Transitions
It seems like the very distant past, but when I was a student of geology in my final years of high school, I found myself torn between alternatives. On the one hand, I was fascinated by palaeontology and the study of fossils, trying to understand the creatures they had once been, and how they had changed and evolved over time. This appealed to me as a collector, brought up on organising anything from postage stamps, butterflies, or engine numbers, to keeping a tally of birds seen, or places visited. However, equally attractive was ‘big picture’ geology, which focussed on rocks, the geomorphology of changing landforms and underlying physical structures over millions of years, where making sense of these changes also involved analysing materials through the tools of mineralogy and crystallography. I knew that if I continued with geology at university, I’d have to specialise in one area or the other.
It didn’t happen, but that contrast between the two facets of geology was to replicate itself at university when I began to study social anthropology. This was at a time, not that long ago, when people studying social anthropology found themselves caught between two approaches to describing other cultures. One was the anthropologist as ethnographer, examining the behaviour of the participants in a given society, observing how various activities, social, economic, political, practical and ritual all worked together to establish a functioning society. This drew on that British collecting tradition, with the researcher embedded in and even participating in tribal life, documenting somewhat idyllic accounts of pre-industrial lives by presenting pictures of societies where everything worked together in a functioning whole.
Famously, this theme of observing and explaining ‘primitive’ (pre-industrial) peoples was greatly influenced by Bronisław Kasper Malinowski, usually described as a Polish-British anthropologist and ethnographer, he of the pith helmet, tent and cooking pots living among nearly naked islanders. He was born in Poland, but the British had an early claim on his thinking, as he said it was after reading James Frazer’s crazy compendium The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion that he decided to become an anthropologist. In June 1914 he left England for Australia, initially for a planned expedition to Papua (as Papua New Guinea was then known). Soon after his arrival things became complicated. Although Malinowski was an ethnic Pole, he was a subject of Austria-Hungary, at war with England. To avoid internment if he returned to Europe, he stayed to carry out field studies. Of these, it was his time in the Melanesian Trobriand Islands that led to his monograph, Argonauts of the Western Pacific, a study which remains a significant contribution to social anthropology.
Across the Channel, perhaps unsurprisingly the French pursued a different approach. They were social anthropologists as ethnologists, taking the data collected by those British field researchers and comparing and contrasting different cultures. Their interest was in the identification of underlying cross-cultural processes, such as incest taboos, religious rituals and types of political system, in identifying universal invariants in human society. They saw the anthropologist’s task as analysing concepts, cultural oppositions and symbols as a way to revealing deeper meaning. If ethnographers like Malinowski provided the raw data, then people Marcel Maus and Claude Levi-Strauss sorted out what it all meant.
Among these analysts was Arnold van Gennep, a Dutch-German-French anthropologist, whose 1909 book The Rites of Passage was to burst on the scene in an English language translation in 1960. He made clear the importance of ‘transitions’:
“The life of an individual in any society is a series of passages from one age to another and from one occupation to another. Wherever there are fine distinctions among age or occupational groups, progression from one group to the next is accompanied by special acts, like those which make up apprenticeship in our trades. Among semicivilized peoples such acts are enveloped in ceremonies, since to the semi-civilized mind no act is entirely free of the sacred. In such societies every change in a person’s life involves actions and reactions between sacred and profane—actions and reactions to be regulated and guarded so that society as a whole will suffer no discomfort or injury. Transitions from group to group and from one social situation to the next are looked on as implicit in the very fact of existence, so that a man’s life comes to be made up of a succession of stages with similar ends and beginnings: birth, social puberty , marriage, fatherhood, advancement to a higher class, occupational specialization, and death. For every one of these events there are ceremonies whose essential purpose is to enable the individual to pass from one defined position to another which is equally well defined. Since the goal is the same, it follows of necessity that the ways of attaining it should be at least analogous, if not identical in detail … Thus we encounter a wide degree of general similarity among ceremonies of birth, childhood, social puberty, betrothal, marriage, pregnancy, fatherhood, initiation into religious societies, and funerals. … Because of the importance of these transitions, I think it legitimate to single out rites of passage as a special category, which under further analysis may be subdivided into rites of separation, transition rites, and rites of incorporation. … Rites of separation are prominent in funeral ceremonies, rites of incorporation at marriages. Transition rites may play an important part, for instance, in pregnancy, betrothal, and initiation; or they may be reduced to a minimum in adoption, in the delivery of a second child, in remarriage, or in the passage from the second to the third age group. …. Furthermore, in certain ceremonial patterns where the transitional period is sufficiently elaborated to constitute an independent state, the arrangement is reduplicated. A betrothal forms a liminal period between adolescence and marriage, but the passage from adolescence to betrothal itself involves a special series of rites of separation, a transition, and an incorporation into the betrothed condition. …”
Van Gennep realised that rites de passage had an important place in pre-industrial societies. They marked culturally significant transitions, central to social cohesion. These moments reminded everyone that some within the group had reached a significant point in their life journey, having arrived at a key stage in their progress from birth to death. Physical changes mattered, as did age, but at least as important were changes in social status, as when a person became a young adult, established an important relationship, or became a mother or an elder.
