Rituals are predefined, recurrent, symbolic activities that consist of verbal and non-verbal elements and are used to indicate the communicative aspect of every behavior.
They are therefore symbolic practices, a way of communicating representations that affirm the system of socially accepted relationships between individuals and groups, reinforce the social structure, and produce their own kind of symbolic knowledge.
The "stations of life" of a person, when they transition from one state to another, are accompanied by rituals, hence they are transitional.
Specifically, rituals accompanied either the threshold points of individuals' social lives (birth, coming of age, marriage, death, emigration) or the "dangerous," transitional temporal points of the "cycle of time" (new moons, sun turns, phases of the moon, etc.).
Such issues are studied here, based on the example of the "three stations" of human life in the Pontus region of Asia Minor, from the second half of the 19th century until 1922, with the inevitable changes that occurred during the defining period of social history in Pontus, approximately spanning these seventy years.
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