Quick Answer
One of the few genuine discoveries in the study of ritual, made in 1909 and still standing. Van Gennep noticed that ceremonies marking a change of status have the same three-part shape everywhere: you are taken out of your old position, held for a while in a condition that belongs to neither category, and then formally received into the new one. The useful part for a modern reader is the diagnosis it enables: we have kept the first and third phases and largely abandoned the middle.
Key Takeaways
- Separation, threshold, incorporation. The pattern is the whole book and it holds up.
- The word liminal starts here, and the original is far more precise than current usage.
- Modern transitions are missing the middle, which is the book's most useful contemporary application.
- Turner developed the threshold phase and added communitas; read them together.
- The sources are colonial-era ethnography and the language shows it. Read with that in view.
🕑 14 min read
What This Book Is
Les rites de passage was published in French in 1909 and did not appear in English until 1960. It is a short book with a single argument, made by comparison across a very large number of societies.
The argument is that ceremonies marking a change of status are not a miscellaneous collection of local customs. They share a structure. Whatever the society, whatever the transition, whatever the theology, the same three movements appear, and once you see them you cannot stop seeing them.
That is the whole book. Everything else is demonstration.
Why the delay in translation mattered. The book sat untranslated for half a century, which is why its influence in English-speaking anthropology arrives so late and largely through Victor Turner. Van Gennep was known and used in France long before the ideas reached most English readers under his name.
Who Arnold van Gennep Was
Born in 1873 to a Dutch father and French mother, van Gennep was a linguist by training, a folklorist by vocation, and an outsider by circumstance.
He never obtained a permanent chair in France, and the reason is not mysterious. He was in open and prolonged conflict with the dominant school of French sociology led by Emile Durkheim, whose approach he considered too abstract and insufficiently grounded in actual customs. That school controlled the academic appointments, and van Gennep spent his career translating, writing for a living, and doing folklore fieldwork.
He compiled a vast survey of French regional folklore over decades, walking villages and recording practices that were disappearing as he documented them.
The exclusion shaped the work. Van Gennep is a collector and a comparer rather than a theorist of society, and his book is grounded in specific customs rather than in a general theory of the social. That is both its strength and its limit.
The Pattern
The observation is simple enough to state in a sentence, which is a mark of how good it is.
A person changing status passes through three phases. They are separated from their old position. They spend time in a condition belonging to neither the old nor the new. They are then formally incorporated into the new position.
Van Gennep called these separation, transition and incorporation, and coined a term for the middle one drawn from the Latin word for a doorway's threshold.
His governing image is spatial and worth holding. Changing status is like passing through a house: you leave one room, you stand in the doorway, you enter the next. The doorway is not part of either room. That is what makes it dangerous, and what makes it the place where change happens.
Phase One: Separation
The first movement detaches the person from what they were, and it is usually more physical than a modern reader expects.
The initiate is taken from the village. The bride leaves her family's house. The dead body is removed from the home. There is frequently a symbolic death: the person who existed before is described as having ceased to exist, and in many initiations is formally mourned.
Marks of the old identity are stripped away. Clothing is removed or exchanged. Hair is cut. Names are surrendered. Ordinary possessions are given up.
Van Gennep's point is that this is not decoration around the real event. The detachment must be actual, because a status you have not genuinely left is one you will slide back into.
Phase Two: The Threshold
This is the part that made the book famous, and it is where van Gennep's attention is sharpest.
In the middle phase the person is nothing in particular. They have no status, because status is a position within a set of categories and they are currently outside the set. Van Gennep notes that societies treat people in this condition as simultaneously vulnerable and dangerous: they must be protected, and everyone else must be protected from them.
The features recur with remarkable consistency across unrelated societies. Seclusion, often in a special place built for the purpose. Silence. Dietary restriction or fasting. Ordeal, sometimes severe. Instruction in knowledge reserved for the new status. Suspension or reversal of ordinary rules, so that behaviour normally forbidden becomes required, or hierarchy is inverted. Nakedness, or uniform dress that erases individual difference.
