Arnold van Gennep

Arnold van Gennep

Arnold van Gennep (* 23. April 1873 in Ludwigsburg , † 7. May 1957 in Epernay ) was a German-French ethnologist who especially through his work on the so-called day rites of passage (French rites of passage is known).

Life

His father was the son of French immigrants and a lieutenant at the court in the Kingdom of Württemberg , his mother came from a Dutch patrician family. When he was six years old, his parents divorced and the mother moved him to France. A few years later she married a doctor. Against the wishes of his stepfather, he enrolled in Paris at the École des Langues orientales and the École pratique des hautes études , where he took general linguistics, Egyptology, ancient and modern Arabic, Islamic and religious studies. When he married in 1897, there was a definitive break with his parents. In 1901 the extremely linguistically gifted van Gennep became head of the translation department of the Ministry of Agriculture.

This was also the time when his scientific career began. In 1908 he gave up his position with the government and financed the living for his family of four as a freelance writer, translator and lecturer. In the first half of his creative period, van Gennep dealt primarily with non-European cultures. In 1911 and 1912 he spent a total of five months doing field research with the Kabyle people in Algeria. During his second creative period he mainly researched the ethnography of France.

From 1912 to 1915 he held the chair for ethnography in Neuchâtel (Switzerland), his only academic teaching position. He lost this job because he accused Switzerland of violating its neutrality through Germany-friendly policies during the First World War. Since he was also expelled, he returned to France and did his military service as a teacher in Nice .

After the war ended, he worked for the information office of the French Foreign Ministry in Paris for four years. In 1922 he went on an extensive lecture tour through the USA and Canada. He then lived for six months as a chicken farmer in southern France before returning to his home in Bourg-la-Reine and resuming his scientific work. After the Second World War, he received a research grant from the Center national de la recherche scientifique , so that he could concentrate fully on the publication of his monumental work Le manuel de folklore français contemporain .

Throughout his life, van Gennep was an outsider in scientific life, who distinguished himself from the doctrines of his time through non-conformist theories. Especially by Émile Durkheim and his school, his findings were not recognized.

Arnold van Gennep's concept of passage rites and his three-phase theory were mainly developed by the Scottish ethnologist Victor Turner (1920–1983).

Les rites of passage

issue

A central element of van Gennep in his major work Les rites de passage (German: rites of passage ) was built in 1909, show, may be that rituals not isolated, fragmented and studied torn from its social context. Rather, in his comparative analysis of numerous rituals from various geographical areas and historical times , van Gennep found a type of ritual that ruled out an atomistic and rigid classification as well as a static categorization. Accordingly, rituals cannot be classified solely on the basis of formal similarities and analogies without considering their internal mechanisms, their logic, meaning and function.

Society as a structured house

For van Gennep, society resembles a house consisting of different rooms that are connected by corridors. While these spaces are still clearly separated from one another in non-industrialized, segmental, indigenous societies in the form of strong differentiations between gender groups, age groups, families or tribal groups, the boundaries and transitions in modern, industrial societies with increasing division of labor have lost their importance or are like in the case of professional groups, it is more of an economic or intellectual nature. In the pre-modern societies he analyzed, on the other hand, “every change, every transition in the life of an individual requires, partly sacred , partly profane actions and reactions that have to be regulated and monitored so that society as a whole does not come into conflict or damage takes. "

These transitions, which are seen as serious by the societies he has consulted - they are illustrated and associated with the motif of death and rebirth in the ritual process - cannot take place without an intermediate stage in which the individual or a group symbolically die and his or her . must abandon and destroy their previous status .

Structural scheme of the rites of passage

Among rites of passage van Gennep counted rituals of spatial or temporal change as well as those of change of state, position, status and age group, although without claiming that absolutely all rites represent rites of passage. According to van Gennep, rites of passage always pursue the same goal: to transfer the individual from a precisely defined situation to an equally clearly defined and structured situation. They also all follow a similar phase model, an analogous sequence order. The various phases of this ritual complex are in a necessary sequence. This three-phase structure of rituals of passage (adopted and developed by Victor Turner) consists of

1. Separation rites (rites de séparation)
2. Transitional or threshold rites (rites de marge)
3. and affiliation rites (rites d'agrégation) that conclude the ritual cycle

As a model for all species, van Gennep uses “spatial transitions”, as the above-mentioned equation of society and dwelling should make clear. Not only that the crossing of a spatial border is often part and expression of rites of passage of all kinds, but rites generally contain a spatial visual model of the crossing of borders, as van Gennep shows with a variety of examples, such as initiation rites, wedding rites, birth or burial rites tries. An example of this is the threshold of a house entrance, which marks and symbolizes the transition between public and private spheres. This threshold forms a kind of no man's land, a “betwixt and between” as Victor Turner was to describe it a good 60 years later based on van Gennep.

