Rites of Passage

Variously known as “life crisis” ceremonies, rites of passage, or by the French term rites de passage,this complex of practices includes birthing, coming of age, commencement exercises, marriage, ordination, recruitment into secret societies or military formations, accession to high office, and mortuary processes. In all known human societies, rituals of status transition are highly organized and consume considerable material resources and social energy.

For nearly a century, anthropological approaches to rites of passage have been profoundly influenced by Van Gennep's classic protōstructuralist model of the “tripartite” structure of these commonly occurring rituals, a formulation that has shown remarkable resilience and longevity in the intellectual history of the discipline. According to Van Gennep, and as famously developed by Victor Turner, such rites [Page 2023]commence with the radical separation of the person or persons being transformed, often marked through special adornment, locale, or comportment. The subject then enters into a special interstitial or intermediate state—in Turner's terms, “betwixt and between” conventional social statuses or categories—in which he or she is neither student nor graduate, child nor adult, unmarried nor married, layman nor priest, heir-apparent nor king. During this “liminal period,” the person undergoing ritual transformation is often subject to special prohibitions and precautions; he or she may be apprehended as especially pure, sacred, stigmatized, or polluted and may be subjected to pain, humiliation, and heightened risks. The person undergoing such a transformative rite is often, in effect, reduced to a subordinate or fluid state subjected to collectively imposed refashioning. This in-between period is often characterized by paradoxical or dramatic reversals of ordinary behavior, often involving real or symbolic violence, exaggerated humor, and carnivalesque elaboration of the lower half of the body; one needs, in effect, to step outside of normal society and socialized frameworks in order to alter one's social position. In the final stage of reaggregation, during which basic principles of social life are celebrated or reinvigorated, the subject is reintegrated into normal life, usually into a different (often higher-ranked) social role than that occupied before the rite.

Source: © iStockphoto/Israel Talby.

Initiation rites, among the most highly elaborated rites of passage, often emphasize the detachment of the initiate from his or her prior links to childhood and exclusively domestic realms by incorporating images of birth and death; they often involve the physical isolation of initiates, often according to principles of strict gender segregation, as well as practices of physical incision, quite literally “cutting” earlier bonds by rupturing the body's surfaces. Often, initiatory cutting is directed towards the organs of generation (the male foreskin, or, less commonly, the female clitoris or labia), signaling, in part, that sexual pleasure and libidinal drives are henceforth to be subordinated to larger, collectively regulated projects of social and symbolic reproduction. Such rites may, at the manifest level, intensify categorical distinctions between human and animal, as well as male and female, while at other levels blurring or transcending these contrastive schemes.

Their tripartite sequence, the extraordinary qualities of the liminal phase, and the bodily symbolism of radical transformation render rites of passage highly appropriate for dramatizing transformations in persons other than the rite's formal subjects. Those organizing, performing, or attending the ritual often take on certain liminal, interstitial qualities during the ceremony and undergo significant (if subtle or backgrounded) transformations and shifts in status. Rites of passage are thus nearly always collective enterprises that proceed upon multiple tracks, establishing important connections and distinctions among varied persons and groups beyond the proximate, central foci of ritual attention.

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