What is Turner's theory of liminalty?
Turner's work on liminalty draws from Van-Gennep's triadic model of the Rite of Passage, which he elaborates to include other cultural phenomena. Van Gennep described the process of shifting from one social status to another in three stages: 1.disengaement in which the individual is symbolically removed from society and his own identity. 2.
What is Victor Turner's view on religion?
Like Clifford Geertz and Mary Douglas, Victor Turner considers religion the key to culture and ritual the key to religion. Like them as well, he interprets religion the way believers purportedly do: as beliefs, as beliefs about the cosmos, yet as cosmic beliefs compatible with modern science.
What is Turner’s theory of rituals?
Turner’s main theoretical advance was to show how rituals are more than just social glue for the maintenance of the social order, and how rituals are processes, not states, in the social world, which itself is “a world in becoming, not a world in being” (Turner 1974a:24).
How did Turner go beyond British structuralism in his work?
Finally, Turner went beyond British structuralism in stressing the inter-structural phase of liminality in ritual and the related notion of communitas. This meant a shift in his work away from the social-structural analyses characteristic of British social anthropology.
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What did Victor Turner argue?
Building upon van Gennep's observation that rites of passage and other rituals are liminal in that they temporarily extricate participants from their social statuses, Turner argued that rites of passage are antithetical to existing social structure and “subjunctive” because they invite new possibilities.
What is Victor Turner known for?
Introduction. Victor W. Turner (b. 1920–d. 1983) was a symbolic anthropologist whose comparative investigations of ritual and cultural performance left a unique impression in the social and human sciences, and across the arts.
What is social drama according to Victor Turner?
Victor Turner defines the social drama as "a sequence of social interactions of a conflictive, competitive, or agonistic type" (33), and he delineates its stages as breach, crisis, redress, and reintegration or schism.
What are the three stages in rites of passage Turner?
Stages. Rites of passage have three phases: separation, liminality, and incorporation, as van Gennep described.
What does liminal stage mean?
The liminal stage is the middle stage, the in-between period during which a person has not yet fully reached their new status in whatever rite of passage they are going through.
What is Communita religion?
From the Latin, communis (community, fellowship, condescension, affability), various meanings of communitas (a term taken up under the aegis of the Roman Catholic Church traditions) include joint possession in the hands of a religious community, stockbreeding society, land subject to rights of common, the whole of the ...
What is social drama in film?
Social film drama is a film genre that moves and inspires people to change policy, practice and individual behaviour. A dramatic, sensitive and authentic treatment of social issues, which powerfully connects audiences to the emotions and people that lie behind our assumptions, stereotypes and prejudices.
What is social drama in drama?
Social dramas. occur within groups of persons who share values and interests and who. have a real or alleged common history. The main actors are persons for. whom the group has a high value priority.
What is a social drama in literature?
Social Drama is a more loose term, it means to question the morality of a society by creating a tragedy for the characters to overcome, but is not necessarily a style or movement similar to realism. Use of Electrical Lighting. The "Box Set" a 3 walled and roofed setting on stage depicting a house.
What are the 5 rites of passage?
These rites are paramount to the development of an individual as well as the community. Most of the ancient rites of passage can be separated and classified into five groups. Rite to Birthright, Rite to Adulthood, Rite to Marriage, Rite to Eldership and Rite to Ancestorship.
Why is rite of passage important?
Most rites of passage are religious ceremonies. They not only mark the transition between an individual's life stages but they reinforce the dominant religious views and values of a culture. In other words, they reinforce the world-view.
What is the purpose of rites of passage?
Ceremonies that mark important transitional periods in a person's life, such as birth, puberty, marriage, having children, and death. Rites of passage usually involve ritual activities and teachings designed to strip individuals of their original roles and prepare them for new roles.
Why is Communitas important?
Communitas is a Latin noun commonly referring either to an unstructured community in which people are equal, or to the very spirit of community. It also has special significance as a loanword in cultural anthropology and the social sciences.
