ABSTRACT
The Victorians thought that they could infer experience from the random puzzle pieces of surface ritual custom and behavior. The "anthropology" of Durkheim, the sociologist, and Freud, the psychoanalyst, was very much a product of this Victorian heritage, which colored their polar treatments of society, ritual, and the individual. "Collective representations" and ritual action were tried and tested over and again as structural-functional reflections of kinship, ancestral worship, and sociopolitical solidarity. Van Gennep recognized the importance of the threshold period, which ritualized the marginality of the initiate and the margins of society, so he also referred to the three transitions as preliminary, liminary, and postliminary. Over the past decade the anthropology of New Guinea initiation and symbolism has finally begun to realize the rich promise of its subject. These new studies are associated with studies of ritual and the rise of "symbolic anthroplogy" at large.
