The Rites of Passage

Arnold van Gennep was a French folklorist and ethnographer, and this foundational 1909 work, translated into English by Monika Vizedom and Gabrielle Caffee, established the enduringly influential tripartite scheme of rites of passage: separation, transition and incorporation. Its strength is exactly that lasting influence, the framework remains the standard vocabulary for describing initiation, marriage and funerary ritual across the study of religion. Its limit is its age and comparative method, van Gennep worked from the ethnographic literature available in the early twentieth century rather than his own fieldwork on most societies he discusses, so a specific ethnographic claim should be checked against more recent fieldwork on that society.