Italy: folk musicking https://stephenjones.blog/2019/04/29/italy-folk-musicking/

A 1956 fieldtrip to Hunan https://stephenjones.blog/2019/03/11/hunan-1956/

In Yet more Chinese wordplay, retelling some splendid subversive jokes from the commune era (cf. Hammer and Tickle, and the Chinese jokes tag), I explained the pleasure of creatively misinterpreting phrases that use the innocent postfix xing 性 (“sex”). Among them is the tired Chinese cliché “International Cultural Exchange“—Grist to Flann O’Brien‘s Mill.

So now here’s a party game that I devised as a spinoff from both my Catechism of Chinese cliché and Italian folk musicking—a kind of Snakes and Ladders:

The Silk Road
hours of harmless fun for all the family!

©SJ 2019

Players can advance along the caravan route by naming cultural features that Italy shares with China (and I couldn’t write the clichés better than this article). Go right back to square one for any mention of:

• an ancient civilisation stretching back thousands of years
• exquisite architecture and masterpieces by great painters
• Suzhou, the Venice of the East
• a wealth of pasta and dumpling varieties
• leprechauns
• kangaroos [Wha-a-t?—Ed.]
• Marc O’Polo (descended from Li Bai, aka Patrick O’Leary)

Female mediums https://stephenjones.blog/2018/10/06/lives-of-female-mediums/

Left: spirit mediums, Guangxi. Right: taranta exorcism, Salento.

But make progress by scoring points for

(leap forward 1,000 leagues🙂

• wedding and funeral laments
• mediums performing exorcisms (here, and here)
• shawm bands (here, and here)
• marionettes
• narrative-singing

(advance 500 leagues🙂

• accordions
• seasonal dance rituals
• Catholicism

(advance 200 leagues🙂

• fraternal [sic] relations with Albania, and a Veritable Cornucopia of white spirits
• Red Brigades
• stultifying bureaucracy
• deeply embedded corruption
• mafias and vendettas
• kitsch state media
• geriatric male leaders with dyed hair (see Burlesque-only)
• blithely resilient sexism
• emigration from the south
• Belt and Road

As usual, the winner will be awarded a small pocket aquarium.

Yangjiagou band, 1999

For more party games, see the Oxford comma and Fantasy Daoist ritual; and for another enterprise, here. For more Chinese clichés, see here, and here. And for the 2002 Smithsonian Festival of the Silk Road, click here.