The notion of ‘Social drama’. Victor Witter Turner (A short description about an athropologist and Religionswissenscaftler) Part 4.

Social drama is defined by Turner (1985: 196), as “an eruption from the level surface of ongoing social life, with its interactions, transactions, reciprocities, and its customs making for regular, orderly sequences of behavior.” Social drama, says Turner, is defined as aharmonic or disharmonic social process, arising in conflict situations. There exist conflicts in a society. People are divided among themselves and because of the imaginative power, or in the terms of Victor Turner, imaginative fire within the people give rise to social drama.  A society is defined by Turner as a set of interactive processes that are punctuated by situations of conflict, with intervals between them.

During his fieldwork among the Ndembu (December 1950 to February 1952, and May 1953 to June 1954), Turner discovered two very much existing principles in Ndembu society: matrilineal descent and virilocality. There was a high rate of divorce among Ndembu and it caused a high rate of residential mobility. Because of this there exist no strong affiliations between the villages and also because of a strong political unity, inter-village disputes frequently take place. As a result, Ndembu society is characterized by many conflicts both within (because of long lineages) and between the villages. Turner introduced the notion of social drama as a device to look beneath the surface of social regularities into the hidden contradictions and eruptions of conflict in the Ndembu social structure. He explains that in a processual form and thus Turner’s social drama theory has four phases of public action:

1.    Breach: A breach of regular norm-governed social relationships between persons or groups of a social unit.

2.    Crisis:  a crisis or extension of the breach, unless the conflict can be sealed off quickly.

3.    Redressive action: It ranges from personal advice and informal mediation or arbitration to formal juridical and legal machinery, and to resolve certain kinds of crisis or legitimate other modes of resolution, to the performance of public ritual.

4.  Reintegration: It is the reintegration of the disturbed social group or social recognition of an
      irreparable breach or schism.