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Heidi Collie (she/her/hers), Low Entropy Volunteer Blog Writer

Please note that this article contains brief mention of cultural practices involving genital manipulation and/or damage.

With my BA graduation ceremony looming over me, I increasingly caught myself wondering, why all the fuss? While it was an honor and a privilege to walk across that stage, commemorating four years of discipline and hard work, the honest truth is that I wasn’t excited about the outfit, photos, attention or expectations for the day. I wasn’t excited about sitting through a long, hot ceremony and, minute-to-minute, I knew I’d have more fun sharing a pint with my mum in the darkest, stickiest dive bar Vancouver has to offer. Minute-to-minute, I would have much preferred to creep into this next phase of life, unwatched and unaccountable. So, why all the fuss?

Rites of passage are a core theme in anthropology, drawing major cross-cultural parallels with birth, coming of age, marriage and death as the central four. While inevitable and innately silent, we mark these transitional phases with grand ceremony and discomfort — ensuring we each acknowledge and remember the culturally symbolic importance attached to them. As a coming-of-age ritual, graduation is a rite of passage. For the cultures who partake, it may be high school or university, but crucially it marks the start of a new phase in life. 

Ceremonially, coming of age may be marked in vastly different ways – it’s a Jewish boy’s bar mitzvah, the increased social activity in the Amish Rumspringa or participation in the annual 15-30 km Naadam bareback horse race for adolescents in the Gobi Desert. Among the Apache of the southwestern United States, it’s the four-day sunrise festival, when each girl is sprinkled with pollen and is imbued with the sacred quality of Changing Woman. It’s the “Sweet 16” and quinceañeras of young women in North, Central and South America.

With ceremony, there is often induced pain and discomfort. It’s the adolescent genital mutilation of girls in many countries across the world; of boys in Pentecost Island before their first ritual land dive; in Australia among the Mardudjara, with the piercing of boys’ septums, removal of their front teeth and subsequent circumcision; and the walungarri — circumcision of adolescents after a three-night circle dance ceremony. In Inuit communities, it’s face tattooing to mark a girl entering womanhood, and in settler cultures often the piercing of an adolescent girl’s ears.

We know that maturity and coming of age will happen whether we commemorate it or not. Like all phases in life, it comes silently, inevitably, so naturally there’s the temptation to be passive, let it happen to you, to creep into the next life phase, unwatched and unaccountable. In fact, you might even find yourself wondering, why all the fuss? But for millennia, cultures have attached ritual significance to coming of age as a rite of passage, indicating that it might just be human to mark it. The psyche rejects liminality and craves tangible transitions, boundaries and explanations. Culturally, functionally, spiritually, as a species we have decided that entering a new phase in life is important, it was never meant to be easy. It’s pierced, chased, burned, seared, tattooed into us — lean into the discomfort of this change, mark it, feel it. As humans, it’s what we do.

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