Adolescence, rites of passage and future society (original) (raw)

In the last century, a certain vision on the adolescence served to explain the role of adolescence as age of the "passage" in the social and cultural process of intergenerational turnover. Facing the "crisis of the educational milieu" of the Twentieth Century, the evolutionary categories of psychobiological theories appear unusable to understand the peculiarities of adolescence in change of the contemporary scene. This article proposes not to speak more in general terms of "adolescence", but to query the material and symbolic properties that support the experiential structure of what we call "doing experience of adolescence" in concrete, every day.From here, we can argue in a new way the question of the "future" as existential horizon. No longer as construction and outcome of an "ability to transit", but as recognition of a "liminalcompetence" that allows youths to do experience and to construct meaning in uncertainty. The specificity of adolescence contemporary seems to consist in this trait.