Rites of Passage
People throughout the world have heightened
emotions during times of major life changes. These
stressful changes may be physiological or social in nature. They are
usually connected with personal transitions between important stages that
occur during our lives. These transitions are generally emotionally
charged--they are life crises.
Most cultures consider the
important transitions to be birth, the onset of puberty, marriage,
life threatening illness or injury, and finally death. Graduation from
school, divorce, and retirement at the end of a work life are also major
transitions in modern large-scale societies.
During the early 20th century, the Belgian
anthropologist, Arnold Van Gennep,
observed that all cultures have prescribed ways for an individual and society
to deal with these emotion charged situations. They have ritual
ceremonies intended to mark the transition from one phase of life to another.
Van Gennep called these ceremonies rites of passage
. In North
America today, typical rites of passage are baptisms, bar mitzvahs and
confirmations, school graduation ceremonies, weddings, retirement parties, and
funerals. These intentionally ritualized ceremonies help the individuals
making the transition, as well their relatives and friends, pass through an
emotionally charged, tense time. Most rites of passage are religious
ceremonies. They not only mark the transition between an individual's
life stages but they reinforce the dominant religious views and values of a
culture. In other words, they reinforce the world-view.
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Marriage is an important rite of passage in all cultures. Note the military symbolism and ritual acts of this formal religious wedding in Canada. |
Rites of passage in many cultures are used
to mark the socially recognized transition to sexual maturity. Among some of the
indigenous societies of Africa and Australia, intentionally painful genital
surgery has been an integral part of such rites of passage. For boys,
this usually involves circumcision
and/or subincision
.
Circumcision is removing all or part of the foreskin of the penis, usually with
a knife. Subincision is cutting into the side of the penis or making a
hole entirely through it. For girls, genital surgery connected with
rites of passage usually involves clitoridectomy
(or "female circumcision")
and/or infibulation
.
Clitoridectomy is cutting off all or part of the clitoris and sometimes all
or part of the labia. Infibulation
is partially closing off the opening to the vagina by sewing, pinning, or
clamping part of the vulva.
Many Native American societies publicly celebrated a girl's first menses.
For instance, the parents of girls among the Luiseño
Indians of Southern California proudly announced to the community that their
daughters were beginning to menstruate and becoming women. The girls were partly buried in heated
sand at this time. They were not permitted to scratch themselves or eat salt, and
they were given instructions by older women about the physiological changes
that were occurring and how to behave as a woman and wife. For most
North American girls today, public announcements that they had begun
menstruating would be considered humiliating. However, it was a matter
of personal and family pride in many Native American cultures.
While boys do not experience such clear
physiological markers of transition to adulthood as menstruation, their rites
of passage to this new status in some cultures are more severe than for girls.
Among the cattle herding Barabaig
culture
of East Africa, the boys' heads are shaved and their foreheads are cut with
three deep horizontal
incisions that go down to the bone and extend from ear to ear. This scarification leaves
permanent scars that identify a male as having received "gar."
Sometimes, the incisions are deep enough to show up on the skulls. Among
the Luiseño Indians, boys had to undergo
severe ordeals such as laying on red ant mounds and not crying out from
pain as they were repeatedly bitten over long periods of time. They were also given
toloache
,
a powerful hallucinogenic drug that made them ill and apparently sometimes caused their
death.
Among some Australian Aborigine societies, a boy being initiated was
expected to repeatedly hit his penis with a heavy rock until it was bruised
and bloody. He also had several of his incisor teeth knocked out with a sharp
rock by the adult men who were instructing him in the duties and obligations
of manhood and the secrets of their religion. All of these rite of passage rituals were intended to be
painful in order to increase the importance of the transition to adulthood.
NOTE: Over the last several
decades, major women's rights organizations in the Western World have focused
attention on eliminating clitoridectomy and infibulation in Africa, the Near
East, and among immigrants from those areas. In order to demonize these
cultural practices, they refer to them as "genital mutilation" and
usually
insist that it is violence against women done as part of the male repression and control of women.
The latter assertion fits Moslem dominated countries more than the non-Moslem
sub-Saharan African societies
that follow these practices. The reality in many non-Moslem African
societies is that the surgery is performed by older women and is an integral
part of the initiation of girls into the world of women. Men usually are not
allowed to be involved in anyway. Continued political pressure from the
Feminist Majority Foundation, the National Organization for
Women (NOW), and other groups has resulted in many Western governments and the
United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) adopting as an important goal the global repression of
clitoridectomy and infibulation. Some indigenous African women's organizations have responded
angrily. Most notably, a Masai
Tribal women's group
from Kenya has accused European
and North American women of practicing cultural imperialism. In a sense,
they are saying that Westerners need to get beyond their ethnocentrism to see
the importance of clitoridectomy and infibulation for women in the societies
that do it. They say that these practices are crucial parts of their
cultures and that they do not want to give them up. Some other women's
groups in Kenya are opposed to the continuation of clitoredectomy but often
resent the "interference" of European and North American based organizations
in their culture. There are now also
the beginnings of organized movements in North America and Europe aiming to stop the
routine
surgical circumcision of male babies and episiotomy
of women during childbirth. For more information and views on all of these issues,
go to the Related Internet Sites section of this
tutorial.
This page was last updated on
Monday, January 08, 2007.
Copyright © 2002-2007 by Dennis
O'Neil.
All rights reserved.
Illustration credits