The concept of rites de passage was of great interest to social anthropologists. However, reading today about studies of these changes in less developed societies seems a throwback to a world long gone. Van Gennep was writing more than 100 years ago. Life in a far more complex today, with vastly more people in Western societies. The processes to sustain rituals and other unifying social processes have changed. That isn’t news. Back in 1956, William H Whyte wrote about The Organisation Man. It was evocative and nostalgic. He documented the conformist post-war industrial system, companies run by business executives with no time for individual issues or status transitions, focussed on jobs for life tailored to fit in with business needs. Perhaps unsurprisingly, his sense of nostalgia led White to hope everyone would have, or could have, more freedom. For him lost rituals and traditions mattered.
White was documenting an industrial culture where rites de passage had become less important. Was this because marking changes in status was no longer as critical as it had been, given an industrial society appears to work more like a factory? Perhaps, but, twenty years later, Gail Sheehy in her 1974 book Passages sought to set things back on track, writing about the ‘predictable crises of adult life’, and the inevitable personality and sexual changes we go through in our 20s, 30s, 40s, and beyond. Observing the consequences of capitalist conformity, she realised we were no longer addressing changes central to our social lives, especially when an individual was an adult:
“Studies of child development have plotted every nuance of growth and given us comforting labels such as the Terrible Twos and the Noisy Nines. Adolescence has been so carefully deciphered, most of the fun of being impossible has been taken out. But after meticulously documenting our periods of personality development up to the age of 18 or 20—nothing. Beyond the age of 21, apart from medical people interested only in our gradual physical decay, we’re left to fend for ourselves on the way downstream to senescence, at which point we’re picked up again by gerontologists.”
Book sell when they make statements like these, but Sheehy had a point. By and large many of the early stages of life were still marked by rites and symbolism. These included birth, christening, puberty, marriage, and pregnancy. Today, many linger on, and some have been elaborated. Some people will hold a ‘baby shower’, an opportunity to celebrate an impending birth. Some still hold a church christening for a child, with a party afterwards. Some celebrate a new partnership by an engagement, to be followed by a wedding down the track. However, these are now a matter of individual preference, no longer standard universal social processes. Sheehy noted these remaining transitions tended to be more common in the early stages of a life. She wanted to reframe a perspective that had become focussed on childhood:
“A new concept of adulthood, one that embraces the total life cycle, is questioning the old assumptions. If one sees the personality not as an apparatus that is essentially constructed by the time childhood is over, but as always in its essence developing, then life at 25 or 30 or at the gateway to middle age will stimulate its own intrigue, surprise, and exhilaration of discovery.”
However, it’s been a battle. Increasing cultural diversity meant that points of transition have become harder to identify, and often the transition points that are emphasised are those that intersect most clearly with the overarching market economy. Today, many of these celebrations are centred around events characterised by conspicuous consumption, using changes in status as an excuse, not a focus. We have parties and gift giving for birthdays, for Mother’s Day and Father’s Day, for Easter (chocolates!) and for Christmas, Hannukah, Kwanzaa, Bodhi Day and Shōgatsu – and I nearly forgot Los Posadas, New Year, and Chinese New Year – among others! All these ‘days’ and many more are not so much about a personal change as a key day in the calendar, opportunities for fun and shopping.
