Arnold van Gennep

Arnold van Gennep (1873-1957) was a French ethnographer and folklorist, born in Germany to a Dutch father and French mother, who is best remembered for coining the phrase 'rites of passage' in his 1909 book Les rites de passage. He identified a recurring tripartite structure in rituals that mark a person's movement from one social status or life stage to another, made up of separation, transition, and incorporation, and he introduced the concept of 'liminality' to describe the ambiguous, threshold-like middle phase. Unlike many of his contemporaries, van Gennep worked largely outside the university system, and he is also considered the founder of folklore studies in France. This description is adapted from Wikipedia contributors under CC BY-SA 4.0; changes were made. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/