Ritual Thinking Tools
Why ritual? What do ritual practices and blessings mean on a psychological, spiritual, and communal level? Here you will find reflections on the role that ritual plays in our lives.
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[From Encyclopedia of Religion, ed. Mircea Eliade, Vol 12, pages 380-87]
Rites of Passage. . . . An Overview
By Barbara G Meyerhoff, Linda A. Camino, and Edith Turner
Rites of passage are a category of rituals that mark the passage of a person through the life cycle, from one stage to another over time, from one role or social position to another, integrating the human and cultural experiences with biological destiny: birth, reproduction, and death. These ceremonies make the basic distinctions, observed in all groups, between young and old, male and female, living and dead. The interplay of biology and culture is at the heart of all rites of passage, and the struggle between these two spheres asserts the essential paradox of our mortal heritage. As humans, we dwell in an equivocal world, for we belong to both nature and culture, as Claude Lévi-Strauss has pointed out. It is through rites of passage that we are able to contemplate, to formulate and reformulate, our ambivalent condition of animal and human. Biology dictates the fundamentals of our experience—birth, reproduction, and death—yet the ways in which we manipulate and modify these imperatives through cultural means are endless.
Tribal Societies. That certain physiological "facts" are as much cultural or social as biological is brought home to us time and time again if we search the vast, intricate descriptions of rites of passage in tribal societies. And the message is clear: men and women are not simply born, nor do they merely procreate and die; they are made what they are through ceremonies. An act of procreation alone cannot make a bride; a wedding must be performed. And brides who can neither copulate nor procreate can be made from infants; many years may separate betrothal from puberty. Sometimes, a female must be initiated into fertility by her society before she is allowed to mate; a girl's social definition as "woman" is provided by ceremony, whether she has begun to menstruate or not. Similarly, males frequently must satisfy certain social conditions before they are allowed to mate; for a boy, a successful hunt or the cutting of his foreskin may be required for passport into adulthood.
In rites of passage we are reminded, too, that the ages of a life are not ordained by laws of nature; most of the ages we acknowledge are socially or culturally created. As Philippe Aris has demonstrated in Centuries of Childhood: A Social History of Family Life (New York, 1962), "childhood" is an invention of post-Renaissance Europe, not a distinctive, universally recognized condition. Prior to modern history, a child was treated, dressed, and regarded as a miniature adult, without special needs or privileges. In like manner, adolescence represents a recently invented, rather than a biologically ineluctable, phase of the human life cycle; G. Stanley Hall established the concept with his book Adolescence in 1904. Since then, all manner of social agencies, commercial enterprises, psychologists, physicians, legislators, and educators have arisen to articulate and serve the needs of teenagers. And, as Margaret Mead in Coming of Age in Samoa (New York, 1928) has pointed out, the menstrual cramps and discomforts that American women regard as inevitable were unknown among Samoan adolescent girls, attesting that biology is not always destiny and that physiological symptoms may result from social or cultural conditions. To be sure, we often quite forget how complex and how numerous are the cultural templates we lay over our biological essence.
Celebration of paradox. Rites of passage embody paradox, the inevitable legacy of our humanity, vividly calling our attention to, and allowing us to announce and renounce, the most profound enigma of all: that we live out our lives suspended between the borders of nature and culture. This is the essential paradox, but other paradoxes are played out as well. Because rites of passage mark distinctions in an otherwise continuous life course, they celebrate and facilitate change or disruption of standard social categories, while at the same time they preserve them. A third paradox represented reveals the conflict between our aspirations and strivings for individual ventures, and our yearnings for assurance and sustenance from our social group. In actual physiological fact, we are born and die quite alone, unique and separate, but we also do so as members of a group, a group that seeks to preserve the continuity of its values and understandings, a group that therefore defines our birth, aging, and death and that reassures us that life is meaningful.
