Interpreting Lives - Rites of Passage, Personal History, and the Life Cycle (Honors Course)
Developed by Dr. Pamela A. R. Blakely
Course Description
This interdisciplinary course considers the stages of life and their cross-cultural variation, including the rites of passage that mark transitions throughout the life cycle. Further, the course examines how people construct and reaffirm their lives through the process of personal narrative. Students will be taught life history interview methods and guided to do independent research with an individual "tradition bearer". Such life history research facilitates the "coming to voice" of women and minority people who are not fore grounded in standard historical and political writing.
Photo: Magdalena, holding daughter Ndiba, weaves a basket at her doorway.
Eastern Congo. Photo credit: Pamela and Thomas Blakely.
Issues and Topics to be Considered
Infant baptism, el sabour 'the seventh', the bris, and 40 day naming ceremony are all rites of passage marking the entry of babies into human societies. Whether in the United States, the Middle East, Indonesia, or Africa the human social experience begins with a ritual of incorporation, and continues to be marked by transition rituals throughout the life cycle. Though "rites of passage" differ markedly from culture to culture, emphasizing the particular beliefs and concerns of each group, nonetheless there are profound similarities in this "ritual process".
Erik H. Erickson has focused on the sequential states each person passes through in his or her life journey, how in each state a new problem needs to be addressed before moving on to the next stage. This developmental perspective has aided Erickson in gaining insight into the lives of individuals distant from us in time or space, including Martin Luther, founder of the Protestant Reformation, and Gandhi, philosopher leader of India. During the "Interpreting Lives" course, we will study Erikson's writings about the pathos of Luther's late adolescent identity crisis and the culture-specific stages in Gandhi's life.
Further, the course considers how people construct and reaffirm their lives through the process of personal narrative, telling stories about rites of passage and stages in the life cycle as they experienced them. To better understand personal experience narrative, students will be taught life history methods and guided in doing original research interviewing an individual "tradition bearer".
"Interpreting Lives" is strongly interdisciplinary, incorporating history, anthropology, biography writing, and psychology and introducing students to theoretical and methodological issues of concern to current scholars in these several disciplines. The course builds on research interests and expertise of the professor, Dr. Blakely.
Photo: Muyumba uses a hammer and anvil to sharpen a machette blade in his family courtyard. His son, Sulemani, stands nearby, holding an ax for sharpening.
Eastern Congo. Photo credit: Pamela Blakely and Thomas Blakely.
About the Professor
Dr. Pamela Blakely earned her B.A. at Harvard University and her M.A. and Ph.D. at Indiana University. She is keenly interested in the topics of this course, having conducted research on rituals in Central Africa as part of a several year ethnographic study. She speaks KiSwahili, KiHemba, and French and has received teaching awards at Brigham Young University and the University of Pennsylvania. She has been teaching at Reading Area Community College since 1993.