Victor Turner, The Ritual Process
Turner was engaged in an empirical investigation of aspects of religion; in particular, he wanted to elicit some of the properties of African ritual.

Part I: Ritual and Community
Ndembu Isoma ritual as example

  1. Beliefs are the articulation of diverse cultural experiences
  2. "Rituals reveal [group] values at deepest level...The keys to an understanding of the essential constitution of human societies." (6)
  3. Social conflict corresponds with high frequency of ritual performance
  4. "Ritual" (chidika) = "obligation;" these are done when someone has failed to meet his or her societal obligation (known by misfortune appropriate to sex or social role)
  5. 3 part structure of Isoma ritual:
    1. Ilembi - candidate taken out of profane world
    2. Kunkinka - "grass hut" partially secluded
    3. Kutumbuka - festive dance collaborating removal of shades' interdiction and return to normal life
  6. ritual elements blaze a trail to find ways through unknown territory and to mark off cosmos vs. chaos
  7. Aims of Isoma ritual:
    1. Implicit: restoration of right relation between matriliny & marriage; Reconstruction of conjugal relations between husband & wife; Making the woman and hence the marriage and lineage fruitful
    2. Explicit: to remove effects of a misfortune or illness; to effect a reconciliation between the visible and invisible parties
  8. Preparation of sacred site via "rites of separation" (penitential rites). re: psychological benefit (p. 43)
  9. Ritual symbols and their relations (e.g., in Isoma) "are not only a set of cognitive classifications for ordering the Ndembu universe. They are also, and perhaps as importantly, a set of evocative devices for rousing, channeling, and domesticating powerful emotions, such as hate, fear, affection and grief. They are also informed with purposiveness and have a 'conative' aspect. In brief, the whole person, not just the Ndembu 'mind' is existentially involved in the life or death issues with which Isoma is conceived." (pp. 42-43)
  10. "Every symbolic item is related to some empirical item of experience. . . . Given the limited knowledge of natural causation transmitted in Ndembu culture, who can doubt that under favorable circumstances the use of these medicines may produce considerable psychological benefit? The symbolic expression of group concern for an unfortunate individual's welfare, coupled with the mobilization of a battery of "good" things for her benefit, and the conjunction of the individual's fate with symbols of cosmic processes of life and death - do these really add up for us to something merely 'unintelligible'?" (43)

Part II: Ritual and Reversal
Wubwang'u ritual as example

  1. "Indeed, one often finds in human cultures that structural contradictions, asymmetries, and anomalies are overlaid by layers of myth, ritual, and symbol, which stress the axiomatic value of key structural principles with regard to the very situations where these appear to be most inoperative." (47)
  2. Ritual stresses unity of group "surrounding its contradictions" -- e.g., twinship: one & many; pair of similar or pair of opposites - mystery of unity of sexes; 2 rituals: the rites of the river source; the making of the twin shrine; fruitful contest of the sexes - division & opposition of the sexes
  3. The ritual process: "structure" v. "communitas" resolved in "societas" (92)

(93) "The raw energies released in overt symbolisms of sexuality and hostility between the sexes are channeled toward master symbols representative of structural order, and values and virtues on which that order depends. Every opposition is overcome or transcended in a recovered unity, a unity that, moreover, is reinforced by the very potencies that endanger it."

(94) "state" = "any type of stable or recurrent condition that is culturally recognized."

Transition - 3 phases: Separation (detachment from state); Margin (limen) - ambiguous character; Aggregation/- new state

(95) attributes of liminality and liminal persons are ambiguous, indeterminate; between positions - comparable to death, in the womb, etc.

Neophytes: Possess nothing, even go naked, implicit obedience; Comradeship with other neophytes & intense egalitarianism, therefore Homogeneity = communitas; essential & generic human bond

(96) Lowliness & sacredness

liminality: moment in and out of time & secular social structure

dialectic of development of individuals and groups:

Transition is time of statuslessness, limbo

Link between weakness & passivity of luminality and "structural" or synchronic inferiority of certain persons, groups and social categorie

(100) "The 'liminal" and the 'inferior' conditions are often associated with ritual powers and with the total community seen as undifferentiated."

Underling becomes uppermost. Supreme political authority becomes a slave (cf. Phil 2)

(102-3)liminality: sexlessness, Sexual continence, Submissiveness toordeals and humiliations; destroy former status; temper for new privileges, so they are properly used; Silence, Anonymity, tabula rasa; ontological value of wisdom, refashions the neophyte; society impresses form (e.g., priestly ordination)

(105) pedagogics of liminality: condemn 2 kinds of separation from the generic bond of communitas

  1. act in terms of rights of office only
  2. act on one's psychological urges at others' expense

powers which shape neophytes are super-human

(106f) Xy - transition as permanent condition (pilgrim state)

(109) "...from the perspectival viewpoint of those concerned with the maintenance of 'structure,' all sustained manifestations of communitas must appear as dangerous and anarchical, and have to be hedged around with prescriptions, prohibitions, and conditions."

