The Role of Rituals and Rites of Passage
Scott Larson and Lloyd Martin
Rituals of initiation are common in nearly every cultural and religious tradition.
Historically, young people have learned adult roles through observing, imitating and
interacting with adults around them. Such rituals of initiation as the Jewish bar mitzvah
and bat mitzvah are very important rite of passage ceremonies for boys and girls turning
thirteen years old. Many churches confer baptism, confirmation or catechism as rites of
passage to adulthood.
Likewise, female Latina girls were traditionally granted a rite of passage ceremony at age
of 15 called a Quinceanero, similar to the Jewish bat mitzvah. The ceremony began with
a church service and was followed by a very elaborate celebration where the quinceanera
wears a ball gown with a tiara, publicly exchanging her flat shoes for high heels. She is
accompanied by 14 couples of her closest friends dressed in formal wear and trained to
dance a traditional waltz. During the ceremony the young woman is presented to family
and friends as no longer a girl, but a woman. Such ceremonies became popular in the
days when teenage girls were expected to take on more adult responsibilities, including
marriage. Sadly, most teenage girls today lack any kind of modeling of what it is to pass
from being a girl to a woman. As result, far too many teenage girls are thrown into an
adult mentality that they were not prepared for – particularly in the areas of sex – through
a host of other more damaging cultural rituals.
Even primitive cultures make use of ritualistic events to demarcate transitions in
life. Primitive puberty rites symbolically and ritualistically enact the death of the boy or
girl, and the ensuing birth of the man or woman.
Elements of Rituals
Thomas Everson points out how rituals such as rites of passage are especially important
for youth because their cognitive abilities are not yet such that they can think
deconstructively. Their cosmos is still filled with the magical and mysterious. Rituals can
hold an almost magical sway over them, so much so that they become angry if the ritual
is interrupted or altered in the slightest fashion.[1] If ritual is important for youth in
general, then its importance for young people who struggle is inestimable. We (Lloyd)
noticed that many of the young people who shared our home had rarely celebrated their
birthdays. Providing simple rituals such as Christmas and a birthday party each year
helped create points of predictability and safety in what was often a dangerous world.
Alternative Rites of Passage
A friend got a call from the mother of her sixteen year old daughter’s friend They were
holding a party for the other girl and the mother wanted her to know that alcohol would
be available at the party. It transpired that the girls were planning to drink a bottle of
vodka together to celebrate turning sixteen –and the other girl’s parents were supplying it
as a birthday present!
When positive rituals and rites of passage are no longer mediated by the adult community,
teens are forced to construct their own. Initiation rites into gangs are one example, gangs
are attractive to young men who don’t have other pathways into adulthood. Other events
like, “The first time I got wasted.” “My first joint.” Or, ”The night I lost my virginity,” all
take on significance for a young person who lacks positive benchmarks into adulthood.
How else does one explain the fact that, despite tremendous public pressure and obvious
health risks, teens continue to be the only age group where cigarette smoking is on the
increase?
Leaving to grow up
The journey towards citizenship and positive participation in community is not a direct
one for most young people. Embedded into many cultures is the wisdom that children
must somehow leave their childhood community in order to find their way back into it as
adults and citizens. It is the responsibility of any healthy community to guide its young
through being involved in and mediating such experiences.
Arnold Van Gennep, an early anthropologist, identified three common stages in rites of
passage: separation, liminality, and reintegration. Separation means leaving the world of
childhood -either physically, or symbolically, and reintegration is the process of rejoining
the community as an adult. The term liminality refers to risk taking experiences that
occur in spaces outside of the normal rhythms and expectations that shape our lives, early
liminal experiences for me (Lloyd) involved a first plane ride on my own as a twelve year
old (independence) and, at about the same age, smoking cigarettes with my friends
behind the railway sheds in my home town (breaking the rules of childhood).
Liminal Moments
In 1950 Victor and Edith Turner moved to Africa to live among and study the Ndembu, a
tribe in Zambia. As symbolic anthropologists they were particularly interested in cultural
rituals and the meanings derived from them. Part of their work focused on how their boys
were initiated as men[2]. The men and women of the Ndembu lived in separate
compounds, and children of both sexes were raised in the women’s compound. As a
group of boys reached a certain age, the men - their uncles and fathers - would stage a
raid into their compound in the middle of the night, waking the selected boys, roughing
them up and kidnapping them. Then the terrified group would be taken to a secret
location in the wilderness. Armed with traditional hunting weapons, facing hunger and
real dangers, the group would spend the next six months hunting and providing for
themselves. In the evenings men from the tribe would come and sit with the boys around
their camp fire, teaching them the tribal stories and conversing about their future roles
and responsibilities. At the end of their ordeal the group would be welcomed back to their
village, returning with their own stories – not as boys but as men.
