Untitled Slide

Rite

Rites of Passage

Rites of Passage

• These ceremonies are held to observe a person's entry into a new stage of life and can be anything from a high school graduation ceremony or a birthday party, to a funeral.

Why?

• Most rites help people to understand their new roles in society. They can also help others learn to treat people in new ways after they experience certain rites of passage.
• They can also help others learn to treat people in new ways after they experience certain rites of passage.

Three Main Phases:
Separation, Transition, and Incorporation

Separation

• In the separation phase, the participant is taken away from his/her familiar environment and former role and enters a very different and sometimes foreign routine that they are forced to adjust to and become familiar with.

Separation: Examples

• A rite that would fall into this category would be BIRTH. The infant leaves a very safe and secure environment in their mother's womb to an extremely different one in the real world.
• DEATH can also be a separation rite, depending on a person's belief about what happens after someone dies.

Separation: examples

• Societies have devised ways to mark these separations and aid in the transitions that will take place.
• For instance, the naming of babies marks the significant event of birth.
• Funerals and the many different funeral customs mark the separation that takes place when a death occurs.
• Funerals can also help those left behind to make the necessary changes needed to adjust to being separated from loved ones.

Transition

Transition: Examples

• This phase can include the time when a person becomes engaged to be married.
• At this time, they are learning about the new stage of life they will soon enter -- marriage. They are also adjusting and preparing for it, or making a transition.

Transition: example

• The transition phase may also include the time that children enter adolescence and leave their childhood behind.
• This is the time when people learn and grow and prepare to be an independent adult in the real world.

Incorporation

Incorporation

• Marriage is a good example of a rite that would take place in the incorporation phase.
• After people are married, they have taken on a very new and different role, having prepared for it in earlier transition and separation rites.

There are five times in one's life that are often considered to be the most significant times of change. They are: Birth, Leaving childhood and becoming an adolescent, Leaving home, Weddings, and Death/Funerals.

Ceremony

• To recognize these significant times in our lives, societies typically hold elaborate ceremonies.
• Each different culture or society may choose to mark these rites in very different ways.
• Each ceremony is unique and meaningful to one's own culture.

Objectives

• Students will be able to define a rite of passage
• Students will recognize five specific rites of passage
• Students will be able to recognize the significance in names and be able to explain the explanation behind their own names.
• Students will recognize that different cultures recognize rites of passage in different, but unique and meaningful ways.