Rites of Passage: Van Gennep's Theory Explained

[00:00:04]hello my name is ian and today we're talking about arnold van gneppe's the rights of passage this is an excerpt the the full right of passage book came out in 1909 is passage and really entered into the vocabulary of not simply folklore research but it's one of those terms that has entered into the common parlance you have probably heard of a rite of passage it is a standard expression now but it has its origins in van gane's work this is an excerpt as i said it's taken from uh it's it was edited down by alan dundas for his collection international folkloristics and i highly recommend the book itself the book basically provides an awful awful awful large amount of examples that fill um and illustrate van gnapp's basic idea about the rite of passage prior to this work folklorists and anthropologists and so on had been interested in studying rights but they typically tended to um think of them individually so they would study funeral rights they would study wedding rights and they might even study them cross-culturally and compare the wedding rights or the funeral rights of one one society to another but they never sort of took that one step back and suggested or or contemplated whether the right itself was a thing whether there was like an invariant structure and so van gane really is kind of hinting towards what would later be called structuralism deep patterns that are clearly present in um uh within humanly uh human constructions of meaning and so what is this structure well what is this well first of all what's his basic idea the basic idea is that the individual exists within groups i mean that's sort of a given and within those groups they are accorded a particular status depending on where they are in their life and that life that status has certain rights responsibilities freedoms expectations and then they grow up or something happens and they go and have enter into a different status with different rights and responsibilities and freedoms and expectations and as they move from one stage to the other the uh group has these um ways of indicating that change because change is fundamentally a kind of a frightening thing and through some ceremonial practices or through at least some kind of performance that passage from one stage to another is marked uh it might be it it might be something that could be considered otherwise frightening and yet there is now an aesthetically pleasing ceremonial pattern that marks that transition it takes the individual away from what they had been living and towards another um way of how they will be living and so the structure what he just what he describes is um separation transition incorporation separation from the prior status the the the the small subgroup within the group as it were that um uh in which the individual was once uh inhabiting this transition uh this transition this period when they are neither in this original status nor have they yet to attain this new status and then incorporation as they move into this new status now there are rights that tend to emphasize one over the other uh initiation ceremonies birthing ceremonies they are much more about incorporation funerals they are much more about separation they are and retirement parties they are much more about separation they are much more about the departure than they are about the bringing in and then there are things like um first menstruation rituals adulthood rituals and so on weddings which are much more about the transition because the the person is really very much present for all three stages and it's the transition that is accorded sort of the the primary focus arguably all three um movements are present in every right but sometimes one of the movements is the the more emphatic one within a particular right so another term that he uses is this notion of um the threshold this this movement through place and threshold the word he gets the words he use is liminal liminus would be the uh the noun and liminal would be the adjective um the threshold the the entrance to a uh you know the thing in which you place a door but really the spot between two rooms the janus figure as it were and so um he will often use the words preliminary things up that are happening before one goes through the threshold liminal or luminary the things that are happening at the threshold and um post liminal uh or post luminary in terms of moving away moving having having moved through and now passed into the threshold beyond the threshold so uh we might also know the word liminal from subliminal in terms of something coming in not through the main entrance but underneath as in subliminal advertising and it's this transitional period that is that tends to be very exciting because the it's really the transition that is the most um daunting that is the pivot that is when one is going from one stage to another and that is when you are um not necessarily uh determined by those sets of expectations that are that are incumbent upon you here's a good example it has to do with like frosh week at a university or you know new student week or whatever the beginning of the autumn semester is called at your institution and that is a period where new people are entering into the group uh they are becoming students but at least this is the conceit they're not students yet there has to be some kind of movement where they have clearly moved literally and figuratively and in some ways like emotionally from their prior groups so from their old high school from their old hometown from their old whatever and they're coming to this place and they undergo some period where it is festive there is different kinds of food and food consumption there is not necessarily in a frosh week in the 21st century that has issues of liability and issues of administrative oversight but there might be licentiousness of some description it might be much more um uh sensory i'm trying to sort of dodge around a couple of uh potentially dangerous terms and even things like you know you were given a shirt of the expectation that you might be wearing your frost shirt every single day and in a way what they are doing is you can make an argument that they're kind of dismantling your old identity and rebuilding a new one rebuilding one that is transitioning you towards this new thing as a student and then the thing about the thing about rites of passage the thing about customs in general the thing about festivals the thing about all these things is that they come to an end because they are moments they are pivots between uh one period of relative stasis and another period of relative stasis and then a little a little uh blip so we can think about the various stages that a person might go through they go from being unborn to born and there is a marker that takes place at which point they are recognized as entering the group and that doesn't necessarily take place at the moment of childbirth it is often just a you know soon