Rites of Passage Oxford Handbooks Online Rites of Passage Paul Garwood The Oxford Handbook of the Archaeology of Ritual and Religion Edited by Timothy Insoll Print Publication Date: Oct 2011 Subject: Archaeology, Historical Archaeology Online Publication Date: Sep 2012 DOI: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199232444.013.0019 Abstract and Keywords Ritual in archaeology is usually explored as an undifferentiated kind of esoteric or ‘irrational’ action, opposed to utilitarian or ‘rational’ — a characterization that clearly approximates most closely to the luminal stage defined by van Gennep and Turner. It is therefore unsurprising that archaeological studies of ritual tend to emphasize ‘otherness’, heightened or extreme modes of expression and symbolic communication. Although archaeologists have become quite comfortable discussing ‘ritual’ in these narrow terms, they usually ignore the different characteristics and purposes of the rites at other stages of the ritual process. This article discusses rites of passage as journeys; rites of passage as technologies of person transformation; rites of passage, cosmic order, and classificatory schemes; power, sacred conquest, and rites of reaggregation; and themes in the archaeology of rites of passage. Keywords: rituals, archaeology, journey, transformation, cosmic order, power, sacred conquest, rites of reaggregation 1 Introduction: Van Gennep's Ritual Process— An Anthropological Classic and its Archaeological Legacy IN William Golding's Rites of Passage trilogy of novels (1980, 1987, 1989), set in the nineteenth century, a disparate group of passengers embark on a sea voyage to a colonial destination. They submit themselves to a journey that divorces them from the world they knew, entering a liminal domain of ‘otherness’, unsettling social inversions and dangerous ordeals, where each person is transformed in some way, before arriving in their new Page 1 of 28 PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com). (c) Oxford University Press, 2015. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a title in Oxford Handbooks Online for personal use (for details see Privacy Policy). Subscriber: Brown University; date: 18 February 2018 Rites of Passage world—a place of social order renewed, akin but different to the one left behind. These allegorical novels, which explore life‐course transitions, journeys of self‐discovery, and passages to new realms give some indication of how widely and how diffusely the idea of ‘rites of passage’ has pervaded Western consciousness. Indeed it seems possible to extend the theme of personal change through real or metaphorical journeys with tripartite structures (departure—other‐world/out‐of‐time experiences—arrival/return), into any context or genre of representation (as Hollywood ‘road movies’ demonstrate ad nauseam). Our present conceptualization of ‘rites of passage’ stems from the work of the Belgian anthropologist Arnold van Gennep, whose book Les Rites de Passage, Click to view larger published in French in Figure 18.1 A summary of van Gennep's tripartite 1911 and belatedly in Rites de Passage model (1960), showing some of the English in 1960, remains key characteristics and qualities of different parts of the ritual process as identified by Van Gennep extraordinarily influential (1960), Turner (1967, 1969, 1974), and Bloch (1992). as the point of departure for discussions of transition rituals. Only Victor Turner's elaboration of some of van Gennep's themes, especially in relation to liminality (1967, 1969), the idea of communitas (1969.; 1974), and performance (1982), have had similar far‐reaching impact on how rites of passage are understood. According to van Gennep, the purpose of rites of passage is ‘to ensure a change in condition or a passage from one magico‐religious or secular group to another’ (1960: 11). He argued that such rituals must be understood in their entirety and that all share a tripartite structure—comprising beginnings (rites of separation), middles (rites of liminality), and ends (rites of reaggregation) (1960: 191–2; see Figure 18.1). The apparent universality of this ritual process (cf. Metcalf and Huntington 1991: 30) suggests a single cultural logic for managing human encounters with the supernatural. Rites of (p. 262) separation dissolve society and guide participants into a domain where ordinary social affairs are excluded; in the liminal stage people find themselves betwixt and between heaven and earth, in the presence of supernatural powers, where social norms are suspended; finally, rites of re‐aggregation provide a way to reconstitute social order. This is not a process without risks; as Mary Douglas observed, van Gennep ‘saw society as a house with rooms and corridors in which passage from one to another is dangerous’ (1966: 96). Although there have been critiques of van Gennep's approach (e.g. Gluckman 1962), as well as occasional attempts to question the validity of the tripartite rites of passage structure (e.g. Werbner 1989), his model remains central to anthropological conceptions of ritual, repeatedly drawn upon for general interpretative purposes and widely applied in every imaginable cultural context. Some anthropologists have even proposed that all Page 2 of 28 PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com). (c) Oxford University Press, 2015. