Adichie's short story collection, The Thing Around Your Neck, is a powerful testament to Nigerian culture that resonates with every Nigerian in her home country origin and in America, it explores the idea of ​​faith and religious expression among well-educated "Americanized" Nigerians, in relation to the long-established conventions of religious practice in traditional Nigerian culture. Stories “A Private Experience,” “Ghosts,” and “The Shivering” characterize the attempts of Americanized Nigerians to understand the role of faith, superstition, and expression of religion in their lives. Say No to Plagiarism Get a. custom essay on “Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned.” In all three stories, the protagonists are well-educated or pursuing higher education and struggle to perceive their people's religious traditions as anything but archaic. Like the professor in “Ghosts”, they are “Western”. educated” and “[are] supposed to have armed themselves with sufficient knowledge to laugh indulgently at the ways of [their] people.” (57) The retired professor describes the superstitious practice of collecting handfuls of sand from the ground and throwing it on a presumed dead person when he meets Ikenna Okoro in "The Shivering", Ukamaka (who is working on his thesis at Princeton); considers Chinedu's "Nigerian Pentecostal method" of "bloodying and binding" in prayer to be unnecessary and pugilistic (143); Chika, in "A Private Experience", mentally refutes the Hausa woman's perception of riots as evil by relying on her sister's academic understanding that "Riots don't happen in a vacuum." (48) Poorer and less educated people are described as more spiritually connected to their faith and superstitions than their scholastic counterparts. For example, the Hausa woman's fragmented sentences, the description of her attire - “...a flimsy pink and black scarf, with a pink and black scarf. the garish beauty of cheap things” – and her activity in the onion trade indicate that she is disadvantaged (44). During their meeting, Chika wonders if the Hausa woman's mind "is big enough to understand" terms and terms. concepts that she so easily attributes to the forces of good and evil. (48) She dutifully performs her prayer ritual for their safety while Chika sits and thinks about how to rationalize what is happening to her. The professor describes the curses of “ragged men.” who were grouped under the flamboyant" - how they energetically curse the vice-chancellor, whom they accused of stealing everyone's pension money - and compare them to street vendors, conjuring up the image of men robust, people very similar to the Hausa woman, making a small living selling goods in the streets. (58) These “modernized” characters exist in a class distinct from the poorer and less educated people and are therefore separated from the beliefs their people have always held. There are multiple references to America, or "Americanized" people, seen as "sterile" and restricted in religious expression – not just in faith, but in practice. (67) Perhaps due to their assimilation into a modernized culture, Adichie's protagonists demonstrate the circumspect distance they have been taught toward religion; they approach theological ideas with cynicism and the polite coldness of skeptics. Guarded by the academic world, they have lost contact with the doctrines of.