Turner, Victor

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TURNER, VICTOR

TURNER, VICTOR (1920–1983). Scottish-born American anthropologist and comparative religionist. On the basis of fieldwork in central Africa, Victor Witter Turner produced the richest ethnographic achievement of the period after World War II, and he explained the nature of religious ritual and symbolism in an African society in more detail than anyone had before.

Turner was born in Glasgow, Scotland. In 1943, in the midst of his five years of military service, he married Edith Davis, who was to collaborate with him in field research and writing throughout his career. He received his B.A. degree with honors in anthropology in 1949 from the University of London, where he studied with some of the leading figures of structural-functionalism: A. R. Radcliffe-Brown, Meyer Fortes, Raymond Firth, and Edmund Leach. He went on to graduate study at the University of Manchester under Max Gluckman and was introduced to conflict theory and political anthropology. During 1950–1954 he was a research officer at the Rhodes-Livingstone Institute in Lusaka, Zambia (then Northern Rhodesia), where he undertook, with his wife, a two-and-a-half-year study of the Ndembu people. In 1954 he returned to the University of Manchester and was appointed to the positions of lecturer and senior lecturer in social anthropology. From 1963 to 1968 he was professor of anthropology at Cornell University, and from 1968 to 1977 he was professor of anthropology and social thought at the University of Chicago. From 1977 until his death he was the William R. Kenan Professor of Anthropology at the University of Virginia. He held numerous fellowships, visiting appointments, and distinguished lectureships at universities in the United States and around the world. He organized major international conferences and was editor of the important series "Symbol, Myth and Ritual" published by Cornell University Press.

Like other leading anthropologists, Turner's ideas were shaped by his field experience. In the course of fieldwork he decided to abandon the social structural emphasis of his teachers and their bias against religion and to pursue a microsociological investigation of the actual processes of Ndembu village life that, he found, were articulated and resolved in ritual performances. Since Ndembu society is prone to conflict because of its inherent inconsistencies, he also rejected the static and mechanistic models of functionalism together with its goal of constructing universal social laws. Instead, he treated Ndembu society as a dynamic social process whose events were analyzable as "social dramas," consisting of phases of breach, crisis, redressive action, and reintegration (or schism), in which ritual played a central role. He also set aside the analytical perspective and alien categories of the outside observer and oriented his studies around the experiential context and cultural criteria of the Ndembu world, an approach that he later called the "anthropology of experience."

Although his initial study, Schism and Continuity in an African Society (1957), was labeled "difficult" and "experimental," Turner continued to refine his ideas about social drama and ritual process. He wrote one of the most detailed and perceptive studies of African divination, Ndembu Divination: Its Symbolism and Techniques (1961), viewing the subject in the context of social process and analyzing its use of social and ethical symbolism. He also wrote a short but brilliant clarification of methodological issues in African witchcraft studies, "Witchcraft and Sorcery: Taxonomy versus Dynamics" (1964), in which he treats a subject that had become bogged down in functionalist theorizing and confused definitions. He argues that witchcraft has to be viewed as a complex matter involving social process, cosmology, ecology, and biological factors. In addition he wrote a pioneering study of an Ndembu cult of affliction, Chihamba, the White Spirit (1962). In this work he attempted to go beyond the examination of social process and symbolic action and to formulate the implicit content of Ndembu thought by means of Thomistic concepts, long before the subjects of ethnophilosophy and ethnotheology had gained currency in anthropology. It was a venturesome effort and did not receive an entirely positive response. In subsequent and more detailed studies he examined Ndembu ethnomedical and ethnobiological concepts in the context of cults of affliction. One of these studies, The Drums of Affliction (1968), became the locus classicus of later scholarship in the field of African medical anthropology.

In the course of these ritual studies, Turner began to develop a theory of religious symbols. He noted in the field that certain symbols were dominant in ritual contexts and that they exhibited properties of condensation, unification of disparate significata, and polarization of meaning. Because of such semantic complexity, contextual variation, and attachment to ritual sequence, Turner rejected as overly simplistic the structuralist method of interpreting symbols in terms of synchronic, binary relationships. Instead, he proposed a threefold hermeneutic, based upon "exegetical," "operational," and "positional" levels of meaning. Moreover, he suggeted that in the context of intense ritual experience, the ideological, or "normative," and the sensory, or "orectic," poles of meaning came together and reinforced one another in such a way as to produce powerful emotional effects and real transformations of character and social relationships. Herein, Turner felt, lay the power and efficacy of ritual.

