The Rites of Passage

London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1965. Book. Fine. Cloth. Second Printing. xxvii, 198pp., index, notes. Fine in worn and torn and price-clipped DJ. Very scarce. Translation by Monika B. Vizedom and Gabrielle L. Caffee; introduction by Solon T. Kimball. "Birth, puberty, marriage, death - those and other crises in man's journey through life prompt the ritual ceremonies that Arnold van Gennep called the Rites of Passage. Van Gennep, a distinguished French anthropologist, was the first observer of human behaviour to note that these ceremonies differ only in detail from one culture to another, and that they are in essence universal. His classic work in ethnography, The Rites of Passage, first published in 1909, points out these uniformities as well as describing the complex richness of the patterns of human ritual. The very phrase 'rites of passage' has become a convention in the vocabulary of anthropologist and sociologists. Now for the first time van Gennep's masterpiece is available in an English translation.".