Rites of Passage

Rites of passage mark a move from one role to another. Birth, coming of age, marriage, death, induction into a group. Some are mostly symbolic. Others put a real obstacle in front of the person, and the new role only counts if they get past it.

Anthropologists paid attention to these rituals because they do two jobs at once. They tell the group what it believes, and they tell the person what just changed for them. The second job is the one I care about for mentoring. A kid who has been through something hard and named tends to walk steadier afterward.

Most of us who work with young people already build small versions of this without calling it that. A first solo trip, a hard hike, a public performance. Naming the pattern helps. When I plan one on purpose, I get more out of it than when I stumble into it.

Arnold van Gennep gave the pattern its name. In “The Rites of Passage” (1909) he described separation, a middle stretch, and return. You leave the old role, go through something disorienting, and come back recognized as someone new. The middle needs symbols and structure to hold it together. It also needs something genuinely at stake. Without a chance of failure, the change doesn’t stick.

Victor Turner picked up the middle stretch and gave it a name: liminality. Normal rules are suspended there. Rank and routine drop away, and people get to try on other ways of being. That openness is useful and unnerving. Old identity is gone, new identity isn’t formed yet.

Turner also pointed at the people who hold the container, the ritual elders. They set the boundaries, keep it safe enough, and walk participants through. He noticed something else too. People who go through this together stay bonded. Shared disorientation does that.

I see a clear overlap with Dabrowski’s theory of positive disintegration. A well-built rite is a guided loop around the growth spiral. Separation breaks up old certainties, the way unilevel disintegration does. The liminal middle matches multilevel disintegration, ambiguous and searching. Return matches reintegration, with a more settled sense of self. Structure and company make the loop survivable.

van Gennep thought modern society had lost the ability to do this. Too fragmented and rational, he argued, back in the 1910s, to pull off shared ritual. I read that alongside Dabrowski’s claim that most people stay at a unilevel level. Same observation from two directions.

Turner disagreed, and so do I. We can still build these things. The alternative is more kids stuck in The Unilevel Loop of Increasingly Uncomfortable Stagnation. We mostly choose not to do the work.

What we build instead is usually thinner. Schools and clubs keep the certificate at the end and skip the middle. No risk, no strangeness, no symbols that stick in memory. Turner called these copies liminoid. They look like initiations. They hand out the badge. They rarely change anyone.

The fix isn’t to copy old societies literally. Nobody needs to send teenagers into the woods for months or make graduation hinge on beating a teacher in a sword duel. The fix is smaller: pick a real challenge, mark leaving and return clearly, and let an adult the kids trust hold the edges. I think of the elder role that way, less instructor, more guide who stays put while things get uncomfortable.