thereafter when an actual ceremony can take place he makes this point of talking about novangnet makes his point about talking about social puberty for example where basically the group has decided that at this particular age independent of actual physical development whether you have whether your body has changed in and you are no longer a child and you are now an adult whether you have experienced manage or whether you have you know started to develop um you know mustache or whatever marker you might have in terms of a an indicator of adulthood i'll say nope 13. that's it you go from this stage to this stage and especially when we start talking about perhaps celebrating these things and kind of cohorts um you know a group travels at this uh moves through at this particular stage so there's the ceremonies around the transition sometimes they happen at the exact same moment like marriage uh where you go you enter into a sort of legal contract and sometimes it's it's the the connotation funeral is another example i'm jumping back and forth but i'll get back to sort of the life cycle funeral is another example a person dies and soon thereafter but not at the exact moment of death there is a ceremony at which point that person is transitioned from being amongst the living to being amongst the dead when and again there's sort of magical practices associated with it and so you also have prior to it you have the period of the wake where or some kind of morning or some kind of sitting where the person is both alive and dead and that's really the transitional one the funeral is the right of um of uh ultimately of uh separation but you know incorporation into the afterlife if you were but this transitional stage the body is dead the spirit is still here and you have so many wonderful um descriptions of you know this person who is the spirit in this liminal state they are still with us they their soul has yet to depart but they will be going and so so they go and then of course we act differently we we enter into this it's not sensory it's not necessarily joyous although there's opportunities for for certain kinds of inversions of the normal order but um you know then it ends and the person is gone and the group moves on again because these things end they go from a constant to another constant so you have birth you have uh puberty you have marriage you have uh uh parenthood you have um uh menopause you have death uh that those might be sort of the sort of almost the purely biological i know marriage is not a purely biological one it's a social construct but that movement of being you know uh fertile in uh in in potency or you know sexual and potency to sanctioned to be sexual in terms of the marriage and the beginning of family and so on so it's that cusp between um biological development and sort of the social development that is immediately imposed on it in many in many societies uh and then we have these other transitions because um they're not simply bit rooted in biology they're not simply rooted in the um in the uh the human as a biological um thing ah i'm really good with the words aren't i um so it's not simply about biological development it is also about the the various levels of status that the social group might might have so we can think i've already mentioned graduation i've already mentioned or initiation we're going to talk about graduation as well we can talk about all these things where you are literally given some new kind of position and we have ceremonies we have markers we have ways of easing that transition from one stage to another we have all these things that are present and when a new one emerges when we decide that there is some kind of of um there's some something new that needs to be marked even if it doesn't have a precedent for it being marked before uh we kind of know how to do it because we have this structure so that's one of the things about the reading is that as you read the structure of the rights of passage or read about the structure of the rights of passage it gives voice to something that you probably already realize but you might not have had voice to it and once you do then you really really see the pattern around you this is something that you know innately but the the the fact that he is the structure is quite fantastic so we move through these various stages and we move through these various statuses and we're going to move from one to another so if we think of like contemporary uh rights that that are starting to emerge they're emerging in the past 15 or 20 years where um the uh things like um when people coming out or people transitioning uh we have this uh this idea of very dangerous and particularly in in heteronormative patriarchal sexist societies those are dangerous acts announcing a change in status in that way and we have ceremonies that are emerging that recognize that we have even if they're not necessarily ceremonies in terms of a place where one gathers we have social scripts that are that mark these things and so i know i imagine that ceremonies will emerge or probably have emerged but we will know more about them as they become more and more commonplace and more and more part of our of our vernacular uh but this is the structure that we have so um one of the terms this transitional stage again is something that we really want to pay a little bit more attention to because that is often the basis of so much it's going to come it's going to re-emerge when we talk about calendar customs it's going to re-emerge when we talk about almost any kind of ceremony and it has to do with that betwixt in between it has to do with that that um that moment that is most different from the ordinary and the everyday and we have this these periods of of inversion as it were of uh we normally behave in a particular staid pattern and at this period of transition whether on the part of the individual or whether on the part of the collective when the collective is gathering and recognizing and controlling uh change through through ceremonial actions it's at those times when a new set of rules applies it's those times as i was saying earlier when people are engaged in different kind of food habits different kind of clothing habits different kind of ways of being embodied we get this term the carnivalesque uh carnival uh i'm i'm describing a calendar custom right now because this is the language that we use but carnival is uh you know the pre-lenten festival carne meat flesh vale uh goodbye this is the farewell to flesh it's a festival of the flesh um in christian tradition you're going to go into 40 days of lent you're going to go into a period of fasting so just before yeah theory you eat up all the stores and this great festival of embodiment if you're going to about to be spending 40 days thinking about matters of the spirit why not spend a couple of days thinking about matters of the flesh so you eat so you drink so you wear suggestive clothing so you are not necessarily engaged