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This article investigates identity construction in the period known as “adolescence” in the West. Adolescence is a central stage of an individual’s maturation in Western culture and particularly in metropolitan France. However, this stage appears to be absent in some traditional Melanesian societies, as can be observed in certain tribes in Vanuatu. This lack of a personal search for identity can be explained by the existence of rites of passage that obscure any sense of individual existence. The person lives only through the community, where no dissent is tolerated, thus avoiding the period of crisis that individualistic Western societies experience in adolescence.