Superstition #19 Cleaning at Night

Title:Cleaning at Night

General Information about Item:

  • Genre and Sub Genre
    • Verbal Folklore: Superstition
  • Language: English
  • Country where Item is from: India

Informant Data:

  • Tanish is a ’20 at Dartmouth College. He is from Singapore and is Indian. He practices Hinduism. He is a Math major who likes playing tennis and fears the deep sea.

Contextual Data:

  • Social Context: The informant learned this superstition from his parents. Though he learned it as a child, he continues to hear about and practice this superstition in his daily life.
  • Cultural Context: Tanish explained that this superstition likely came from the caste system that has been in place in India for centuries. Especially for members of higher castes, it is important to be perceived as clean by avoiding cleaning at night.

Item:

  • Bad Luck Superstition: Cleaning at night brings bad luck.

Associated file (a video, audio, or image file):

Transcript of Associated File:

Informant’s Comments:

  • Tanish said that this is one superstition that he continues to practice today. He believes it is important to be clean and to be perceived as clean, even though he is no longer in a culture where the caste system is in effect.

Collector’s Comments:

  • I thought this was an interesting one because of it’s similarity to cutting fingernails at night. Both focus on being clean before nighttime, which appears to have both religious and social ties. Like cutting fingernails at night, this one could have a practical reason – cleaning in the dark would be much more difficult, and it would be easier to miss spots of dirt.

Collector’s Name: Mitchell Tang

Tags/Keywords:

  • Indian/Bad Luck/Superstition/Cleaning/Night

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