Victor Turner

Victor Witter Turner (born May 28, 1920 – died December 18, 1983) was a British anthropologist, famous for his work on rituals.

Life

Victor Turner was born in Glasgow, Scotland, in a middle-class family. His father was an electric engineer and his mother an actress. It is probably that under his mother’s influence Turner’s life-long interest for performance and drama has started. At the age of eighteen he entered at the University College in London to study poetry and classics. The World War II, however, interrupted his plans, and Turner was out of college for five years. During that time he married and had two children.

After the war Turner’s interest in anthropology was sparked and he decided to return to university to study anthropology. He received his B.A. in Anthropology in 1949, and went on for graduate study at the University of Manchester, in a newly formed Department of Anthropology. His professor there was famous Max Gluckman, who arranged for Turner to participate in a fieldwork among the Ndembu people of Zambia (then Northern Rhodesia). It was there that Turner begun his life-long interest in rituals. It was also there that Turner became a co-worker of other important figures of British social anthropology - A. R. Radcliffe-Brown, Darryl Forde, Meyer Fortes, and Raymond Firth.

Turner received his Ph.D. in 1955, with a dissertation Schism and Continuity in an African Society: A Study of Ndembu Village Life (published in 1957). He continued to work at the University of Manchester as a Senior Fellow and Senior Lecturer. He soon became one of the leading figures of Manchester School of anthropology.

In 1961 Turner started his work at Stanford University as a Fellow of the Center for Advanced Behavioral Sciences. He liked the American academic life, and decided to stay in the United States. In 1964 he moved to the Cornell University, during which time he conducted his fieldwork among the Gisu people of Uganda.

In 1968 Turner accepted the invitation from the University of Chicago to become Professor of Anthropology and Social Thought. There he joined the team of renown scholars, who gathered in the Committee on Social Thought. Among others, there were art critic Harold Rosenberg, novelist Saul Bellow, and philosopher Hannah Arendt. It was in Chicago that Turner started to investigate world religions, and do study on Christian pilgrimage.

In 1978 Turner moved to the University of Virginia, where he served as the William R. Kenan Professor of Anthropology and Religion. He became also a member of the Center for Advanced Studies and the South Asia Program. Here his interest shifted toward performance and drama as modern forms of liminality.

Turner died on December 18, 1983.

Work

During his early career Turner studied the Ndembu tribe in central Africa. While observing the Ndembu, Turner became intrigued by ritual and rites of passage. Like many of the Manchester Anthropologists of his time, he also become concerned with conflict, and created the new concept of social drama in order to account for the symbolism of conflict and crisis resolution among Ndembu villagers. In his Schism and Continuity in African Society (1957) he explains the concept of social dramas, arguing that dramas exist as a result of the conflict that is inherent in societies.

Turner was rather pragmatic in his approach to anthropology. Similar to Emile Durkheim, Turner believed that social order depends on rituals and ceremonial performances. He saw culture in a constant change, with members of the culture negotiated common beliefs.

Turner gained notoriety by exploring Arnold van Gennep’s threefold structure of rites of passage and expanding theories on the liminal phase. Van Gennep's structure consisted of a pre-liminal phase (separation), a liminal phase (transition), and a post-liminal phase (reincorporation). Turner noted that in liminality, the transitional state between two phases, individuals were "betwixt and between": they did not belong to the society that they previously were a part of and they were not yet reincorporated into that society. Liminality is a limbo, an ambiguous period characterized by humility, seclusion, tests, sexual ambiguity, and communitas (unstructured community where all members are equal).

I have used the term "anti-structure,"... to describe both liminality and what I have called "communitas." I meant by it not a structural reversal... but the liberation of human capacities of cognition, affect, volition, creativity, etc., from the normative constraints incumbent upon occupying a sequence of social statuses (From ritual to theater, 44).

Turner’s work on liminality and communitas was pioneering, contributing greatly to our understanding of the method how social change takes place. In his theory of social dramas he argued that there were four main phases of public action, which leads to change:

1) Breach - in the first phase the crisis emerges, as one individual or group publicly breaches the common norm that regulates relationship between parties 2) Crisis – the crisis widens and extends the gap between parties 3) Redressive action – in this phase the crisis is being negotiated by the use of redressive mechanism that exists in the society, and which have the goal to establish pre-crisis-like social peace. Public ritual usually serves this kind of purpose. 4) Reintegration – resolution of the problem is being negotiated; the change is being legitimized.

Turner spent his career exploring rituals. He later applied his study of rituals and rites of passage to world religions and the lives of religious heroes. He argued that rituals are in fact symbols, and as such they have three meanings – exegetical, operational, and positional. Exegetical meaning is subjective, as explained by the person performing the ritual; operational meaning is objective, observed by the researcher, and deals with the purpose of ritual in a society. Finally, positional meaning takes all symbols into account and asks of the relationship between them.

