European rituals of initiation and the production of men

This article examines how male rites of initiation in Europe have been replaced by adjustments to lifecourse events located within the enlarged sphere of entertainment. These adjustments foster new forms of attachment and separation. Based on an interpretation of European films and informed by ethnographic fieldwork, it argues that contemporary European masculinity no longer relies on violent, transformative, collective rituals. This violence still exists, however, experienced vicariously within Europe, while actual violence is largely displaced outside the West. Masculinity nonetheless survives, as a counterconcept to femininity to give expression to the comic, the lost, the confused, the contingent, the unnecessary, the needy, the playful.