"Passages" from Van Gennep to the Present day/«Passages» De Van Gennep a Nos Jours

Both polysemic and paradoxical, concept of appears to remain essential for understanding non-precedented transformations (deracination, migration, and secularisation) taking place in contemporary world. Rooted in Latin patior (to suffer, undergo, experience), word indicates a displacement, a process of transformation undertaken, that not yet finished. It designates equally the site where this process, its mark or its support are enacted whatever its morphological or metaphorical (La Soudiere 2000: 5). The concept of indicates metamorphosis preceding change, disorder followed by order, a state between order and disorder. As with bereavement, sense of passing can not be reduced to mere loss, because death it implies symbolic and necessary for renewal of life. Since it a process, any passage is, successively and simultaneously, a before and an after, a here and a there, a separation but also a belonging, a loss but also a gain, a disidentification but also an identification. The researcher thus able to emphasise what passage connects or, conversely, separates; what it must leave behind, what lost in mourning, or, conversely, what gained--a benefit, attainment of a new state, or of a new status (La Soudiere 2000: 8). Passage involves a reflection on current order; through opposition it challenges this order, obliging it to renew itself. The act of passage thus linked to thought and self-awareness. If identity inhibits act of thinking, it respects an order. To think, on other hand, is to pass, it to question this order, to be astonished by its (Certeau 1987; see also La Soudiere 2000: 11). The father of this concept undoubtedly Arnold Van Gennep. He proposed consubstantiality of a rite and a passage. Today three phases into which a passage seperated are well known: a before (a period of separation, of mourning), a during (a liminal period, of border and threshold), and an after (a period of reincorporation and recombination after crossing of threshold). As for Victor Turner, he perceives threshold as a border which thickens and grows in time: a liminal phase signifies a period of transition and simulated death, as in African rites of initiation. The threshold communitas where people live unfettered by status and in communion (Turner 1990: 96). Pierre Bourdieu returns to Van Gennep's theory to better explain it by starting from a unique world vision. Bourdieu notes how, from antiquity to present day, through Christian mysticism and eastern philosophies, conception of universe was based on principle of existence of binary opposites. Day follows night as dry season follows rains, light follows darkness .... The establishment of order, of culture, presupposes act of establishing a boundary, a separation and a distinction. If threshold highlights distinction--the difference--between things, rites of passage must resolve its crossing and make unification of opposing entities possible (Bourdieu 1980: 374). If these rite of passage theories are critized today, it because of their weak relationship to empirical and material evidence, or even total absence of such. At beginning of his work, Van Gennep attributes a specific spatial origin to rites of passage, which almost immediately abandoned as spaces become pure idealised constructs (Philippe Bonnin 2000: 65-57). The material and spatial dimensions of passages were left out of analysis to be replaced by an emphasis on antiquity of their origins. This process of over-symbolism of reality certainly justified from point of view of times that produced it. At beginning of twentieth century, which saw publication of Van Gennep's The Rites of Passage, folklore provided symbolic framework necessary to legitimate new national identities. …

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