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Arts & Culture

Ritual and Liminality in Rites of Passage Across Cultures

Quick fact

Anthropologists like Arnold van Gennep and Victor Turner found that rites of passage worldwide—from Christian baptism to Japanese coming-of-age ceremonies—follow a universal three-stage pattern: separation, liminality, and reincorporation, with the liminal phase being the most powerful and transformative.

Why this is interesting

Every society marks life’s big changes—birth, puberty, marriage, death—with ritual. But why do so many of these ceremonies share the same hidden structure, even across vastly different cultures?