This video depicts some of the customs of the Maasai people and shows how they perform wedding celebrations.Traditional garb, dancing, singing, and wedding customs are displayed. Folk songs are sung too by men to boast their hunting prowess. Women sing songs describing how good it is to get married and how being a good house maker is important. These songs are sung while both groups perform the famous Maasai jumping dance.
Maasai Wedding Ceremony 2010 Supukuu Enkiama
2011 video by Kanal von hollersepp. Maasai Wedding Ceremony. YouTube, January 2
This is a video I found that shows some of the customs of the Maasai people do for their weddings. They wear very traditional, very beautiful looking clothing and perform wedding celebrations by way of group song and dance. In these songs men sing about how they will be great hunters and protectors and the women sing about pretty much how important being a good housekeeper is and use the songs to recruit and encourage more young women to get married. What stood out to me while watching this video is how old fashion all of that seems. The ideas of men needing to be super macho defenders and women being super helpful housekeepers takes me back to the idea of like 1950's America and how their gender roles are practically the same in theory. Another similarity that between our culture and theirs is that people really dress up for weddings and try and have a great time for them, the cloths the Maasai people wear are really cool looking. I could really feel my own cultural bias kick in when I heard about the women just singing about how great it is to get married because I immediately thought, "hey not all women need to get married, they can go and pursue a career on their own and do quite fine for themselves." I think the reason I felt uncomfortable with the idea of women being designated as housekeepers in a society because of who am I and where I come from culturally. I am a fairly liberal-minded, college attending, young man from America that doesn’t mind if his girlfriend or wife works for a living because I know that we will probably both need to work if we want to have a good life. In my culture I’ve been taught that gender shouldn’t play any role in what a person is inclined to do because it limits peoples’ agency, which I believe is wrong. These notions are silly ideas in the context of the Maasai culture because they don't have anything like careers in the sense that America has. For them it doesn’t make sense to get upset about women being pigeon holed into certain roles, because it is vital that those roles are filled for the good of the whole village. I think about the traditional Coptic wedding I attended for one of my cousins and it was pretty different from the Maasai wedding we saw. The first difference I noticed was that not a lot of people showed up for my cousin’s wedding because her family didn’t know all that many people as compared to the Maasai wedding. It seems like practically everyone was invited for the wedding we saw in the video. Another difference I noticed was that we didn’t really do much dancing and certainly no singing at my cousin’s wedding. Our wedding was done in an air conditioned church in Baltimore. Their wedding was done outside in what looks like just a regular clearing. I think these differences come from the fact that my cousin’s family is a group of very religious Arab Americans that emigrated here mostly by themselves, so they are brought up more reserved and didn’t know a whole lot of people to begin with.
ReplyDeleteI think it would be a very enriching experience and a blast to attend a Maasai wedding, although I wouldn’t be able to sing along I could certainly try and dance with them as they do it