Hence, during the performance of these life-crisis rituals, societies may inscribe their designs both literally and figuratively upon the initiate, and in doing so, life's paradoxes are proclaimed, contemplated, and dramatized. The struggle between nature and culture is evidenced in Bali, where before a young man or woman may marry, he or she undergoes a tooth-filing ceremony, in which the canine tooth, the mark of the beast, is smoothed so that the smile is less reminiscent of an animal's snarl. The theme of disruption and continuity is enacted in certain African societies, where, as Victor Turner has described, an initiate undergoing male puberty ceremonies ingests a powder ground from the burned foreskins of previous initiates, thereby incorporating into his body the vitality and power of his forebears. And James Fernandez has called our attention to the interdependence of the individual and the collectivity in "Reflections on Looking into Mirrors" (Semiotica, 1980) by describing an initiation ceremony in which a neophyte stares into a looking glass until the face of an ancestor appears and merges with his own.
In the extreme expression of the interdependence between the individual and his or her social group, the initiate is construed as a microcosm of society, and what is enacted by or upon the individual is thought to transform the collectivity. Rites of transition performed for divine royalty—birth, marriage, procreation, and death—are rites performed for the perpetuity of the kingdom as a whole, and in certain cultures a king has been killed annually in order to rejuvenate and ensure the fertility of the land. Moreover, certain rites of passage, such as healing rituals, may serve to resolve social problems and to perpetuate the social order directly as well as indirectly because they treat not only the sick or diseased person but also the entire society.
For all that societies use rites of passage to instill their values and configurations in the individual, they also take advantage of these ceremonies to foster the arousal of self-conscious questioning, for rites of passage are also times of what Victor Turner terms "reflexivity." Individuals (as well as the society itself) may be moved to the edge of profound self-investigation and exploration: social categories are played with, inverted, suspended; social borders are liquidated, crossed, blurred; identity symbols are stripped away and affixed anew. Such play is facilitated through the use of mirrors, masks, costumes, and other kinds of novelty. Free reign of reflexive awareness is permitted, even expedited—but only within the formal constraints of the ritual itself.
Paradox, then, lies at the heart of rites of passage. The paradoxes and conflicts in our lives as humans may produce great anxiety because they defy our desire to live in a logically consistent and comprehensible world. Ritual exposes these paradoxes and accentuates them; tension is heightened and resolution is eagerly sought. But precisely because these paradoxes are cognitively or logically irresolvable, no actual resolution can be gained. But the familiar bounds and safety that ritual provides allow us to experience their truth, and thereby to discover the intractable parameters of our fate as humans. In this way, rites of passage not only accentuate anxiety but also alleviate it.
History of study. The structure of rites of passage was clearly articulated early on in the discipline of anthropology by Arnold van Gennep, who in 1907 discerned a fundamental tripartite form inherent in all rites of passage: separation, transition, and incorporation. Van Gennep noted that a person had to be separated from one role or status before he or she could be incorporated into a new one. He thus identified not only those phases of separation and incorporation but a transitional, or liminal, one as well. Consequently, for van Gennep ritual truly represented a process, and he thus stood apart from mainstream Victorian anthropology, which emphasized evolutionary phases and the tracking down of the origins of customs. In this way, van Gennep laid much of the groundwork for the modern interest in symbolic and ritual studies.
Building on van Gennep's work, Victor Turner has generated exceptionally rich and fruitful theories for the study of ritual processes; his works articulating the concept of liminality are especially generative and far-ranging. Through Turner's work, liminality has been extended far beyond its original sense of an intermediate or marginal ritual phase and has taken on new meaning as an autonomous and sometimes enduring category of people who are "betwixt and between." All manner of those who inhabit and cross the edges of social boundaries and codes—tricksters, clowns, poets, shamans, court jesters, monks, "dharma bums," and holy mendicants—represent liminal beings. Not only people but also social movements, such as millenarian cults, and social principles, such as matrilaterality in patrilineal systems, may be viewed as liminal. These ideas are developed in The Ritual Process (Chicago, 1969) and Dramas, Fields, and Metaphors: Symbolic Action in Human Society (Ithaca, N.Y., 1974).
What do these persons or principles have in common with neophytes in a liminal phase of ritual transition? The point is made in many ways: the symbols used for them are similar, emphasizing innocence, rebirth, vulnerability, fertility, change, emotion, paradox, disorder, anomaly, opposition, and the like. Such people, because they dwell on and between the borders of our categories, as Mary Douglas tells us in Purity and Danger (London, 1966), are designated taboo or polluted simply because they are out of place. Like ritual neophytes they are neither here nor there, and like ritual neophytes they threaten our orderly conceptualizations. Yet, because they are out of place, they are mysterious and powerful; and liminal beings or phases can also be, as Turner shows, the sources of renewal, innovation, and creativity.
