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PASSAGES
31-1, 2009
Maria MATEONIU
Introduction
Catherine ARSENEAULT
Autour des départs à la retraite: Le bien cuit comme rite de passage
Anamaria IUGA
La
"belle salle" du Maramures
Daniela MOISA
Amener
l’ailleurs chez soi: Pratiques architecturales domestiques au Pays d’Oas
Raluca NAGY
Tourisme
et migration dans le Maramures
Pascal HUOT
Tourisme culturel en milieu insulaire: Le cas de l’Île aux Grues
HORS THÈME
Dominique POULOT
Le
patrimoine immatériel en France entre renouveau muséographique et "territoire de projet"
Laurier TURGEON et Louise SAINT-PIERRE
Le
patrimoine immatériel religieux du Québec: Sauvegarder l’immatériel par le virtuel
Eduardo GONZÁLEZ CASTILLO
Cultures
musicales transnationales et capitalisme: Le milieu sonidero
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“PASSAGES” FROM VAN GENNEP TO THE PRESENT
DAY
Maria Mateoniu
National Romanian Peasant Museum, Bucharest
mariamateoniu@hotmail.com
Both polysemic and paradoxical, the concept of “passage” appears to remain essential for understanding the non-precedented
transformations (deracination, migration, and secularisation) taking place in the contemporary world. Rooted in
the Latin patior (to suffer, undergo, experience), the word “passage” indicates a displacement, a process of transformation
undertaken, that is not yet finished. It designates equally “the site where this process, its mark or its support
are enacted whatever its morphological or metaphorical sense” (La Soudière 2000: 5).
The concept of “passage” indicates the metamorphosis preceding change, disorder followed by order, a state between
order and disorder. As with bereavement, the sense of passing can not be reduced to mere loss, because the death
it implies is symbolic and necessary for the renewal of life.
Since it is a process, any passage is, successively and simultaneously, a before and an after, a here and a there,
a separation but also a belonging, a loss but also a gain, a disidentification but also an identification. The
researcher is thus able to emphasise what the passage connects or, conversely, separates; what it must leave behind,
what is lost in mourning, or, conversely, what is gained — a benefit, the attainment of a new state, or of a new
status (La Soudière 2000: 8).
“Passage” involves a reflection on the current order; through opposition it challenges this order, obliging it
to renew itself. The act of passage is thus linked to thought and self-awareness. If identity inhibits the act
of thinking, it respects an order. To think, on the other hand, “is to pass, it is to question this order, to be
astonished by its existence” (Certeau 1987; see also La Soudière 2000: 11).
The father of this concept is undoubtedly Arnold Van Gennep. He proposed the “consubstantiality” of a rite and
a passage. Today the three phases into which a passage is seperated are well known: a before (a period of separation,
of mourning), a during (a liminal period, of the border and the threshold), and an after (a period of reincorporation
and recombination after the crossing of the threshold).
As for Victor Turner, he perceives the threshold as a border which thickens and grows in time: a liminal phase
signifies a period of transition and simulated death, as in African rites of initiation. The threshold is the communitas
where people live unfettered by status and in communion (Turner 1990: 96).
Pierre Bourdieu returns to Van Gennep’s theory to better explain it by starting from a unique
world vision. Bourdieu notes how, from antiquity to the present day, through Christian mysticism and eastern philosophies,
the conception of the universe was based on the principle of the existence of binary opposites. Day follows night
as the dry season follows the rains, light follows darkness …. The establishment of order, of culture, presupposes
the act of establishing a boundary, a separation and a distinction. If the threshold highlights the distinction
— the difference — between things, rites of passage must resolve its crossing and make the unification of opposing
entities possible (Bourdieu 1980: 374).
If these rite of passage theories are critized today, it is because of their weak relationship to empirical and
material evidence, or even the total absence of such. At the beginning of his work, Van Gennep attributes a specific
spatial origin to the rites of passage, which is almost immediately abandoned as spaces become pure idealised constructs
(Philippe Bonnin 2000: 65-57). The material and spatial dimensions of passages were left out of the analysis to
be replaced by an emphasis on the antiquity of their origins.
