TURNER, VICTOR

Professor of anthropology and religious studies; b. Glasgow, Scotland, May 28, 1920; d. Charlottesville, Va., Dec. 18, 1983. He received his doctoral degree in 1955 from Manchester University for research in the social organization and ritual of the Ndembu people of Zambia. In 1959 he became a member of the Catholic Church, and remained so until his death. He taught at the University of Manchester, Cornell University, the University of Chicago, and the University of Virginia. Turner was one of the foremost theorists of ritual and symbolism in the mid-20th century. He also influenced many other disciplines, notably social thought, history, medical anthropology, performance studies, and literature.

Symbol and Ritual. A major part of Turner's work developed from Van Gennep's discovery of rites of passage in world cultures (1910). A variety of rites which denoted and created cultural change contained a distinct phase in which the subject was withdrawn from an old status structure but not yet introduced into a new one. Turner pointed out that this intermediate liminal phase was characterized by "antistructure and sentiments of communitas "—the undifferentiated free spirit of fellowship between comrades, brought about by the communication of sacra, ritual reversal, and the deconstruction and recombination of familiar cultural configurations. He set up analytical frameworks for the study of ritual symbols, which he used to explain their properties. The cross, for example, he held to be fired by its sensory character and corporeality, an element which in every symbol is indissolubly combined with its ideological meaning. Such an antithesis he called "the polarization of a symbol."

Social Theory. In his social theory Turner was process oriented. He argued, like sartre, that social structures are created by unstructured activity. Turner thus drew attention to the idea that religions, as well as systems of law and all objectified culture, derived from the living moments of human experience and activity—the study of which he later termed the anthropology of experience. Initially a Marxist convinced of the dynamic processual nature of human social existence, he became dissatisfied with the structuralist-functionalist approach and its argument that all social organization results from functional necessity and absolutely determines the character of culture. This did not seem to explain the curious symbolic and ritual phenomena he encountered in Africa. In 1962, exploring this theme further, he wrote Chihamba, the White Spirit: A Ritual Drama of the Ndembu [republished in Revelation and Divination in Ndembu Ritual (Ithaca, N.Y. 1975)] in which he borrowed Étienne gilson's idea of "the ungraspable act-of-being" to describe the Ndembu's ungraspable spirit figure of Kavula, the thunder god. These were the terms of mysticism, not those of a reductionist anthropology.

In The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure (Chicago 1969) Turner introduced and expanded the themes of liminality and communitas. The fate of spontaneous communitas when it enters social history was exemplified by early Franciscanism. St. francis lived a spiritual life, in poverty. His thinking was concrete, personal, and imagist, characteristic of those in love with existential communitas. After his death problems emerged concerning the continuity of the order, and the Conventual system was developed. This insured the incorporation of permanent structural features into the order—a prime example of the movement from communitas to structure. In Dramas, Fields, and Metaphors (Ithaca, N.Y. 1974, pp. 275–294) Turner described how communitas may emerge within such an organization, and even exhibit itself as an oscillation with structure through time. He defended the archaic patterns of Church ritual and symbol that arose from the free space within liminality, and held that such patterns can become protective of future free spaces. He warned liturgiologists that structural-functionalism had little understanding of ritual liminality and should not be the basis for abolishing ancient liturgical traditions ["Passages, Margins and Poverty: Religious Symbols of Communitas," Worship 46 (1972) and "Ritual, Tribal and Catholic," Worship 50 (1976)].

Turner regarded religious action as deeply connected to and rooted in social life, though not determined by it. He saw ritual in the early days of humankind arising in situations of sickness, life crisis, or the conflict of social drama—the latter consisting of four stages: breach of a norm; crisis; redress; followed either by reintegration or the recognition of irreparable schism. In the stage of redress, Turner held that ritual can effect a more comprehensive solution than law, because it can encompass the paradox of two irreconcilable goods.

Later Work. Turner applied his processualism and symbolic theory to the lives of St. Thomas Becket, Miguel Hidalgo, and many other historic figures, and he made use of literary examples such as the events and symbols in the Icelandic sagas and Dante's Purgatorio. In his monograph, Image and Pilgrimage in Christian Culture: Anthropological Perspectives (with E. Turner, New York 1978), he treated pilgrimage as a rite of passage, studying it as an important liminal phenomenon within the structured lives of the common people.

Shortly before he died, Turner began to use the findings of neuroscience to throw light on ritual. He became interested in the nonverbal right cerebral hemisphere, with its powers of holistic thinking. He realized that many of the problems of spiritual existence and human conflict found in his anthropological material were not resolved at the cognitive left-hemispheric level, but in the nonverbal noetic mode known as "ritual knowledge"—when the brain's instrument for religion, in both its hemispheres, was most fully engaged.

See Also: structuralism.

Bibliography: h. b. porter, "Liminal Mysteries: Some Writings by Victor Turner," Anglican Theological Review, 57: 215–219. u. t. holmes, "Liminality and Liturgy," Worship 47: 386–397; "Ritual and Social Drama," Worship 51: 197–213. j. r. nichols, "Worship as Anti-Structure: The Contribution of Victor Turner," Theology Today 41: 401–409. r. l. moore and f. e. reynolds, eds., Anthropology and the Study of Religion, pt. 2, "The Work of Victor Turner" (Chicago 1984) 77–143.

[e. turner]