The transition (liminal) phase is the period between stages, during which one has left one place or state but has not yet entered or joined the next. He or she is "cutting away" the former self: the civilian. For example, the cutting of the hair for a person who has just joined the army. from an earlier fixed to point in the social structure." There is often a detachment or "cutting away" from the former self in this phase, which is signified in symbolic actions and rituals. "The first phase (of separation) comprises symbolic behavior signifying the detachment of the individual or group. In the first phase, people withdraw from their current status and prepare to move from one place or status to another. "I propose to call the rites of separation from a previous world, preliminal rites, those executed during the transitional stage liminal (or threshold) rites, and the ceremonies of incorporation into the new world postliminal rites." Rites of passage have three phases: separation, liminality, and incorporation, as van Gennep described. He mentions some others, such as the territorial passage, a crossing of borders into a culturally different region, such as one where a different religion prevails. In the work he concentrates on groups and rites individuals might normally encounter progressively: pregnancy, childbirth, initiation, betrothal, marriage, funerals and the like. " He is able to find some universals, mainly two: "the sexual separation between men and women, and the magico-religious separation between the profane and the sacred." (Earlier the translators used secular for profane.) He refuses credit for being the first to recognize type of rites. The rest of Van Gennep's book presents a description of rites of passage and an organization into types, although in the end he despairs of ever capturing them all: "It is but a rough sketch of an immense picture. Passage between these groups requires a ceremony, or ritual rite of passage. Van Gennep further distinguishes between "the secular" and "the sacred sphere." Theorizing that civilizations are arranged on a scale, implying that the lower levels represent "the simplest level of development," he hypothesizes that " social groups in such a society likewise have magico-religious foundations." Many groups in modern industrial society practice customs that can be traced to an earlier sacred phase. Van Gennep uses the metaphor, "as a kind of house divided into rooms and corridors." A passage occurs when an individual leaves one group to enter another in the metaphor, he changes rooms. The population of a society belongs to multiple groups, some more important to the individual than others. In addition, all these groups break down into still smaller societies in subgroups." "Each larger society contains within it several distinctly separate groupings. In English, Van Gennep's first sentence of his first chapter begins: The term is now fully adopted into anthropology as well as into the literature and popular cultures of many modern languages. 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. It involves a significant change of status in society. A rite of passage is a ceremony or ritual of the passage which occurs when an individual leaves one group to enter another.
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