And time. The threshold phase is not brief. Initiations lasting weeks, months or years are common, and van Gennep is clear that the duration is doing work rather than being a scheduling inconvenience.
The design logic here is worth spelling out, because it is not obvious. If you want someone to actually change status rather than merely be told they have, you must first make it impossible for them to keep operating as who they were. Stripping the marks of identity, suspending the rules, removing the person from everyone who knew them in the old role: all of it prevents the old self from continuing to function. The threshold is not a waiting room. It is the period during which the previous arrangement is prevented from reassembling itself, and it is long because that takes time.
Phase Three: Incorporation
The third movement receives the person into the new status, and it is public by necessity.
A new name is given. New clothing, ornament or marking is put on. The person eats with the group again, and shared eating recurs constantly here across societies. There is a formal presentation, a declaration, a witnessing.
The essential feature is that the community does the recognising. A status is a position in a set of relationships, and it cannot be self-conferred. This is why the third phase is always social and never private, and why the witnesses matter more than the words.
Not Every Rite Weights Them Equally
Van Gennep is more careful than his summarisers, and this qualification matters.
The three phases are a template, not a fixed schedule. Different ceremonies develop different parts.
Funerals typically emphasise separation, which makes sense: the work is detaching the dead person from the living community, and detaching the living from them. Marriages emphasise incorporation, since the point is the joining. Initiations emphasise the threshold, because the transformation itself is the object.
Some rites compress phases almost to nothing. Others elaborate one into an entire institution.
He also notes that the same event contains multiple passages at once: a wedding is an incorporation for the couple and a separation for their families, running simultaneously and sometimes uncomfortably.
The Territorial Passage
An underread section, and the one that shows where the whole scheme came from.
Van Gennep begins with physical movement between territories: crossing a border, entering a foreign village, passing a boundary stone. He observes that such crossings are ritualised almost everywhere, that the frontier zone between two territories is treated as belonging to neither, and that the traveller in it is in a specific and precarious condition.
The rites of hospitality, in which a stranger is progressively incorporated into a household through washing, eating and gift exchange, follow the identical three-part shape.
His argument is that the spatial case is the original and the social ones are extensions of it, which is why the vocabulary of doors, thresholds, gates and crossings appears in every language for changes that involve no physical movement at all. It is also why so much ritual attaches to actual thresholds, doorways and gates.
What Turner Did With It
Victor Turner, working from the 1960s onward, took the middle phase and built a career on it, and most people who use the word liminal today are using Turner's version.
His additions are substantial. He coined the term communitas for the intense, levelling, unstructured bond that forms between people passing through a threshold together, and argued it is a genuine mode of social relation rather than merely an absence of structure. Anyone who has been through basic training, a long illness, a retreat or a disaster with others will recognise it.
He extended liminality beyond formal rites to pilgrimage, to art, to theatre, to social movements and to whole periods of cultural upheaval, and distinguished the genuinely liminal from what he called the liminoid: the optional, leisure-time, partial version available in modern societies.
Turner is the more quotable writer and the more ambitious thinker. Van Gennep is the more careful observer. Read the original first, because Turner's extensions are considerably looser than the pattern they extend, and it is easy to mistake his speculations for van Gennep's findings.
The Missing Middle in Modern Life
The most useful contemporary application of this book is diagnostic, and it is worth setting out carefully.
Modern societies have kept plenty of ceremonies. Graduations, weddings, retirement parties, funerals. What has largely disappeared is the threshold phase: the extended period of being formally nobody, held by a community that understands what is happening.
Consider the transitions people actually go through. Divorce. Redundancy. A serious diagnosis. Bereavement. Migration to a new country. Leaving a religion or a marriage or a career. Recovery from addiction. Becoming a parent. Each involves a genuine separation from a former status, and each ends, eventually, in some new arrangement.
