Essays on Rites of Passage

L: Coming of age ceremonies are rituals, and rituals are important to humans, particularly in helping to keep the culture alive. We have to understand that these rituals are embedded within cultures. J: Using words like ‘savage’ to describe a cultural practice shows how we judge people from other cultures that are not our own. If you live with lions everyday, then dealing with lions is something you have to learn, just like Navajo women have to learn how to work with corn that they eat everyday. I thus support the point that different cultures ask different things from ...

Adolescence to Adulthood

Adolescence begins at the end of childhood, generally when a child reaches the age of puberty. The arrival of adolescence is definite and certain, for example in girls, adolescent is determined by menarche or their first menstruation whereas in boys, growth of reproductive parts determine the onset of adolescence (Glozah and Lawani 1188:1197). Adolescence ends with the beginning of adulthood but the later stage is vague and not definite to mark its onset. Adolescence to adulthood signifies life transition. Traditional societies have rites of passage which helped the individuals evolve through stages. In spite of this, contemporary societies lack ...

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Introduction The novel, ‘City of Thieves’ by David Benioff, presents an opportunity to analyze the concept of masculinity under the circumstances of war. What is significant in this literary work is that manliness emerges under extreme adversity, which is often considered as the very test of being a man. Although Benioff’s ‘City of Thieves’ is fictional, the circumstances are realistic and is based on a historical incident that happened around six decades ago in Leningrad, which is the present day St. Petersburg in Russia. Becoming a man is one of the most confusing rhetoric there is. ...

Culture is a very dynamic element of the social setting of human beings. Culture is kinetic meaning that it is bound to constant modification and change from time to time. For example, when we consider the English language, we notice the constant and frequent adoption and addition of new words meant to describe varied situations in different cultures. These new words emanate from the frequent changes or social developments constantly shaping our world today. For example, one of the new words adopted as part of the accepted English words is the word ‘Photobomb’. A ‘photobomb’ is a verb meaning ...

Attaining a specific chronological age of maturity stipulated in law is not enough to make one an adult. Virginia Woolf, an English writer in the twentieth-century quotes, ” One of the signs of passing youth is the birth of a sense of fellowship with other human beings as we take our place among them.” It is evident that experiences with people and nature play a key role in transition to adulthood. In the past, different societies had different rites of passage celebrated to mark the transition from adolescence to manhood as opposed to the current society. The author of “Passage ...

Across the cultures, rites of passage are held to mark transition between different phases of life. Although the practices are unique, the rites of passage are common across all cultures. Similarly, anthropological studies have revealed that despite differences between cultures, rites of passage follow a three-stage process. The three stages are separation, liminality and incorporation. Separation is the first stage in any rite of passage. It involves divorce of an individual from his or her familiar environment. In the liminality stage, the individual’s old identity is destroyed and a new one created. In the last stage, the individual ...

Almost every culture have some type of rites of passage that boys must go through to become a man. Each of the different Native tribes in the United States had their own rite of passage for their men. However, several factors contributed toward the loss of Native tribal men’s rites of passage. Factors such as Christians wanting to convert the Native tribes, the taking of land from the Native tribes by Euro-Americans, and the misunderstanding of Native rituals by the Euro-Americans led to the loss of Native tribal men’s rites of passage. Many Native tribes fought hard ...

The religion originated in the Indus Valley region near the river Indus, a place which is currently in modern day Pakistan. About 80 percent of the total Indian population is Hindu. The Hindus believe in the Supreme God and the forms get represented in the number of deities which they worship. The central belief of Hindus is the existence of a cycle of birth, death and then rebirth which is governed by karma of an individual. They believe that the soul travels through the cycle of successive lives. The next incarnation is dependent on the activities of a person’s previous ...

