Rite of passage
A rite of passage is a ceremony or ritual of the passage which occurs when an individual leaves one group to enter another. It involves a significant change of status in society. In cultural anthropology the term is the Anglicisation of rite de passage, a French term innovated by the ethnographer Arnold van Gennep in his work Les rites de passage, The Rites of Passage.[1] The term is now fully adopted into anthropology as well as into the literature and popular cultures of many modern languages.
For other uses, see Rite of passage (disambiguation).Stages[edit]
Rites of passage have three phases: separation, liminality, and incorporation, as van Gennep described. "I propose to call the rites of separation from a previous world, preliminal rites, those executed during the transitional stage liminal (or threshold) rites, and the ceremonies of incorporation into the new world postliminal rites."[5]
In the first phase, people withdraw from their current status and prepare to move from one place or status to another. "The first phase (of separation) comprises symbolic behavior signifying the detachment of the individual or group ... from an earlier fixed to point in the social structure."[6] There is often a detachment or "cutting away" from the former self in this phase, which is signified in symbolic actions and rituals. For example, the cutting of the hair for a person who has just joined the army. He or she is "cutting away" the former self: the civilian.
The transition (liminal) phase is the period between stages, during which one has left one place or state but has not yet entered or joined the next. "The attributes of liminality or of liminal personae ("threshold people") are necessarily ambiguous."[7]
In the third phase (reaggregation or incorporation) the passage is consummated [by] the ritual subject."[8] Having completed the rite and assumed their "new" identity, one re-enters society with one's new status. Re-incorporation is characterized by elaborate rituals and ceremonies, like debutant balls and college graduation, and by outward symbols of new ties: thus "in rites of incorporation there is widespread use of the 'sacred bond', the 'sacred cord', the knot, and of analogous forms such as the belt, the ring, the bracelet and the crown."[9]
Psychological effects[edit]
Laboratory experiments have shown that severe initiations produce cognitive dissonance.[10] It is theorized that such dissonance heightens group attraction among initiates after the experience, arising from internal justification of the effort used.[11] Rewards during initiations have important consequences in that initiates who feel more rewarded express stronger group identity.[12] As well as group attraction, initiations can also produce conformity among new members.[13] Psychology experiments have also shown that initiations increase feelings of affiliation.[14]
Aronson and Mills tested the Festinger's (1957) theory of cognitive dissonance by having three groups read either embarrassing material, not very embarrassing material, or nothing at all to a group. Aronson and Mills summarized Festinger's theory of cognitive dissonance as such when discussing the rationale for their study: "No matter how attractive a group is to a person it is rarely completely positive, i.e., usually there are some aspects of the group that the individual does not like. If he has undergone an unpleasant initiation to gain admission to the group, his cognition that he has gone through an unpleasant experience for the sake of membership is dissonant with his cognition that there are things about the group that he does not like. He can reduce this dissonance in two ways. He can convince himself that the initiation was not very unpleasant, or he can exaggerate the positive characteristics of the group and minimize its negative aspects. With increasing severity of initiation it becomes more and more difficult to believe that the initiation was not very bad. Thus, a person who has gone through a painful initiation to become a member of a group should tend to reduce his dissonance by over estimating the attractiveness of the group." Those who read the severely embarrassing material perceived the group as more attractive than those who read the mildly embarrassing material or nothing at all.[15] Another study using mathematical subtraction tasks reached the opposite conclusion[16] but research using electrical shocks supported the concept that suffering increased the degree to which participants liked the group.[17]