Gennep, Arnold Van

GENNEP, ARNOLD VAN (1873–1957), French anthropologist, was born in Ludwigsburg, Germany, his father a descendant of French emigrants. When van Gennep was six, his parents divorced, and his mother returned to France with him. Several years later she married a doctor who had a summer practice at a spa in the French province of Savoy. Van Gennep's attachment to this region, which he considered his adopted homeland, dates from these years. He was to travel through Savoy, village by village, collecting ethnographic and folkloric materials.

Van Gennep had a diversified and original university education at the École Pratique des Hautes Études and the École des Langues Orientales in Paris; his studies included general linguistics, ancient and modern Arabic, Egyptology, Islamic studies, and studies of the religions of primitive peoples. He possessed a rare gift for learning languages. For seven years he was in charge of translation at the Ministry of Agriculture in Paris, but he gave up this post, the only one that the French government ever offered him, in order to devote himself to his personal research. From 1912 to 1915, he taught ethnology at the University of Neuchâtel in Switzerland. After being expelled for having expressed doubts concerning Swiss claims to total neutrality during World War I, he made his living by the publication of numerous articles and periodic reports, lecturing, and commissioned translations.

His voluminous production can be divided into two periods separated by his most important work, Les rites de passage (1909). The concept that he discovered here permitted him, during the second part of his life, to devote himself entirely to the ethnography and folklore of France. In the first part he had been occupied with the problems posed by the English school of anthropology, concerning totemism, taboo, the original forms of religion and society, and the relationships between myth and rite. But he had approached these anthropological commonplaces with a certain originality. For example, in his study, based on documents collected in Madagascar, of the problems of taboo, he not only sees the expression of religious institutions and attitudes but also emphasizes the social effects of taboo, which creates, maintains, or transforms the order of nature, and which consolidates the bonds between a single clan's members, between animal and human members of a clan, between ancestors and descendants, and between humans and gods. Taboo, he believed, is both a social and religious institution. The appearance of his work L'état actuel du problème totémique (1920), which purported to be a provisory summation of works on totemism, was in reality, as Claude Lévi-Strauss says, the "swan song" of speculations on totemism. The personal theoretical position of van Gennep in this work is pre-functionalist: Totemism has as its function to maintain the existing cohesion of the social group and to assure its continuity, which the totem symbolically represents.

Van Gennep's main contribution remains the idea of "rites of passage," which he put forward and developed in the book of that title. By rite of passage he means any ceremony that accompanies the passage from one state to another and from one world, whether cosmic or social, to another. Each rite of passage includes three necessary stages: separation, boundary, and reaggregation (or the preliminal, the liminal, and the postliminal). Van Gennep also introduced other important ideas. By emphasizing "ceremonial sequence," van Gennep demonstrates the importance of the process of "unfolding" in rituals and in the relations that exist between rituals. He also introduces the concept of the "pivoting" of the sacred—that is, the idea that the sacred is not an absolute but rather an alternating value, an indication of the alternating situations in which an individual finds himself. Every individual, in the course of his life, passes through alternations of sacred and profane, and the rites of passage function to neutralize for the social group the harmful effects of the imbalances produced by these alternations.

Van Gennep was a nonconformist with regard to his ideas, which obliged him to live at the periphery of academic institutions. His most original contribution in the field of anthropology was to show profound connections between the social and religious spheres.

Rites of Passage, Overview Article.

Belmont, Nicole. Arnold Van Gennep: The Creator of French Ethnography. Translated by Derek Coltman. Chicago, 1978.

Gennep, Arnold van. Manuel de folklore français contemporain. 9 vols. Paris, 1937–1958.

Gennep, Arnold van. The Rites of Passage. Translated by Monika B. Vizedom and Gabrielle L. Caffee. Chicago, 1960.

Gennep, Ketty van. Bibliographie des œuvres d'Arnold van Gennep. Paris, 1964.

Belier, Wouter W. "Arnold Van Gennep and the Rise of French Sociology of Religion." Numen 41 (May 1994): 141–162.

Schjødt, Jens Peter. "Initiation and the Classification of Rituals." Temenos 22 (1986): 93–108.

Zumwalt, Rosemary Lévy. The Enigma of Arnold van Gennep (1873–1957): Master of French Folklore and Hermit of Bourg-la-Reine. Helsinki: Suomalainen Tiedeakatemia, 1988.

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