Arnold van Gennep (1873 to 1957) was an ethnographer and folklorist, born in Germany and living most of his life in France, whose book Les rites de passage (1909) gave us the phrase ‘rites of passage’. He showed that the ceremonies marking life’s great changes share three stages: separation from the old state, a transitional or ‘liminal’ stage in between, and incorporation into the new state. Therapeutic Shamanism uses his three stages to understand initiation into Adulthood and the betwixt-and-between places where transformation happens.
Who was Arnold van Gennep? #
A scholar who worked almost entirely outside the universities. He was born in Germany in 1873, to a father descended from French immigrants and a mother of Dutch descent, and moved to France at the age of six. In Paris he studied Arabic, history and religious studies; there were no courses in anthropology in France at the time. He worked as head of translations at the Ministry of Agriculture until 1908, then lived by his writing and translating. He became a leading figure in the new fields of anthropology and folklore, wrote a regular column on them for over three decades, and held only one university post, at Neuchâtel in Switzerland, from which he was dismissed during the First World War, apparently for criticising the Swiss government for what he saw as its pro-German position.1
Later he devoted himself to the folklore of rural France, and became a leading figure in the study of European folklore. He spent his last decades at Bourg-la-Reine, outside Paris, and died in 1957.2
What is The Rites of Passage about? #
The patterns behind the ceremonies that carry people from one state of life to another. “The life of an individual in any society is a series of passages from one age to another and from one occupation to another”, and births, coming of age, marriages, initiations into religious groups and funerals are all surrounded by ceremonies “whose essential purpose is to enable the individual to pass from one defined position to another which is equally well defined.”3 Van Gennep’s interest was not in any single rite but in their order, the shape they share.
He applied the same pattern to changes of place: crossing a frontier, entering a house, the arrival of a stranger. The land between two territories, the threshold of a door, is a neutral zone where a person “wavers between two worlds”.4 He found the pattern too in the passages of time, in rites of the seasons and of the new year.
What are the three stages of a rite of passage? #
Separation, transition and incorporation. Van Gennep divided rites of passage into “rites of separation, transition rites, and rites of incorporation”, and also called them preliminal, liminal and postliminal rites.5 The word ‘liminal’ comes from the Latin limen, a threshold, and he named the rites carried out during the transitional stage “liminal (or threshold) rites”.6
– Separation: the person is cut off from their old state, place or group. – Transition: the in-between stage, when they are no longer what they were and not yet what they will become. – Incorporation: they are received back into the community in their new state.
The three are not equally developed in every rite. Rites of separation are prominent in funerals and rites of incorporation at marriages, whilst the transition stage can be long and elaborate in initiation, pregnancy and betrothal. Sometimes the in-between stage becomes almost a state of its own, as when someone is betrothed, no longer single but not yet married.7
Are initiation rites the same as puberty rites? #
No, and van Gennep was firm about it. He argued that “physiological puberty and ‘social puberty’ are essentially different and only rarely converge”, and that “it would be better to stop calling initiation rites ‘puberty rites.’”8 An initiation marks the point at which a society treats someone as grown up, which may come before or after the changes of the body. See What is a rite of passage, and what did we lose when initiation disappeared?
How did his ideas spread? #
Slowly at first, then very widely. The book met a hostile review in France and a warm welcome in Britain and America, but it was the English translation of 1960, three years after his death, that gave it its enormous worldwide influence, and the three stages became one of the best-known ideas in the study of ritual.9 The anthropologist Victor Turner took up the middle stage and developed it into his idea of liminality, in his essay “Betwixt and Between: The Liminal Period in Rites de Passage”, and called the person in that in-between state ‘betwixt and between’.10 The anthropologist Mary Douglas also built on van Gennep’s observation that the in-between period can take on a life of its own.11 See Who was Victor Turner, and what are liminality and communitas? and Who was Mary Douglas, and what did Purity and Danger show?
How does Therapeutic Shamanism use the three stages? #
As a map of initiation and transformation. In separation, the initiate is taken away from what is familiar, and normality is deliberately disrupted to shock them into an altered state. In transition, the liminal stage, “everything is full of potential, flux and interconnectedness. You are essentially taken apart and reformed, like a pupa in a chrysalis.” In reincorporation, they are welcomed back into society, transformed, with a new role and place.
The hunter-gatherer initiation into Adulthood followed this shape: it was “designed to dismantle the middle-worldMiddle-world. Ordinary physical reality together with its energetic layers: the realm of individuality, separation and mixed intentions, and the only realm where harm is possible. “If there is a hell, then it is the middle-world.” Read the full answer identity that someone had constructed in their childhood, and replace it instead with a new identity”, one rooted in Soul.12 And the middle stage is one of the betwixt-and-between places that matter so much in shamanic practice, the cracks between separations where transformation becomes possible. See What are the betwixt-and-between places, and why do they matter? and What does it mean to become a True Adult?
Has his work been criticised? #
Yes, from the start. The sociologist and anthropologist Marcel Mauss reviewed the book harshly soon after it appeared, objecting that van Gennep “sees everywhere only passages” and that his method was a ramble through all of history and ethnography, taking examples from every continent. David Kertzer, introducing the 2019 edition, thinks the criticism of the method rings true, since it was common to the anthropology of the time to pluck examples out of their context, but finds other points in the review to be misreadings: van Gennep never called his scheme a law, and repeatedly said that much in ritual lay outside it.13 His own words bear that out: “It is by no means my contention that all rites of birth, initiation, marriage, and the like, are only rites of passage.”14
The book also uses the language of its era, describing peoples as ‘semicivilized’ and the like, a ranking of cultures that modern readers, and Therapeutic Shamanism, reject. In Kertzer’s view, the book nevertheless helped move anthropology beyond a simple division of the world into ‘savage’ and ‘civilized’, by placing the rites of so-called complex societies in the same categories as those of so-called primitive ones.15