This process of the “over-symbolism” of reality is certainly justified from the point of view of the times that
produced it. At the beginning of the twentieth century, which saw the publication of Van Gennep’s The Rites of Passage, folklore provided the symbolic framework necessary to
legitimate new national identities. Found in all cultures since the beginning of time, rites of passage are thus
understood as proof of cultural continuity and the “antidote” to the angst brought forth by modernity. It was necessary
to impose an order on the customs collected by folklorists and give them direction, in opposition to the uncertainty
of the industrial age.
Insofar as “Tradition” is opposed to “Modernity,” the raison d’être of Van Gennep’s passage
is the need for continuity as a necessary condition to fill the void left by the rupture. In this context, the
metaphorical scheme of rites of passage risks moving contemporary scholars away from an understanding of various
realities rather than helping them towards one. Running counter to this tendency to oversymbolise reality, the
authors in this issue give preference to anchoring passages in lived space and time (Belmont 1986: 16). A number
of passages were caught within their current turmoil (societies in transition; communities between ancient and
modern; individuals at the crossroads of their life; tourist practices, and new forms of immigration; the meaning
given to landscape, roads, and frontiers). At the same time this issue contains reflections on the current forms
of rites of passage and on passages as individual and collective experiences.
Rites of passage have not disappeared from the current scene: theycan be found in new, often unanticipated forms.
These days rites have freed themselves from strict forms, and become individualised and privatised (Roberge 2006:
214). They elevate the everyday and the personal by investing them with the significance of the symbols and the
values of the collectivity (214). Catherine Arsenault positions herself within this perspective of the perpetuation
of rites of passage. By looking at a roast, she analyses retirement parties as secular rites, even if they are
not always perceived as such by the participants involved. Nevertheless, everything makes sense as ritual: the
structure (the presence of a liminal phase and mourning), speech and language, the staging of the action as dramatic
ritual, the distribution of roles, and the manipulation of certain objects.
As for Anamaria Iuga, she re-examines the public/private boundaries that structure the village communities of the
Maramures area of Romania. Built of wood using traditional techniques, the “old-fashioned house” is a site for
rites of passage. The “beautiful room” is the most valued part of the house, a focus for domestic and community
life. Iuga takes into account not only the transformations produced by modernism but also the tendency of the villagers
to keep this particular domestic space as it was. The “beautiful room” thus seems to be a “symbolic mediator” between
the interior and the exterior of the house, and between a “before” and an “after” for major celebrations (see Augé
1994: 106 for references to Althabe’s symbolic mediators).
The term “passage” indicates in this case tensions between “tradition” and “modernity,” which can also be found
in the articles by Daniela Moisa and Raluca Nagy. The Maramures region became famous for its archaic quality after
the dissemination of folklorists’ and ethnographers’ descriptions and because of government policies lasting from
the national period until recently. The region still represents the cradle of Romanianism at its most ancient and
conservative in regards to the changes brought by modernity.
Since 1971, the architecture there has changed because of a decree imposed by the Ceaucescu regime, requiring that
all new house construction be multi-storey. These systematic measures were imposed by force in all Romanian villages.
This was also the case in the Oas region where Daniela Moisa conducted her research, analysing the history of state
intervention during the 1970s. Since that time, the inhabitants of Oas have engaged in temporary labour migration,
investing the money they earn in the construction of large houses built according to prescribed standards.
While this migration was initially confined within Romania’s borders, the situation changed after the fall of communism,
when the villagers started to migrate to Western countries. Nevertheless, money continued to be invested in house
construction. The “new house” built in a “Western” fashion was favoured at the expense of the “traditional house,”
a concrete representation of the idea of success for the villagers, a projection of self, and a means for communicating
a newer and higher status through a process of accelerated innovation.
Subject to fashion and competition, the home is perpetually being reconstructed. In contrast to the inhabitants
of Maramures who took to heart the findings of specialists concerning the authenticity and distinctiveness of their
region, the inhabitants of Oas have given in to the standards of modernity, without however completly abandoning
their local values. The passage of villagers to the countries of Western Europe was followed by a return to their
homeland. The going back and forth between the two places made borders familiar and passage a permanent state (Diminescu
2006).
