Hole In One: Piercings/Body Ritual as a Rite of Passage

TOPIC: Body Ritual

SOURCE: Moving 657 miles away from home to live with other similarly aged students, who had never lived on their own and wished to define their own separate identities by way of self-mutilation immediately after leaving their parents’ houses to start a new life in college.

RELATION: “These rituals [rites of passage] mark a person’s passage from one identity to another. Van Gennep identifies three phases of these rites: first, the ritual separates the person from an existing identity; next, the person enters a transition phase; finally, the changes are incorporated into a new identity” (RR 139).

DESCRIPTION: As soon as I settled into the freshman dormitories here at Humboldt State University, I had the opportunity to get to know the other young adults with whom I would share the building. And everyone began to establish friendships and start to spend more time with certain people over others, it became more and more apparent the things that some valued over other things and how that affected the way they spent their time and the people they wished to accompany in them in those activities. A common thread among the groups, including my own, was that “freedom” from the life they lived with their parents or caretakers was a thing to be celebrated. And for many that meant breaking away from that life in the most obvious way that they knew how, with a blatant disregard for the rule that many of their parents had set for them so long as they were living “under their roof”, by getting their first body piercing.

COMMENTARY/ANALYSIS: The explanation I received from many of these rebellious young students was that the desire to make their own identities was enough to make them want to do “something”, anything that would make them feel like they were finally members of the grown-up world. In this way, they were able to take part in an unspoken rite of passage that would have to serve as a sufficient ceremonial passage between two phases in life. Each began with separation from their former groups/parents. Then came the time to decide how to separate themselves, which would mark the transitional phase between old and new, developed identity. And following the walk down to the piercing parlor, these individuals all felt something slightly different but all insisted that they felt like new people, thus marking the passage from one role in life to another. It seems that this is the way that it often goes in our society: milestone events become milestone events because we have assigned that meaning to them and allowed those milestones to make us feel as though we have made a significant passage to a new and developed state of personhood. And for those whom I observed, that rite of passage was manifested as taking part in a body ritual common to our culture and receiving a piercing.