Although he wrote two detailed accounts of Ndembu boys' and girls' initiation rites (the first appearing in The Forest of Symbols, 1967, the second in The Drums of Affliction, 1968), it was in the context of a brief comparative study of rites of passage, "Betwixt and Between: The Liminal Period in Rites de Passage " (1964), that he began to focus upon the work of the Belgian anthropologist Arnold van Gennep. He found van Gennep's analysis of rites of passage into the phases of separation, threshold or limen, and reaggregation to be not only a useful cross-cultural model but also the source of a fundamental insight: the regenerative and transformational possibilities of ritual liminality. Whereas van Gennep emphasizes only the outward change of social status accomplished by these rites, Turner emphasizes the inward, moral, and cognitive changes that occurred, and where van Gennep examines only the social aspects of the liminal state, Turner examines its deconstructive and reconstructive processes. Thus Turner concentrated upon the heretofore neglected, strange, and amorphous properties of symbols and actions of the liminal phase. He regarded such symbols and actions both as channels for communicating basic social and cultural values and as channels for discovering new moral and metaphysical insights that tend to subvert as well as support established religious and social orders.

Turner developed his theory of liminality further in the seminal work The Ritual Process (1969). Here he defines the social form of liminality as communitas, the direct, egalitarian encounter and fellowship between people as people, which characterized both temporary ritual states and certain more enduring social groups. In this context he defined three forms of communitas, the "spontaneous," the "ideological," and the "normative," and he elaborated a host of contrasting liminal and status system forms. In addition to illuminating past religious and political movements as well as popular currents in American society of the 1960s, Turner brought his theory of liminality to bear upon the phenomenon of religious pilgrimage, a generally ignored subject in the history of religions. His contribution, presented in another important essay, "The Center Out There: Pilgrims' Goal" (1973), was to see pilgrimage as a rite of passage whose goals include both the experience of communitas and the liminal encounter with the sacred at the pilgrimage center. There followed a series of lectures and articles on this theme, and they inspired other scholars to take up the subject. Together with Edith Turner, he explored the subject further in relation to Mexican, Spanish, and Irish pilgrimage sites in a fieldwork study, Image and Pilgrimage in Christian Culture (1978). His subsequent search for liminality in the modern secular world led to his use of the word liminoid to represent the nonreligious genres of art, sport, and performance.

Although Turner often emphasized his departure from social functionalism, his vision of religion and society remained partly indebted to it. Like Émile Durkheim, he saw social order to be dependent upon ritual and ceremonial performances, and like Max Gluckman, he emphasized the cathartic effects of ritual reversal that helped to restore and legitimate established social structures. But he went beyond both Durkheim and Gluckman by examining the processes of social change and the ways in which ritual helped to create new social realities. His work, along with that of anthropologists Claude Lévi-Strauss, Clifford Geertz, and Mary Douglas, also helped to revive comparative studies in religious anthropology, which had been abandoned by British and American functionalists. But, although he agreed with Douglas and Geertz on the cognitive importance of ritual symbols, he refused to tie them closely to social structure as in Douglas's theory or to construe them as "texts" according to Geertz's formulation.

Following the American anthropologist Edward Sapir, Turner held that culture is not a completely or consistently articulated system, a set of dogmas or logically arrayed or Lévi-Straussian symbolic codes, but rather a changing entity, influenced by "root paradigms," that is, by axiomatic frames, or deep myths, that propel and transform people and groups at critical moments. In this respect Turner came to see that the Ndembu are not exceptional but typical, and thus that social order is fundamentally "processual" in form and "dramatic" in character.

