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.

"liminality" and "communitas". Victor Witter Turner (A short description about an athropologist and Religionswissenscaftler) Part 5.

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)

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.