Introduction

The seven Ninian Smart’s dimensions of religion include practical and ritual, for example baptism, prayer and worship; narrative or mythical, for instance historical stories of Moses and Jesus in the bible; ethical and legal, as evidenced by the ten commandments and beatitudes in Christianity; doctrinal and philosophical, which entails justification of the faith through scriptures; experiential and emotional, expressed through deep emotions when something believed to be supreme or profound is experienced; institutional and social as evidenced by existence of churches, mosques and temples; and material aspects such as architectural structures, music and religious symbols. This paper analyses ...

Expressed in Macbeth

Myths and legends are part of our common collective unconscious; they provide us with ways to process the feelings and aspirations we have as individuals to better ourselves and be rewarded for our hard work and moral goodness. There is also a psychoanalytical portrait to this sense of myth as well, as Freudian concepts of dreams and human fantasies of the unconscious combine with Jungian archetypes to create models of human behavior that we wish to emulate and look up to. No matter the story, be it Jesus or Holden Caulfield or Luke Skywalker, myths often operate on a very similar ...

A rite of passage is a very important part of an individual’s life in many cultures. Most typically represent when the individual comes of age in the culture. Young Jewish children have a Bat Mitzvah or Bar Mitzvah, depending on their genders, to express when they become adults. The Satere Mawe tribe in the Amazon are forced to wear gloves filled with bullet ants for several hours to show that they have the strength to face adulthood. In rites of passage such as these, sometimes the participants die. In less serious, more celebratory rites of passage, the participants merely get ...

Rites of passage between Malaysian and Brazilian adolescents

Cultures in all parts of the world practice different and unique rites of passage. For a young people to be acceptable in any given social group, they are required to undergo certain rites of passage, which become their transition period from adolescence to adulthood. The rites of passage among many cultures in the world help in separating or distinguishing boys from men (Virtanen, 2012). Rite of passage is a concept that is used to help explore other areas and in the description of other various milestones in the life of a given individual during transition to any other stage, which includes change ...

Introduction

Coming of age is a big deal to a lot of young men and women, it gives them something to look forward to when they get to that specific age. For some, it is going to their first strip club and for others, it is hunting trip as well as shooting their first deer that signifies their status as a man/adult. This coming of age ritual is called a Rites of Passage, it is a holy ceremonial activity that people in certain cultures and religions partake in to cement their adult status. Rites of Passage is a very serious and effervescent pastime that people in ...

Folklore is the art of the oppressed classes according to population. Such oppressed classes include the workers and peasants of a population. For the West folklore can be defined as a culture that is a peasant in nature and of one people that is of mostly the researchers’ people. There is always a possibility of scientifically studying the national cultures, but folklore is unacceptable. In a classless society, folklore should disappear and often loses its features as a product of lower strata. In a socialist society, folklore lacks meaning since there are neither upper nor lower strata. Philippine folks have characteristics of myths. These mentioned folks ...

- The purpose of this ethno-profile of the Crow Nation is to gain an in-depth awareness of some human group different from the one in which we live. - I chose to write about the Crow Nation people because although more than one-half of all Native Americans in the United States live outside the reservation the Crow Nation is concentrated on their reservation. This makes them unique and interesting to write about. - The physical environment - The Crow Nation has a reservation south of Billings, Montana. They also live in several cities, mainly in western America. ...

Culture is simply the way of living of the people as it gives people a sense of identity, belonging and pride. This explains why people always regard their culture and have such a great esteem towards it. Culture entails several aspects of the community ranging from language, traditions, customs, and festivals among others. It is in this broad concept of culture that the rites of passage exist. There are many transitions that occur in the life of a person. Some of these transitions are trivial while others are major depending on societal consideration. The rites of passage are a cultural mark and the ...

Race, Ethnicity, Human variation

Race is someone’s background. It is a common origin or relatives a group of people shares. Ethnicity is the relationship of an individual to a group of people or culture. Human variation is the different of people from cultural with different perspectives and physical perspectives. In my opinion, race does exist. It exists because it determines who you are. Should race exist? I think that race should exist because race sets the differences among individual with in cultures, and beliefs about human differences. Without race we wouldn’t have culture and human differences and we won’t have anything unique about ...

