Analysis Turner versus BlochFor many cultures, rituals are a part of daily life and give purpose and meaning to life. Simple ceremonies like a prayer before a meal, a Bar Mitzvah for a teenager, or even a wedding for a loving couple fill our lives with such meaning, but never provoke a second thought about the depth of such rituals. Anthropologists Victor Turner and Maurice Bloch both created ritual models describing the attainment of higher social statuses. Turner discusses ideologies about liminality and how it relates to human rites of passage. While Maurice Bloch describes his ideas of rebirth and how they relate to rituals in various cultures. According to Turner, the transition period for humans is a fixed state within an individual's culture. As Victor Turner puts it: "Such rites present to us a 'moment in and out of time', in and out of the secular social structure, which reveals, however fleetingly, some recognition of a generalized social bond. (VT: 96). This means that liminality is an important transitional concept when it comes to social power structures. In Turner's initiation model, he describes rituals as being a kind of formula composed of behaviors and relationships, which ultimately result in social change. For Turner, such rites of passage and rituals are not the fundamental structure of life, but rather exponential opportunities in an individual's life. In his analysis of the Ndembu tribe, he discovered that a man's transition from childhood to adulthood (Mukunda) does not constitute a ritual practice. the foundation of a boy's adulthood, but rather a transition of possibilities and potential. At the beginning of the three-step process o...... middle of paper...... liminality can be found universally across cultures. In contrast, Bloch's ideas on religiosity and rituals can be limited to a broader spectrum. Although such rituals cannot be practiced as formally as in others, humans must go through a period of transition (liminality) to achieve any type of social change. And ultimately, social change is of great value, even an ultimate desire, in many cultures. For example, in American culture, the concept of the “American dream”. For many people in the United States, the idea is to "keep up with the Joneses" or even do better than our parents. For many, it is almost impossible to achieve such social change without a period of liminality. (VT: 106) This concept is the basis of colleges and the American military. Young Americans are entering this period of liminality and achieving social change through such communities with others..