What is the name anthropologists give to a ritual in which a person?
A rite of passage is a ritual event that marks a person's transition from one status to another. Rites of passage explore and describe various notable milestones in an individual's life, for any marked transitional stage, when one's social status is altered.
What is symbolic and interpretive anthropology?
Symbolic anthropology or, more broadly, symbolic and interpretive anthropology, is the study of cultural symbols and how those symbols can be used to gain a better understanding of a particular society.
Who is anthropologist?
Anthropology is the study of what makes us human. Anthropologists take a broad approach to understanding the many different aspects of the human experience, which we call holism. They consider the past, through archaeology, to see how human groups lived hundreds or thousands of years ago and what was important to them.
Who was Victor Turner?
The charge was led by the British anthropologist Victor Turner, who acknowledged the contribution of structural functionalism to the study of rites of passage and ...
What did Turner study in his study of African rites of passage?
In his study of African rites of passage, The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure (1969), Turner revealed the drama and flux of everyday social life and highlighted the agency of rites in effecting social change, which he considered to be their fundamental role.
Why do rituals emerge?
Ritual, including rites of passage, emerges in response to structure and its limitations. Structure has the positive quality of organizing a society so it can meet its material needs, yet it also draws distinctions between human beings. Although structure is a basic human need, according to Turner, so are directness and equality.
Abstract
This article is dedicated to the symbolism of a religious site (the church) and a religious object (the cross) in Christianity in a concrete locality and community. The study was based on Victor Turner's theory of rituals and symbols. I used Turner's definitions and classifications of symbols as well as his theses related to rituals.
References (34)
ResearchGate has not been able to resolve any citations for this publication.
Abstract
Victor Turner’s The ritual process is discussed as articulating a general sociological theory, a practice theory, concerning the dynamics of continuity and change methodologically grounded in the analysis of rites that address moments of sociocultural and personal existential crisis.
References (5)
In contemporary capoeira groups, newcomers are symbolically ‘baptised’ into the community at a public ceremony called their Batizado (literally baptism) held during a festival. Novices play a game with a guest expert, get their first belt and thereafter they are members of their teacher’s group.
When did Turner publish his book The Forest of Symbols?
In 1967 he published his book The Forest of Symbols, which included an essay entitled Betwixt and Between: The Liminal Period in Rites of Passage. Within the works of Turner, liminality began to wander away from its narrow application to ritual passages in small-scale societies.
Who said "The Greenhorn is the ultimate victor in everything"?
”. — Gilbert Keith Chesterton (1874–1936)
Who was Victor Turner?
Victor Turner on Liminality and communitas –Summary and Analysis. Anthropologist Victor Turner made a huge contribution to anthropology by reintroducing the concept of "liminality" into the anthropological discourse.
What was Turner concerned with?
Turner was concerned with understanding cultures on the basis of dynamism and disorder, seeing society not as a "thing" but rather as a dynamic and dialectic process. Tuner conceptualized culture as a constant struggle between structure and anti-structure.
What model did Turner use for liminalty?
Turner's work on liminalty draws from Van-Gennep's triadic model of the Rite of Passage, which he elaborates to include other cultural phenomena.
What is the second phase of Van Gennep's model?
Turner took an interest is the second phase of Van Gennep's model – that of liminality . Liminalty, in terms of social structure and time, is an intermediate state of being "in between" in which individuals are striped from their usual identity and their constituting social differences while being on the verge of personal or social transformation.
What is Turner's work characterized as?
Second, Turner’s work will be characterized as one in which there are crucial intellectual turning-points, often coinciding with important crossroads in his life; parallels can be traced between Turners’ anthropological enterprise and his personal life history.
Where did Victor Turner live?
