The most important contribution Turner made to the field of anthropology is his work on liminality and communitas. The term ‘liminality’ is not found in any of the available dictionaries to me. I need to further my search some time later. But it is found that the word ‘liminality’ is derived from the Latin “limen,” which means “threshold”—that is, the bottom part of a doorway that must be crossed when entering a building. Victor Turner owes to Arnold van Genepp’s rites de passage for the notion and word ‘liminality’.
Turner noted that in "liminality," the transitional state between two phases, individuals were "betwixt and between"—they did not belong to the society that they previously were a part of, and they were not yet re-incorporated into that society. Turner first formulated his theory of liminality in the late 1960s, and it continued to be a central theme in his work until his death in 1983. Liminality is an ambiguous period characterized by humility, seclusion, tests, sexual ambiguity, and "communitas". It is the condition of being midpoint between status sequences, a no longer not yet status. Liminal individuals have nothing, in Turner’s words, “no status, insignia, secular clothing, rank, and kinship position, nothing to demarcate them structurally from their fellows”.
The "communitas" is an unstructured community where all members are equal. Turner introduces this idea as the state of hippies in Western society, and then compares occurrences of communitas in other tribal communities. Communitas is characterized by spontaneity, rather than goals and decisions. Communitas exists between periods of structure, and is revealed in liminality.
Turner conceived of communitas as an intense community spirit, the feeling of great social equality, solidarity, and togetherness. It is characteristic of people experiencing liminality together. Communitas is an acute point of community. It takes community to the next level and allows the whole of the community to share a common experience, usually through a rite of passage. This brings everyone onto an equal level—even if people are higher in positions, they were lower at one point and know what that means.
Turner distinguished three types of communitas in society: (1) existential or spontaneous communitas, which is free from all structural demands and is fully spontaneous and immediate; (2) normative communitas, which is organized into a social system; and (3) ideological communitas, which refers to utopian models of societies based on existential communitas and is also situated within the structural realm. The types of communitas are phases, not permanent conditions. If we take for example the "hippie" movement in the late 60s, following the communitas scheme, its development can be outlined as having started with the spontaneous communitas which occurs in "happenings" such as rock concerts, experiments with drug-use. With these happenings a union of followers was normatively organized, with their own places and times where communitas could be experienced on the margins of the society at large. Eventually complete ideologies were developed to promote, ideally for all members of the society, the type of ‘communitas’ the hippies experienced. In the end, however (as was the case with the hippie movement), the fate of any type of communitas is inevitably a "decline and fall into structure and law", after which a new form of communitas may rise again. (Based on the books of Victor turner, The Ritual process and Dramas, fields and metaphors: Symbolic action in human society)
No comments:
Post a Comment