Exam and Graduation Rules
The next significant transitional rites for students are final exams, post-exam celebrations and graduation ceremonies: the passage from studenthood to proper adulthood. Studenthood can itself be seen as a rather prolonged 'liminal' stage - a sort of limbo state where one is neither an adolescent nor a fully-fledged adult. University effectively postpones true adulthood for an extra three years. As limbo states go, this is quite a pleasant one: students have almost all of the privileges of full adult members of society, but few of the responsibilities. English students moan and whine constantly to each other about their 'impossible' workload, and are always having what they call 'an essay crisis' (meaning they have to write an essay) - but the demands of most degree courses are not very onerous compared to those of an average full-time job.
The ordeal of final exams provides an excuse for even more therapeutic moaning-rituals, with their own unwritten rules. The modesty rule is important: even if you are feeling reasonably calm and confident about an exam, it is not done to say so - you must pretend to be full of anxiety and self-doubt, convinced that you are going to fail, because it goes without saying (although you say it repeatedly) that you have not done anywhere near enough work. Only the most arrogant, pompous and socially insensitive students will ever admit to having done enough revision for their exams; such people are rare, and usually heartily disliked.
If you have clearly swotted like mad, you can admit this only in a self-deprecatory context: 'I've worked my butt off, but I'm still completely pants at genetics - I just know I'm going to screw up - and anyway there's bound to be a question on the one thing I haven't revised properly. Just Sod's law, isn't it?' Any expression of confidence must be counterbalanced by an expression of insecurity: 'I think I'm OK on the sociology paper, but statistics is just totally doing my head in...'
The superstition element, or the risk of making a fool of oneself, may be an important factor before the exam, but the modest demeanour is maintained even after the desired result has been achieved. Those who do well must always appear surprised by their success, even if they secretly feel it was well deserved. Cries of 'Oh my God! I don't believe it!' are the norm when such students receive their results, and while elation is expected, success should be attributed to good fortune ('I was lucky - all the right questions came up') rather than talent or hard work. An Oxford medical student who had got a First, and was being congratulated by friends and relatives at a celebratory lunch, kept ducking her head, shrugging and insisting that 'It's not really such a big deal in science subjects - you don't have to be clever or anything, it's all factual - you just memorize the stuff and give the right answers. It's just parrot-learning'.
At post-exam celebrations, it is also customary for all students to indulge in moaning rituals about their sense of 'anti-climax'. At every party, you will hear students complaining about how jaded they are. 'I know I'm supposed to be feeling all happy and celebrating,' they say 'but actually it's a bit of an anti-climax', 'Everyone's all euphoric, but I just feel like, yeah, OK, whatever...' Although every student seems to believe that he or she is the first to experience this, the anti-climax lament is so common that students who do feel euphoric and celebratory are in the minority.
The next opportunity not to get excited is the graduation ceremony. Students all claim to be bored and unimpressed by this occasion; none will admit to any sense of pride: it is just a tedious ritual, to be endured for the sake of doting parents. As at the start of the Freshers' Week rites, parents are again seen as something of an embarrassment. Many students go to some lengths to keep their parents and other relatives away from their friends and from any tutors or lecturers who might be present at the ceremony ('No, Dad! Don't ask him about my "career prospects". This isn't a bloody PTA meeting...'; 'Look, Mum, just don't do anything soppy, OK?'; 'Oh for Christ's sake Granny, don't cry! It's only a degree - I haven't won the fu- the flipping Nobel prize...'). Students with overly doting parents adopt bored, exasperated expressions - rolling their eyes and sighing heavily, particularly when anyone they know is within view or earshot.
The last few pages have focused disproportionately on educated-middle-class rites of passage - Gap Year, Freshers' Week, graduation. This is because there are no equivalent national, official rites for those who leave school at 16 - or even for those who stop full-time education at eighteen. School leavers may celebrate in some way with their friends and/or family, but there is no formal ritual to mark their passage from school to vocational training, employment or unemployment. Yet one's first job (or dole cheque) is an important landmark, and arguably much more of a momentous change than simply going from school to university. Some schools have special speech days with prizegivings and so on, but no actual 'graduation' ceremony (certainly nothing like an American high-school graduation, which is a big event, more grand and elaborate than most English university graduation ceremonies). GCSE and A-level exam results are sent to school leavers by post some months later, so 'graduates' would in any case only be celebrating the end of their schooldays, rather than the academic success or achievement implied by the term 'graduation'. But it still seems a shame that the completion of secondary education, and the passage from school to adult working life, is not ritually marked in some more significant way.
Matching Rites
At the beginning of this chapter, I pointed out that there is little about the format of an average English wedding that would seem odd or unfamiliar to a visitor from any other modern Western culture: we have the usual stag and hen nights (Americans call them bachelor and bachelorette parties); church or civil ceremony followed by reception; champagne; bride in white; wedding cake ditto; bridesmaids (optional); best man; speeches; special food; drink; dancing (optional); family tensions and feuds (more or less compulsory); etc. From an anthropologist's perspective, an English wedding also has much in common even with exotic tribal marriage rites that would seem odd to most modern Western eyes. Despite superficial differences, they all conform to van Gennep's basic rites-of-passage formula - separation, transition, incorporation - by which people are ceremoniously shunted from one sociocultural/life-cycle category to the next.
The English make rather less of a big social fuss about the 'engagement' than many other cultures - in some societies, the betrothal or engagement party can be as important an event as the wedding itself. (Perhaps to compensate, we make rather more of a fuss over the stag and hen nights, which are often considerably more protracted and festive than the wedding.)
Debrett's etiquette bible reminds us, somewhat pessimistically, that 'an important function of an engagement is to allow the two parental sides to get used to one another, and thus smooth out as early as possible any differences and difficulties.' This tells us a lot about the English attitude to weddings. We know that a wedding is supposed to be a joyous event, but in our usual Eeyorish fashion, we really see it as an ordeal, an occasion fraught with difficulties and dangers (or, as the ever-cheery Debrett's puts it 'a minefield for the socially insecure and a logistical nightmare for the organisers' and, for good measure, 'a source of inter-family tension'). Something is bound to go drastically wrong, and someone is bound to be mortally offended - and because of our belief in the magical disinhibiting powers of alcohol, we know that the veneer of polite conviviality may crack, and the inevitable family tensions may erupt into unseemly tears and quarrels. Even if stiff upper lips are maintained on the day, there will be grumbles and recriminations in the aftermath, and in any case, even at best, we expect the whole ritual to be rather embarrassing.