- What is custom?
- Custom and tradition
- Examples of customs
- Traditions and customs
- Custom in law
- Mexican traditions
We explain what a custom is, its relationship with tradition and various examples. In addition, the most famous customs of Mexico.
What is custom?
Custom is a set of practices o habits that are acquired through repetition and perseverance. They may belong to a human being or to a society whole, and are part of its particular idiosyncrasy and its identity family, regional or national.
Customs are ways of behaviour shared by a community and distinguishing it from others. They are transmitted from generation to generation orally, through practice or as institutions. If they are established during the weather Enough, customs become traditions.
Among the customs of a particular community are its Folkloric dances, its forms of crafts, its popular music, its gastronomy, their religious rites and local festivals.
Customs can exist formally or informally, that is, institutionalized or free. On the other hand, they can be considered as "good customs" or "bad customs", depending on the margin of social approval that they have within the community.
From the customs it comes off (and at the same time they are part of) the local culture. Its weight can influence the shaping of traditions and even laws (Common law, from the Latin customary). It is a common practice for all humanity.
Custom and tradition
The border between a custom and a tradition is not always very clear. For now, traditions are customs that are preserved over time and that enjoy full acceptance in the community that practices them, since it takes them as part of its ancestral identity.
A custom is a practice that can be created and implemented through repeated ritual practice of your actions; while a tradition cannot be created from scratch, but requires the acceptance and perpetuation of a custom over time.
A generation may have a custom that is later lost to the next generation, perhaps because some objective conditions have changed or because the sensitivities of the new generation are different. On the contrary, traditions tend to endure and enhance the sense of belonging.
Examples of customs
Examples of customs are:
- Religious celebrations. Like the "Misachico" of northern Argentina, where family saints or Catholic images stroll through town; or the paradura of the Virgen del Valle, in eastern Venezuela, in which it is taken out in procession and the fishermen carry it from beach to beach aboard their peñeros, to collect alms and receive promises.
- Typical local festivals. As the particular way of celebrating the carnival of the different Latin American regions, disguising themselves as devils, painting each other with painting, or throwing flour, foam or Water. Or like the celebration of Halloween or All the Dead's Day, in the United States, with the children's costume to ask for sweets in the neighborhood.
- Body ritual practices. Such as the piercing of the earlobes of women in most societies at birth, or the custom of stretching the neck, piercing the nose or lengthening the skull of some African ethnic groups, associated with the passage to adulthood or with acceptance in the community at birth.
Traditions and customs
In various countries, the System of Customs and Usages is known as a model of practices that, within a social group, allows to regulate the coexistence and exercise a certain sense of order and Justice, despite the fact that it is not a formal legal framework, as are the laws contained in a National Constitution.
Generally, by uses and customs, reference is made to ancestral norms, prior to writing and modern law, which the community imposes itself. Depending on the legislation of each country, may be admitted under some figures of autonomy tribal or ethnic, or they may be outlawed.
Custom in law
Custom is also one of the sources of law in the sense that, since the time of Roman lawIt was already understood that the traditional and ancestral way of doing things had a certain character of law within a given community.
Customs end up begetting laws, as the Roman adage expresses it Consuetudine quasi altera natura ("Custom is our second nature"). Thus was born customary law, or customary law, which is a form of unwritten law, stemming from the traditional way of doing things.
Mexican traditions
Some of the most famous Mexican customs are:
- The celebration of the day of the dead.In which food and drink are provided to relatives who have already disappeared, under the premise that they have been given a night to return to the world of the living and visit their loved ones. This celebration involves typical gastronomy and decoration.
- The blessing of tamales. Which is carried out during their cooking, as a way of entrusting them to God, since due to their preparation method it will not be possible to know if they have become bad (lumpy, cut) until the end. For the same reasons, it is advisable not to make tamales when in a bad mood, because the food is contagious and gets "tantrum".
- The piñatas. Tradition shared with others nations Latin American, they are cardboard figures stuffed with candies or small souvenirs that are hung from a rope on children's birthdays, so that the children beat them with a broomstick until the content is released and distributed.
- The mariachis and the serenade. Typical custom of central Mexico, in which a lover dedicates his girlfriend music live on a special occasion, especially romantic songs (rancheras), accompanied by a mariachi band, who wear clothes that are reminiscent of the dress of the charros during the Mexican Revolution.