The liminal phase also contains another universal and critical element. Turner observes that among the neophytes living outside the norms and fixed categories of the social system a feeling of solidarity and unity emerges, and this oneness, or communitas, also has a structure, although its purpose is antistructural. Equality, undifferentiated humanness, androgyny, and humility characterize this condition, and neophytes are symbolically represented as a kind of tabula rasa, pure, undetermined possibility—the converse of social structure, which emphasizes differentiation, hierarchy, and separation. Even historical periods may be liminal, transitional times, when the past has lost its grip and the future has not yet taken definite shape. At those times, the "subjunctive" mood of the culture prevails, and play, imagination, and paradox are encouraged, all as part of a self-conscious quest for the basic truths of the human condition.
Another structuralist interpretation of initiation rites is advanced by Mary Douglas in Purity and Danger, in which she seeks to explain the sex and role reversals so common to these ceremonies. Douglas sees them as a reflection of the usual social symmetry. That is, the impersonation of women by boys is a statement of symmetry that echoes a fundamental social structural principle in societies in which wife exchange between two groups must articulate the symmetry and equality between the two groups.
Mircea Eliade in Rites and Symbols of Initiation (New York, 1958) contends that the dynamics in rites of passage provide a means through which participants may achieve religious perfection. The concepts of male and female provide a fundamental structural complementarity in the usual social order, but complementarily also fosters envy between men and women. Each is fascinated with the special attributes of the other. Because rites of passage abound with sexual symbolism, particularly evident in cross-dressing and role-play reversal between the sexes, they allow the neophyte the chance to experience the usually repressed other half. Accordingly, the neophyte can then become the incarnation of totality, can then reach perfection, and can then transcend irreducible quotidian complementarily.
Some scholars hold that rites of passage function to underscore the social importance of the group or sex that is the focus of the celebration. This stance is illustrated by Alice Schlegel and Herbert Barry in "The Evolutionary Significance of Adolescent Initiation Ceremonies" (American Ethnologist, 1980), in which they show that puberty ceremonies for girls predominate in those societies where female participation in food production exceeds or is more important than male contribution. They also add an evolutionary scheme by contending that as societies grow more complex, gender as a classificatory principle recedes in importance, and fewer initiation ceremonies are found altogether. A further twist on the evolutionary scheme is put forth by Martha and Morton Fried in Transitions: Four Rituals in Eight Cultures (New York, 1980). The Frieds examine four critical transitions (birth, puberty, marriage, death) and find that they are not crucially linked to the success of social cohesion or of social operation. They also conclude that ritual may not be a critical element in the success of social groups, for they note that ritual seems to have appeared rather late on the human scene. The evidence we have for this are the flower-strewn remains of Neanderthal humans, which date from only about 40,000 BCE.
Learning and experience through ritual. Whether or not rites of passage, or any ritual activity, is necessary to human existence is a debatable matter, yet rites of passage do provide for and fulfill at least one crucial task: that of inculcating a society's rules and values to those who are to become its full-fledged members. Because rites of passage occur at great moments of anxiety (life crises) and because they even provoke anxiety by vividly calling attention to irresolvable human paradoxes, they provide an atmosphere in which the neophyte is rendered most susceptible to learning. Initiates are almost always separated from society; their previous habits of acting, thinking, and feeling are stripped away. Thus cut off from their usual ways of apprehending the world—their routines and their customary ways of communicating—they are placed in a highly suggestible state for learning. But how does this learning take place? How does learning permeate the various levels of consciousness and unconsciousness so that the person is filled with motivation and desire to become what he or she must become in addition to absorbing knowledge?
One way the communication of society's arcane knowledge is achieved is through direct instruction. Sometimes secret names of deities or ancestors are revealed; sometimes the mythical history of the society is recounted in full; sometimes special incantations or creeds are taught. All of these do much to transmit the store of esoteric principles to the initiates, and they are often encouraged, if not forced, to reflect upon this knowledge.
