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	===Biography===		===Biography===
			Victor Witter Turner (28 May 1920 – 18 December 1983) was a British-American cultural anthropologist, one of the central figures of the Manchester School and the leading twentieth-century theorist of ritual. Born in Glasgow to an electrical engineer and an actress, he read English at University College London, served as a non-combatant bomb-disposal soldier during the Second World War, and turned to anthropology afterwards, taking his doctorate at Manchester under Max Gluckman. His fieldwork was among the Ndembu of north-western Zambia between 1950 and 1954. He later taught at Cornell, the University of Chicago and the University of Virginia.<ref>[https://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/Victor_Turner Victor Turner], biography and bibliography.</ref>

	===~~Projects~~===		===Key Ideas===
			* '''Liminality.''' Turner's most influential concept, developed from Arnold van Gennep's tripartite model of rites of passage (separation, transition, incorporation). Turner concentrated on the middle phase — the threshold, ''limen'' — in which the initiate is "betwixt and between," stripped of former status and not yet holding a new one. Liminal persons are structurally invisible, ambiguous, often treated as polluting or sacred, and typically levelled: uniform dress, no rank, submission to authority, and the suspension of ordinary rules.
			* '''Communitas.''' The mode of relationship that arises among people in the liminal state: unstructured, egalitarian, intensely felt, and by nature temporary. Turner distinguished spontaneous communitas from the normative and ideological forms that attempt to institutionalise it — and argued that the attempt always fails, because structure reasserts itself. Every monastic order, commune and movement rediscovers this.
			* '''Structure and anti-structure.''' The framing of ''The Ritual Process'' (1969). Societies oscillate between structure — the ordinary world of status, role and rule — and anti-structure, the periodic, licensed dissolution of those categories. Anti-structure is not the failure of structure but its necessary complement.
			* '''Social drama.''' Turner's method for analysing conflict, developed in ''Schism and Continuity in an African Society'' (1957). Disputes unfold in four phases: breach of a norm, mounting crisis, redressive action (ritual, arbitration, law), and either reintegration or the recognition of schism. The model is deliberately transposable to any social unit, from a village to an institution.
			* '''The liminoid.''' A late distinction. In industrial societies the obligatory, collective liminal phase is largely replaced by the ''liminoid'' — optional, individual, commodified experiences (theatre, sport, art, leisure, travel) that do liminal work without the obligation.

	===~~=Subproject (if applicable=~~===		===Selected Works===
			* ''Schism and Continuity in an African Society'' (1957)
			* ''The Forest of Symbols: Aspects of Ndembu Ritual'' (1967)
			* ''The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure'' (1969)
			* ''Dramas, Fields, and Metaphors'' (1974)
			* ''From Ritual to Theatre: The Human Seriousness of Play'' (1982)
			* ''The Anthropology of Performance'' (1986)

	===~~Further Reading~~===		===Relevance to Cyborg Anthropology===
	*		Turner's apparatus transfers to networked life more readily than almost any other classical anthropology. Online communities routinely produce liminal conditions — the newcomer stripped of offline status, levelled by a default avatar, subject to unwritten rules they must learn by transgressing; see [[Internalization of moral code\|internalization of moral code]]. Communitas describes the intense, temporary solidarity of an event, a raid, a thread or a crisis, and its reliable decay into hierarchy. And the social drama model is the most useful available template for analysing a platform conflict, because it treats the redressive phase — the moderation, the apology, the policy change — as a structural stage rather than as a failure.
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	~~===External Links===~~

			===Related Reading===
			* [[Internalization of moral code]]
			* [[Status]]
			* [[Social dialect]]
			* [[Russ Bernard]]
			* [[Charisma]]

			===References===
			<references/>

	[[Category:People]]		[[Category:People]]
			[[Category:Traditional Anthropology]]
			[[Category:Digital Anthropology]]


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Victor Turner - Revision history

Caseorganic at 14:02, 25 August 2026

Caseorganic: Created page with 'Title ===Biography=== ===Projects=== ====Subproject (if applicable==== ===Further Reading=== * * * ===External Links=== [[Category:P…'