A special ritual marking a persons transition from one role to another is called a

Rites of Passage

People throughout the world have heightened emotions during times of major life changes.  These stressful changes may be physiological or social in nature.  They are usually connected with personal transitions between important stages that occur during our lives.  These transitions are generally emotionally charged--they are life crises.  Most cultures consider the important transitions to be birth, the onset of puberty, marriage, life threatening illness or injury, and finally death.  Graduation from school, divorce, and retirement at the end of a work life are also major transitions in modern large-scale societies.

During the early 20th century, the Belgian anthropologist, Arnold Van Gennep, observed that all cultures have prescribed ways for an individual and society to deal with these emotion charged situations.  They have ritual ceremonies intended to mark the transition from one phase of life to another.  Van Gennep called these ceremonies rites of passage

Rites of passage in many cultures are used to mark the socially recognized transition to sexual maturity.  Among some of the indigenous societies of Africa and Australia, intentionally painful genital surgery has been an integral part of such rites of passage.  For boys, this usually involves circumcision

Many Native American societies publicly celebrated a girl's first menses.  For instance, the parents of girls among the Luise�o

While boys do not experience such clear physiological markers of transition to adulthood as menstruation, their rites of passage to this new status in some cultures are more severe than for girls.  Among the cattle herding Barabaig

NOTE:  Over the last several decades, major women's rights organizations in the Western World have focused attention on eliminating clitoridectomy and infibulation in Africa, the Near East, and among immigrants from those areas.  In order to demonize these cultural practices, they refer to them as "genital mutilation" and usually insist that it is violence against women done as part of the male repression and control of women.  The latter assertion fits Moslem dominated countries more than the non-Moslem sub-Saharan African societies that follow these practices.  The reality in many non-Moslem African societies is that the surgery is performed by older women and is an integral part of the initiation of girls into the world of women.  Men usually are not allowed to be involved in anyway.  Continued political pressure from the Feminist Majority Foundation, the National Organization for Women (NOW), and other groups has resulted in many Western governments and the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) adopting as an important goal the global repression of clitoridectomy and infibulation.  Some indigenous African women's organizations have responded angrily.  Most notably, a Masai

This page was last updated on Monday, January 08, 2007.
Copyright � 2002-2007 by Dennis O'Neil. All rights reserved.
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What is the name anthropologists give to a ritual in which a person enters the ritual as one category of person in society?

What is a ritual quizlet?

When a sacred item or symbol is removed from its special place or is duplicated in mass quantities it becomes profane as a result of?

Which of the following is one of the three distinct stages of gift giving rituals?