Arnold van Gennep

Arnold van Gennep, in full Charles-Arnold Kurr van Gennep (23 April 1873 – 7 May 1957) was a noted Dutch-German-French ethnographer and folklorist.

He was born in Ludwigsburg, in the then-independent Kingdom of Württemberg. Since his parents were never married, Van Gennep adopted his Dutch mother's name "van Gennep". When he was six, he and his mother moved away to Lyons, France, where she married a French doctor who again moved the family to Savoy.

Van Gennep is best known for his work regarding rites of passage ceremonies and his significant works in modern French folklore. He is recognized as the founder of folklore studies in France.

He went to Paris to study at the Sorbonne, but was disappointed that the school did not offer the subjects he wanted. So he enrolled at the École des langues orientales to study Arabic and at the École pratique des hautes études for philology, general linguistics, Egyptology, Ancient Arabic, primitive religions, and Islamic culture. This scholarly independence would manifest itself for the remainder of his life. He never held an academic position in France.

From 1912 to 1915 he held the Chair of Ethnography at the University of Neuchâtel in Switzerland but was expelled for expressing doubts about the neutrality of Switzerland during World War I. There he reorganized the museum and organized the first ethnographical conference (1914). In 1922 he toured the United States.

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