those lessons. I could explain a typical day, describe a ritual, or present another artifact of the holiday. 4) An explanation of the importance of learning such things and why humanity would benefit from such a holiday. 5) Various connections to other holidays or practices 6) A conclusion that wraps up the entire essay and gives the reader a sense of closure Please review the rubric so you know what is expected.
