Chapter 26

Ritual—
Victor Turner
 Victor Turner Defines Ritual
• As stated in the Part 4 introduction, Turner
regarded ritual as a drama in which the
participants are the actors:
As a result of their actions in the ritual,
they are transformed, and through their
experiences, they have the power to
change the society itself.
Turner’s Classification of Rituals
Rituals deal with:
• Seasonal or cyclic events – “hallowing a culturally defined moment
of change in the climatic cycle or the inauguration of an activity such
as planting, harvesting, or moving from winter to summer pasture.” A
Thanksgiving Day parade, for instance, celebrates the harvest at the
end of the northern growing season.
• Contingent events – “held in response to an individual or collective
crisis”
– Life-crisis ceremonies – “performed at birth, puberty, marriage, death,
and so on, to demarcate the passage from one phase to another in the
individual’s life cycle”
– Rituals of affliction – “performed to placate or exorcise preternatural
beings or forces believed to have afflicted villagers with illness, bad
luck, gynecological troubles, severe physical injuries, and the like”
• Initiations
 Different Perspectives
on Ritual
• Exegetic – The explanations of the meaning and
significance of a ritual are given by insiders, those who
participate in it.

• Operational – The anthropologist, who is outside the

society, records what is done in the ritual and how the
participants behave and feel.

• Positional – The anthropologist, who is outside the

society, relates the symbols found in a ritual to other
symbols found in the society and the culture.
 Rites of Passage
• Ceremonies that celebrate the movement of a
member of a society from one state or condition
to another, like graduations or weddings.
• All rites of transition are marked by three
phases:
– Separation – The individual or group is detached from
an earlier fixed state in the social structure.
– Margin (or limen) – During the liminal period, the state
of the ritual subject is ambiguous.
– Aggregation – The passage is consummated.
 Characteristics of Ritual
Subjects in the Liminal Period

• They are at once no longer classified and not yet

classified. The symbols that represent them may be
drawn from the biology of death and decomposition.
• They are very commonly secluded, partially or
completely, from the rest of society.
• Such neophytes are sometimes treated or symbolically
represented as being neither male nor female.
• They have nothing – no status, property, insignia,
secular clothing, rank, kinship position – nothing to
demarcate them structurally from their fellows.
 Communitas
• Between neophytes and their instructors, there
is often complete authority and complete
submission. Among neophytes, there is often
complete equality.
• This comradeship transcends distinctions of
rank, age, kinship position, and in some aspects
of the cultic group, even sex.
• All are supposed to be linked by special ties that
persist after the rites are over, even into old age.
 Play as a Characteristic of
Liminality
• The serious games that involve the play of ideas and the manufacture of
religiously important symbolic forms and designs are often, in traditional
societies, reserved for authentically liminal times and places.
• The forms created may include icons, figurines, masks, sandpaintings,
murals in sacred caves, statues, effigies, pottery emblems, and the like.
• Symbolic structures, elaborately contrived, are exhibited to neophytes at the
most sacred episodes and are then, despite the time and labor taken to
construct them, destroyed.
• Even in solemn rites of passage, it is considered licit to fool around with the
factors of cultural construction, liberating the signifiers from the signified,
filling the liminal scene with dragons, monsters, caricatures, fantasies made
up of elements of everyday experience, torn out of context and improbably
combined with other disrupted elements.
• Alternatively, the ordinary, the expectable, is distorted. Human heads, limbs,
genitalia are monstrously enlarged or unnaturally diminished, leaving the
rest of the body of normal size.
 Liminality and Modern Society

• There is a fundamental distinction

between societies before and after the
Industrial Revolution with respect to how
the rite of passage and liminality operate
in them.
 Traditional Societies
• In these societies, there is
– Total participation of the whole community in
all rituals. Sooner or later, no one is exempt
from ritual duty, just as no one is exempt from
economic, legal, or political duty.
– No distinction between work and play. The
“play” or “ludic” aspects of tribal and agrarian
ritual and myth are intrinsically connected with
the “work” of the collectivity.
 Postindustrial Societies
• The distinction between “work” and “play,” or better between “work” and
“leisure” (which includes, but exceeds play), is itself an artifact of the
Industrial Revolution.
• Technological development and other factors have had the cumulative
effect of bringing more leisure into the “free time” of industrial cultures. And
leisure implies choice.
• Thus not all participate in any of the rituals of postindustrial society, and as
a result, these societies do not have a liminal period in their rites of
passage.
• In these societies, such rites are characterized by a liminoid (“resembling
the liminal” or “liminal-like”) period. Other nonritual activities can also have a
ritual-like element, because belonging to the group is not as important in
such societies.
 Postindustrial Societies, 2
• In tribal societies, liminality is often functional in the
sense of being a special duty or performance required in
the course of work or activity. Its very reversals and
inversions tend to compensate for the rigidities or
unfairnesses of normative structure.
• In industrial society, the rite de passage form, built into
the calendar and/or modeled on organic processes of
maturation and decay, no longer suffices for the total
society.
• In the so-called high culture of complex societies, the
liminoid is not only removed from a rite de passage
context, but also is individualized.
 Liminal versus Liminoid: A
Comparison of Characteristics
• Kind of society – Liminal phenomena tend to
predominate in tribal and early agrarian societies.
• Frequency of occurrence – Liminoid phenomena are
more characteristically individual products. They are not
cyclical, but continuously generated, though, in the times
and places apart from work settings and assigned to
“leisure” activities.
• Integration into the social process – Liminal
phenomena are centrally integrated into the total social
process. Liminoid phenomena are plural, fragmentary,
and experimental in character.
 Liminal versus Liminoid: A
Comparison of Characteristics, 2
• Common meaning for a group – Liminal phenomena reflect the
history of the group, that is, its collective experience, over time.
Liminoid phenomena tend to be more idiosyncratic or quirky. Their
symbols are closer to the personal-psychological than to the
objective-social typological pole.
• Nature of criticism – Liminal phenomena tend to be eufunctional,
making the social structure work without too much friction. Liminoid
phenomena go further in being social critiques or even revolutionary
manifestoes.
• Cost – The liminoid is felt to be freer than the liminal, a matter of
choice, not obligation. The liminoid is more like a commodity –
indeed, often is a commodity, which one selects and pays for – than
the liminal, which elicits loyalty and is bound up with one’s
membership or desired membership in some highly corporate group.
 Liminal versus Liminoid: A
Comparison of Characteristics, 3
• In such a postindustrial society, the play associated with
marginality (in a ritual or in ritual-like activity) can be
more extreme because the participants are not all
members of the same groups in society, or their
membership in a group is temporary or shifting.
• Think of the play Marat/Sade, the movie Fight Club, or
the music of some rap or rock musicians.
• Even if all the aspects of society are mocked or satirized,
the playful activity will not lead to the dissolution of the
society, because everyone in the society does not
participate in it or is not committed to it.