Every society moves its children into adulthood, and a surprising number of them do it through the body. A boy is cut, a girl is secluded, a young man is tattooed, a young woman is bathed and dressed and presented.

The ethnographic record on these practices is one of the deepest in the discipline — field reports stretching from the 1890s to last year's journals, covering societies on every inhabited continent. Read together, as scholars have done since the publication of Arnold van Gennep's Les rites de passage in 1909, they show something that no single case reveals on its own: a shared structure underneath practices that look nothing alike. Readers following this subject historically may want to start with our companion survey of how initiation shaped male bodies in ancient civilizations, which covers the classical and early historical material this article sets aside.

The pattern van Gennep noticed

Van Gennep's argument was simple and has held up for over a century. Comparing rites from societies across Africa, Oceania, Europe and the Americas, he proposed that ceremonies marking a change of social position — birth, puberty, marriage, death — follow a sequence of three phases: separation from the previous status, a transitional middle period, and reincorporation into the group with a new position (van Gennep, 1909/1960).

The middle phase turned out to be the interesting one. Victor Turner, working with the Ndembu of what is now Zambia, described initiates in that phase as socially ambiguous — no longer children, not yet adults, held outside the ordinary categories of their society and therefore treated as both powerful and polluting (Turner, 1967). He named the condition liminality, and the intense equality that develops among people passing through it together communitas (Turner, 1969). Those two terms have organized the study of ritual ever since.

Why the body carries the meaning

Marcel Mauss argued that the way people use their bodies — how they walk, sit, swim, give birth — is learned rather than instinctive, and therefore culturally specific (Mauss, 1935/1973). Mary Douglas took the point further: the physical body, she proposed, works as a small-scale model of the social body, so that societies preoccupied with policing their boundaries tend also to be preoccupied with the boundaries and openings of the person (Douglas, 1970). Terence Turner's study of Kayapó body painting in central Brazil made the mechanism concrete, describing the skin as the surface where a society writes the difference between a social being and a merely biological one (T. Turner, 1980).

This is why so many initiations leave a mark. A certificate can be forged and a claim can be disputed; a scar, a tattoo, a filed tooth or a surgically altered body part is a statement that cannot be quietly withdrawn. Pierre Bourdieu called such ceremonies rites of institution, and his central observation is easy to miss: the important line a rite draws is not between the child and the adult, but between those who are eligible to undergo it and those who never will be (Bourdieu, 1991).

The global record, in outline

The range is genuinely worldwide, and the following is a small selection of the published literature rather than a survey of it.

Africa. Audrey Richards recorded the Bemba chisungu in Northern Rhodesia (now Zambia) in 1931 — a ceremony for girls lasting roughly a month, built around songs, clay emblems and instruction delivered by senior women (Richards, 1956). Jomo Kenyatta's account of Gikuyu irua described initiation as the mechanism that sorted young people into age-sets, the groups that then organized labor, warfare and authority for the rest of their lives (Kenyatta, 1938). Simon Ottenberg's later work among the Afikpo Igbo of Nigeria followed boys through a graded series of village society rituals rather than a single event (Ottenberg, 1989).

Melanesia and the Pacific. Gilbert Herdt documented male initiation among the Sambia of Papua New Guinea as a sequence of stages running from childhood into married adulthood, with each stage revealing knowledge withheld at the last (Herdt, 1981). Baldwin Spencer and Francis Gillen's Central Australian fieldwork produced the earliest sustained descriptions of Arrernte men's initiation, including genital modification, in the ethnographic literature (Spencer & Gillen, 1899). Alfred Gell's comparative study of Polynesian tattooing treated the tattooed skin as a kind of protective wrapping of the person, an argument developed most fully for Samoan tatau (Gell, 1993).

South Asia. The upanayana, the sacred-thread ceremony that admits a boy to Vedic study, is among the most thoroughly documented initiations anywhere, with a textual record reaching back millennia (Pandey, 1969). Karin Kapadia's fieldwork in rural Tamil Nadu described the ceremony marking a girl's first menstruation as a public announcement of marriageability, financed and staged by her family (Kapadia, 1995).

East Asia. Patricia Ebrey's work on Chinese family ritual traces the Confucian capping ceremony, guan li, from its description in the Book of Rites through centuries of revision by scholars concerned that it was falling out of use (Ebrey, 1991). Martina Deuchler documented the same capping rite in Korea as part of the Confucian reordering of Korean family life under the Chosŏn dynasty (Deuchler, 1992).

Indigenous North America. Charlotte Frisbie's monograph on the Navajo Kinaaldá recorded a girl's puberty ceremony centered on running, grinding corn and the baking of a large ceremonial cake (Frisbie, 1967). Claire Farrer's long fieldwork with the Mescalero Apache described the girls' ceremony as the community's principal annual event rather than a private family matter (Farrer, 1991). Joseph Jorgensen's comparative study of the Sun Dance among Plains and Great Basin peoples analyzed a ritual involving fasting and, in some forms, ordeal (Jorgensen, 1972).

The Middle East and the Abrahamic traditions. Lawrence Hoffman's history of brit milah traced how rabbinic authorities reinterpreted circumcision across periods, showing that the meaning attached to an unchanged practice shifted considerably over time (Hoffman, 1996). Abdelwahab Bouhdiba's study of Islamic societies treated khitan as a rite of social entry marked by feasting and gift-giving, with the timing varying widely by region (Bouhdiba, 1985).

Europe and the Americas. Western societies retain the same architecture, though the body plays a smaller part. Karen Mary Davalos analyzed the quinceañera among Mexican American families in Chicago as a rite that produces gendered and ethnic identity simultaneously (Davalos, 1996). Aldo Cimino's research on hazing argued that costly, unpleasant admission ordeals appear reliably in groups where members must depend on one another and where free-riding is possible (Cimino, 2011).