At the age of 11, Turner left Scotland and went with his divorced mother to live with his maternal grandparents in Bournemouth, England. After attending Bournemouth Grammar School, he studied English language and literature at University College of London (1938-41). During World War II, Turner, a pacifist and objector to military service, became a non-combatant bomb disposal soldier in Britain. In 1943 he married Edith Davis who remained his wife and collaborator throughout his life. After the war the Turners and their two sons lived in a gypsy caravan near Rugby Town, England, a proper home being unobtainable due to German bombing. In the public library there, Turner came across Coming of Age in Samoa by Margaret Mead and The Andaman Islanders by A. R. Radcliffe-Brown. From these books Turner discovered that tribal life was even more down-to-earth than that of the British soldier which he had experienced during the war. He decided to study anthropology at University College of London, where he attended the seminars of (among others) Daryll Forde, Meyer Fortes, and Edmund Leach, and received his B.A. with honors in 1949. Max Gluckman, the exiled South-African anthropologist and spiritual leader of the Manchester School, then offered Turner a grant from the Rhodes-Livingstone Institute to carry out fieldwork in an African tribe. Turner accepted and was assigned to the Mambwe tribe. However, he never reached the Mambwe homeland; during his stay at the Institute in Lusaka he received a telegram from Gluckman: “Suggest you change to Ndembu tribe Northwestern Province much malaria yellow fever plenty of ritual” (E. Turner 1985:2). In 1950 the Turners moved to the Mukanza village in the Mwinilunga district of Northern Rhodesia (now Zambia). Here Victor Turner started his fieldwork among the Ndembu.
Why did Turner give up his predisposition to ritual?
Two factors seem to explain why Turner by this time had given up his “prejudice against ritual.” First, his interest in the human capacity to engage in creative and ritual activity must have already manifested itself in the early years of his life. From his mother, Turner inherited a profound interest in the theatrical and creative side of man (which also provided the name for his conceptual tool of social “drama”). Turner’s fascination with human creativity is also clear from his lifelong interest not only in ritual, but also in art, literature, and poetry (which he in fact wrote occasionally). Such interests led him even in the midst of his studies at the Rhodes-Livingstone Institute to write essays on Lunda rituals (Turner 1953) and on the revival of the study of African ritual in the 1950s (Turner 1955). Second, equally important as Turner’s spontaneous attraction to ritual, was the fact that he was assigned to study the Ndembu. From the many reports of Turner’s research among the Ndembu, the picture clearly emerges of a people in whose lives ritual occupies a prominent place. Edith Turner (1985:2-3) reports that the beating of the ritual drums could be heard so often, and the performances of some kind of ritual were so manifold during Turner’s fieldwork, that surely ritual had to be more than just “social glue” to sustain the Ndembu social order. As a result, during his second period of fieldwork (1953-54) Turner started to focus on ritual with a vigour which would eventually make him one of the most prominent ritual specialists in anthropology, and which on a personal level must have been an important contributing factor, if not a direct cause, for his conversion to Catholicism.
What tribe did Turner belong to?
Turner accepted and was assigned to the Mambwe tribe. However, he never reached the Mambwe homeland; during his stay at the Institute in Lusaka he received a telegram from Gluckman: “Suggest you change to Ndembu tribe Northwestern Province much malaria yellow fever plenty of ritual” (E. Turner 1985:2).
Where did the Turners live after the war?
After the war the Turners and their two sons lived in a gypsy caravan near Rugby Town , England, a proper home being unobtainable due to German bombing. In the public library there, Turner came across Coming of Age in Samoa by Margaret Mead and The Andaman Islanders by A. R. Radcliffe-Brown.
Who developed the processual view of ritual?
In his discussions of the ritual complex among the Ndembu, Turner presented the processual view of ritual with a distinction between life-crisis rituals and rituals of affliction. He had already drawn this distinction in Schism and Continuity (Turner 1957a:292), but it was not until the introduction to The Forest of Symbols that he elaborated the model (Turner 1967:7-15).
Was Turner interested in the Ndembu?
The members of the Rhodes-Livingstone Institute paid’ little attention to the ritual activities of the African tribes they were studying, and at first Turner, who was a research officer at the Institute, was no exception.