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a title in Oxford Handbooks Online for personal use (for details see Privacy Policy). Subscriber: Brown University; date: 18 February 2018 Rites of Passage rituals are in some way rites of passage (e.g. Parkin 1992). In contrast, despite mention of rites of passage in archaeology, especially in reviews of anthropological approaches to ritual or as allusions to practices supposedly represented in the material evidence, especially in ‘liminal’ contexts, there is no concerted discussion of van Gennep's ideas to be found anywhere. Remarkably, most recent general discussions of ritual in archaeology barely mention rites of passage at all (e.g. Brück 1999b; Insoll 2004a, 2004b; Bradley 2005; Diaz‐Andreu et al. 2005). (p. 263) 2 All Things Liminal The emphasis on liminality in the archaeology of ritual can be explained in part by the influence of Victor Turner, who extended van Gennep's model to encompass many kinds of ‘social dramas’ (legal, political, or religious), which all require similarly structured redressive Click to view larger processes to re‐establish Figure 18.2 The ritual process and rites of passage order and validate new in the context of Turner's model of ‘social dramas’. social and moral conditions (summarized succinctly in diagrammatic form: 1986: 293; cf. Schechner 1994: fig. 6; see Figure 18.2). Turner focused especially on liminal stages and their shared symbolic and performative properties: ‘milieus detached from mundane life…characterized by the presence of ambiquous ideas, monstrous images, sacred symbols, humiliations, esoteric and paradoxical instructions, the emergence of “symbolic types” represented by maskers and clowns, gender reversals, anonymity and many other phenomena’ (Turner 1990: 11). Combinations of symbols drawn from both nature and culture are especially common in such liminal contexts: a good example is the association of uprooted tree, winged angel, fairy lights, sweets, tinsel, and colourfully wrapped gifts found in many Western houses at (p. 264) Christmas time—when the moral economy of the ‘family’ is affirmed as transcendent over secular values and market principles (Kuper 1993). Reversals of fundamental assumptions during liminal states can also cause intense stress, forcing participants to reconstruct their understanding of the world: for example, the revelation for male Orokaiva initiates that wild pigs are not simply ‘public enemies’ and sources of food but also the equivalents of men—virile, cunning, and dangerous (H. Whitehouse 2000: 30). Central to these themes is the idea that liminality represents anti‐structure as opposed to the structure of the social world—a structure which is first dissolved in rites Page 3 of 28 PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com). (c) Oxford University Press, 2015. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a title in Oxford Handbooks Online for personal use (for details see Privacy Policy). Subscriber: Brown University; date: 18 February 2018 Rites of Passage of separation and later reconstituted in rites of reaggregation. In liminal conditions, according to Turner, a form of sociality entirely different to that of the everyday world is brought to the fore—communitas—where social hierarchy is overturned in favour of egalitarian religiosity and shared identity (1974). In this context it is notable that ritual in archaeology is usually explored as an undifferentiated kind of esoteric or ‘irrational’ action, opposed to utilitarian or ‘rational’ behaviour (cf. Brück 1999b)—a characterization that clearly approximates most closely to the liminal stage defined by van Gennep and Turner. It is therefore unsurprising that archaeological studies of ritual tend to emphasize ‘otherness’, heightened or extreme modes of expression and symbolic communication. Although archaeologists have become quite comfortable discussing ‘ritual’ in these narrow terms, they usually ignore the different