Summary SANT104 Lectures and Literature, Part 2
LECTURE 7: PERFORMATIVE APPROACHES TO CULTURE
Victor Turner (1920–83) is not a structuralist but more what is called symbolic or interpretive
anthropology. He is concerned with how rituals are organised across time. In the 1950s Turner did
fieldwork on the Ndembu tribe in central Africa, in Zambia what use to be called Northern Rhodesia.
There he became interested in rituals, in Life-Crisis Rituals and Rituals of Affliction. Life-crisis rituals
deal with transition, from one way of being a person to another way of being a person. They deal
with the transformation of a boy into a man or a girl into a woman, or living person who has died
into a spirit. Life-crisis rituals mark and produce a movement from one social status, role and
identity to a new one social status, role and identity. These can in our society be rituals like a
marriage, christening, or graduation ceremony. In a christening you move from being a pagan to
becoming a member of a congregation or in a graduation ceremony you move from being a young
inexperienced man or woman to someone who is credited with a certain kind of professional
knowledge and expertise.
Rituals of affliction deal with conflicts that are internalised into individuals. They are performed on
individuals who are punished by the spirits of dead relatives whom they have forgotten or neglected.
Turner calls these spirits "shades" and they can cause various kinds of misfortune, such as
preventing hunters catching any game, causing women to have reproductive difficulties or making
the living sick. Different cults cure these different kinds of misfortune.
Turner and the Transformative power of Ritual
When Turner did fieldwork (1951-4), there were about 18000 Ndembu people scattered in small
villages of about a dozen huts. They practiced subsistence agriculture growing cassava and hunting.
They also grew finger millet and maize for food and beer making. The Ndembu are matrilineal, which
means that they trace descent through women. Your clan identity comes from your mother, her
mother, and her mother’s mother. Yet when women marry, they do not live in their mother’s
village, they go and live in their husband’s village.
Whereas a great many approaches like the structuralist approach, are concerned with the logic
between the symbols, Turner is unique in arguing that time needs to be incorporated into the
analysis. A symbol occurs at certain points in time in the ritual, after certain events and before
others and this is crucial to its meaning. Structural analyses tend to deny time and try to find the
meaning of something through its relationship to other signs.
Communitas and Liminality
Turner’s analysis of rituals drew on the ideas of a Belgian anthropologists called Arnold Van Gennep,
who studied rituals from around the world. He concluded that there were similar types of rituals
that had similar types of structures. These were rituals that were concerned with rites of passage
where you move people between positions, roles and identities; where you move them from one
point in the social structure to another. These include rituals like birth, death, initiations,
confirmations, weddings and coronations. The process of transition and movement from one
category of being to another category of being had a structure to it. This ritual structure took the
form of 3 ritual phases: separation, marginality and aggregation
,The first phase, Separation, removes the individual from his group, from ways of identifying himself.
He is removed from his previous roles and relationships. It might be Melanesian boys taken into the
bush or recruits into army going into the barracks and having their clothing and hair removed.
The second phase of the ritual is the liminal period. The initiate is in transition. He or she has an
ambiguous identity, they are neither their previous role nor have they taken on their new role or
identity. He is in-between categories neither a boy or a man, neither a girl or woman. In this period
of the ritual, the initiate is often marked with danger and he or she can be highly polluting. Often
initiates are subjected to various ordeals by those who have already passed through the ritual.
Around the world, this can often involve beatings, fasting, and dehydration. In the army it will be
recruits being subject to very harsh military training and them losing their individual clothing and
hair style so that they now dress and act the same. The army recruits are ground down to a
common level before being recreated as something else.
The third final phase is reaggregation or reincorporation. The ritual journey is completed and the
initiate is brought back into society but with new obligations and powers. In the army, the person
will be now be allowed to make visits back to their home but with a new identity as a soldier or
sailor. After an initiation ritual, the initiate might be given a new name.
Societies ritualise social and cultural transitions. They have ways of symbolising this ambiguous
stage. These liminal people are temporarily outside the normal categories that organise social life
and there are special symbols they are used to think about them: “invisibility, to darkness, to
bisexuality, to the wilderness, and to an eclipse of the sun or moon. (1969: 95)” “The structural
“invisibility” of liminal personae has a twofold character. They are at once no longer classified … In
so far as a neophyte is structurally “dead,” he or she may be treated, for a long or short period, as a
corpse is customarily treated in his or her society. . . The metaphor of dissolution is often applied to
neophytes; they are allowed to go filthy and identified with the earth, the generalized matter into
which every specific individual is rendered. … The other aspect, that they are not yet classified, is
often expressed in symbols modelled on processes of gestation and parturition. The essential
feature of these symbolizations is that the neophytes are neither living nor dead from one aspect,
and both living and dead from another. Their condition is one of ambiguity and paradox, a confusion
of all the customary categories. (Turner 1967:96-7).”
For Turner, they are being ground down to a common shared level of subordination so that later
they can be recreated. Those who jointly undergo the liminal phase because they have suffered
together often develop close ties of friendship and egalitarianism between each other. “Their
behaviour is normally passive or humble; they must obey their instructors implicitly, and accept
arbitrary punishment without complaint. It is as though they are being reduced or ground down to a
uniform condition to be fashioned anew and endowed with additional powers to enable them to
cope with their new station in life. (1969: 95)”
Sharing the same ambiguous position as each other, initiates experience intense comradeship. In
liminal periods of communitas, individuals recognise “an essential and generic human bond,
without which there could be no society” (1969: 97).
