Rites of Passage

Rites of passage is a concept introduced by the anthropologist Arnold van Gennep in his 1909 book Les Rites de Passage, describing the ceremonies many cultures use to mark an individual's transition from one life stage or social status to another, such as birth, the passage into adulthood, marriage or death. Van Gennep argued that such rites, despite their wide cultural variation in specific content, share a common underlying three-part structure: a phase of separation, in which the individual is symbolically removed from their previous social status or everyday life; a transitional, or liminal, phase, in which the individual exists in an ambiguous state, no longer holding their old status but not yet having taken on the new one; and a phase of incorporation, in which the individual is formally reintegrated into society under their new status, often marked by a distinct ceremony or public recognition. Van Gennep's three-phase model became a foundational framework within anthropology for the comparative study of ritual, and his concept of the transitional, liminal phase in particular was taken up decades later by the anthropologist Victor Turner, who developed it into an extensive theory of liminality and the social bonds that can form among people who pass through it together. Rites of passage remains one of the most widely applied concepts in the anthropological study of ritual and the life course.