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Pioneered by the Durkheimian anthropologist Arnold Van Gennep (1909: Les Rites de Passage), the term rite of passage refers to ceremonies that mark individual changes of identity (e.g. childbirth, death) or collective celebrations of seasonal change (Easter, harvest). Van Gennep identified three phases in these rites: (1) separation, when the individual or the group is distanced from their former identities; (2) liminality, an intermediate phase; and (3) reaggregation (incorporation), during which the individual/group is readmitted to society as bearer of new status. Because rites of passage demarcate sacred from profane time (everyday life), their performance is formalized. Initiates are placed in symbolically subordinate positions vis-a-vis those who have already been initiated, undergoing elaborate ”trials” (isolation, humiliation, fasting) before they are accepted back into the community.
Van Gennep influenced two important twentieth-century symbolic anthropologists, Victor Turner and Mary Douglas. Turner (1966) explored liminality as a dangerous phase for the initiate(s) and the whole community, which both challenges and sustains social order. Douglas (1966) suggests that liminality negotiates opposing structural situations: her analysis of ”dirt” as a moral sign that enables societies to establish boundaries between social categories (clean and unclean, good and evil, dangerous and safe) echoes Van Gennep’s tripartite analytical schema.
It was noted that the concept’s inherent vagueness invites researchers to construct most transitional stages as rites of passage. Van Gennep also stressed that in such rites one phase may be ritualistically exaggerated at the expense of the other two (e.g. baptism as incorporation into society). This led to confusion concerning the classification of transitional rituals as rites of separation, liminality, or incorporation (e.g., marriage can be all three). The concept found various uses in the social sciences (e.g. in tourism/leisure studies).
Bibliography:
- Douglas, M. (1966) Purity and Danger: An Analysis of the Concepts of Pollution and Routledge & Kegan Paul, London.
- Turner, V. (1966) The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure. Cornell University Press, Ithaca, NY.
- Van Gennep, A. (1960) [1909] The Rites of Passage. University of Chicago Press, Chicago, IL.
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