Ritual and Symbols. Victor Witter Turner (A short description about an athropologist and Religionswissenscaftler) Part 6.

Victor Turner altered the way ritual is viewed, by emphasizing its role as an agent of social change rather than an agent for conserving the status quo. Turner spent his career exploring rituals. He focused on how to understand the transmission of cultural symbols from generation to generation, and the changes in rituals that reflected social change. He argued that rituals are constructed of symbols. “Rituals are storehouses of meaningful symbols by which information is revealed and regarded as authoritative, as dealing with the crucial values of the community”. (Victor Turner in ‘the ritual process: Structure and anti-structure’) In his own words “ a symbol is the smallest unit of ritual which still retains the specific properties of ritual behavior; it is a "storage unit" filled with a vast amount of information”.

There are three levels of meaning of symbols. He explains this in his book ‘The forest of symbols: Aspects of Ndembu ritual Ithaca’. The exegetical meaning is obtained by "questioning indigenous informants about observed ritual behavior". Exegesis can also be derived through the analysis of myths, through the fragmentary interpretations of separate rituals or ritual stages, and through written or verbally uttered doctrines and dogmas. The operational meaning comes from observing what is done with the symbol, the structure and composition of the group that handles the symbol and the affective qualities of the handling of the symbol. The operational meaning also enquires that why some people are absent at the performance of ritual.. The positional meaning of a symbol derives from its relationship to other symbols in a totality. It reveals the symbol’s hidden meanings.

Turner inferred the properties of symbols from three levels or fields of meaning: the exegetical, operational, and positional meanings of ritual symbols. The three major empirical properties of dominant symbols are (1) condensation, polysemy, or multivocality, when one single dominant symbol represents many different things and actions; (2) unification of disparate significata, where the significata (the underlying meanings of the symbol) are interconnected by virtue of their common analogous qualities, or by association in fact or thought; and (3) polarization of meaning or bipolarity, in which dominant symbols possess two distinct poles of meaning; at the ideological or normative pole.