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.
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 Cross-Tradition Connections
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