Victor W. Turner

Scottish cultural anthropologist

• Born: May 28, 1920
• Birthplace: Glasgow, Scotland
• Died: December 18, 1983
• Place of death: Charlottesville, Virginia

Education: University College; Manchester University

Significance: Victor Witter Turner's groundbreaking work in cultural anthropology brought a novel and unique perspective to critical and scholarly understanding of symbolism, rituals, performance arts, and rites of passage. Applying his theories, studies, and observations to broader aspects of human society, Turner created new and compelling models of social structure with wide-ranging applicability to both the historic and modern worlds.

Background

Victor Witter Turner was born in Glasgow, Scotland, in 1920. His father, Norman Turner, was an electrical engineer, and his mother, Violet Turner (nee Witter) was a renowned actress and cofounder of the Scottish National Theatre. In 1938, Turner enrolled at University College, London, where he studied English literature on a scholarship. Completing his bachelor of arts degree in 1941, Turner was then drafted into the British military during World War II (1939–1945). After the war, Turner resumed his studies and earned a bachelor of arts degree in social anthropology in 1949. He then entered a PhD program in social anthropology at Manchester University, and he wrote his dissertation under the tutelage of renowned anthropologist Max Gluckman. An influential scholar, Gluckman was known for championing a neo-Marxist brand of comparative cultural anthropology known as dialectical processualism. While Turner's work eventually moved beyond the neo-Marxist viewpoints that dominated Manchester University's anthropology department, ideas associated with dialectical processualism were a clear influence on his developing perspectives. By the time Turner completed his PhD in 1955, he was a member of the British Communist Party and had fully embraced the ideals of Marxism.

However, in the late 1950s, Turner abruptly abandoned Marxism and Communism, possibly as a result of the Soviet Union's brutal suppression of the Hungarian Revolution of 1956. He then joined the Roman Catholic Church and remained a devout Catholic for the rest of his life.

Life's Work

Between 1957 and 1963, Turner was a Simon Research fellow and lecturer at Victoria University of Manchester. During this time, most of Turner's writing focused on the rituals of the Ndembu tribe of northern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe). Turner's doctoral dissertation had also taken the Ndembu people as its subject, at Gluckman's suggestion.

In 1963, Turner accepted an offer to become a professor of anthropology at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. It was after his move to the United States that Turner's work began to evolve beyond its exclusive focus on rituals and rites of passage as attributes of particular cultures. Instead, Turner moved toward applying his ideas to broader aspects of human society by drawing meaning from the commonalities found in various systems of symbolism and ritualistic performance.

In 1967, Turner left Cornell University to join the anthropology faculty at the University of Chicago, and it was in Chicago that he developed his best-known theory: the notion of communitas. This theory drew on an extended and complexified iteration of ritualistic liminality, an idea first expounded by the Dutch ethnographer and folklore expert Arnold van Gennep.

Expanding on van Gennep's work, Turner proposed the liminal phase as an ambiguous, intermediary period that bridges the beginning and the end of a ritual performance. For Turner, rituals exist as rites of passage that mark the transition of an individual from an initial state to a new state, and he believed that such transitions occur over three phases. The first phase is the subject's original state, called "separation" by van Gennep. The second phase is the liminal state, or "transition." The third and final phase is the subject's new state, "reincorporation." In the liminal state, which Turner called communitas, the subject exists in a hazy and indefinite place that is neither where he or she began, nor where he or she is bound to end up. Turner alternately referred to liminality as "betwixt and between" separation and reincorporation.

Turner then applied this abstract theory to human society in general, which gave it broad applicability beyond the scope of anthropology. Carrying the idea past the simple ritualistic transition of an individual and applying it on a macrosocial level, Turner formed a theory that effectively views human societies as existing in alternating, dialectic states of structure and communitas (or antistructure). In this context, structure corresponds to the initial state of separation seen during the first phase of a ritual as well as the new state of reincorporation arrived at in the final phase of a ritual, while communitas or antistructure corresponds to the liminal state between the two. Thus, Turner posited that human society is constantly moving between dialectical periods of structure, or differentiated hierarchy, and communitas/antistructure, or transition, upheaval, and change marked by the undifferentiated equality of individual members. Communitas, liminality, and antistructure mark the "betwixt and between" conversion of the old state of society to its new state.

By the end of his career, which concluded at the University of Virginia, Turner had earned a reputation as an engaging orator and freethinking, influential scholar. At the University of Virginia, Turner went on to apply his model of liminality to neurobiology, characterizing the functions of the left and right hemispheres of the brain as expressions of structure and communitas.

Impact

Turner helped guide anthropological theory to a new and fertile array of cross-disciplinary applications in a wide range of other academic subjects, including history, sociology, neurobiology, literature, and many other fields within the humanities. His work continues to be widely studied in Western universities, at both the undergraduate and graduate levels.

Personal Life

Turner married Edith Turner (nee Davis) in 1943. The couple met during World War II, and had five children together. Edith Turner was a valuable research partner to her husband, and she went on to forge her own reputation as an accomplished anthropologist.

Principal Works: Books

• The Forest of Symbols: Aspects of Ndembu Ritual, 1967
• The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure, 1969
• Dramas, Fields, and Metaphors: Symbolic Action in Human Society, 1974
• From Ritual to Theatre: The Human Seriousness of Play, 1982

Bibliography

Deflem, Mathieu. "Ritual, Anti-Structure, and Religion: A Discussion of Victor Turner's Processual Symbolic Analysis." Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, vol. 30, no. 1, 1991, pp. 1–25.

Norget, Kristin, et al. The Anthropology of Catholicism: A Reader. U of California P, 2017.

St. John, Graham. "Victor Turner." Oxford Bibliographies, 30 June 2014, www.oxfordbibliographies.com/view/document/obo-9780199766567/obo-9780199766567-0074.xml. Accessed 20 Feb. 2018.

Thomassen, Bjorn. Liminality and the Modern: Living through the In-Between. Routledge, 2016.

Turner, Victor. The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure. Routledge, 1996.