The story illustrates many of the essential elements of a positive liminal experience; it
involved some hardship and risk taking, as the young people were thrown together as a
group to solve problems and learn to work together as they moved through the stages of
group development. It also resulted in an intense experience of community that would
come to generate its own set of stories. The best trips and camps with young people
reflect many of these elements. Interestingly, we have found that recreational activities
simply aimed at entertaining youth (‘keeping them off the streets’) held little meaning
unless they were directed towards these other ends.
The core youth development needs are being met whenever a liminal experience is run
well; it creates belonging, allows participants to master skills, gives opportunity for them
to exercise choices, and grants the fulfilling experience of acting generously.
The interesting thing about Turner’s story is that the stories and values of the Ndembu
people were wrapped around the experiences of the boys, as they were guided through
their liminal journey by their elders. The end result was an affirmation of their belonging
and place. The community itself benefitted directly, each time a new group of boys
returned from their time away with new stories of their adventures and experiences, the
community was enriched as comparisons were made with earlier exploits and old jokes
retold.[3]
Rituals and Identity
Every culture has its own unique rituals and rites of passage to adulthood. When I was a
pre-teen (Scott), my family moved to a farm in Minnesota where hunting trips were one
of those rituals. Somewhere around age 13, my father felt I was ready to participate in the
“big annual hunt.” This was not for little kids, you see, and you could only go when your
father had determined you were ready.
Excitement made it hard to sleep the night before. But at 4 a.m. on the opening day of
hunting season, fathers and sons everywhere arose, put on bright orange clothes, and
congregated at one end of a newly-harvested cornfield. With the sun not yet poking over
the horizon, and steam rising from our bodies – thirty or so men and boys, with shotguns
loaded, prepared to begin the pursuit of the sought-after prize – a three-pound pheasant.
While it may seem a bit silly to some, there was something very powerful about that day
for me. And although I’m not a hunter today, that culturally-relevant experience to rural
Minnesotans, somehow served as sort of rite-of-passage to manhood for me.
Contrast that with Tyrone, a thirteen year-old boy in a Massachusetts detention center.
His feet could barely touch the ground as he sat on his chair. He was explaining, with
great animation, how he had another kid pinned to the ground, shaking. “I held a gun to
his head and told him, ‘I got the power to take your life, or to give it back to you... I’m
gonna let you live.’”
It was painfully obvious that Tyrone had never experienced a positive male role model,
and consequently had no idea who he was, or what it meant to be a man. In contrast my
experiences linked me back into a world of positive adult role models.
Professionalized Liminality
The need for our young to find their way into liminal experiences still exists today.
However it seems that they are more likely to be met by professional or commercial
service providers. Outdoor adventure companies, gap experiences, short term mission
trips, youth camps, and boot camps all provide liminal experiences for young people. The
best of them work at developing the potential of their clients, and the worst concentrate
on fixing their faults. But the thing they nearly all lack is a connection between a young
person’s liminal experience and the ongoing communities they will interact with back at
home. The young people miss out on having their connection to an ongoing community
built, and the community itself misses out on being renewed by new stories and
adventures. An experience in isolation may result in temporary connections between
young people, and perhaps to the goals of the program, but the young people themselves
have not been developed into citizens of their own family, church, school or community.
We gave something away when education was professionalized and we began to leave it
up to the people ‘who knew best’ to teach our kids. The roles we lost as adults were as
informal educators who had opportunities to link experiences back to the stories and
values of our own communities. The same thing may be happening as camps and gap
experiences become more professionalized, and the liminal experiences of our young
people become further disconnected from our shared communal spaces simply because
we have not been involved in them.
As in other aspects of development, when communities don’t provide youth with
opportunities for adventure, many will seek liminal experiences themselves. At the
healthier end of the spectrum, some seek it through travel, and (at the other end) some
by engaging in other forms of risk taking such as speeding in cars, sexual adventures and
recreational drug taking. Any of these activities hold out possibilities for experiencing
risk and belonging. Rather than condemning these behaviors, perhaps we should focus on
meeting the needs that drive them.
Any community developing young people has two challenges, the first is to provide
positive experiences around rites of passage, and the second is to become involved in the
process by visiting and allowing them to show us around, and by creating spaces for our
kids to tell their stories back to us. I (Lloyd) can still recall the harsh change of gears
when, as a teenager I went from the highly charged social world of summer camp, back
home to the same old routines and problems. It was as if there was a complete disconnect
between my experiences ‘there’ and the regular world I had to live in. There was no
community of adults at home or at church that I could really tell my stories with or have
my experiences validated by. As a result I sought it from my friends.
[1] Thomas J. Everson, Pathways: Fostering Spiritual Growth Among at-Risk Youth, (Nebraska: Boys
Town Press, 1993), Multicultural Perspectives, 8.
[2] These comments are from Michael Frost’s book Exiles (2006) page 109.
[3] From Lloyd Martin’s book… (insert info on this book that was recently published by Starr)
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