Main content
10 Intimate Rituals of Love, Life and Death
1. Painted Protection
In the Brazilian Amazon, 19 year-old Irenekwa cradles her first child. He’s painted with black dye made from the genipe fruit as an expression of love, to strengthen him, and to protect him from the spirits – according to Kayapo belief, it’s feared the ancestor spirits could steal him away from the land of the living.
2. Naki Sumo
In this 400 year-old Japanese ritual, parents hand over their babies to professional sumo wrestlers, who compete to make them cry in the belief that a baby’s cry scares away demons and crying babies grow fast.
3. Long Horn Miao Love
In China, older girls of the Long Horn Miao people wear headdresses that include their ancestor’s hair to look beautiful for the annual match-making festivities. Younger girls dress up too and pose for a selfie.
4. Moped Romance
For more than a thousand years, teenage boys of the Long Horn Miao people in the mountains of Southwest China have travelled to meet eligible girls in neighbouring villages during an annual matchmaking ritual. They once journeyed on foot, but these days it’s easier by moped.
5. Taking a Life
For an Inuit boy to become recognised as a hunter by his community, he must stalk and shoot a seal on the sea ice. For this rite of passage, he wears white for camouflage and stops still if the seal looks up, only creeping forward again when it looks away.
6. A Woman Now
In Papua New Guinea, Rose has completed an extreme initiation ritual, in which her back was scarred with hundreds of cuts to resemble crocodile scales. Both young men and young women of Kaningara can choose to go through this brutal rite of passage into adulthood.
7. A Sahara Wedding
Abdullah and Azahara both lead modern, urban lives, but they chose to marry according to ancient Tuareg tradition in the desert. The groom is veiled, not the bride, and they spend their wedding night in a specially constructed nuptial tent.
8. Death Duties
Agustina Losong Bunga’allo is a widow who has lived alongside the embalmed body of her husband for 18 months prior to his elaborate funeral. For the Torajan people of Indonesia, the moment of death is thought to come only when the body leaves the family home. The funeral cost £170,000 – an essential cost to give her husband status in the afterlife.
9. Hi-Tech Afterlife
Japan’s Bansho-ji temple is a 500 year-old Buddhist shrine. Inside it’s a hi-tech, computer-controlled cemetery, offering a state-of-the-art environment in which to honour the dead. Behind every one of the 3000 neon Buddhas is a small compartment bearing the ashes of a loved one.
10. Rising from the Grave
In the Ma’nene ritual, Torajan families raise their loved ones from the grave to tend to them, remember them and introduce them to new relatives who have been born since their death. Two men pose for a family picture with their relative who’s been dead for fifteen years. Increasingly these images are posted on social media so that distant family members can feel part of this ancient ritual. The body is given new wrappings and placed back in the tomb.
