The Role of Age Initiation in the Socialization of the Child

Abstract

The article is an attempt at reassessing the traditional notion of initiation as a ritual for individual’s socialization; it draws a distinction between the rites of passage and the age initiations in preindustrial societies. By examining particularities of social structure in archaic societies, the author argues about the presence or absence of age initiations in the ritual cycle of one or another community. She suggests that the basic stages of socialization might be accomplished through rites of passage, while the role of initiations is that of re-socializing the individual into a different social status.