Turner was also a superb ethnographer who constantly mused about his craft in his books and articles. Eclectic in his use of ideas borrowed from other theorists, he was rigorous in demanding that the ideas he developed illuminate ethnographic data; a theorist for theory's sake he was not. A powerful example of his attitudes can be found in the opening paragraph of the essay “Social Dramas and Ritual Metaphors” in Victor Turner (1975) Dramas, Fields, and Metaphors: Symbolic Action in Human Society. There he writes,

In moving from experience of social life to conceptualization and intellectual history, I follow the path of anthropologists almost everywhere. Although we take theories into the field with us, these become relevant only if and when they illuminate social reality. Moreover, we tend to find very frequently that it is not a theorist’s whole system which so illuminates, but his scattered ideas, his flashes of insight taken out of systemic context and applied to scattered data. Such ideas have a virtue of their own and may generate new hypotheses. They even show how scattered facts may be systematically connected! Randomly distributed through some monstrous logical system, they resemble nourishing raisins in a cellular mass of inedible dough. The intuitions, not the tissue of logic connecting them, are what tend to survive in the field experience.

Criticism

Turner's work on ritual has stood as one of the most influential theories in anthropology during the twentieth century; but recently this "Turnerian Paradigm" has been challenged. With reference to his concept of communitas, Eade & Sallow's (1991) work "Contesting the Sacred" directly opposes it, as being oversimplified and idealized.

More recently a compilation of essays on pilgrimage edited by John Eade & Simon Coleman - Reframing Pilgrimage: Cultures in Motion (2004) have suggested that the Turner’s work has rendered pilgrimage neglected as an area of anthropological study, due to Turner's assertion that pilgrimage was, by its liminal nature, extraordinary and not part of daily life (and therefore not a part of the make up of everyday society).

Legacy

With his concepts of liminality and communitas, Turner explained the state in which social change takes place. Scholars have used these concepts well into the 20th century. Performance Studies scholar Richard Schechner pulled from Turner's theories on social drama and liminality. Turner's work has resurfaced in recent years (90's - 00's) among a variety of disciplines, proving to be an important part of the social sciences. His concepts of symbols and social dramas has also been used in anthropological textbooks.

Bibliography

• Turner, Victor 1969. The forest of symbols: Aspects of Ndembu ritual. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. ISBN 0801404320

• Turner, Victor 1969. The ritual process: structure and anti-structure. Walter De Gruyter Inc. ISBN 0202010430

• Turner, Victor (1975). Dramas, fields and metaphors: Symbolic action in human society. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. ISBN 0801491517

• Turner, Victor (1975). Revelation and divination in Ndembu ritual. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. ISBN 0801408636

• Turner, Victor (1977). Variations of the theme of liminality. In S. Moore & B. Myerhoff (Eds.) Secular ritual (pp. 36-52). Assen: Van Gorcum. ISBN 9023214579

• Turner, Victor (1978). Image and pilgrimage in Christian culture: Anthropological perspectives. New York: Columbia University Press. ISBN 0231042868

• Turner, Victor. 1981. (original work from 1968). The drums of affliction: a study of religious processes among the Ndembu of Zambia. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. ISBN 080149205X

• Turner, Victor (1982). From ritual to theater: The human seriousness of play. New York: PAJ Publications. ISBN 0933826176

• Turner, Victor (1986). On the edge of the bush: Anthropology as experience. Tucson, AZ: University of Arizona Press. ISBN 0816509492

• Turner, Victor. 1996. (original work from 1957). Schism and continuity in an African society: A study of Ndembu village life. Berg Publishers. ISBN 0854962824

References

ISBN links support NWE through referral fees

• Alexander, Bobby C. 1990. Victor Turner Revisited: Ritual as Social Change. An American Academy of Religion Book. ISBN 1555406017

• Bradley, Noel. 1978. Communitas and transcendence: A critique of Victor Turner's conception of the function of ritual. Pontificia Universitas Gregoriana.

• Eade, John & Coleman, Simon. 2004. Reframing Pilgrimage: Cultures in Motion. Routledge. ISBN 0415303540

• Eade John & Sallnow, Michael J. 1991. Contesting the Sacred: The Anthropology of Christian Pilgrimage. Routledge. ISBN 0415043611

• Turner, Edith. 1992. Experiencing Ritual: A New Interpretation of African Healing. University of Pennsylvania Press. ISBN 0812213661

External links

• Victor Turner - Biography

• Victor Turner – Biography by Beth Barrie on Indiana State University webpage

• Symbolic anthropology - Brief introduction to symbolic anthropology using the techniques of Victor Turner

• Ritual, Anti-structure, and Religion: A Discussion of Victor Turner's Processural Symbolic Analysis – Article by Mathieu Deflem originally published in Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, 30(1):1-25, (1991).

• Victor Turner’s Postmodern Theory of Social Drama – Article by David M. Boje, Ph.D. from New Mexico State University

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