Turner called his analytical method "dramatistic," because, like Freud, he believed that examination of disturbances of the normal and the regular often gives greater insight into the normal than does direct study. Because of the episodic character of social systems, Turner preferred the sociologist Kurt Lewin's image of society as "social fields." He also saw affinities with the phenomenological sociology of Alfred Schutz and his followers, who regarded culture as a constantly negotiated set of meanings, and he found useful Wilhelm Dilthey's theory that the meanings and values of life are to be found in the "structures of experience" and not in the formal categories of thought. This approach led him to welcome a shift in anthropology away from such concepts as structure, equilibrium, function, and system to such concepts as process, indeterminacy, and reflexivity, and he envisioned a new anthropology based upon a synthesis of disciplines instead of the usual disciplinary specialization. Turner himself was not, however, given to sustained theoretical exposition, and he often let unclarities remain in his writings, for which he was sometimes taken to task by his colleagues. He preferred to forge his concepts as he went along. His approach was regarded as highly original, and he put forward his ideas with a strong personal conviction that gave his analyses great force.

His final studies led him into the field of performance theory. In theater, especially experimental theater in the United States in the late 1960s and early 1970s, Turner saw the same kind of liminal reflexivity, the public cognizance of social situations, that he encountered in rituals associated with the redressive phase of Ndembu social dramas. Together with the drama theorist and director Richard Schechner, Turner understood theater to be an important means of communicating a society's self-reflections and a means of cross-cultural understanding. Thus he encouraged anthropologists to study theatrical performances as well as ordinary social life. In the course of his teaching he also guided students in the performance of ethnographic rituals as a means of learning about ritual and about the societies from which the students came.

At this juncture, he became interested in the subject of the neurobiology of ritual. It appeared that the contrasting functions of the cerebral hemispheres, the right and left brain, might correspond to the two aspects of society Turner had been looking at, structure and liminality. In a major essay, "Body, Brain and Culture" (1983), Turner speculated that the right hemisphere might also be the source of universal symbolic patterns, such as C. G. Jung's archetypes or his own root paradigms and deep myths, which seemed to exist at the subliminal level until activated and brought into the articulate realm of the left brain. The existence of different brain levels, especially the neocortex and the midbrain, also seemed to resemble the ideological and orectic poles of dominant symbols. Perhaps at the height of ritual, Turner speculated, it was the interaction between these two levels with the right and left hemispheres of the brain that produced the transformational effect that was essential to successful ritual performance. Although these were but speculations about the possible biological mechanisms of the ritual process, they were consistent with Turner's fundamental conviction that it was in the dynamics and dramatics of social, ritual, and theatrical events that one came to understand the lives of others and oneself.

Bibliography

From 1980 until his death in 1983, Turner was an editor of this encyclopedia, to which he contributed two articles: "Bodily Marks" and "Rites of Passage: A Few Definitions." His previously published works include the following.

Schism and Continuity in an African Society: A Study of Ndembu Village Life. Manchester, 1957.

Ndembu Divination: Its Symbolism and Techniques. Manchester, 1961. Reprinted in Revelation and Divination in Ndembu Ritual.

Chihamba, the White Spirit: A Ritual Drama of the Ndembu. Manchester, 1962. Reprinted in Revelation and Divination in Ndembu Ritual.

"Betwixt and Between: The Liminal Period in Rites de Passage." In Symposium on New Approaches to the Study of Religion, edited by June Helm, pp. 4–20. Seattle, 1964. Reprinted in The Forest of Symbols.

"Witchcraft and Sorcery: Taxonomy versus Dynamics." Africa 34 (1964): 314–325. Reprinted in The Forest of Symbols.

The Forest of Symbols: Aspects of Ndembu Ritual. Ithaca, N. Y., 1967.

The Drums of Affliction: A Study of Religious Processes among the Ndembu of Zambia. Oxford, 1968.

The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure. Chicago, 1969.

Dramas, Fields, and Metaphors: Symbolic Action in Human Society. Ithaca, N.Y., 1974.

Revelation and Divination in Ndembu Ritual. Ithaca, N.Y., 1975.

Image and Pilgrimage in Christian Culture: Anthropological Perspectives. Written with Edith Turner. New York, 1978.

From Ritual to Theatre: The Human Seriousness of Play. New York, 1982.

"Body, Brain, and Culture." Zygon 18 (September 1983): 221–245.

On the Edge of the Bush. Edited by Edith Turner. Tucson, 1985.