Arnold van Gennep

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Arnold van Gennep
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Social and cultural anthropology

Arnold van Gennep, in full Charles-Arnold Kurr van Gennep (23 April 1873 – 7 May 1957) was a noted Dutch-German-French ethnographer and folklorist.

Biography

He was born in Ludwigsburg, in the then-independent Kingdom of Württemberg. 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 away to Lyons, France, where she married a French doctor who again 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 recognized as the founder of folklore studies in France.

He went to Paris to study at the Sorbonne, but was disappointed that the school did not offer the subjects he wanted. 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. This 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. There he reorganized the museum and organized the first ethnographical conference (1914). In 1922 he toured the United States.

His most famous 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: preliminary, liminaire (liminality) (a stage much studied by anthropologist Victor Turner), and postliminaire (post-liminality).

His major work in French folklore was Le Manuel de folklore français contemporain (1937-1958).

He died in 1957 at 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

References

• Arnold van Gennep at unjobs.org
• Belmont, Nicole Arnold van Gennep: The Creator of French Ethnography Derek Coltman trans. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979

External links

• Works written by or about Arnold van Gennep at Wikisource
• Works by or about Arnold van Gennep at Internet Archive
• Arnold van Gennep on data.bnf.fr