Introduction

We begin with a tantalising question: how do you make a man? This chapter deals with some apparently unproblematic ethnography of processes by which boys are ‘made’ into men—male initiation rituals, practised across south Asia, among Hindu middle and higher castes. This ethnography prompts us to reflect on classic approaches to gender and maturity, such as theories that stress the importance of social role in making gender. Such approaches take us part of the way but they are not helpful across the board. Firstly, only certain communities practise rites of passage, and secondly, we sense that gender is not amenable to one-off ‘achievement’. Lately, following the influence of several theorists, but notably Judith Butler, anthropologists have come to think of gender as more precarious and less straightforward than a status attained.

Societies and cultures often deal with processes of physical maturity, growth and decay through what are commonly called ‘rites of passage’, following the French turn of the 20th-century anthropologist Arnold van Gennep. As rituals that deal with transition from one social status to another, rites of passage are often explicitly tied to physiological or maturational milestones in the life-course such as birth, puberty or death. Van Gennep (orig. 1908) undertook the sort of vast cross-cultural survey based upon secondary sources that was common for the proto-anthropology of the time, before the ‘discovery’ of fieldwork.