Coming of age: the rituals that make an adult

In 1909, Arnold van Gennep published an analysis of rituals marking transitions in status, and argued that they share a three-part structure regardless of culture. The framework has been refined and criticised since, and it has held up remarkably well as a description.

The three stages

Separation. The individual is removed from their previous status and frequently from the community physically. Taken from the village, from the family home, from the company of the other sex. Old clothing removed, hair cut, previous name set aside.

Liminality. The middle phase, in which the person is neither what they were nor what they will become. This is the part van Gennep and later Victor Turner found most interesting.

During it, ordinary rules are suspended or inverted. Initiates may be treated as dead, as infants, as animals, as invisible. They may be subject to ordeals, deprivation or instruction. Normal hierarchy among them is often flattened — everyone in the liminal state is equal, which produces intense bonds among people who go through it together.

Incorporation. The person is returned to the community with a new status, frequently marked visibly — new clothing, a new name, a permanent bodily mark, the right to certain objects or foods or forms of speech.

The final stage matters more than it might appear. The point is not the ordeal but the public acknowledgement afterwards. The community has to accept the new status, and the ritual is the mechanism by which it does.

What initiation transmits

Knowledge, often restricted. Many traditions use the liminal period to teach things not shared with children or outsiders: histories, songs, technical knowledge, obligations.

Endurance, demonstrated. Ordeals of pain, isolation, fasting or fear are common, and the explanation given is generally that adulthood requires the capacity to bear things.

Bonds. Cohorts initiated together frequently maintain lifelong obligations to each other. In some societies the age set is a fundamental social unit, cutting across family and clan.

A visible marker. Scarification, tattooing, tooth modification, circumcision, ear or lip piercing, a haircut, an item of clothing. The point is that adult status is legible at a glance and cannot be claimed without having gone through the process.

The uncomfortable part

Some initiation practices cause serious and lasting harm, and some are performed on people who cannot consent.

The clearest case is female genital cutting, which is practised in a range of societies as an initiation requirement, which causes documented severe harm, and which is the subject of sustained work by campaigners from within the affected communities as well as from outside.

The general anthropological point that initiation practices are meaningful within their context does not resolve this. A practice can be socially coherent and harmful, and describing the coherence is not the same as endorsing it.

The most effective work on such practices has generally come from within — from people who hold the culture and are arguing about what it should require — rather than from external prohibition, which has a poor record.

What happened in industrial societies

Formal initiation largely disappeared, and the transition to adulthood became gradual and unmarked.

What remains is fragmentary and inconsistent: religious ceremonies at a fixed age that do not correspond to any change in social status, legal thresholds spread across several years for different rights, graduations, first jobs, driving licences.

None of these carries the structure. There is no separation, no liminal instruction, and — critically — no moment at which a community collectively acknowledges a change and treats the person differently afterwards.

Various writers have argued that this absence has costs, and that adolescents in societies without clear markers construct their own, sometimes through risk-taking that functions as an improvised ordeal without any of the surrounding structure or the acknowledgement at the end.

That argument is plausible and it is difficult to test, and it should not be pushed into nostalgia for practices that were frequently brutal.

What persists

The structure turns up wherever people mark a change in status. Military basic training has all three stages, explicitly. So do many professional initiations, apprenticeships, monastic entries and, in a much diluted form, the induction rituals of clubs and workplaces.

Which suggests the pattern is not a cultural curiosity but a fairly robust solution to a real problem: how a group changes its collective mind about who someone is, all at once, in a way that everybody can see.