“Elements of ceremonial behavior were no longer the relics of former superstitious eras,” the anthropologists Richard Huntington and Peter Metcalf later wrote, but “keys to a universal logic of human social life.” In the century since, scholars have applied van Gennep’s framework not just to individuals but to societies in times of turmoil and transformation. Van Gennep’s observations were a landmark in the nascent field of anthropology. “It is to act and to cease, to wait and to rest, and then to begin acting again, but in a different way.” “Life itself means to separate and to be reunited, to change form and condition, to die and to be reborn,” van Gennep wrote. Finally, in the “post-liminal” phase, the “rites of incorporation” allow one to reënter society somehow changed. Next comes the “liminal” phase, a volatile interregnum that’s simultaneously disorienting and ambiguous, destructive and constructive, during which “rites of transition” open up the possibility of a new and different future. First, there’s the “pre-liminal” phase, in which “rites of separation” detach individuals from their earlier thoughts, feelings, and perspectives: the Old You dies. Van Gennep argued that certain universal principles underlie rites of passage across cultures and eras. How do communities shepherd individuals from the pre- to the post-? Birth, puberty, graduation, religious initiation, marriage, pregnancy, promotions, the seasons-we’re always on the threshold of one phase or another. In 1909, the French ethnographer Arnold van Gennep published a book called “ The Rites of Passage.” In it, he explored the rituals that cultures use to transition people from one stage of life to the next.
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