Yet certainly this is not the only kind of teaching and learning that transpires during rites of passage. What are we to make of the masks and images that incorporate grotesque combinations and weird juxtapositions of animal and human parts; what of the bold body decorations or scarifications; what of the driving, incessant beat of the music that accompanies ritual? Symbolic experience—whether in drama, poetry, myth, the arts, or trance—holds forth its particular kind of information, eluding words but nonetheless significant and real. On other deeper, less verbal, less cognitive levels, we are moved to understand something of our lives and our place within the cosmos when we enact ritual. Because rites of passage are performed—that is, carried out physically and mentally—experience—affective and subjective as well as cognitive—may well represent the crux of ritual. Unfortunately, for the most part, anthropologists have failed to deal with the experiences of ritual participants—private, subjective, psychological, conscious, and unconscious—in their endeavors to explain ritual, and this represents an enormous barrier to an understanding of the subject.
There are notable exceptions to this truism, however. There are some who have pioneered an examination of emotion and learning in ritual. In the classic study Religion: An Anthropological View (New York, 1966), Anthony Wallace presents the concept of a "ritual learning process," which essentially works through what he calls the "law of dissociation." That is, because the neophyte has been placed in a stage in which he or she is radically dissociated from past knowledge before being presented with much new information, cognitive and affective restructuring is facilitated. Wallace outlines the various phases of this kind of learning: prelearning or anticipation; separation (through sensory deprivation, monotonous stimuli, extreme physical stress, and the like); suggestion (high suggestibility associated with trance or dissociation, sometimes thought of as conversion or possession); execution (achievement of a new cognitive structure); and maintenance (through repetition or reinforcement), occasionally involving a resynthesis.
We find that Jerome Frank uses a similar paradigm in Persuasion and Healing: A Comprehensive Study of Psychotherapy (Baltimore, 1961). However, Wallace's and Frank's work do not seem to have been utilized, at least not systematically, in subsequent studies of ritual, and it is clear that a complete comprehension of the manner in which learning takes place in ritual calls for psychologically informed theories and hypotheses.
One that stands out is cognitive dissonance theory. Leon Festinger informs us in the seminal A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance (Evanston, Ill., 1957) that there is a direct relationship between the degree to which persons suffer for an experience and the value that they attach to the experience. The higher the psychological price paid, the more likely are subjects to pronounce it worthwhile. It is noteworthy that rites of passage, especially rites of puberty, may be acutely painful, involving as they often do tattooing, circumcision, scarification, cicatrization, and other forms of mutilation. Yet, the application of this theory has not been systematically applied to initiation rites.
Psychologists, for their part, have not availed themselves of the opportunity to test learning theories against the vast and rich ethnographic literature on rites of passage. True enough, there has been enormous interest generated for puberty rites among psychologists, but this attention has been limited generally to the use of psychoanalytical theory in explanation. Freudians, particularly, have focused on the dramatic aspects of puberty rites, seeing in them support for the ideas that Sigmund Freud advanced in Totem und Tabu (1913). In his "Oedipus theory" Freud proposed that the beginning of civilization occurred when an ancestral patriarch was slain by his jealous sons because of his monopolization of the females in the group. The patriarchs in turn punished their sons for their incestuous yearnings toward their mothers and for the sons' desire to overthrow the authority of their elders. In this view, puberty rites celebrate this moment in human history by recreating these episodes, especially through circumcision or other forms of genital mutilation.
The diverse and plentiful symbols of procreation and birth in adolescent initiation rites led Bruno Bettelheim to expound another interpretation of these rituals in Symbolic Wounds (New York, 1954). Noting that circumcision and subincision of the penis cause bleeding and that often puberty rites stipulate that boys must move through the legs of older men (symbolizing rebirth), Bettelheim concludes that male initiation ceremonies are thus forums for the expression of envy of the procreative powers of women. Circumcision is seen as imitative of menstruation, giving birth to new life, and extreme cases of subincision are viewed as making male genitals superficially similar to those of women. Envy and emulation are thus the key messages and purposes of male puberty rites.
