600 words 8 hrs

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Tianyin Lu

Mr. Williams

Advanced Composition

9/9/2020

Essay 1: Summarizing Articles

Anthropology: Kottak, "Rites of Passage"

"Rites of Passage" is an article by Conrad Philip Kottak. The author is an anthropology

professor and the chair of the anthropology department at the University of Michigan. The article

is extracted from his textbook Critical Strategies that was written in 1998. In the article, the

author discusses the findings of a study conducted on the rites of passage from different social

groups. Kottak conducted a literature review to collect data mostly from two anthropologists'

works: Van Gennep and Victor Turner.

Gennep studied the way boys move from boyhood to socially acceptable men. Kottak

notes that boys were separated from the community and allowed to go to the wilderness alone for

a particular period (99). During the isolation time, boys would engage in fasting and taking

drugs. Hence, they would see visions that will act as their guardian spirit. At the end of isolation

period, having successfully completed the rite of passage, the boys would then be allowed to

return to their communities, and they were now esteemed as adults. In modern societies, rites of

passages encompass a broad range of activities, such as fraternity hazing, confirmations,

baptisms, and bar mitzvahs, which vary from one community to another (Kottak 99). Such

ceremonial activities not only involve alterations of social status, that is, from boyhood to

adulthood, but they are also characterized by changes in age, places, and social position.

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On the other hand, Turner studied the marginal time, the position between states, and the

duration that people left one region before they entered the next. From this study, the author

discovered that there are general characteristics of liminality. This aspect is evident when Kottak

states that "Liminal individuals occupy ambiguous social position" (100). During the rite of

passage, these individuals are not involved in social activities; they are insulted, instructed on

what to do, and humiliated. Liminality seems to be temporary in most rites of passage, but they

sometimes become permanent features of particular social groups. Moreover, it indicates that

religious organizations use liminal features to differentiate themselves from other groups. The

article concludes that the rite of passage is not individualistic but involves a group of individuals.

Biology: Morse, "Stirring Up Trouble"

The article "Stirring up Trouble" is the work of Stephen Morse, a virologist. The article

discusses how viral diseases are mysterious in terms of where they come from, how they are

treated, and how they vanish after some time. It starts with a shocking story of an Australian

tourist who got a mysterious disease that killed him when he had toured South Africa (Morse

101). The author indicates that it was later discovered that he was suffering from a condition

known as Marburg that was first identified in 1967 in Belgrade and Germany. The author equates

the virus with diseases such as Ebola, influenza, and AIDS. However, he acknowledges that the

latter diseases have caused many deaths in comparison. The article indicates that scientists had to

reexamine how this virus arose due to its reoccurrence.

Morse suggests that any virus that emerges so fast means that it have evolved de novo

(102). The matter is that the speed of evolution depends on genetic mutation. He indicates that

most newly discovered viruses are not new per se because they are commonly transferred from

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animals to humans. For instance, the Marburg virus is indicated to have originated from an

infected monkey, and it is transmitted when humans interact with them. Subsequently, the article

states that the spread of virus diseases is similar to severe tropical diseases like malaria and

yellow fever transmitted from animals to humans (Morse 103). The article concludes that

infectious illness has an origin where the pests have been successful in transmitting.

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Works Cited

Morse, Stephen S. "Stirring Up Trouble." The Sciences, vol. 30, no.5, 1990, pp. 101-103.

Kottak, Conrad P. “Rites of Passages.” Critical Strategies. 3rd ed. Malcolm Kiniry and Mike

Rose. Boston: St.Martin’s, 1998. 99-100