Puberty Ceremony Quotes

Yes, and let’s make sure every American gets a puberty ceremony, an impressive welcome to the rights and duties of grown-ups. As matters now stand, only practicing Jews get those. The only way the rest of us can feel like grown-ups is to get pregnant or get somebody else pregnant or commit a felony or go to war and then come back again.

I suggest to you that the withholding of a puberty ceremony from young males in our society is a scheme, devised cunningly but subconciously, to make those males eager to go to war, no matter how terrible or unjust a war may be. There are just wars, too, of course. The war I was eager to go to happened to be a just one.

What impressed Yali most were not the roads, the lights, and the tall buildings, but the Queensland Museum and the Brisbane Zoo. To his amazement, the museum was full of native New Guinea artifacts. One of the exhibits even contained his own people's carved ceremonial mask worn in the great puberty rituals of former times -- the very same mask which the missionaries had called the "works of Satan." Now, carefully preserved behind glass, the mask was being worshiped by priests in white frocks and a steady stream of well-dressed visitors, who talked in hushed tones. ... It was not until after the war, while attending a government conference in Port Moresby, the capital of Australian New Guinea, that Yali realized the extend to which the missionaries had been lying to the natives. During the course of the conference Yali was shown a certain book which contained pictures of apes and monkeys becoming progressively more similar to men. At last the truth dawned on him: The missionaries had said that Adam and Eve were man's ancestors, but the whites really believed their own ancestors were monkeys, dogs, cats, and other animals.

the sexual practices of the uninhibited Mohaves surely gave a young Mormon from the Midwest ample reason for embarrassment. The Mohaves considered sex natural, fun, and emotionally inconsequential. Children witnessed it at a young age because they lived in one-room houses with their parents and other adults. Many lost their virginity by the time they reached puberty, and most girls had sex soon after they began menstruating. Adult Mohaves encouraged the young to indulge themselves sexually while they could, so that by their mid-teens, they were jaded, at which point, wrote the psychoanalyst George Devereux, “frills” were added to keep things lively: “The Mohave will actually devote some time to thinking up sexual ‘stunts,’ to make the act more exciting.” If their hosts’ sexual frankness didn’t kick the girls’ culture shock to new heights, their flexible definition of gender did: children’s gender was not considered fixed until after puberty and transvestism was not only accepted but merited its own confirmation ceremony, after which some homosexual Mohaves crossed over to become same-sex wives or (less often) husbands. 19

another Muslim woman took office alongside her. Rashida Tlaib, representative for Michigan’s 13th Congressional District, was the other first Muslim woman in Congress. Rashida boasted yet another first: She was first in her family to graduate from high school. The daughter of Palestinian immigrants, a single mother of two boys, and the oldest of fourteen children, Rashida had blasted through other people’s expectations of what it meant to be a Palestinian American woman. And at every step, she was taking all of her heritage with her, proudly representing Michigan and Palestine. At her congressional swearing-in ceremony, Rashida wore a floor-length, long-sleeved black and red thobe, the quintessentially Palestinian dress, which is typically hand-embroidered by women from Palestinian villages. The stitching and styles vary across Palestine, but thobes with lavish designs are worn to mark special occasions, such as puberty, motherhood, and now entry of a Palestinian American woman into the United States Congress. Rashida posted a close-up of her thobe on Instagram.

The anthropologist Arnold van Gennep coined the expression ‘rites of passage’ after noticing the important structural analogy between ceremonies of birth, puberty, initiation, marriage and death. The ceremonies, he argued, involve three components, ordered successively: separation of the individuals or groups from their previous condition; existence on the margin (marge) during which they remain suspended in limbo, and incorporation (agrégation) as participants in their new condition. Thus the initiation into full membership is preceded by a period of alienation, as the youth is cast out from childhood and care, and forced to earn the fruits of adult freedom. Imagine, however, a situation in which the adult world is clouded over: everything pertaining to adulthood has become dark, forbidding, treacherous. The only freedom lies in youth itself. Identity must be forged by the youth from his own adolescent experience – the experience of alienation, in which the protection of the adult world has been withdrawn, and nothing put in place of it. The traditional totems, which represent the continuity and longevity of the tribe, now lose their significance. The youth must construct his own totem, his own ceremonies of initiation and membership, his own sense of togetherness, while borrowing nothing at all from the expertise and knowledge of his forefathers. His dances must be formless and violent, so that only youth can dance to them; sexual pleasure, the mark of youth, must occupy the foreground of the ritual, but sex must be meticulously divorced from marriage and the birth of children. His totems must be formed in his own image – perpetually young, perpetually transgressive, perpetually incompetent. As he dances among his kind, such a youth will be conscious of a lack. All this commotion ought to mean something; it ought to be lifting him to a higher plane. But it leaves him exactly where he was – on the margin of society, enjoying a freedom that is empty since it has no goal. He tries to lift himself with drugs, and as a result sinks further into the void. His protest resolves itself at last in a strangulated cry – a song which sounds like music only when the drumming feet of adolescents sound along with it. And if he discovers words for this song, they will probably be these: I can’t find words to say About the things caught in my mind.