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Anthropology of religion
Arnold van Gennep
Basic concepts Afterlife Animism Augury Communitas Comparative religion Divination Divine language Evolutionary origin of religion Fetishism Great Spirit Henotheism Initiation Liminality Magic (supernatural) Mana Monotheism Nympholepsy Oracle Polytheism Rite of passage Ritual Sacred language Sacred–profane dichotomy Sacred site Shamanism Soul dualism Superstition Theories about religion Totem Transtheism Veneration of the dead
Case studies Magic Coral Gardens and Their Magic Treatise on the Apparitions of Spirits and on Vampires or Revenants Neo-Paganism Ritual Angakkuq Babaylan Bobohizan Bomoh Bora Dukun Miko Jhākri Pawang Slametan Wu Revitalization movements Cargo cult Ghost Dance Handsome Lake
Related articles The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life Purity and Danger Myth and ritual Archaeology of religion and ritual Poles in mythology Lived religion Elite religion
Major theorists Augustin Calmet Akbar S. Ahmed Talal Asad Joseph Campbell Mary Douglas Émile Durkheim Arnold van Gennep E. E. Evans-Pritchard James Frazer Clifford Geertz Robin Horton Claude Lévi-Strauss Robert Marett Roy Rappaport Saba Mahmood Marshall Sahlins Melford Spiro Stanley Tambiah Victor Turner Edward Burnett Tylor Daniel Martin Varisco Anthony F. C. Wallace
Journals Anthropological Perspectives on Religion Folklore The Hibbert Journal The Journal of Religion Oceania
Religions Ethnic and folk religions Afro-American religion Alaska Native religion Anito Atua Böö mörgöl Chinese folk religion Hanitu Hausa Kejawèn Native American religion Noaidi Shindo Shamanism in Siberia Shinto Tengrism Traditional African religions Buddhism Mahayana Nichiren Pure Land Shingon Theravada Tiantai Tibetan Vajrayana Zen Christianity Adventism Anglicanism Armenian Apostolic Church Baptists Calvinism Catholic Church Coptic Orthodoxy Eastern Orthodoxy Ethiopian Orthodoxy Greek Orthodoxy Lutheranism Methodism Nestorianism Oriental Orthodoxy Pentecostalism Protestantism Quakers Russian Orthodoxy Hinduism Hindu denominations Shaivism Shaktism Smartism Vaishnavism Ayyavazhi Islam Ahmadiyya Ibadi Mahdavia Non-denominational Quranists Shia Sufism Sunni Yazdânism Judaism Conservative Haredi Hasidic Haymanot Karaite Orthodox Reform Jainism Digambara Śvētāmbara Sikhism
Social and cultural anthropology
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Arnold van Gennep, in full Charles-Arnold Kurr van Gennep (23 April 1873 – 7 May 1957) was a Dutch–German-French ethnographer and folklorist.

Biography

He was born in Ludwigsburg, in the Kingdom of Württemberg (since 1871, part of the German Empire). Since his parents were never married, Van Gennep adopted his Dutch mother's name, "van Gennep". When he was six, he and his mother moved to Lyons, France, where she married a French doctor who moved the family to Savoy.

Van Gennep is best known for his work regarding rites of passage ceremonies and his significant works in modern French folklore. He is recognised as the founder of folklore studies in France.

He went to Paris to study at the Sorbonne. However, he was disappointed that the school did not offer the subjects he wanted and so he enrolled at the École des langues orientales to study Arabic and at the École pratique des hautes études for philology, general linguistics, Egyptology, Ancient Arabic, primitive religions and Islamic culture. That scholarly independence would manifest itself for the remainder of his life. He never held an academic position in France.

From 1912 to 1915, he held the Chair of Ethnography at the University of Neuchâtel in Switzerland but was expelled for expressing doubts about the neutrality of Switzerland during World War I.^{[citation needed]} There he reorganized the museum and organized the first ethnographic conference (1914). In 1922, he toured the United States.

His best-known work is Les rites de passage (The Rites of Passage, 1909), which includes his vision of rites of passage rituals as being divided into three phases: préliminaire or "preliminary", liminaire or "liminality" (a stage much studied by the anthropologist Victor Turner), and postliminaire or "post-liminality".

His major work in French folklore was Le Manuel de folklore français contemporain (Handbook of Contemporary French Folklore, 1937–1958).

He died in 1957 in Bourg-la-Reine, France.

Influences

• The Rites of Passage was highly influential in the structuring of Joseph Campbell's 1949 text, The Hero with a Thousand Faces, as Campbell divides the journey of the hero into three parts, Departure, Initiation, and Return.
• The Rites of Passage influenced anthropologist Victor Turner's research, particularly his 1969 text, The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure.

Works

• Le Tissage aux Cartons et son utilisation décorative dans l'Egypte Ancienne, Neuchatel, Switzerland: Delachaux & Niestlé, 1916, co-author Gustave Jeqier. English translation Cardweaving in Ancient Egypt Barbara Shapiro, transl. San Francisco, 2010.
• Traité comparatif des nationalités, Paris: Payot, 1922
• Tabou et Totemisme a Madagascar Etude Descriptive et Theorique, Paris: 1904
• Essai d’une théorie des langues spécialesl, Paris: 1908
• Works at archive.org
• The Rites of Passage, 1909. University of Chicago Press, 1960. web page
• Les Jeux et les Sports populaires de France: Arnold Van Gennep (textes inédits 1925), L.S. Fournier (éd.), Paris, éditions du Comité des travaux historiques et scientifiques, 2015.