Introduction

Abstrakt

Student culture has long been an important element of academic heritage, shaping the identity of universities and bringing together successive generations of students. This issue opens with a collection of articles on customs, traditions, language, creative expression, and forms of student association across different eras and academic environments. The opening essay by Andrzej Gielarowski argues that student culture can be interpreted in terms of the theory of rites of passage developed by Arnold van Gennep in The Rites of Passage and further elaborated by Victor Turner (among others, in The Ritual Process), with a focus on the transitional (liminal) phase of the ritual. The author points to examples of student rituals that can be considered rites of passage due to the experience of community among the participants, which Turner describes as the experience of communitas, constituting an essential element of the liminal phase of every rite of passage.