Almost none has a marked middle. There is no name for the condition, no expected duration, no community holding it, no instruction, and crucially no external signal telling anyone when it has finished. People are expected to be separated on Monday and incorporated by Tuesday, and when that does not happen the difficulty is read as a personal failure of adjustment rather than as the ordinary shape of a passage with no structure around it.
If you are in the middle of something like that, van Gennep offers no technique and does offer a name. The disorientation, the loss of a clear answer to who you are, the sense that ordinary rules do not apply and that other people do not know how to behave around you: those are not symptoms of coping badly. They are the documented features of the threshold phase, reported from societies all over the world, in people undergoing transitions that were understood, supported and expected to take a long time. The condition is not a malfunction. What is missing is the container, and knowing that it is missing is worth something on its own.
One further observation of van Gennep's deserves more attention than it gets, because it explains why these ceremonies are so often uncomfortable. He notes that the rites are not designed for the benefit of the person passing through them. They are designed for the community that has to absorb a change in its own arrangement. A village with a new adult in it, a household with a new member, a family with a member removed by death: each of those is a problem for everyone else, and the ceremony is how the group updates itself.
This reframes the ordeal considerably. The severity of many initiations looks cruel if you read it as something done to the initiate for their own development. Read as the community's way of making the change unmistakable to itself, it looks different: the group needs an event it cannot forget or dispute, and mild ceremonies do not supply one. Whether that justifies anything is a separate question, and van Gennep does not ask it.
It also explains a common modern frustration. People who mark a major change privately, without witnesses, frequently report that it did not take, that they still feel like who they were, that nobody treats them differently. On van Gennep's account that is exactly what should happen, because the mechanism was never internal in the first place.
The Criticisms
Three, and the first is serious.
A pattern that fits everything. The three-phase scheme is so general that almost any sequence of events can be sorted into it. Something begins, something is in the middle, something ends. A model that cannot fail to apply is not making a strong claim, and critics have argued that van Gennep found a shape that is a property of processes in general rather than of ritual in particular.
The defence is that the specific features clustering in the middle phase, the seclusion, the reversal, the ordeal, the symbolic death, are not predicted by the trivial reading and do in fact recur. That is more than a truism, and it is where the book's real content sits.
Form without meaning. The scheme describes structure and says little about what participants think is happening, what the rites accomplish socially, or whose interests they serve. Later anthropology has been much more interested in ritual as a site of power, and van Gennep has almost nothing to say about who is imposing these passages on whom, or about initiations that are coercive and harmful.
Tidiness. Real ceremonies are messier than the model, run out of order, get interrupted, are contested internally, and change over time. Presenting them as instances of a clean sequence smooths a great deal away.
The Sources, Honestly
This has to be said plainly.
Van Gennep did not do the fieldwork for most of his examples. He worked from published ethnographic reports, the great majority produced within colonial administrations, by missionaries, officials and travellers, of very uneven quality, frequently without the language, and describing peoples who had no say in how they were represented.
The book also uses the vocabulary of its period, including the standard early twentieth-century framing of non-European societies as primitive and as earlier stages of a single developmental sequence. A modern reader will encounter that language and should not be surprised by it.
The structural insight survives this, because the pattern has since been confirmed by fieldwork of a far higher standard. The presentation does not, and a reader should treat individual examples as needing verification rather than as reliable descriptions of the societies named.
What Holds Up
The pattern itself. It has been tested against a century of better ethnography and it keeps appearing, which is more than can be said for most grand comparative schemes of that era.
The insight that the threshold is the operative phase rather than the gap between the real parts, which is genuinely counterintuitive and turns out to be right.
And the vocabulary. Liminality gave people a word for a condition that had none, and the difference a name makes to something you are living through is not a small thing.
Who Should Read It
Read it if you are interested in ritual and want the foundational text rather than the many summaries of it.
Read it if you have encountered initiation in an esoteric context and want to see the anthropological structure underneath what those traditions do, which is illuminating in both directions.
Read it alongside Turner, and alongside Eliade on initiatory patterns, with the caution that Eliade's method is considerably less careful than van Gennep's.
