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Tuc Riti Ia I 111 Lb TUC RITI IA I 111 LB. 11 1 1 %J i \ L» i""^ /^®% P H & ^^^^ ^^^r ^^^y v^—^g Structure and Anti-Structure VICTOR TURNER The Lew/s Hen/y Morgan Lectures | 7966 presented at The University of Rochester, Rochester, New York Cornell Paperbacks Cornell University Press ITHACA, NEW YORK lite.*..- SYMBOL, MYTH, AND RITUAL SERIES General Editor: Victor Turner Raymond Firth, Symbols: Public and Private* Eva Hunt, The Transformation of the Hummingbird: Cultural Roots of a Zinacanlecan Mythical Poem Bennetta Jules-Rosette, African Apostles: Ritual and Conversion in the Church of John Maranke* Sally Falk Moore and Barbara G. Myerhoff, eds., Symbol and Politics in Communal Ideology: Cases and Questions^ Barbara G. Myerhoff, Peyote Hunt: The Sacred Journey of the Huicho'l Indiansj Victor Turner, Dramas, Fields, and Metaphors: Symbolic Action in Human Socielyj Victor Turner, Revelation and Divination in Ndembu Ritual^ Victor Turner, The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structurej Roy Wagner, Lethal Speech: Daribi Myth as Symbolic Obviation *Also available in a Cornell Paperbacks edition. tAvailable from Cornell University Press only in a Cornell Paperbacks edition. To the memory of Allan Holmberg this book is respectfully dedicated. Copyright © ig6g by Victor W. Turner Foreword to Cornell Paperbacks edition copyright © 1977 by Cornell University All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or parts thereof, must not be reproduced in any form without permission in writing from the publisher. For information address Cornell University Press, 124 Roberts Place, Ithaca, New York 14850. First published ig6g by Aldine Publishing Company. First published, Cornell Paperbacks, 1977. Seventh printing 1991. Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data (For library cataloging purposes only) Turner, Victor Witter. The ritual process. (Symbol, myth, and ritual series) (Cornell paperbacks ; CP-163) Reprint of the ed. published by Aldine Pub. Co., Chicago, in series: The Lewis Henry Morgan lectures, ig66. Bibliography: p. Includes index. 1. Rites and ceremonies. I. Tide. II. Series: The Lewis Henry Morgan lectures ; 1966. [GN473.T82 1977] 301.2'1 76-56627 ISBN 0-8014-9163-0 Printed in the United States of America © The paper in this book meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences— Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1984. Foreword to the Cornell Paperbacks Edition Recently both the research and theoretical concerns of many anthropologists have once again been directed toward the role of symbols—religious, mythic, aesthetic, political, and even economic—in social and cultural processes. Whether this re­ vival is a belated response to developments in other disciplines (psychology, ethology, philosophy, linguistics, to name only a few), or whether it reflects a return to a central concern after a period of neglect, is difficult to say. In recent field studies, an­ thropologists have been collecting myths and rituals in the con­ text of social action, and improvements in anthropological field technique have produced data that are richer and more refined than heretofore; these new data have probably challenged theoreticians to provide more adequate explanatory frames. Whatever may have been the causes, there is no denying a re­ newed curiosity about the nature of the connections between culture, cognition, and perception, as these connections are revealed in symbolic forms. Although excellent individual monographs and articles in symbolic anthropology or comparative symbology have recently appeared, a common focus or forum that can be provided by a topically organized series of books has not been available. The v vi FOREWORD present series is intended to fill this lacuna. It is designed to include not only field monographs and theoretical and compar­ ative studies by anthropologists, but also work by scholars in other disciplines, both scientific and humanistic. The appear­ ance of studies in such a forum encourages emulation, and em­ ulation can produce fruitful new theories. It is therefore our hope that the series will serve as a house of many mansions, providing hospitality for the practitioners of any discipline that has a serious and creative concern with comparative symbology. Too often, disciplines are sealed off, in sterile pedantry, from significant intellectual influences. Nevertheless, our primary aim is to bring to public attention works on ritual and myth written by anthropologists, and our readers will find a variety of strictly anthropological approaches ranging from formal analyses of systems of symbols to empathetic accounts of divin- atory and initiatory rituals. This book is based on the Lewis Henry Morgan Lectures at the University of Rochester which I delivered in 1966. It was in the course of these lectures that I crossed the threshold be­ tween the study of ritual in an African tribal context and the analysis of processual symbols in cross-cultural and transtem- poral terms. The Ritual Process and subsequent