rites of passage

rites of passage In all societies, major events in the life cycle are subject to ritualized forms of recognition. Across the world, such events are celebrated in diverse and sometimes elaborate ways, with different cultures singling out different stages of life for attention. Where ancestry is important, as in China or many of the societies of Africa, death may be the subject of extended and intricate mortuary ceremonials, which act both to separate the living from the dead and to transform the dead from elder to ancestor. In others, death may be neglected and cultural salience given rather to marriage, to the installation of office holders, or to initiations into adulthood or into cult groupings. In these cultural processes, actual biological events are subsumed and transformed, even negated in the various schemas of culture. Among the Kuria of Kenya and Tanzania, life for both men and women is said not to begin and end with their birth and death but rather to begin in early puberty when they are circumcized and to culminate in dramatic rituals of eldership, which celebrate the achievement of a full life course, of successful fertility, and of wealth as evidenced in the growth of the homestead herd.

Despite the variety in the forms and meanings of such rituals, a certain unity has been given to the category by the work of the Belgian scholar, Arnold Van Gennep. His book, Les Rites de Passage, first published in 1909, has formed the backdrop to most anthropological work. Van Gennep envisioned life in society as a house with many rooms, in which the individual has to be conveyanced formally from one defined position to another. From this perspective, life is not a matter of gradual development and change but rather consists of a series of abrupt and ritualized transitions. Rites of passage, he argued, display common features — in particular, a definite three-phase structure, of separation transition, and aggregation. Initial rites of separation serve to remove the individual from normal social life, thus dissolving existing social ties and status. These rites are often mirrored in the opposing rites of aggregation, which end the ritual process and reinstate a normal social life when the individual is welcomed back into a new position in the community. In between these two contrasting phases are the rites of transition. This pattern, though discernible to some extent in all, tends to be most fully recognized in intiation rites, where it may be given added force in the symbolism of death and rebirth.

Of particular interest has been Van Gennep's identification of the mid or transitional phase as one of marginality or liminality (from the Latin, limen, meaning threshold). It represents, he writes, the point of inertia for the novices between contrary ritual movements; they are regarded as being outside society — untouchable, dangerous, sacred as opposed to profane. Sharing with Van Gennep a similar concern with social classification and the cultural imposition of order on natural and social affairs, the British anthropologist, Mary Douglas, has argued that the idea of danger attaches to any situation or object that transgresses or cannot be placed within the dominant schema of social classification. Novices, betwixt-and-between defined social positions, are inherently anomalous and likely to be regarded as both polluted and polluting. Often this state is expressed in strict rules of seclusion, of physical as well as social invisibility, in which the neophyte's condition can be expressed only in terms of ambiguity and paradox. Outside and opposed to normal social life, liminality is also given ritual expression in licence, disorder, and role reversal.

For Van Gennep the theme of passage provides one clue to the diverse symbolic devices employed in such rites. The ritual passage may be represented in spatial terms, by exits and entrances, crossings and journeys, and in the general significance attached to crossroads, boundaries, and thresholds. By extension, too, the term may be used of other ritual events that, like life crisis rituals, are seen to share a concern with the social recognition of time — particularly communal rituals that serve to mark changes in the seasons or calendar, such as first fruits celebrations or those conducted to usher in the New Year. Other events that also imply a dramatic change in social life, such as going to war, or periods when the community prepares itself for major religious festivals, may also be subject to similar forms of ritualization.

Rites of passage, which disconnect ritual moments from the normal flow of life, break the passage of time, representing it as a constant replay of opposed movements. Rather than inexorable processes of growth and decay, the ritualization of the stages of life seems to speak to the discontinuity of personal experience and the oscillation of social life between contrasting moods and phases. These characteristics of rites of passage have been seen to make them most typical of traditional societies and repetitive social orders. In terms of the personal biography of individuals, this gives ritual the formative role, as the essential catalyst in major life changes and the key to the creation of identity and personhood. To explore these aspects, one needs to abandon the simple metaphor of transition, bequeathed to us by Van Gennep, and focus instead on the idea of transformation. Thus life crisis rituals may not simply bestow or formally acknowledge changes in the life history, but in many societies have a truly transformational intent: the main and only means by which boys can be transformed into men, girls into women, elders into ancestors, the sick into spirit mediums, or princes into kings.

Suzette Heald

Bibliography

Van Gennep, A. (1960). The rites of passage. Routledge, London.

See also initiation rites; funeral practices; taboos.