Essay on Van Gennep’s stages and understanding a rite of passage in relationship to one or more rituals.
Wittgenstein (1987, p.14, Chapter I. Introduction) set a large challenge for anthropology that has yet to be taken up. After reading the Golden Bough, he argues that Fraser made a crucial mistake by trying to deduce what things mean. He accused Fraser of not understanding that practices signify nothing but themselves, and that the extent of anthropology could be to delimit and work out the practical structure of such tasks. For the past fifty years or so, anthropology has largely ignored Wittgenstein’s remarks and has built an anthropology that privileges the observer. It privileges the observer because it is only the observer who can read into phenomenon their underlying socio-cultural meaning. It is precisely this sort of reifying reductionism that we find in Van Gennep’s (1909) theory of the rite of passage.
Rites of passage present an irresistible and difficult focus for the ethnographer: they are constellations of compacted meanings removed from the process of everyday life. In the author’s own experience, they are also some of the most frustrating things to analyse. Presented with so many unusual phenomenon, the ethnographer asks, what does this mask mean only for your informant to respond with a shrug. This difficulty of compacted meaning may partly explain why ethnographers are so quick to ignore the phenomenon involved in a rite of passage in favour of reading it as a structural process. This difficulty may also explain why, fully one hundred years after it was published, Van Gennep’s Rites of Passage theory remains unchallenged in the anthropological world.
That said, Van Gennep’s overall structures has remained remarkably adept at matching up to all the rituals people apply to it. However, there should not be taken as a mark of its success. It one is to recall that the ‘success’ of Evans-Pritchards structural-functionalism (Kuper: 1988,…
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Tags: rite of passage, rituals, sacred, social structure, Van Gennep