Another psychological view holds that male initiation rites serve to expedite the resolution of Oedipal conflicts and to establish masculine identity. This perspective, represented in Frank Young's Initiation Ceremonies: A Cross-cultural Study of Status Dramatization (New York, 1965), further contends that in societies where the mother-son bond is particularly strong, elaborate and painful ceremonies are needed to vigorously and decisively break a male child's identification with his mother (and hence with other women) and to install him in the psychological and social company of his father's group.
Most psychological treatments of initiation ceremonies have investigated those of male puberty; discussions of female initiation rites are scarce. In The Drums of Affliction (London, 1968), Victor Turner describes the girls' initiation rites observed and analyzed by him and Edith Turner while among the Ndembu of Zambia. The rites express woman's ultimate structural dominance in a matrilineal system. The central symbol, a "milk" tree, with white sap, is not merely an emblem of womanhood, it also represents the value set on matriliny as the hub around which the whole society revolves. The rites oppose women to men as a sex before they reunite them with men as joint producers of children. The great aim of initiation is to convert a girl into a fruitful married woman. Other writings on girls' initiation have emphasized the bonding between females that occurs at these times; however, they describe rites whose main function is to communicate female inferiority and the suppression of female sexuality.
As has been made clear in the foregoing paragraphs, the literature on rites of passage is profuse and much research attention has been devoted to the subject. These rituals of transition and initiation have yielded forth many distinct lines of explanation: structural, functional, religious, symbolic, and psychoanalytical, each articulating an aspect of what these ceremonial activities tell the participants and onlookers. Many of these interpretations have gone a long way toward analyzing the multilayered meanings contained in rites of passage. Unfortunately, however, anthropologists and other scholars have paid disappointingly little heed to what these rites do to people. We need to know how, in fact, culture is transmitted—not merely as a codified system of principles and messages, but as an intrinsic learning process, embracing experience so that, as Victor Turner puts it, one's duty becomes one's desire. Anthropology cannot possibly reach an understanding of the transmission of culture, of the maintenance of values, without expanding its conceptions of learning theory and symbolic processes, unconscious and conscious.
Modern, Industrial Society. When we peruse the literature on rites of passage, we find, in addition to scholarly interpretations, descriptions (and often photographs) of fantastic, elaborate masks, costumes, or other body decoration, and while these certainly may be intriguing, Westerners may be quite thankful that they do not have to endure tooth filing, circumcision, subincision, cicatrization, tattooing, and the like. Still, the impression we are frequently left with is that rites of passage are elaborate affairs occurring in small-scale societies in which every member of the community takes part. What meaning, if any, do rites of passage hold for us in the modern, industrial world? Have we lost sight of our need to move people clearly and safely from one life stage to another? Is the safety and assurance that ritual provides no longer possible, or even applicable for those of us in complex societies?
Our society may be characterized as fragmented, confusing, complex, and disorderly. We put a premium on our individuality; we pay dearly, though, for the individuality that we so cherish. The cost of our freedom is often adjustment to life's transitions quite alone, and with private, not public, symbols. Our society is so multifarious and diffuse that we must entrust our lives into the hands of experts and anonymous agencies or individuals who care for only a small part of our human needs. We are born, for the most part, in hospitals, and we usually die there. Birth and death, the irreducible entrance and exit, become merely secular affairs, matters of the most profound emotional significance that are left publicly uncelebrated.
There may well be dire consequences for our lack of public ritual. Long ago, mile Durkheim made evident in his classic work Suicide (1897) that the lack of social connection, the unacknowledged existence, and the feeling of anomie may be expressed by the individual in the form of suicide. More recently, Solon Kimball remarks in the introduction to a reprint of van Gennep's Rites of Passage(Chicago, 1960) that one result of the strain of undergoing individualistic ritual may be mental illness.
Some scholars argue that genuine rites of passage are not possible in modern societies because of the limited, specialized, or attenuated social relations experienced in them. For example, Max Gluckman asserts in Essays on the Ritual of Social Relations (Manchester, 1962) that rites of passage are "sacred" and thus can exist only in societies where the social is also religious, where social relations serve multiple purposes and are charged with moral valuations.