The reality that Daniela Moisa so thoroughly describes recalls the assertions of George Balandier, that societies
in transition or developing societies are characterised by “a dialectic which operates between a (degraded) traditional
system and a (dictated from without) new system giving rise to a third sociocultural system, which, though instable,
exhibits authentic modernity” (Balandier 1986: 104). Far from having attained a modern third system, the inhabitants
of Oas live instead at the crossroads of their existence, torn between an eagerness for a constant assembly-line
transformation and a return to a reconstructed tradition (see Balandier 1986: 109). While the West represents money,
the village and, particularly, the home are the contexts for displaying their professional achievements. There
is thus the emergence of a dual identity, affirms Moisa, between the modern and the traditional.
Raluca Nagy, meanwhile, shows that the passage is not a rite in and of itself, enacted because it should be enacted
but without a reason, knowing neither why it is done nor what it represents (see Bourdieu 1980). Today’s social
actors have become conscious of their differences. The social world no longer presents itself as a spectacle solely
for the researcher’s gaze: it has become a stage where gazes are multiple and cross each other. Through the interpretation
of both tourist practices and migration to the West, Raluca Nagy, in the same region of Maramures, studies the
complex relationships between the actors involved. The tourism they practice is not an economic activity in the
strict sense of the term because it is not framed within the context of profitability. It is rather an “improvisation”
supported by an exchange of authenticity between locals and foreigners. The former play the part of bearers of
an authentic and ancient tradition, a role allotted them in the second half of the nineteenth century by the State,
which they offer up to tourists searching for the traditional. The locals who periodically leave to work in the
West have taken on the role of mediators, of cultural brokers. Life lived “betwixt” provides them with knowledge
and power. Experts on tourists’ expectations, they give themselves the right to correct and guide the “show” of
traditional customs.
In another context, Pascal Huot seeks to know if there is a particular form of cultural tourism that lends itself
to island cultures. On l’Île aux Grues, in Québec, he identifies elements which constitute the place’s
identity markers. The Mid-Lent festival provides the occasion for tourists to cross and be present at a display
of identity preservation. However, the word “passage” does not exclusively indicate the act of crossing a boundary,
of crossing by boat to arrive at the shore, but also the act of continuing on a straight road, passing alongside
the fences and thresholds, without crossing them (Dubost 2000:60).
There is no risk or danger that cannot be overcome, because the resistance to an obstacle generates
a new solution, itself containing a new stratagem which, once understood by legal authorities, is abandoned for
other behaviours which immediately take its place (Diminescu 2006).
We are involved in a dynamic where breaking down boundaries always follows the appearance of new boundaries. The
hope of abolishing borders and the impossibility of doing so informs all the articles in this Passages issue.
References
Augé, Marc. 1994. Pour une anthropologie des mondes contemporains. Paris: Flammarion.
Balandier, George. 1986. Sens et puissance. Paris: Presses Universitaires
de France.
Bonnin, Philipe. 2000. “Dispositifs et rituels du Seuil.” Communications 70: 65-93.
Bourdieu, Pierre. 1980. Le sens pratique. Paris: Minuit.
Centlivres, Pierre. 2000. “Rites, Seuils, Passages.” Communications
70: 33-45.
Certeau, Michel de, Luce Giaral, and Pierre Mayal. 1994. L’invention du quotidien, vol 2. Paris: Gallimard.
Clifford, James. 1997. Routes. London: Harvard University Press.
Diminescu, Dana. 2006. “Le système D contre le système SIS: Navigateurs, passeurs, prisonniers des
frontières informatiques.”
Available at http:www.ticm.msh-paris.fr.
Dubost, Françoise. 2000. “Les agréments de l’entrée.” Communications 70: 53-65.
La Soudière, Martin de. 2000. “Le paradigme du passage.” Communications 70: 5-31.
Le Breton, David. 2002. Conduites à risque: Des jeux de mort au jeu de vivre. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France.
Maffesoli, Michel. 1997. Du nomadisme: Vagabondages initiatiques.
Paris: Livre de Poche.
Mihãilescu, Vintilã. 2008. “Foreword: The Cultural Market of Traditions.” Martor.
The Museum of the Romanian Peasant Anthropology Review 13: 11-15.
Rivière, Claude. 1995. Les rites profanes. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France.
Roberge, Martine. 2006. “En guise de conclusion: Pour une relecture de nos rites dans la société
contemporaine.” Ethnologies 28 (2): 213- 222.
Turner, Victor. 1990. Le phénomène rituel: Structure et contre structure. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France.
Van Gennep, Arnold. 1969 [1909]. Les rites de passage. Paris:
Mouton.
[pp. 13-20]
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