On Roots and Wings
Celebrating Jugendweihe as Coming-of-Age in Peri-Urban Eastern Germany
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 2143196 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Grit Wesser (0000-0002-1155-5402, Newcastle University, Newcastle upon Tyne, UK, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2023 |
| Volume | 88 |
| Issue | 4 |
| Pages | 882-899 |
| Publication date | 2023-08-08 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Ethnos (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0014-1844 • E-ISSN: 1469-588X |
| Publisher | Informa UK Limited (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1080/00141844.2021.1924218 |
| OpenAlex | W3161358430 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 33 |
This article uses the secular coming-of-age ritual Jugendweihe as a case study to argue that any analysis of a life-cycle ritual requires attention not only to the public ceremony but also to the family celebration to understand its social significance. Jugendweihe is closely associated with the former East German state, which employed it as a means of secularisation and of creating 'socialist personalities'. Empirical studies on Jugendweihe therefore largely focus on the public ceremony, reinforcing the view that in modern state societies the state (public/political) and kinship (private/domestic) are two distinct domains, in which 'the family' is believed to be unimportant to the public domain. By contrast, I analyse the Jugendweihe family celebration as providing initiates with both 'roots' and 'wings': re-creating ties to kin and regional home (roots) and socially acknowledging the initiate's end of childhood (wings
Archaeology · Ceremony · German · Kinship · Political science · Politics · Secularization · Sociology · State (computer science · Anthropology · Communism, Protests, Social Movements · European history and politics · Gender Studies · History · Law · Religion and Society Interactions
Family and Household
Remembrance of Repasts
Ambivalence in Kinship since the 1940s
Belonging in the Two Berlins
Within Walls
Ritual Disjunctions
Gender and kinship
The Interpretation of Ritual
After Kinship
Ritual and Religion in the Making of Humanity
European rituals of initiation and the production of men
What Was Socialism, and What Comes Next
Die Jugendweihe. Bedeutung und Funktion eines biografischen Übergangsrituals
Erinnerungsorte der DDR
The People's State
Chisungu
Showing Them You Love Them
A ritual middle ground? Personhood, ideology and resistance in East Germany
Rites of Terror
The Changing Face of Power
The Changing Face of Power
The intimacy of state power
The Substance of Kinship and the Heat of the Hearth
A ritual middle ground? Personhood, ideology and resistance in East Germany1
Ethics, self-knowledge, and life taken as a whole
(N)Ostalgie' for the present
Learning Courage
| Citation velocity | historical |
|---|---|
| Highly cited | No |