The process of ritual. Victor Witter Turner (A short description about an athropologist and Religionswissenscaftler) Part 7.

"Betwixt and Between: The Liminal Period in ‘Rites de Passage’," is his first essay discussing the processual form of ritual. He developed further his processual view on ritual. Very early in 1955, he already suggested that the temporal structure of rituals of rebellion, as described by Gluckman (1954), might shed light on the capacity of rituals to transfer a rebellious affect to the official social order. In Arnold von Gennep’s ‘Rites de Passage’, he found a basis to further develop the ritual analysis. Ritual itself is processual in form.

Arnold von Gennep argued that all rites of passage share similar features, including:

1.    Period of segregation from previous way of life (preliminary phase);

2.    State of transition from one status to another (liminal phase); and

3.    Process of introduction to the new social status and the new way of life (postliminal phase).

Van Gennep regarded rites of passage as essentially necessary for the normal and healthy life of society. He believed that rites of passage preserve social stability by releasing the pressure built up in individuals through giving them new social status and new roles.

On the background of his field study among Ndembu of Zambia, Turner presented the processual view of ritual with a distinction between life-crisis rituals and rituals of affliction. Life-crisis rituals refer to that class of rituals which mark the transition of one phase in the development of a person to another phase. Such phases are important points in the physical or social development of the ritual subject, such as birth, puberty, or death. Rituals of affliction, on the other hand, are performed for individuals who are considered to have been affected or bound by the spirits of deceased relatives whom they have forgotten or neglected.

Then he proceeded further in explaining the notion of field. To this distinction he owes to Kurt Lewin’s field theory. Turner in ‘The forest of symbols: Aspects of Ndembu ritual Ithaca’, distinguished the social from the cultural field in which rituals take place. The social field (or action-field) refers to the groups, relationships, and social-structural organizational principles of the society in which the rituals are performed.  In Ndembu society, the social field is dominated by the contradiction between matrilineal descent and virilocality. In the cultural field, ritual symbols are regarded as clusters of abstract meanings. Turner distinguished four components in Ndembu religion.

1.    A belief in the existence of a high god (Nzambi) who has created the world but does not interfere with worldly human activities

2.    A belief in the existence of ancestor spirits or "shades" who may afflict the Ndembu

3.    A belief in the intrinsic efficacy of certain animal and vegetable substances

      4. A belief in the destructive power of female witches and male sorcerers.