The 31st of October

Halloween. The one time in the year where kids of all ages all around the country dress up in various costumes. The one time where parents actually allow their kids to a stranger’s door begging for candy. This image reveals exactly that. An astronaut, a lion, a witch, a devil…the list goes on and on. Each child is carrying a basket, for candy of course. Yet, the interesting idea to point out here is most of the kids probably don’t know what or even when Halloween originated. As children, they are mostly just concerned, for the large amount of candy that they will soon acquire. This quite simply exhibits praxis, a customary or accepted practice. In our culture today, it is a naturally accepted idea that on the night of October 31^st kids put on their scary, cute, or even funny costume and travel door to door for candy. Our culture doesn’t question the practices of Halloween, we just “roll with it”. This may be one of the reasons we are considered as docile bodies. According to Susan Bordo, docile bodies are bodies whose forces and energies are habituated to external regulation, subjection, transformation...”(166). We are governed by our environment, our culture. As a result, some may even say we are the products of our culture. As these children in the image exhibit, we sometimes perform acts which we may not know the reason behind, yet only know that the rest of the culture is doing the same.