Hello, and welcome to the Folklore & Fiction newsletter. In this edition, I'm writing about rites of passage with help from scholars Arnold van Gennep, Alan Dundes, and others, discussing rites of passage in fiction, and providing you with storytelling insights related to the topic. Rites of passage are customs underpinned by the beliefs that inform them, much as myths are narratives about the beliefs that inspire them. This understanding of folklore genres as flexible or slippery is an important one, and it's often examined in folklore scholarship. As I move into a second year of genre discussion, I plan to mention these crossovers when I see them so that you can begin to think in multiple ways about the topics I present and bring that thought process to your creative work.
Folkloric Discussion of Rites of Passage
Alan Dundes writes that although Arnold van Gennep had little experience researching and teaching in a university, his analysis of ritual made a tremendous impact upon scholarship in several disciplines. Before this analysis, rituals were often categorized by type, which produced sets of birth, marriage, death, and other sorts of rituals (Dundas 1999, 12). Van Gennep changed this methodology with the realization that most rituals share the same three-fold sequential structure:
This is a Folklore & Fiction dispatch excerpt. To read the full dispatch, create a free account or log in to your existing account for access to the archives.