Summary
His works deals with a lot of notions and ideas. As I have already explained, here i may try to bring everything together. So the main notion is his ritual process. He had developed a unique ritual approach stressing the processual nature of ritual among the Ndembu and of ritual activity in complex societies. „I have used the term "anti-structure,"...to describe both liminality and what I have called "communitas." I meant by it not a structural reversal...but the liberation of human capacities of cognition, affect, volition, creativity, etc., from the normative constraints incumbent upon occupying a sequence of social statuses“(From Ritual to Theater). He is for the transformation of the society or the betterment of the society. Society (societas) seems to be a process rather than a thing--a dialectical process with successive phases of structure and communitas. There would seem to be--if one can use such a controversial term--a human "need" to participate in both modalities. Persons starved of one in their functional day-to-day activities seek it in ritual liminality. The structurally inferior aspire to symbolic structural superiority in ritual; the structurally superior aspire to symbolic communitas and undergo penance to achieve it (based on his book ‘The ritual process’) Turner believes that individuals deprived of either structure or communitas will seek to fill their needs through rituals that provide them with either structure, in the case of those that are structurally inferior, or communitas, in the case of those that are structurally superior.
Crits
Turner’s schema provides a social revolution through ritual, which draws both from his Marxist past and his Christian present. His structure anti-structure ritual process is dialectic in nature. Theoretically provocative discussions on Turner are very rare. Victor Turner is primarily an anthropologist. His concrete data regarding ritual comes from his fieldwork with the Ndembu. Turner's theoretical approach is reliant on the work of Arnold van Gennep, who developed the idea of liminality in his own work. Turner used ideas, like communitas and liminality to organize his thoughts and to assist in understanding the ritual behavior of the tribe he studied. Turner's work is also influenced by structuralists, such as Levi-Strauss, and by sociologists of religion, such as Emile Durkheim.
Turner has often been praised for the careful detail in his accounts of ritual among the Ndembu. Turner has been widely acclaimed for his views on the processual nature of ritual, and his identification of the liminal phase in ritual was an important innovation in the anthropological study of religion and ritual. Turner has been praised for the ethnographic richness of his ritual analyses and for his theoretical innovations, but he cannot be applauded as a great systematizer. Turner's failure to treat his ideas systematically is evident from the multitude of labels with which his work has been characterized: It has been called "situational analysis" (Collins 1976), "symbolic action theory" (Holmes 1977), "the semantics of symbolism" (Gilsenan 1967), "comparative symbology" (Grimes 1976; Turner 1974b), "anti-structural social anthropology" (Blast 1985), and "processual symbolic analysis" (Arbuckle 1986; Keyes 1976; Moore 1984; Saler 1979).
Turner's most valuable contributions remain his conceptual apparatus, his distinct analytical mode of ritual analysis, and his application thereof in his Ndembu research. This last accomplishment is a major strength of his work. He was not a theorist for theory’s sake. Literaturverzeichnis
}Axel, Michaels (Hrsg.,1997): Klassiker der Religionswissenschaft, München: Beck.
}Ashley, Kathleen M (ed.1990): Victor Turner and the construction of Cultural Criticism, Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press.
}Turner, Victor (1957): Schism and continuity in an African society ,Oxford: Berg.
}Turner, Victor (1969): The ritual process, Structure ans anti-structure, NY: Aldine publishing company.
}Turner, Victor (1974):Dramas, fields and metaphors, Ithaca and London: Cornell university press.
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