rites de passage à l'anthropologie

The metaphor of threshold is central to understanding life-course changes in anthropology. Scholars such as Van Gennep (2011) and Victor Turner (1967) popularised the idea of rites de passage to account for cross-cultural practices of performing certain rituals to mark one’s transition from on stage in life to the next. A good example of such rites would be the initiation rituals which are usually performed around the time of puberty to mark the transition of an individual into adulthood i.e. the status of a full member of the society. Rituals associated with birth, marriage, death or even graduation are some other examples. Anthropologists have likened life-course to a series of rooms which are connected to each other through doors or portals between them. One enters the next room by leaving the previous room behind. Importantly, crossing the threshold is a moment of great uncertainty because it is at this precise moment that one is neither here, nor there. According to anthropologists, this liminal moment is dangerous because of the ambiguity that surrounds the status of the person doing  crossing or liminal persona. 

These moments are dangerous not only for the liminal persona itself (note that I avoided gendered pronouns here) but for the social equilibrium of the entire community/society. Therefore, all societies across the world have some form of rites of passage to facilitates the transition of individuals through phases of life. Van Gennep argues that these rituals are universally marked by three distinct stages: separation, liminality and incorporation. Thus, the first phase involves symbolic death of the person to separate it from its previous status in the society (e.g. as a child or an unmarried person) and the third phase involves symbolic birth to mark the arrival of the person in its new status. Following on from Van Gennep, Victor Turner has emphasised the importance of the in-depth study of the use of cultural symbols in the sets of rites associated with the liminal phase. He argues that among Ndembu in Democratic Republic of Congo, liminality in initiation rituals is about ontological transformation of individuals and not just easing the passage from one stage to the next. This is done through communication of the sacra which involves processes of disproportion, monstrousness and mystery. These processes destabilise given notions of the novices about their society and expose them to new building blocks of their culture.

Rite de passage is a threshold concept in Social Anthropology – i.e. you must grasp this concept in order any claim to being a socio-cultural anthropologist. In a way, it guards the disciplinary boundary between social anthropology and its cognate disciplines. 

One can think of initiation rituals in in parallel with classrooms our educational institutions. Such juxtaposition would be useful as both spaces are marked by crossing certain thresholds – symbolic or conceptual – that destabilise already established ideas and introduce new worldviews, thus opening portals of knowledge of a culture or a discipline such as socio-cultural anthropology. These threshold moments can create confusion and ambiguity; they can be dangerous too!

Opening the portals and crossing them has to be handled carefully. As instructors in higher education, we can learn a thing or two from how it's done in initiation rituals of Ndembu.

Threshold concepts may be defined as those that create a ‘new or previously inaccessible way of thinking about something… [and may result into] a transformed internal view of the subject matter, subject landscape, or even world view’ (Meyer & Land 2003:1).