A rite of passage is the general anthropological category for rituals that mark an individual's change of social status, classically at birth, puberty, marriage and death, theorized and named by French ethnographer Arnold van Gennep in his 1909 book Les rites de passage. Van Gennep proposed that every such rite has a three-part structure: rites of separation from the previous status (preliminal rites), rites performed during an ambiguous, in-between transitional stage (liminal rites), and rites of incorporation into the new status (postliminal rites). The middle, liminal phase, where 'threshold people' occupy a status that is neither their old one nor their new one, was later expanded into an influential theory of its own by Victor Turner. The category is documented across an extremely wide range of cultures worldwide, making it one of the few genuinely near-universal categories in anthropology. This description is adapted from Wikipedia contributors under CC BY-SA 4.0; changes were made. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/
Facts
Typical RegionSourced to the subject's own accountGenuinely global and near-universal as a category, documented across cultures on every continent; the specific rituals classified under it are each culturally specific rather than uniform. 1 Documented YearSourced to the subject's own account Connections
Associated With
The Sunrise Ceremony is a puberty rite of passage for Apache girls entering womanhood.
The bullet ant glove ordeal, practiced among Amazonian peoples including the Sateré-Mawé of Brazil, is a male rite of passage into manhood and warriorhood.
Victor Turner developed communitas specifically from his analysis of the liminal phase of rites of passage.
Land diving on Pentecost Island, Vanuatu, is traditionally a male rite of passage and yam-harvest ritual.
The quinceañera marks a girl's transition to womanhood at age fifteen across Latin American cultures.
Scarification is frequently performed as part of puberty and initiation rites of passage in the societies that practice it.
The vision quest functions as a rite of passage marking transition to adulthood or spiritual maturity, typically through solitary fasting and isolation.
Studied By
Source Wikipedia: Rite of Passage
Sources
1. Wikipedia: Rite of Passage
Wikipediaopening section and three-phase structure
Rites of passage have three phases: separation, liminality, and incorporation, as van Gennep described.
opening section, citing Les rites de passage (1909)
Van Gennep, Arnold (1909). Les rites de passage (in French). Paris: Émile Nourry.
opening section
A rite of passage is a ceremony or ritual of the passage which occurs when an individual leaves one group to enter another.
original French term
the term is the anglicisation of rite de passage, a French term innovated by the ethnographer Arnold van Gennep in his work Les rites de passage, The Rites of Passage.
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