Vivre, grandir et mourir dans l'Antiquité : Rites de passage individuels au Proche-Orient ancien – ViGMA

Rites of passage, which accompany and render meaningful key moments in an individual's lifetime, also serve the purpose of symbolically manipulating time, thus providing the illusion of mastering it. Such rites also participate in the « making » of persons, in the sense that they assist in their biological, social and psychological development, as well as in moving from one social group to another. The « ViGMA » project seeks to discover the way, or rather ways, in which individuals lived and experienced such rites of passage in the Ancient Near East, including Anatolia and Egypt. The 2nd Millennium BCE provides the chronological setting, since it is this period which provides the richest amount of epigraphic and archeological sources on the subject of rites of passage. In addition, no systematic study of rites of passage has yet been attempted for this period. Though of course deeply anthropological in nature, ViGMA is nevertheless an interdisciplinary project, combining philology, archeology, and the history of religions. This very interdisciplinarity provides, in fact, the key to the project, for it is only through the confrontation of inherently different methodological approaches that the question of rites of passage in the Ancient Near East can be addressed effectively. The three major research themes are : 1) « Becoming someone : the social dimension of rites of passage », in which the interface between the religious and socio-cultural spheres is explored ; 2) « Real life, symbolic life : Ritualized life and death in rites of passage », in which each stage lived by the individual is conceived of as yet another beginning ; and 3) « Liminarity and Impurity : The Dangers of transformation », which confronts the complex relationship between rites of passage and the notions of purity and impurity in the Ancient Near East. The ViGMA project will provide a springboard for several quite innovative publications, applying the theoretical models of anthropology to the study of Ancient Near Eastern societies. For the academic disciplines of the Ancient Orient, such an approach is only now beginning to be explored. For this reason, the ViGMA project will also inaugurate a new publication series, entitled « Études d'anthropologie historique », which, in addition to the monographs which result directly from the project itself, will also incorporate other studies of the same nature, thus encouraging the further development of this new approach.