Self evaluation

My oral presentation was about death rituals. I did this project with ona.
To evaluate myself, I have to say that the presentation was right, it was nice to see. On the video I can see that maybe, I have to improve my eye contact a bit more, because I was nervous and it made me forget some things I had to say. But the rest I think that was right. The only thing we have to care is the vocabulary, because there were a lot of key words, and we didn't write them anywhere. Anyway, I'm happy with the presentation because a lot of people said that I have a good pronunciation, and I think it's the most important thing when I speak english!

PD: I don't know how to download the video on internet.

Copy of DEATH

INTRODUCTION

Hi, we are Ona and Irene and we’re going to introduce you our presentation.

We’re going to talk about different death rituals; tzanzta,  satí and Burials in the clouds. We have chosen this topic because we thought that it could be interesting for you because it’s totally unknown.

If you don’t understand any key word, you can ask us and we’ll answer. Anyway, we’ve adapted the vocabulary to make sure that you understand everything.

TZANTZA

The Shuar tribe was located in the northwestern region of the Amazon. Their language was the shuar-chicham.

The Spanish conquistadors named this tribe as a Jíbaros, that the meaning of this word was WILD, because when someone died, they practised the tzantza, and it’s about shrunking their heads.

When two tribes confront themselves, the winner boss took the head from the loser and he shrunked it. This process was named tzantza, and he did this without eating in any moment and totally alone.

PROCESS:

They first cut the head of  the person  with a knife, they made a cut on the neck to extract the brain and they  stretch the skin (pulled out the skin)

The next step was boiling the skin with some herbs that were used to prevent the hair fall. They do this during 15 minutes.

After, they pulled out the head and it was reduced to half the original size and they let it dry. 

Later, they sewed the cut made on the nape and the eyes and the mouth. The head was like a sac, where they introduced inside a fist-sized stone.

Finally, they hung it above the fire to dissect it with the smoke. The head was now totally reduced. They pulled out the stone and stained the skin of  black.

SATÍ

The sati was a social funeral celebrated in India. This ritual is about what happen when a husband died, the wife was burnt alive with her husband, but he was already dead.
 

There are different ways to burnt the wife:
   First, the woman was burnt taking her husband in her arms, or sat with him.
   Second, the woman ran into the bonfire while her husband was burning.
   Third, the wife burned herself in the bonfire.

All these cases were voluntaries, that is, because the wife wanted to die burned with her husband. Almost all the bonfires were voluntaries, but there also were some that weren’t  voluntaries, in these case the women  could dies by three ways:

   First the woman was tied with ropes  with her husband.

   Second she was drugged.

   Third the woman couldn't escape from the bonfire, because around the bonfire there   

   were men with spears, and if the wife tried to escape from the bonfire, they would kill

   her.

On 1829 British banned this ritual (at this time India was a British colony). But still people continued doing this ritual. The last sati was in 2006, where the wife ran into the bonfire.

The origin of this ritual is religious. Sati was Daksha’s daughter, and she was married to Shiva. One day, Daksha insulted Shiva. Sati, in honour to her husband, she burnt herself. For this reason, Indian people celebrated this ritual.

With this tradition, you could imagine how big the chauvinism there was, but today it’s still going on.

BURIAL IN THE CLOUDS

This ritual is from Tibet.  The people who were from there, had the tradition that they couldn’t bury the dead bodies. For this reason, they had a special burial. 

When someone died, during three days the monks sang songs for them. After that, the family brought the body at the mountain and cut it. 

As the family thought about the reincarnation, they weren’t ashamed of the body. When they finally cut it, some birds came to eat the body. 

At the same time, the family was looking at after it. When the birds had eaten it all, there were only the bones left. The family crushed the bones and brought it again to the little birds.

At present, there are some people who do it.

CONCLUSIONS

To conclude, we can say that these rituals are very impacting, as you could see in our explanations. 

If you had to choose one of them, which one would prefer?

Irene doesn’t like any of them, she doesn’t want to die like this. But I would choose the Tibetan one, because I think it’s a beautiful way to end your life, because like this you are more useful than in a tomb. 

Do you have any questions?