The Interpretation of Data: Puberty Rites

Abstract

SINCE the emergence of anthropology as a systematic study a century ago, accounting for similarities and differences in culture among the societies of the world has been the central concern of evolutionists, diffusionists, and functionalists. Van Gennep's classic work on rites of passage deals largely with similarities. Since the time of van Gennep, various writings concerning a single society or a few societies have considered differences in rites of passage, attempting to explain the presence, absence, or relative elaboration of rites concerned with birth, puberty, marriage and other important events in the lives of individuals. These studies, of which Audrey Richards' Chisungu (1956) is the most recent detailed example, have come to us principally from scholars identified as social anthropologists, and they present interpretations relating the rites to features of social structure and social institutions. No study using this approach collates and compares the scattered group of publications on the subject or attempts to be comprehensive. The idea expressed by Durkheim and various of his followers that whatever is important in social life tends to receive ritual attention seems to form the implicit foundation of most studies of this kind. Their objective has been to state why stable marriages or the attainment of adult status and the like are socially important and fraught with difficulties in one society but less important and less disturbing in another. Of a similar vein is the view expressed by Chapple and Coon (1942) that rites are both an indication of disturbed social equilibrium and a device for restoring equilibrium. Where no rites occur, it appears to be assumed that no social disturbances exist; at least, there has been no systematic observation of individual societies to account for differences in practice. It is with some interest, then, that we see the publication by Whiting, Kluckhohn, and Anthony (1958) of a large-scale, cross-cultural comparison of male initiation ceremonies at puberty that offers a specific interpretation to account for the presence and absence of these ritual events and generalizations on the significance of the rites that presumably apply to all societies.2 Interpretations of individual features of puberty rites have come to us previously from psychoanalysis, notably from Freud (1939), and more recently from Bettelheim (1954). Again, these interpretations do not account for variations in practice from society to society, and they do not attempt to quantify data. The study by Whiting and collaborators compares 56 societies and offers an interpretation, presented in quantitative form, that is derived largely from psychoanalytic theory concerning the Oedipus complex. A close relation is reported to exist between customs fostering intimacy between mother and infant son,