You can get the argument from the first and last chapters in an hour. The middle is a catalogue, and reading it exhaustively is for people with a specific interest in the ethnographic record.
Separation, threshold, return. The book that found the shape.
Affiliate disclosure: Thalira earns a small commission on purchases made through the link above, at no additional cost to you. Our account of the book's colonial-era sources and its methodological limits is set out above and is independent of that.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is The Rites of Passage about?
Arnold van Gennep's 1909 argument that ceremonies marking a change of status, across every society he could find records for, share the same three-part structure: separation from the old position, a transitional period outside ordinary categories, and reincorporation in the new position.
Who was Arnold van Gennep?
A French ethnographer and folklorist, 1873 to 1957, of Dutch and French parentage, who never held a permanent university post in France and spent much of his career doing patient folklore fieldwork outside the academic establishment that ignored him.
What are the three phases?
Separation, in which the person is detached from their previous status, often physically removed. Transition or liminality, in which they belong to neither the old nor the new category. Incorporation, in which they are formally received into the new status by the community.
What does liminal mean?
From the Latin for threshold. Van Gennep used it for the middle phase, in which the person is between categories: no longer what they were, not yet what they will be. The word entered general usage largely through Victor Turner's later development of it.
Do all three phases always appear equally?
No, and van Gennep is explicit about it. Different ceremonies emphasise different phases. Funerals typically stress separation, marriages stress incorporation, initiations stress the transition. The full pattern is a template rather than a fixed sequence.
Why does the threshold phase matter most?
Because it is where the actual transformation is held to occur, and because it is the phase modern societies have largely abandoned while keeping the ceremonies around it. It is also where the ordeal, seclusion, silence, symbolic death and reversal of normal rules typically belong.
How does it apply to modern life?
Its most common contemporary use is diagnostic: many modern transitions, including divorce, job loss, retirement, migration and recovery from illness, have separation and eventual incorporation but no marked middle, which leaves people in an unnamed and unsupported condition for a long time.
What did Victor Turner add?
Turner took the liminal phase and developed it extensively, adding the concept of communitas, the intense levelling bond that forms between people passing through a threshold together, and extending liminality to art, pilgrimage and social movements.
What are the main criticisms?
That a scheme fitting everything explains little, that van Gennep relied on colonial-era ethnographic reports of uneven quality, that the neat sequence flattens ceremonies that do not run in order, and that the model describes form while saying little about meaning or power.
Is the book readable?
Moderately. It is short, systematic and clearly organised, but it is also a dense catalogue of examples from many societies, presented with limited context, in the ethnographic style of its period. The argument can be grasped from the first and last chapters.
Does it contain outdated material?
Yes. It uses the vocabulary of early twentieth-century anthropology, including terms and framings about non-European peoples that are now unacceptable, and it draws on sources collected in colonial conditions. The structural insight survives that context; the presentation carries it.
Who should read it?
Anyone interested in ritual, initiation or the structure of major life changes, and anyone who has encountered the word liminal and wants the original argument rather than the vague version now in circulation.
Build the middle yourself
The practical use of this book is that once you can see the missing phase, you can supply some of it. Give the transition a name, even a private one. Give it an expected duration, so that it has an end you are moving toward rather than an indefinite failure to be over it. Find the few people who are in it too, because communitas is real and it is the one part of the old structure that still assembles on its own. And mark the finish when it comes, out loud, in front of someone. None of that reproduces what a society with intact ritual would have given you. It is a great deal better than crossing the threshold with nobody having mentioned that you were on one.
Sources & References
- van Gennep, Arnold (1909). Les rites de passage; English translation 1960.
- Turner, Victor. The Ritual Process, on liminality and communitas.
- Turner, Victor. Writings on the liminoid in modern societies.
- Scholarship on van Gennep's conflict with the Durkheim school and his exclusion from French academia.
- Later ethnographic work confirming and qualifying the three-phase pattern.
- Critical literature on colonial-era ethnographic sources.