books of mine have produced their share of controversy over the years. More than once I have been accused of overgeneralizing and of mis­ applying concepts like "liminality" and "communitas." These terms, it is argued, may adequately describe or account for social and cultural processes and phenomena found in prelit- erate societies, but have limited use in explaining sociocultural systems of much greater scale and complexity. To attempt to answer such criticisms is probably a futile exer­ cise. I am unable, however, to resist quoting the adage "The proof of the pudding is in the eating." This book has been cited repeatedly by scholars in such diverse fields as history, the his­ tory of religions, English literature, political science, theology, and drama, as well as in anthropological and sociological books and articles concerned with ritual and semiotics, particularly in African contexts; its reception encouraged me to extend the FOREWORD Vll comparative enterprise. In Dramas, Fields, and Metaphors, an­ other work in the Symbol, Myth, and Ritual series, several case studies are based on the assumption, first developed here, that society is a process rather than an abstract system, whether of social structural relations or of symbols and meanings. Society, moreover, is a process in which any living, relatively well-bonded human group alternates between fixed and—to borrow a term from our Japanese friends—"floating worlds." JBy^erbaL„and_jip„nv£r^al_means of dassm^cadon^^e^impose xupjpn.purselyes innumerable constraints and boundaries to keep chaos at bay, but often at the cost of failing to makejiis- ,_cpveries and inventions: that is -to say ..noLall instances. of sub-, version of the normative are deviant or criminous. Yet-in-order jto live, to breathe, andjp.generate.novelty, human beings have had to create—by structural means—spaces and times in the calendar or, in the cultural cycles of their most cherished - groups which cannot be captured in the classificatory nets of .their quotidian, routinized spheres.oLaction.. These_Jmiinal areas.pf time and space—rituals, carnivals, dramas, and latterly films—are open to the play of thought, feelings and_wjll;Jn them are generated new models, often fantastic, some of which may have sufficient power and plausibility to replace eventually the force-backed political and jural models that control the cen­ ters of a society's ongoing life. The antistructural liminality provided in the cores of ritual and aesthedc forms represents the reflexivity of the social pro­ cess, wherein society becomes at once subject and direct object; it represents also its subjunctive mood, where suppositions, de­ sires, hypotheses, possibilities, and so forth, all become legiti­ mate. We have been too prone to think, in static terms, that cul­ tural superstructures are passive mirrors, mere reflections of substructural productive modes and relations or of the political processes that enforce the dominance of the productively privi­ leged. If we were as dialectical as we claim to be, we would see that it is more a matter of an existential bending back upon ourselves: the same plural subject is the active superstructure that assesses the substructural and structural modalities that we also are. Our concreteness, our substantiality is with us in our vm FOREWORD reflexivity, even in the ludic play domain of certain of our liminal moments: play is more serious than we, the inheritors of Western Puritanism, have thought. The Ritual Process represents an attempt to free my own thought, and I hope that of others in my field as well, from grooved dependence on "structure" as the sole sociological di­ mension. A good deal of the philistinism perhaps rightly ascribed to our discipline has been due to this "single vision," as William Blake would have called it—this obdurate evasion of the rich complexities of cultural creation. Our goal should be to study man alive and woman alive, in the many levels of their mutual dealings. This book is, if nothing more, a modest step toward realizing that goal. VICTOR TURNER University of Chicago Contents Planes of Classification in a Ritual of Life and Death Paradoxes of Twinship in Ndembu Ritual 44 Liminality and Communitas 94 Communitas: Model and Process 131 Humility and Hierarchy: The Liminality of Status Elevation and Reversal 166 Bibliography 204 Index 209 1 Planes of Classification in a Ritual of Life and Death MORGAN AND RELIGION It must first be said that for me, as for many others, Lewis Henry Morgan was one of the lodestars of my student days. Everything he wrote bore the stamp of a fervent yet pellucid spirit. But, in under­ taking to deliver the Morgan Lectures for 1966, I was immediately conscious of one profound, and it might seem crippling, disadvan­ tage. Morgan, though he faithfully recorded many religious cere­ monies, had a marked^ disinclination to give the study of religion, the same piercing attention he devoted to kinship and politics. Yet religious beliefs~and pracfices~weie themain subject matter of my talks.
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