Victor Turner

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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.

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.

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)

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. 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.

Related Reading

• Internalization of moral code
• Status
• Social dialect
• Russ Bernard
• Charisma