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.
To access the Ritual Thinking Archive, click here.
[The following notes were found among the papers of the late Victor Turner.]
Rites of Passage: A Few Definitions
By Victor Turner
The term ritual denotes those aspects of prescribed formal behavior that have no direct technological consequences. If one performs Trobriand gardening ritual, for example, this will not directly cause the tare crop to grow. The "prescription," or prescribed component in the definition, is ordinarily provided by cultural tradition, but it may in some cases be a spontaneous invention of the individual. The majority of "religious" and "magical" actions are ritual in this sense, but the concept of ritual is not usefully limited to religious and magical contexts. Ritual actions are "symbolic" in that they assert something about the state of affairs, but they are not necessarily purposive, that is, the performer of ritual does not necessarily seek to alter the state of affairs.
For anthropologists—and ecclesiastics, for that matter—the term ritual always refers to social customs, traditionally sanctioned, but some psychoanalytic writers use the term to include prescribed and elaborated behavior that has been spontaneously invented by an individual, as by compulsion neurotics, for example.
The term rites de passage was first used by Arnold van Gennep in his book of
that name (published in 1909 and now available in an English translation). It describes
two types of rite:
1. Rites that accompany the passage of a person from one social status to another in the
course of his or her life and
2. Rites that mark recognized points in the passage of time (new year, new moon, solstice,
or equinox).
The term has come to be restricted (although I am not in agreement with this) to the
former type, which are now sometimes called "life-crisis rites." Typical rites
de passage in the modern sense are those that accompany birth, the attainment of adult
status, marriage, and death.
Van Gennep analyzed these rites into a sequence of three stages: (1) rites of separation, (2) marginal, or liminal, rites, and (3) rites of aggregation, or, more simply, rites of entry into, waiting in, and leaving the intermediate no-man's land. The three elements are not equally marked in all rites de passage; according to van Gennep, the element of separation is more important in mortuary or funerary rites, that of aggregation in marriage. The marginal rites, marking the period in which an individual is detached from one status but not yet admitted into the next, are most conspicuous in those initiation ceremonies that involve the participants in a long period of isolation, cut off from their normal social contacts.
The sacralization of these crucial periods in individual life is itself a matter of sociological interest. Van Gennep drew attention to the characteristic symbolism of rites de passage, such as a simulated death and resurrection, or a ritualistic passing through a door or archway (hence the term liminal, from the Latin limen, "threshold"). He interpreted birth rituals as signifying the separation of the infant from the world of the dead (or the not-living) and his aggregation to that of the living. Recent ethnography has supplemented his analysis of mortuary ritual by showing how it can explicitly include the aggregation of the dead person to the society of the ancestors.
To join the conversation at Ritual Thinking, click here.
To access the Ritual Thinking Archive, click here.
To receive the Ritual Thinking column by email on a regular basis, complete the box below:
