CHAPTER THREE - Adolescent Issues and Coming-of-Age Ceremonies

A: BACKGROUND

3. A Life Cycle Crisis? Time for a Ceremony

The need for the ceremony may be understood, but the impact of such a ceremony should first be examined in its conceptual perspective. In essence, this need arises out of the uncertainties occasioned by the changes in the individual, which make it clear that there is a major transformation in self-image and social role that need to be negotiated, but this is not a clear-cut transition and requires approaches at different levels.

Clearly, the purpose and major task of any life-cycle ceremony must be to legitimise those changes, to standardize and formalise a new role for the individual within the community. Up to now, the individual has been seen essentially as the “property”, the concern and the responsibility of the parents. The community, for the most part, has tended to reinforce and to legitimise the parental role, stepping in to subvert that role only in exceptional cases, where the parents are either not present (orphans) or not able (complete penury or extreme inadequacy) to fulfil their minimal commitments to their children.

Now, however, that relationship is changing. The adolescent feels increasingly less like a child requiring parental care - and adolescent ceremonies tend to legitimise that feeling. Indeed, one of the major roles of the adolescent ceremony is to support the burgeoning feeling of desired emancipation that the young person senses as one of the hallmarks of adolescence.

However, no traditional society or culture fully legitimises the modern, western idea of unfettered individual freedom. Rather, they tend to emphasise the position of the individual within the group.

As a result, a coming-of-age ceremony is most likely to include an acceptance and an approval of the child moving away from the virtually exclusive realm of parental responsibility, and recognition of a new, individual responsibility, within a different, more independent relationship in that society as a whole.

The most likely elements within a ceremony will relate to the society's goals in relation to the adolescent: one of its major goals is naturally to regulate afresh the relationship between the individual and the group, and to move that individual into a new, more responsible relationship with the group.

Most significantly, although all societies are likely to have immersed the child at birth in some of its central symbols and values, (exactly as we saw in Jewish culture in the previous chapter), the society has now to approach the adolescent child as a conscious being. To a large extent, the symbols and meanings in a child’s birth ceremony were there for the parents, as suggested in the chapter on birth. The child itself was too young to be any more than a passive and unaware spectator of the ceremony and ritual that surrounded them.

However, at adolescence, the child is a conscious participant, which means that a society will tend to reinforce the new status through concerted emphasis on those values and ideas most central to the life of the group. It will attempt to underscore those central values to and for the child, in order to maximise their internalisation, in the hope that they will accompany the child into full adulthood, and throughout her or his life.