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.