In writing Passages Sheehy was attempting to get critical moments of change over a lifetime back in focus. While she could have looked to pre-industrial societies, she observed it was our own earlier traditions that had attenuated. She recalled Shakespeare telling us that man lives through seven stages (“All the world’s a stage” speech in As You Like It). She could have added examples from other cultures: Hindu scriptures described four rather different distinct life stages: student; householder; retirement, a time to become a pilgrim and begin ones true education; and finally a sannyasin, “one who neither hates nor loves anything.”
However, Passages was making further point. If attention to rites de passage was dwindling in contemporary society, they were disappearing faster the further along the life cycle. We still recognise and sometimes invoke some kind of transition process to deal with a baby on the way (that oddly named baby shower), a birth, children’s birthdays, adolescence, and even reaching adulthood (if only we knew at what age that happened!). For some, weddings remain enough of a major rite de passage to be surrounded with all sorts of transitional procedures and symbols. However, weddings also demonstrate what has changed, as many people no longer choose to get married, and among those who do, some do so ‘without fuss’, the only tasks being to change an address, employment record, or car insurance.
As usual, it is writers who are alert to these changes. One brief but telling example of how transitions are losing their social relevance is offered by the novelist Margaret Mahy. Mahy mainly wrote funny and chaotic adventures for young children, but she also wrote stories aimed at adolescents, especially her outstanding two prizewinning novels, The Haunting and The Changeover. The second of these, subtitled A Supernatural Romance, concerns a sister risking her life to save her bewitched brother. It’s a coming-of-age story, an unconventional romance. It’s a superb evocation of how transitions have now become individual. Lucy Chant is a girl at the beginning of the story, a young woman at the end. It is subtle, clever, but more to the point, it leaves the changes of puberty to be no more than a personal matter.
You might think that ending full-time employment deserves recognition. Some workplaces and organisations do make a retirement an event, with speeches, gifts, and a party. However, many no longer bother. To add to the complexity of ‘ending’ work, there are many individuals who do not ‘retire’ so much as transition from full-time employment to self-employment, part-time work or occasional work, sometimes paid, sometimes voluntary. It is increasingly unlikely that a person describes themself as retired, but rather will mention various activities that now take up their time as they linger on in an ‘almost’ employed state.
This persistence of being in work of some kind or other hides yet another quite different process, best described as ‘fading’. As we lose markers of changed status for older people they ceased to be noticed, (unlike the almost revered status given to older people in pre-industrial societies). Today an older person will tell you this fading has two consequences. First, older people are no longer seen. In a shopping mall, street, or other venue, they are seldom acknowledged. Younger people will walk past a ‘senior citizen’ and are unlikely to remember they’d seen an individual there. It seems older people are slowly disappearing!
Second, apart from within families where many remain close to dependents, older people have a smaller place in society. The practices William White had noted haven’t disappeared, just developed. The new stages of man are childhood, organisational life, and retirement. Today, when older people retire, they are literally moved out to the fringe of society. In countries like Australia, the UK and the USA, they are often left to be out of the way, living in old peoples’ developments, segregated homes, largely unseen in their own little world. Some of this is caught in that wonderfully bizarre 2015 film Youth, with its scenes of an ageing Michael Caine staying with other ‘forgotten’ people in a Swiss health resort.
This gradual disappearance is becoming clearer. As long as retiring Baby Boomers have access to significant resources, they won’t be ignored. Businesses continue to offer various goods and services, ranging from trips overseas to keep-fit activities and special diets to keep brains active. However, as the baby boomers cease representing a large and affluent group in society, this will change. Van Gennep was writing about relatively stable societies, but in contemporary societies, change is making his analysis less relevant. Rites de passage for younger people are losing their broader social significance. For older people these transitions are losing any importance; ideally, the older generation could just quietly fade away.
