Title: Testing the Emergency Light

General Information about Item:

• Genre: Customary
  • Subgenre:   Ritual, Superstition

• Language: English

• Country of origin: USA

Informant Data: Wyatt Smith ’19 is a 20-year-old male caucasian light-weight rower from Hong Kong. He is a long-time rower, having rowed competitively before Dartmouth, and was recruited to Dartmouth’s D150 Lightweight Rowing team.

Contextual Data: 

Social Context: Races are incredibly competitive for lightweight rowing, mainly because the team competes directly with other college teams and because all the weekly practices/weight cutting is in preparation for these races. As such, rowers observe rituals before or after races to bring good luck.

Cultural Context: The practice of testing the emergency light after practice is something that Wyatt created that helps him feel ready and prepared for the day. After observing him, several younger rowers started copying his ritual to also bring good luck.

Item: This item is a piece of customary folklore that focuses on the passing down of a ritual that is suppose to help bring later success in a race. It is customary because it combines the ritual itself as well as the underlying superstition about bringing success.

Associated media:

Transcript (5:15 – 5:40):

WS: “After every practice I have a ritual that I do where there is this… like um… it’s like an emergency light that sits on the wall, and in case the power goes out the light will turn on, and it has a little red test button. And after every single practice, I press that test button and it flickers the light. And I don’t know, it’s just some weird thing I do, but I do it, and if I didn’t do it, it would be not a good day.”

Transcript (6:37 – 6:48):

WS: “Actually, some guys have started doing it [the emergency light testing] too since I’ve been doing it.”

BC: “Oh really?”

WS: “Yeah, and it’s not weird at all. Everyone has their own little quirks. Um, so now that I’ve started doing it, I’ve done it for around a year or so, some guys have started doing it too.”

Collector’s Comments:

• The sharing and passing down of this ritual is interesting because it shows that certain traditions or rituals can be individual in origin but diffused and shared among a certain folk over time. It is interesting also that we can study folklore genesis in modern settings like these because it allows us to consider overall folklore parallels like monogenesis v polygenesis ideas.

Collector’s Name: Brian Chekal