Initiation and Passage: Multilingual Encyclopedic and Bibliographic Approach
Diederik F. Janssen, Independent Researcher

Download the Paper (PDF format) - July 9, 2008 Tell a colleague about it. Printing Tips: Select 'print as image' in the Acrobat print dialog if you have trouble printing. This work has been peer reviewed.

ABSTRACT:
An encyclopedic and bibliographic review of “initiation” and life course rituals (Janssen, in preparation) highlights a number of indexing problems that complicate previous efforts to code the cross-cultural distribution of such rituals. Qualitative assessment of this classification issue is extensive and draws from a number of disciplines beside anthropology. Contemporary interest in ritualized organization of status change on the level of metaphor, narrative and discourse and across social sciences and public appropriations (Janssen 2007) foregrounds concerns substantial enough to compromise any comparative approach to the problem. This is, of course, an inevitable corollary of semantically convoluted concepts such as initiation. In this short research note I briefly list available cross-cultural tools and provide short critiques of them.