World Cultures eJournal

An encyclopedic and bibliographic review of “initiation” and life course rituals (Janssen, in preparation) highlights a number of indexing problems that complicate previous efforts to code the cross-cultural distribution of such rituals. Qualitative assessment of this classification issue is extensive and draws from a number of disciplines beside anthropology. Contemporary interest in ritualized organization of status change on the level of metaphor, narrative and discourse and across social sciences and public appropriations (Janssen 2007) foregrounds concerns substantial enough to compromise any comparative approach to the problem. This is, of course, an inevitable corollary of semantically convoluted concepts such as initiation. In this short research note I briefly list available cross-cultural tools and provide short critiques of them.