Victor Turner

Victor Witter Turner (born May 28, 1920 in Glasgow , † December 18, 1983 in Charlottesville , Virginia ) was an ethnologist and a representative of symbolic anthropology . He was of Scottish descent. His ethnological activity can be attributed to the direction of the Manchester School of Anthropology . His main research work was in southern Africa. He also examined pilgrimages in Mexico, Brazil and Ireland. Best known is his research into the rituals and symbolism of the Ndembu in what is now Zambia .

Life

Turner's father was an electrical engineer, his mother Violet Winter an actress and founding member of the Scottish National Theater. After his parents separated at the age of eleven, he grew up with his maternal grandmother in Bournemouth . He studied English literature at University College London before being drafted into the British Army in 1941. Because he refused to use the weapon, he was assigned to a bomb detection unit. In 1943 he married Edith Lucy Brocklesby Davis and had five children in the following years.

After the end of the war he studied anthropology at the new Department of Anthropology at University College London and graduated in 1949 with a BA (with honors). Max Gluckman persuaded him to continue his studies in Manchester in the new Department of Ethnology. The prevailing Marxist humanism there convinced Turner that he joined the Communist Party. In 1951 he traveled to Zambia to do field research in the position of research officer at the Rhodes Livingstone Institute .

The Turners spent a total of two and a half years with the Ndembu in the northwestern province. In 1955, a year after his return, Turner earned his Ph. D. in Social Anthropology with his schism and Continuity in an African Society (published 1957) . In the meantime he had turned away from Marxism and in 1957 he converted to Catholicism. Turner taught at the University of Manchester until 1963 and in 1963 took up a professorship at Cornell University in America. Here he dealt extensively with the rituals and symbols of the Ndembu, whereby he established his fame in comparative symbol theory and procedural ritual analysis. Between 1968 and 1977 Turner taught at the University of Chicago . Together with his wife, he traveled to Mexico, Ireland and France between 1969 and 1972, and later India, Japan and Brazil to research pilgrimage. In 1977 he moved to the University of Virginia , where he taught as a professor of anthropology and religion until his death from a heart attack .

Representative of symbolic anthropology

Turner represents the more ideal strand within the UK Manchester School of Anthropology . Like all members of the Manchester School, he dealt primarily with change processes, with local opposites, including supra-regional, global contexts. The carefree crossing of subject boundaries was typical of his way of working.

Together with Max Gluckman he worked in southern Africa, but mainly turned to the symbolic areas. He examined processes of tension and change in the religious field. Southern Africa during the British colonial era at that time was characterized by constant processes of change, which were particularly evident in the Copperbelt . He saw tens of thousands of former tribal farmers become commuters and miners in the mining area. He asked about symbols and rituals that arise in the processes of change from tribal groups to miners, urbanization, and detribalization.

Theories

Turner found that especially in uncertain times of change and change, symbols and rituals are used to create security in the face of uncertainty. A few decades after Arnold van Gennep , Turner followed up on his great ritual theories. According to Turner, a ritual develops among participants who go through the liminality together (the intermediate phase in the passage ritus according to van Gennep), a community that can create a common, new identity with the help of the symbols and the dance and musical process. This identity can be consolidated and emphasized in that the ritual stands out as an event from everyday life and creates an opposite world to everyday life.

He describes this special community as communitas and particularly indicates that there are no clear social structures within a communitas, but rather "all are equal " at least for the duration of the ritual . Turner shows this in particular with a ritual for the appointment of a chief, in which the otherwise common hierarchical rules are abolished. Here actors who are within the liminality and thus outside of society have the power to do or say things that would not be allowed within society.

Another observation is that people who have gone through a liminality together often remain connected to one another. If the change in liminality is particularly deep, this bond can last a lifetime.

Turner follows Arnold van Gennep in his model of the rites of passage . Rites of passage regulate the status or position change of individuals within societies and thus ensure the continued existence of the community. These rites take place in three phases, which are illustrated here using the example of an initiation ritual:

• Separation phase: The initiate leaves his previous status.
• Threshold phase or liminality: The initiate has no social characteristics and is prepared for the duties and tasks of the coming status.
• Reintegration: In the course of a ritual, the initiate attains his new status.

Turner coined the term " social drama ". The social drama has four stages:

• Break with the social norm
• Crisis and conflict
• Attempt to resolve the conflict through a ritual
• Reintegration or division

Awards

• In 1965 he received the Rivers Memorial Medal from the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland in recognition of his outstanding field research .
• In 1973 he was elected a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences .

Aftermath

Turner's work is of considerable influence on modern ethnology and religious studies . Turner also acted as a stimulus for literary studies , linguistics , semiotics , performance , theater theory , theology , subculture research , migration research , cultural sociology and folklore . His field research, especially its dialogical principle, is considered exemplary. The criticism, brought forward by Clifford Geertz and Justin Stagl , among others , was sparked by his extensive, ahistorical analogy, his propensity for idealization and his commitment to Catholicism, which ideologically deforms ethnological and scientific analysis.

Publications (selection)

Turner has published twenty books and over seventy articles as an author and editor.

• 1957: Schism and Continuity in an African Society: A Study of Ndembu Village Life .
• 1964: Betwixt and Between: The Liminal Period in Rites de Passage . In: Symposium on New Approaches to the Study of Religion , ed. v. Melford E. Spiro; Seattle, American Ethnological Society.
• 1967: The Forest of Symbols. Aspects of Ndembu ritual . Cornell University Press, Ithaca and London.
• 1968: The Drums of Affliction: A study of Religious Processes among the Ndembu .
• 1969: The Ritual Process: Structure and Antistructure . PAJ Publications, New York.
• 1974: Dramas, Fields, and Metaphors . Symbolic Action in Human Society. Cornell University Press, Ithaca and London.
• 1977: Process, System, and Symbol: A New Anthropological Synthesis. In: Daedalus. 1977, pp. 61-80.
• 1982: From Ritual to Theater. The Human Seriousness of Play . PAJ Publications, New York.
• 1986: The Anthropology of Performance . PAJ Publications, New York.

German:

• From ritual to theater. The seriousness of the human game . Fischer-Taschenbuch-Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 1995, ISBN 3-596-12779-3 .
• The ritual: structure and anti-structure . Campus-Verlag, Frankfurt / Main 2005, ISBN 3-593-37762-4 .

Secondary literature

• Hendrik Hillermann: Victor Witter Turner: A biography. Kohlhammer, Stuttgart 2017, ISBN 978-3-17-033353-6 .
• Christian Claucig: Liminality and Adolescence. Victor Turner, Mukanda and Psychoanalysis or: The Anthropologist's Fallacy . Turia + Kant, Vienna / Berlin 2016, ISBN 978-3-85132-785-4 .
• Peter Bräunlein : Victor Turner . In: Axel Michaels (Hrsg.): Classics of religious studies . Beck, Munich 1997, ISBN 3-406-42813-4 , pp. 324-341.
• Peter Bräunlein: Victor Turner. Ritual processes and cultural transformations . In: Stephan Moebius , Dirk Quadflieg (Ed.): Culture. Present theories . VS - Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften, Wiesbaden 2006, ISBN 3-531-14519-3 , pp. 91-100.
• Kathleen M. Ashley (Ed.): Victor Turner and the Construction of Cultural Criticism . Indiana University Press, Bloomington et al. a. 1990, ISBN 0-253-20594-8 .

Web links

• Literature by and about Victor Turner in the catalog of the German National Library