Rites of Passage

Rites of passage are rituals or ceremonies that individuals in many societies must endure in order to pass from one stratum of life to another. Some examples of rites of passage include naming ceremonies, initiation into adulthood, marriage, childbirth, and funerals.

Arnold Van Gennep described rites of passage, or rites des passages, in his 1906 book of the same name. Van Gennep discussed the significance to individuals and society of certain ceremonies or life events that act as a doorway from one stage of existence into another. While passing through this doorway, the initiate found him or herself in a dangerous stage or interface (in some cases literally) of liminality, after the Greek for “threshold.” Van Gennep further subdivides rites of passage into rites of separation (preliminal rites), for example, funerals, transition rites (liminal rites) such as initiation, engagement, and pregnancy, and rites of incorporation (postliminal rites) like marriages. These three stages of rites not only transform the individual but reinforce the validity of the social group as a corporate whole by its participation in the events, as well as by the transformé'?, desire to become part of it.

Victor Turner argues that if the basic model of society is a “structure of positions,” the liminal phase is an interstructural situation. During this stage the initiate is separated from the society as a whole by physical means, clothing, or behavior, as he or she is neither what was nor what will be. By analogy we might compare this to a pupa stage between larva and adult in entomologyneither what was nor what will be, but an inchoate form in between. It is during this phase that the individual is intentionally remolded into something different from before by rituals that can cause the [Page 1113]initiate to be made to look foolish (as in the Bemba chisunga) or ultrapious (as in Holy Orders), or in some manner is stripped of the previous identity and becomes structurally invisible. As an example, when one joins the military, one's old identity is stripped awayliterallyas such personal statements as clothing and hair are removed, the name is replaced by “recruit” or “private,” and one is subjected to humiliating public medical examinations and torturous training exercises. Eventually the recruit is accepted into the society in the new identity as “soldier” (or “marine,” etc.). By passing through these rituals together, the group members feel a sense of cohesion that may outweigh those of kinship bonds, as when age mates (those who have been initiated into an age set at approximately the same time) are compelled to protect each other even against their own kin, as described by Laura Bohannan.

Among the most often described rites of passage are initiation rites from childhood into adulthood, which Turner finds to be core periods in social instruction. In the modern Western world, this often takes the form of a driving license examination or the bar mitzvah and bat mitzvah found in Judaism. In other cultures these can be painful and dangerous genital surgeries such as the subin-cision found among the Arunta of central Australia, in which a boy's penis is split lengthwise along the urethra, spread flat, and bound to an object to keep it that way until it heals. One of the boy's incisors also is knocked out. Among the Nuer of the Sudan, boys between the ages of 14 and 16 who wish to become men must have a series of parallel incisions called gar carved into their foreheads so deeply that it is said that they can be detected on the skulls of dead men. Following the ceremony, the new man takes a new name from his favorite ox, and thereafter is known by his “ox name.” These men then belong to a named age-set of men of similar age who form a fraternity for life. Bruno Bettelheim argues in Symbolic Wounds that, at least in the male case, bloody rites of passage give men the right to take credit for giving birth just as women can. Women give birth to children, but men give birth to men.

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