For Turner, it is almost as though there are two models of society being juxtaposed. There is the
outside hierarchical society of normal everyday life and the liminal society, which is more
unstructured, rudimentary, undifferentiated and involves unity and equality of the initiates.
The stripping away of hierarchical distinctions and the grinding of people down to a common low
status can be sometimes an experience of sacredness.
,This break down of distinctions, of categories of classification in the liminal period can also take the
form of blurring the distinction between male and female, so sometimes initiates will be dressed up
in women’s clothing, or they will be dressed in a way that no longer identifies them as male or
female. There they are given knowledge and the knowledge is often said to make the boys and girls
grow.
Turner gives the example of the installation of the senior chief Kanongesha among the Ndembu.
Before he becomes a ruling chief he is mocked and criticised, scolded and made fun off. He is
dressed in raggedly clothes and he must sit quietly and listen with patience and humility as he is
harangued.
Rites of passage involve symbols of inversion where what was previously lowly becomes powerful
and dominant whilst that which is dominant is made to be lowly.
In our society a similar ritual would be the coronation of the pope where he takes on the role of
washing the feet of the poor. This is seen to mirror Christ’s washing of the feet of his twelves
disciples. Here a polluting act washing feet is the essence of the sacred.
Transition/state
Totality/partiality
Homogeneity/heterogeneity
Communitas/structure
Equality/inequality
Anonymity/systems of nomenclature
Absence of property/property
Absence of status/status
Nakedness or uniform clothing/distinctions of clothing
Sexual continence/sexuality
Minimization of sex distinctions/maximization of sex distinctions
Absence of rank/distinctions of rank
Humility/just pride of position
Disregard for personal appearance/care for personal appearance
No distinctions of wealth/distinctions of wealth
Unselfishness/selfishness
Total obedience/obedience only to superior rank
Sacredness/secularity
Sacred instruction/technical knowledge
Silence/speech
Suspension of kinship rights and obligations/kinship rights and obligations
Continuous reference to mystical powers/intermittent reference to mystical powers
Foolishness/sagacity
Simplicity/complexity
Acceptance of pain and suffering/avoidance of pain and suffering
Heteronomy/degrees of autonomy
These are symbolic ways of codifying liminality and they are not exhaustive.
Transitory liminal states can sometimes be institutionalised. Eg pilgrimage journeys
Institutionalised forms of liminality can be found in monastic traditions of monks and nuns. They live
a common life of poverty, discipline and obedience. They share a common experience of suffering in
, fasting, avoiding meat and avoiding conversation. They are stripped of their clothing and previous
social status.
Rites of passage and liminal periods can be found in what Goffman calls total institutions, the prison,
mental hospital, boarding school, military service. There new recruits will often be ritually degraded,
stripped of clothes or humiliated in some way that reduces and equalises them. In ordinary society,
the buck’s party can assume these qualities.
For Turner, liminality and communitas are often associated with the powers of the weak, of that
which is lowly or marginal in some sort of way. Turner refers to Gluckman’s work on the court jester,
who came to be a privileged moral spokesman.. In Africa you also have jesters associated with
African monarchs and they were frequently dwarfs or had some other kind of distinguishing
peculiarity, “These figures representing the poor and the deformed, appear to symbolize the moral
values of communitas as against the coercive power of supreme political rulers. (Turner 1969:110)”
In modern western society, Turner believes the values of communitas resurfaced in the cultural
protest movement of the hippies.
In other societies, the social structure creates others figures who embody the values of communitas
as opposed to hierarchy. Those who are marginal to the main structures, who are structurally weak
as opposed to structurally superior will have the ritual powers of the weak. It might be the mother’s
relatives in a patrilineal society, they can have religious ritual powers. In Africa, one finds that chiefs
often belong to conquering groups who come from the outside but that religious powers of fertility
are assigned to those who belong to the earth, to autochthonous groups who have sprung from the
soil. Often the king or chief has to be installed by the subordinate group, that has been conquered.
In patrilineal societies, it is the maternal relatives, such as the mother’s brother who embodies
magical mystical powers. Turner then analyses the Ashanti which is a matrilineal society in Ghana.
There the religious powers of fertility are associated with male-to-male descent from the sky god
and the river gods. They control the health, fertility and strength of people. That which is structurally
marginal can be given mysterious ritual cosmological powers.
Just as individuals may undergo rites of passage, so there are periods of time when society can
undergo transformation. first fruit rituals or harvest festivals. A society moving from war to peace
or from peace to war will need rituals and ceremonies to mediate the transition.
Periods of historical change can also produce manifestations of communitas, such as religious
movements that predict a new world, or a new millennium. This coincides with rural people being
displaced into towns and cities, or tribal societies conquered by a colonial power. In millenarian
cults, people might give up property and rank and emphasise egalitarian relations between
themselves. Some groups will destroy property as a way of bringing close the world of the future.
Turner also believes that millenarian movement become institutionalised over time,
“In practice, of course, the impetus soon becomes exhausted, and the "movement" becomes itself
an institution among other institutions for the reason that it feels itself to be the unique bearer of
universal human truths. Mostly, such movements occur during phases of history that are in many
respects "homologous" to the liminal periods of important rituals in stable and repetitive societies,
when major groups or social categories in those societies are passing from one cultural state to
another. “
In our societies examples of liminal times would be New Year Eves, when the clock strikes exactly
twelve and Russefeiring.
