Source: https://onevoicebhm.org/not-simply-ritual-rite-passage

Just a few months ago, there was a discussion in my MA classroom during one of our lectures in a course on the sociology of religion about rites de passage, or rites of passage – essentially meaning magical or religious rituals surrounding those moments in life where one passes from one state in one’s life cycle to another. At some point, our professor asked us about routine rites we do in our daily lives, and about moments of passage we have encountered. I must confess, the semester had already caught up to me and I had momentarily lost my ability to correlate what was in the prescribed texts with the world around me. Not a good look for an aspiring practitioner of sociology, but perhaps a mental break or two was necessary at the time. But I do not recall much of that classroom discussion.

What those texts, in short, wanted to say was that life is marked by several moments where we move from one state of being to another (it could be as simple as moving from inside the house to the outside), and historically, these moments have stood as times of great turmoil. There is something deeply disconcerting about a change of any kind, perhaps. But these points of transition have often been marked by religious and magical rituals of various kinds to safeguard both the individual and society.

Moments of transition mark a limbo in our existence. Take for example the neophyte as studied by anthropologist Victor Turner (1969). The word seems loaded, but it means something as simple as the initiate in say, older tribal societies. In these communities, at a certain age, a person (usually a boy) had to undergo certain rituals to transition into being a social adult, which required him to stay away for a period from his tribe. During this phase of ritual and social education, the boy was an initiate- invisible socially and sometimes even physically in normal collective life.

Much like this neophyte, at any given moment of transitioning from one state to another even today, we lose a part of what grounds us in social reality. Ask yourself – what are you in the period when you’ve passed your Boards and are awaiting the admission results of the colleges you’ve applied to? You are, depending on your age, either an older teen or a young adult. You are still a member of your social group. But are you still a student- an identity that comes to define most of us in the first phase of our lives? Like the initiate, we are floating in limbo, – no longer a student, not yet a student.

I feel that a similar (perhaps even more severely disconcerting) liminal phase in life is the one where you can no longer claim to be a teenager, but do not feel like an adult either. Sure, 18 marks the point when we become legal adults in India. But there is no switch in our brains we can turn on or off at will to become an adult when the clock strikes 12 on our 18th birthday. This period (mostly in the first half of our 20s) is marked by considerable mental distress. Many of us are completing our graduation or post-graduation in this phase. Still, there may be people looking for a job, or just entering the workforce as a fresher. For those who are in the final phase of our bachelor’s with no plans for further study, it is perhaps employment that bothers us. For those who wish to go for a master’s, it is the question of which degree would make us employable that perhaps fills our nights. Or maybe you’re like me- in your first year of Masters, sans-internships, sans-publications, sans (useful) networks in an economy that seems favourable to only those ‘jinke upar contacts hain’, (those who have access to people in power) and struggling to organize your higher study plans abroad.

Long story short, do any of us in any of these categories feel like an adult yet? We cannot, in complete honesty, keep aside our ‘adult responsibilities’ and keep living life like we used to do in our late teens. But the pressure on us is to be an adult, to do adult things, to have our life sorted. Most of us will probably eventually figure things out. But there is no way of knowing when that will be. So we remain stuck in this liminal position between adolescence and adulthood, between being a potential human resource and an actual human resource for society. In that way, we may be a new kind of neophyte.

But Turner’s neophyte had an entire system supporting him in becoming a new, adult version of himself. Critics may argue that we also have an entire world of opportunities and information at our disposal to become a new being. What is left unsaid is that access to this world ‘at our fingertips’ is very distorted, and very unequal. Sure, one person may not want access to the same kind of resource as another since we are all different; but even within the same domain, our social identities circumscribe the boundaries of our worlds often in a very limiting manner. Furthermore, Turner’s neophyte was not psychologically alone in the way a lot of us are today. A group of neophytes perhaps learned the same things during their initiation, went through the same ordeals which they could communicate in close quarters, and they developed a life-long camaraderie with each other. Today, we “modern neophytes” compete and compete over the same things; we ‘communicate’ but forget to connect. No one’s path to success needs to be a replica of another’s. But we mistake what connects us in our journeys of transition as justifications for an endless competition at the expense of all things humane.

If we are indeed neophytes, what are the rites of passage connecting us? And what new state of ‘social’ being are we aspiring towards?

Reference:

Turner, Victor. 1969. The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure.

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Shreya Mukherjee is pursuing an MA in Sociology from the Delhi School of Economics (DSE).