Separation rites express the detachment from an earlier state (social, cosmic or vegetative nature). Affiliation rites manifest a new position in life associated with corresponding rights and duties through symbolic actions such as sharing a meal, exchanging gifts, ritual sexual intercourse, putting on insignia that corresponds to the status or giving names. Compared to these clearly defined starting and ending points, the threshold phase is characterized by moments of the indeterminate, non-classifiable, in which the participants are outside of social life. The usual economic and legal relationships are changed, sometimes suspended. Social rules are abolished, the initiators are considered "holy" and "impure" at the same time, or dangerous and are considered dead.

During this time of transition, individuals or groups are instructed in their new way of life, introduced to tribal law, received religious instruction, and brought into contact with the sacra of the community. Nudity, physical mutilation , humiliation, physical and mental weaknesses are supposed to bring about and control a visible and irreversible detachment and simultaneous integration into a new group. The transition from one social category to another takes place under the precautionary measures of the ritual and restores the equilibrium of the social order.

Function of the rites of passage

According to van Gennep, all transitions and breaks that life itself makes represent a threat to the static social order. According to this, the function of the rites of passage is to control or weaken the dynamics of social life and to maintain the order of the clearly structured society. The shifting of the “magical-religious circles”, i.e. classification and structural patterns that contain every individual and social change, and the resulting disruption of social and individual life is countered with rites that monitor, bring about and accompany them. For van Gennep, rituals are “social necessities”. In this sense, even if he was not a major theoretician in his life and his theoretical considerations only gain persuasiveness through repetition, he shows himself to be one of the forerunners of functionalism , which clarified the importance of ritual for the cohesion of society. With his focus on the internal structural scheme and the interrelations of the ritual phases of rites of passage, his work also has some structuralist traits.

The fact that van Gennep unfolded his material, as Schomburg-Scherff emphasizes, “in the form of uncut diamonds”, left it “open” for further developments and receptions, whereby Victor Turner, as mentioned at the beginning, was to be most strongly influenced by van Gennep's work .

Works

• Manuel de folklore français contemporain . Picard, Paris 1988
• Mythes et legends d'Australie. Etude d'ethnographie et de sociologie . Guilmoto, Paris 1905
• Les semi-savants
• Tabou et totémisme à Madagascar. Étude descriptive et théoretique . Leroux, Paris 1904
• Les rites of passage . 1909. German: Rites of passage . Campus-Verlag, Frankfurt / M. 2005, ISBN 3-593-37836-1

literature

• Sylvia M. Schomburg-Scherff: Arnold van Gennep (1873-1957) . In: Axel Michaels (Hrsg.): Classics of religious studies. From Friedrich Schleiermacher to Mircea Eliade . Beck, Munich 2004, ISBN 3-406-42813-4 , pp. 222-233 .
• Justin Stagl : Rites of passage and status passages. Reflections on Arnold van Gennep's “Les Rites de Passage” . In: Karl Acham (ed.): Social processes. Contributions to historical sociology and social analysis . Adeva, Graz 1983, ISBN 3-201-01224-6 , pp. 83-96 .
• Victor Turner : The ritual. Structure and anti-structure . Campus, Frankfurt am Main 2005, ISBN 3-593-37762-4 (English: The Ritual Process. Structure and Anti-Structure .).
• Michael Prosser-Schell: Arnold van Gennep 1873–1957. Aspects of the further effect of his concepts. Attempt a brief sketch . In: France. Yearbook for European Ethnology , 6th ed. By Heidrun Alzheimer a . a. Gorres Society . Schöningh, Paderborn 2011 ISSN  0171-9904 pp. 35-48

Web links

• Literature by and about Arnold van Gennep in the catalog of the German National Library