But ritual is not synonymous with religion, and it may well be that religion operates more through conscious cognitive faculties than does ritual. The differences are informative. One of ritual's distinguishing features is that it is performed. One must engage more than merely cognitive processes in order to carry out ritualistic activity, for ritual absorbs and employs all the senses, and indeed it probably involves different centers in the brain from those of cognition. As Mircea Eliade puts it so well, one may become what one performs; hence, critical thinking may not be so essential an element here as it may be in religious belief. Rituals also incorporate paradox and conflict; problems of codification and consistency, therefore, may not be so relevant as they are in religious belief. Rituals are indeed "transformative" experiences, as Victor Turner tells us; and as Sherry Ortner observes in Sherpas through Their Rituals (Cambridge, 1978), we approach ritual with a cultural problem, stated or unstated, and then work various operations upon it, arriving at "solutions"—reorganizations and reinterpretations of the elements that produce a newly meaningful whole. Achieving the appropriate shift in consciousness is the work of ritual.
It is important to note that rituals are constructed—fabricated, built, created—for that indicates that we may then be able to create and provide them for ourselves if they are not already bestowed by our society. Studies of crises in the adult life cycle in Western society today (e.g., Roger Gould's Transformation: Growth in Adult Life, Louisville, Ky., 1978, and Gail Sheehy's Passages: Predictable Crises of Adult Life, New York, 1974) have highlighted our creation of various life phases and the various cultural and psychological problems that result from them. These works, however, have not considered the relation and importance of ritual to these junctures in our lives.
Those of us in modern Western society indeed experience numerous forms of crises and transitions: menopause, surgery, "empty nests," divorce, retirement. They are traumatic and anxiety-provoking, and yet they regularly occur uncelebrated. We do make attempts to enact rituals at several crossroads in our lives, although we usually do so alone and secluded. Burning an unfaithful lover's photograph, returning gifts from one no longer cherished, changing a hairstyle, and cleaning house are all ways to announce that one phase of life has ended and a new one is beginning.
We in Western society do not live in the same kind of world as do those in tribal or traditional societies, yet surely we experience the same anxiety and uncertainty at life's crisis points. And surely we share with them the same conceptual quandaries about life: that we are natural yet cultural beings; that our lives are marked both by disruption and by continuity; and that we are individual yet collective. These are the fundamental paradoxes that everyone everywhere experiences, and that rites of passage announce to us, instruct us about, and help us to transcend. . . .
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Eliade, Mircea. Rites and Symbols of Initiation: The Mysteries of Birth and Rebirth. New York, 1958. A classic work on initiation in its religious aspect. Eliade deals with the transcendence of sexual opposition in initiation.
Fried, Martha N., and Morton H. Fried. Transitions: Four Rituals in Eight Cultures. New York, 1980. A study of life-crisis rituals in a carefully varied selection of cultures.
Gennep, Arnold van. Les rites de passage. Paris, 1909. Translated by Monika B. Vizedom and Gabrielle L. Caffee as The Rites of Passage (Chicago, 1960). The essential handbook on rites of passage. Van Gennep, the pioneer in this study, laid out the three stages: separation, the transitional or liminal stage, and reincorporation.
Gluckman, Max. "Les Rites de Passage." In Essays on the Ritual of Social Relations, edited by Max Gluckman, pp. 1-52. Manchester, 1962. A useful commentary on van Gennep's Les rites de passage. Gluckman, a social anthropologist, discusses the social roles and processes involved in such rites.
Mead, Margaret. Coming of Age in Samoa. New York, 1928. The controversial study of the life of girls in a Polynesian culture.
Turner, Victor. "Mukanda: The Rite of Circumcision." In his The Forest of
Symbols: Aspects of Ndembu Ritual, chap. 7. Ithaca, N.Y., 1967. A detailed account and
anthropological analysis of boys' initiation among the Ndembu.
Turner, Victor. "Nkang'a." In his The Drums of Affliction: A Study of Religious Processes among the Ndembu of Zambia, chaps. 7 and 8. London, 1968. A detailed account and anthropological analysis of girls' initiation among the Ndembu.
Turner, Victor. The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure. Chicago, 1969.
Turner goes beyond van Gennep in exploring the liminal domain found in rites of passage,
where that domain exists in a number of different cultures and periods of history.
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