Millenarian movement - manifestations of communitas occur during times when major groups in stable societies are passing from one cultural state to another (eg "hippies")

116f Shaman - "assumes a statusless status, external to the social structure, which gives [her] him the right to criticize all structure-bound personae in terms of a moral order binding on all, and also to mediate between all segments or components of the structured system."

(118) soil from the village links Bokologo shrine to matrilateral line (cf. II Kgs 5 re: Naaman; fraction rite in Eucharist)

(125) secular weakness - sacred power

(126) social structure: arrangement of positions or statuses involve institutionalization and perdurance of groups and relationships

"Communitas emerges where social structure is not.:" Spontaneous vs norm-governed, Immediate v. Institutionalized, concrete v. Abstract

(129) "the immediacy of communitas gives way to the mediacy of structure" - dual reversal in rites of passage

society - system of social positions- segmentary and/or hierarchical structure

(131) "the units of social structure are relationships between statuses, roles, and offices."

"Beyond the structural lies...communitas...a relationship between concrete, historical, idiosyncratic individuals." (I-Thou Confrontation)

(132) 3 stages of communitas developing into structure:

  1. existential or spontaneous communitas
  2. normative comm (#1 organized into a perduring social system)
  3. ideological communitas (utopian models based on #1,#2 & #3 routinized charisma of leaders and routinized communitas of first disciples

(132) "an attempt to describe the external and visible effects--the outward form, it might be said--of an inward experience of existential communitas, and to spell out the optimal social conditions under which such experiences might be expected to flourish and multiply."

(138f) existence - ecstasy - spontaneous communitas; end or means to fuller involvement in structure? mystery of intimacy and mystery of mutual distance

(145) liminal state provides optimal conditions for realization of communitas (cf. college)

(154) crisis in contemporary social experience--eschatological aspect (e.g., millenarianist) of existential communitas

(154) crisis before or after,--moving into order of structure, communitas as transitional stage "rather than an established mode of being or an ideal soon to be permanently realized."

Communitas of crisis, withdrawal, retreat; marriage represents structure

(163) "The Sahajys seem to be intent upon utilizing various cultural and biological means to attain a structureless state of pure social communitas."

(161) Sex outside of marriage idealized because woman is not svaky or svy ("She who is one's own") but paraky ("she who is another's")

(163f) marriage and family symbolically dissolved by paraky love, therefore, break-down of caste structure (cf. Franciscan denial of property)

(167) liminality - simplification or elimination of social structure but increase in logical categories and forms of their relations (i.e., myth & ritual) = structure in sense of Levi-Strauss

phase & state, then re-enters structure & acquires full complement of structural roles and positions (e.g., church vs. seclusion lodge)

2 types: liminality characterizing rituals of status elevation; liminality characterizing rituals of status reversal

  1. strong getting stronger with temporary humbling (e.g., driver's test; fraternity initiation)
  2. permanently weak with fantasy of structural superiority (e.g., pre-graduation "roast" of faculty and administration by graduating students; mardi gras or carnivals with faculty members in dunk tank; Sadie Hawkins dances; Halloween; course evaluations; student dinners where faculty wait on them)

(170) re: ordeals of (e.g.) circumcision rites: "The implication is that for an individual to go higher on the status ladder, he must go lower than the status ladder." (cf. JSN begging for 40 days before 1st vows) Teach personal experience of pain/suffering/abuse of power so person can rightly use it without inflicting such pain on others.

(176) Structures of society taken into account in different ways: "Through successive life crises and rites of status elevation, individuals ascend structurally. But rituals of status reversal make visible in their symbolic and behavioral patterns social categories and forms of grouping that are considered to be axiomatic and unchanging both in essence and in relationship to one another." Therefore paradox underlines regularity; reversal reaffirms the hierarchical principle that these are usually calendar rituals emphasizes structural regularity via temporal order

(177) or in crisis when "concrete historical irregularities alter the natural balance between what are conceived to be permanent structural categories."

Rituals of status reversal: "Not only do they reaffirm the order of structure; they also restore relations between the actual historical individuals who occupy positions in that structure."

(178) i.e. restore communitas and structure to right mutual relations -- e.g., between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur (Day of Atonement), asking forgiveness of every person you know

(190) "religions that stress hierarchy, whether direct or inverted, as a general attribute of religious life, are generated from the midst of the structurally inferior in a socio-political system that rests as much upon force as on consensus."

"Society (societas) seems to be a process rather than a thing--a dialectical process with successive phases of structure and communitas. There would seem to be...a human 'need' to participate in both modalities. Persons starved of one in their functional day-to-day activities seek it in ritual liminality. The structurally inferior aspire to symbolic structural superiority in ritual; the structurally superior aspire to symbolic communitas and undergo penance to achieve it."