Rite of passage

Initiation ritual of boys in Malawi. The ritual marks the passage from child to adult, each subgroup having its customs and expectations.

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.

  1. ^ Van Gennep 1909, Lay Summary

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