Abstract

Rite of Passage is a term that refers to a ritual or ceremony for a specific and important phase in a person’s life. In every part of the world, people celebrate different transitional phases in their own specific ways to mark their importance. In the similar manner, in the Middle East, these rituals or ceremonies vary from culture to culture. Events like birth, adulthood and marriage hold their own significance among different tribes and groups in the region. This paper discusses the marital ceremonies and adulthood rituals that are performed in the Kurdish and the Sunni culture and also compares their similarities ...

The Masonic society has grown to greater levels in the contemporary world such that it has attracted the attention of many researchers. Initially, it was a group of brothers, who eluded from the royal society, who had a deep and abiding desire to seek knowledge, debate philosophies, explore history and discover symbolism. It paved way for the development of what is commonly known as freemasonry in the contemporary society. Some books define it as a peculiar system of morality oblique in fable and exemplified by symbols (Jeffers, 98). It evolved from the discussion of ethics and morality that brought disagreement in the ...

Introduction

Rite of passage refers to the occasion or an event that classifies an individual to have transition from on stage of life to another. This activity encompasses Clitoridectomy, rite, Circumcision, and infibulations. It is valued and treasure within the community. It normally commemorates or rather celebrated through performance of fork dances and songs to entice the entire event. It exists in between the current or present time and the standing reality. The rites of passage classified into different distinct forms namely territorial passage whereby a person is required to go by certain set formalities (Kasomo, 2010). The other type of ...

Explain what Rites of Passage means and then describe at least two Rites of Passages for the Native American culture/religious tradition. Rites of passage refer to ceremonial mechanisms that societies use to mark the transition of a member of society from one social rank to another. They can therefore be termed as ceremonies bounding important events in life like birth, wedding and death. They particularly provide individuals and groups in society with ways to handle tension that comes with changes during various occasions of life. By aiding these life path changes, rites of passage hold significant emotional meaning for ...

In many communities in the world, a rite of passage is an event that that marks the transition of an individual’s life from one stage to another (Nelson, 2012). This paper will discuss rite of passage and the stages involved.

Rites of passage can either be for sacred or religious purposes, for example, baptism which is a religious rite of passage or tattooing which is a secular rite of passage in America (Scharwz, 2006). The rites of passage are very important socio-cultural practices in the communities that practice them and are normally in three phases, namely: separation, transition, and reincorporation (Berry, ...

In the story of Ngeti, there are several rituals practiced by the traditional Taita community in Kenya as well as rituals practiced by the catholic community from the region. In addition, there are also rituals practiced by the Protestants1. This paper seeks to identify at least one particular ritual in Ngeti’s story that is similar to or different from the rituals identified by Emile Durkheim and understanding of rites passage.

With the myriad rituals in the story of Ngeti, the one that stands out especially with regards to traditional practices in the Taita community is the ritual to ...

Arguably, many people in the world have numerous emotions in times of major changes in life. In the modern world, adolescent girls too undergo several psychological, physical, and emotional changes, which in most cases are stressful. During this stage most of them are lost to pregnancy, alcohol, suicide, drugs as well as spiritually. Rite of passage in adolescent girls is a cross culrural-phenomina. The modern rite of passage that an adolescent girl should undergo is coming together of the mothers and the girl child so as to explore the puberty. This facilitates a health transition of daughters to young women ...

The Pokot is a tribe in Africa living in both Kenya and Uganda. However, most Pokots live in the Northern part of Kenyan Rift-Valley which lies along the Kenya /Uganda border. An interview with Daniel Lotodo, a 78 year old man from the community revealed a lot about the ethnography of the community The Pokot for a long time are predominantly pastoralists’. Their occupations of cattle keeping has been necessitated by environment factors. The area is semi arid and agricultural produce can hardly do well. However, through barter trade with neighboring communities such as the Samburu and the Marakwet, the society would ...