The Rites of Passage, Second Edition

By Arnold van Gennep

Book Overview

A CLASSIC WORK OF ANTHROPOLOGY--OVER SEVENTY THOUSAND COPIES SOLD
With a new introduction by Pulitzer Prize-winner David I. Kertzer

Arnold van Gennep's masterwork, The Rites of Passage, has been a staple of anthropological education for more than a century. First published in French in 1909, and translated into English by the University of Chicago Press in 1960, this landmark book explores how the life of an individual in any society can be understood as a succession of transitions: birth, puberty, marriage, parenthood, old age, and, finally, death. Van Gennep's great insight was discerning a common structure in each of these seemingly different transitions, involving rituals of separation, liminality, and incorporation. With compelling precision, he set out the terms that would both define twentieth-century ritual theory and become a part of our everyday lexicon.

This new edition of his work demonstrates how we can still make use of its enduring critical tools to understand our own social, religious, and political worlds, and even our personal and professional lives. In his new introduction, Pulitzer Prize-winning historian and anthropologist David I. Kertzer sheds new light on van Gennep, on the battles he fought, and on the huge impact the book has had since publication of the first English edition.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 022662949X
• ISBN13: 9780226629490
• Release Date: May 2019
• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Length: 256 Pages
• Weight: 0.75 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 5.2" x 7.9"

Customer Reviews

Landmark Anthropology Text

This is one of the most interesting, well-researched, and innovative books I've ever read. Van Gennep provides an entire philo-anthropological system for understanding ritual and the rites of passage. A truly powerful piece of scholarship that establishes a framework based on inductive first-hand research, that compares and contrasts itself to other texts, and that has relevance to life. This is the Anthropological equivalent to Aristotle's Poetics. It is dense, it is well-reasoned, and it justifies its categorizations. Not an easy read, but extraordinarily worthwhile. Must read for people interested in philosophy, myth, psychology, anthropology, cultural studies, theater, and literature.

A book worth reading

This book is worth reading. As an early work (published in 1908), it has influenced many Anthropologists. Amazingly, it was not translated into English from French until 1960, so students (and others) who wished to read it had to be either fluent in French or willing to translate it sentence by sentence.Although many of its concepts are considered elementary by the unknowing today, it was a revolutionary look at cross-cultural phenomenon, namely the rites surrounding territories, pregnancy/childbirth, childhood, initiation, bethrothal/marriage and funerals.It is a great basis for a complete understanding of the history of Anthropology.

A good text in anthropology

It suggests a theortical framework for explaining many cultural beliefs.