in sex but you are engaged in being a sexual being in terms of dance in terms of movement it's a crowd event it's it's a it's a it's an embodied fleshy vest it's a festival of the flesh and it is what the thing that's most marked about it is that it is different from how one typically operates in the day to day and we and that's the the concept of the carnivalesque we get that from kyle bach teen in his description of the works of ravalay and carnival as it as it occurred in the medi in um gargantua and and uh as he describes in gargantua so basically the medieval forms of carnival this great uh subversive celebration that actually sort of you know one of the things that it does is it you know on a very functionalist basis it lets off steam it's one of the reasons that people are involved in many ways and other people's rights of passage in that it is an opportunity to celebrate it's an opportunity to momentarily take pause and focus on someone else um uh be be in celebration it's not my celebration it's their celebration but we are celebrating together because that is the key to the rite of passage it is focused on the individual but it is about the group it is about the the individual moving through the group the group recognizing that this individual is moving through the group and on the one step back the group recognizing that it is fragile it is fragile because it is dependent on the presence of individuals who shift in status as they go and yet through ceremonial purposes one of the things that happens is that the group as an idea remains constant despite the fact that its constituent members pass through it and so it is about the uh the the this person is moving doubly so i mean perhaps it's most exemplary when we see it in the funeral practice when it's like this is someone who is leaving but they are leaving us and eventually all of us will be leaving this group and yet the group remains because the membership keeps on being replenished it's a sad thing when we talk about death but think about graduation we think about the group that is not defined by the family or the town or whatever but by the university by by that context where we have this idea of alumni we have this idea of a student body that has persistence in time despite the fact that every four years when people graduate according to sort of regular schedules the entire body is replenished and that someone who is um gra who enters into this uh new in into this calendar year five years hence will be gone and there'll be no one who is present at this particular moment uh still present five years hence it's a completely different group of people and yet the group has constancy because there are ceremonies of entering their ceremonies are progressing and there are ceremonies of leaving and the group celebrates it in that way i'm not saying that these things can't be lame i'm saying that this is one of the things that happens and one of the reasons that they happen is that it promotes the idea of the relationship between the group and the individual and the individual in the group he has this wonderful section and i was as i was preparing the video and rereading it again because i actually reread it each and every time i i go through and uh do this i was struck and maybe i'm just becoming an old person more sentimental in my old age but i was really struck by it it's on page 104 and i'm going to read it in whole we have seen that an individual is placed in various sections of society synchronically and in succession in order to pass from one category to another and to join individuals in other sections he must submit from the day of his birth to that of his death to ceremonies whose forms often vary but whose function is similar sometimes the individual stands alone and apart from all groups sometimes as a member of one particular group he is separated from the members of others two primary divisions are characteristic of all societies irrespective of time and place the sexual separation between men and women and the magical religious separation between the profane and the sacred however some special groups such as religious associations totem clans flatteries casts and professional classes appear in only a few societies within each society there's also the age group the family and the restricted politico administrative and territorial unit a band village or town in addition to this complex world the living there is the world preceding life and the one which follows death these are the constants of social life to which have been added particular and temporary events such as pregnancy illnesses dangers journeys etc and always the same purpose has resulted in the same form of activity for groups as well as for individuals life itself means to separate and to be reunited to change form and condition to die and to be reborn it is to act and to cease to wait and rest and then to begin acting again but in a different way and there are always new thresholds to cross the thresholds of summer and winter of a season or a year of a month or a night the thresholds of birth adolescence maturity and old age the threshold of death and that of the afterlife for those who believe in it i think there's just something that is obviously describing what he is talking about in terms of the structures or the instead of an anthropological focalistic view but at the same time it also describes something that is fundamental to the human condition and we can just walk away at this point and be kind of moved by that the idea of life as a form of flux that is often in these stages of constancy this is who i am this is where i am in life and those categories might exist for years and then there are interruptions and all of a sudden we have something new and that is that is what life is and so again i now start to sound like an old romantic when i'm waxing philosophically about sort of the the the the beautiful sentiments that he's referring to but it's that there'll be existing groups and the group has a as uh is a fl is constant but it's fluid and what's fluid is that membership of the group the group wouldn't exist were it not for the individual members within it and yet it has permanence despite the fact that groups move within it because it demands permanence because it creates permanence through ceremony through recognizing change recognizing the pivots of its members and reaffirming that despite the individuals moving through it there is something to return to boom it's a wonderful article i mean it's it's a classic reading it is a necessary reading every folklorist you could make an argument that everyone in the humanities and social sciences should be familiar with this and is the basis of so much theory of so much custom it's the basis of oh the basis of so much uh but i digress or rather i go on too long so i've been talking about arnold van gneppe's the rights of passage my name is ian i wish you nothing but the best as ever my friends so take care be well and bye bye