Youth as a Stage of Life: from rites of passage to rites of impasse

Abstract

The course of life is segmented into different stages. However, in the last three decades - at least as far as Europe is concerned - many studies have highlighted an increasing variability in the determination of the frontiers that separate them. Regarding youth, some markers of the passage to the so-called adult life continue to be valued, like getting a job, marriage or the birth of the first child (European Social Survey, 2006/2007). Nevertheless, life trajectories frequently block impasse crossroads, which are determined by societal variables, although the transition arrangements are becoming more and more aligned with autonomy strategies, similarly to the individualization theses. In former societies, there were rites of passage that delimited, in a precise way, the youths' transition to adult life. Nowadays, many of these rites have disappeared, although some still exist. This is the case of the so-called boys' party, a rite of initiation to the adult life that takes place in many towns in the Northeast of Portugal, where the masculine identity is celebrated in a festive, transgressive, orgiastic way. Ethnographic research into the boys' party suggests that the complexity of the modern cannot be reduced to manifestations of the past stripped of their new significant validities. The aim of this paper is to discuss how an old rite of localized expression faces the air of modernity. The conclusion suggests the possibility that, among youths, the rites of passage are giving way to rites of impasse.