Rites of Passage at Adolescence: A Ritual Process Paradigm

Abstract

Concepts which relate rites of passage to the developmental process at adolescence are reviewed. Selected concepts are assembled to serve as a new interdisciplinary paradigm of ritual processes affecting development. The new paradigm is offered as an elaboration of the classic tripartite paradigm of vanGennep (1909), from the original three steps to fourteen. It is expected that the elaboration will suggest ways of operationalizing aspects of environmental process at strategic points, passages in the developmental process. It may thereby also facilitate empirical studies with strong experimental design, including pure experimentation.

Relevant literature in cultural anthropology, developmental theory, psychology, sociology, and theology is brought to bear in the formulation of the paradigm.

Because it includes elements of various disciplinary origins, the fourteen-step paradigm may be approached with research techniques that tap variables that are phenomenological, behavioral, social, institutional or cultural. Furthermore, it may be addressed to questions of individual development, family process, or community process. It appears to be applicable to both normal development and pathological conditions of the individual, the family, or the society.

The adolescent mind is essentially a mind of the moratorium, a psychosocial stage between childhood and adulthood, and between the morality learned by the child, and the ethics to be developed by the adult. It is an ideological mind-and, indeed it is the ideological outlook of a society that speaks most clearly to the adolescent who is eager to be affirmed by his peers, and is ready to be confirmed by rituals, creeds, and programs which at the same time define what is evil, uncanny, and inimical. (Erikson 1959, p. 128).

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