Three different questions, routinely confused

Reading this literature well means keeping three things apart. The first is what a rite does — the observable sequence of acts, which is the part ethnography records most reliably. The second is what participants say it means, which is testimony about a community's own understanding and often varies between men and women, elders and initiates, one village and the next. The third is what scholars have proposed the practice accomplishes for the group, which is analysis produced by outsiders and is frequently contested by other outsiders.

The confusion runs in both directions. A functional argument is sometimes read as though it were the community's own account, and a community's account is sometimes read as though it settled the analytic question. Jean La Fontaine's comparative study made the point about outcomes: initiation confers a recognized status, and that status is a social fact regardless of whether the initiate has actually matured in any other sense (La Fontaine, 1985).

Practice, meaning and interpretation compared

Fertility and the reproductive body

Rituals concerned with fertility are among the most heavily documented in the comparative literature, and they overlap with initiation more often than not — a girl's ceremony frequently addresses her future childbearing directly. Victor Turner's account of the Ndembu Isoma ritual described a lengthy performance staged for a woman experiencing reproductive misfortune, which participants attributed to a neglected ancestor rather than to any bodily cause (Turner, 1968). Janice Boddy's fieldwork in a northern Sudanese village linked women's zar spirit practices and local ideas about fertility to a wider concern with enclosure and the protection of the household (Boddy, 1989). Studies of ritualized nursing and kinship in South Asia sit in the same family of practices; our report on the Rajasthan breastfeeding ritual and its anthropological context covers one documented example in detail.

Male circumcision in the anthropological literature

Circumcision is the most widely distributed body-marking practice on record. A 2016 review estimated that between 37 and 39 percent of men worldwide are circumcised, with roughly half of procedures carried out for religious or cultural reasons (Morris et al., 2016, in Population Health Metrics). Anthropology has offered several competing accounts of why it recurs. John Whiting and colleagues proposed a cross-cultural association between severe male initiation and particular household sleeping and weaning arrangements (Whiting, Kluckhohn & Anthony, 1958). Frank Young countered that such rites correlate instead with strong male solidarity and organized male groups (Young, 1965). Bourdieu's account of rites of institution treats the cut as a boundary marker for the whole society rather than a statement about the individual (Bourdieu, 1991). Hoffman's history shows that within a single tradition the stated meaning has been rewritten repeatedly while the practice stayed constant (Hoffman, 1996).

The practice also generates continuing disagreement, and the honest position is to report it rather than resolve it. The American Academy of Pediatrics issued a technical report in 2012 concluding that benefits outweighed risks sufficiently to warrant access for families who choose it (AAP Task Force on Circumcision, 2012); a group of European clinicians published a formal response in the same journal arguing that the conclusion reflected cultural assumptions rather than evidence (Frisch et al., 2013). Ethical debate over procedures performed before a child can consent continues in the bioethics literature. Our fuller treatment of circumcision across cultures and its global distribution sets out the regional picture.

Female genital modification: documentation and dispute

The same analytic discipline is required here, and it is harder to maintain. The practice is documented across a defined set of regions; the World Health Organization estimates that more than 230 million girls and women alive today have undergone some form of it in around 30 countries in Africa, the Middle East and Asia, and classifies it as a violation of the human rights of girls and women (WHO fact sheet on female genital mutilation).

The ethnographic literature addresses a different question: what the practice means to the communities that carry it out. Janice Boddy's work in northern Sudan recorded women describing the practice through ideas of purity, enclosure and preparation for childbearing, situated within a broader symbolic system rather than standing alone (Boddy, 1989). Ellen Gruenbaum's long-term fieldwork in the same region traced how those meanings shift as economic and educational conditions change, and how local opposition develops from within (Gruenbaum, 2001). Bettina Shell-Duncan and Ylva Hernlund's edited volume gathered field studies from several countries alongside analysis of eradication campaigns and their reception (Shell-Duncan & Hernlund, 2000). Fuambai Ahmadu, an anthropologist writing about the Sierra Leonean society in which she was initiated, published an account that dissented from the standard framing and generated substantial argument within the discipline (Ahmadu, 2000).

Recording a stated meaning is not endorsement of a practice, and this is the distinction that most public argument loses. Anthropologists have generally held that understanding why a practice persists is a precondition for anything else, while international health and human-rights bodies maintain the position stated above. Both bodies of work exist, they answer different questions, and readers are better served by seeing both. Our detailed account of documented practices, meanings and debates around female genital modification treats this subject at length.

What the comparative record shows

Alice Schlegel and Herbert Barry's coding of adolescent ceremonies across the Standard Cross-Cultural Sample found such rites documented for girls at least as widely as for boys, contradicting a long-standing assumption in the earlier literature that initiation was chiefly a male affair (Schlegel & Barry, 1991). Bruce Lincoln's comparative study argued that women's initiations tend to take a different narrative shape from men's — less often structured as symbolic death and rebirth, more often as growth, cultivation or magnification of what the initiate already is (Lincoln, 1981).

What recurs across the record is the architecture rather than the content: separation from ordinary life, a period of instruction and ordeal, a mark or token, a public return, and a status that others are obliged to recognize. What varies is nearly everything else — who is initiated, at what age, by whom, with what degree of pain, and toward what stated end. The literature does not support ranking these traditions against one another, and the discipline abandoned that project a century ago. It does support reading them as institutions that solve a problem every society faces: how to make a change of status visible, credible and difficult to reverse.