Victor Turner's  and Arnold Van Gennep's Contributions to the Theory of Ritual
 

Many of the readings and films in this course have suggested that marginal or transitional states or persons are likely to be associated with supernatural forces, whether favourable or malevolent. Witches themselves are believed to exhibit behaviours which are marginal, ambiguous, or the inverse or normality - flying by night instead of walking by day; eating humans in the company of animal familiars rather than animals in the company of human companions; incestuous or other deviant sexual practices. The links between the marginal and the supernatural have been variously explained by the power and danger of cognitive and structural ambiguity , by the emotional states associated with marginal or ambiguous positions in society, or by the need to neutralize potential sources of social tension (almost everyone). Turner's concept of liminality provides us with a framework in which all of these dimensions of magico-ritual-religious systems may be analyzed in terms of a unified theory. Turner imagines a "ritual man" who serves the same purpose for the analysis of religious phenomena that the "economic man" did for classical economics: provides us with a generalized motive for ritual systems. Turner suggested that humans possess an inherent need and capacity for various forms of liminal experience (heightened emotion, doing things backwards, permitted excesses, challenges to authority) and that such experience will be brought into play during social dramas which punctuate social life as a process which unfolds over time. The term liminality is derived from the Latin limen, or threshold, used by Arnold Van Gennep as a metaphor for the social borders crossed through rites of passage. Van Gennep's huge contribution to the study of ritual, made early in the century in a monograph entitled Les Rites de Passage, was to note that whether they were wedding, funerals, initiations, or any other celebration of a change of state, life crisis rituals had a similar structure throughout the world.  This structure involved a phase of separation, when an individual is removed from a previous state, a period of transition, the liminal phase, when the individual is neither one thing nor the other, and a phase of incorporation, when the individual is welcomed back into the community, in a new state. The person , thing or group in a liminal state may be perceived as dangerous, taboo, sacred, or possesed of special powers -- or a combination of those things. Normal rules may be suspended, people may wear special clothes, like graduation gowns or formal wedding costume. Rites of separation may involve literal cutting (circumcision, cutting a rope, etc.) or may involve walking from a place where one was in the old state to the place where one's status will be transformed, and  perhaps being physically parted from the people one one linked to in the old state -- like a bride walking down the aisle on her father's arm.  Incorporation phases of ritual may involve tying knots, joining things together, etc.  Putting a ring on a bride's finger and the first kiss are good examples.

For Van Gennep rites of passage were chiefly ways of providing an orderly way to achieve changes in social status, without challenging the underlying symbolic structure of the community.  Turner did not reject this, but also suggested that humans may have an inherent need for the experience of "liminality" of being in a kind of "time out of time."  Moreover, Turner noted that society incorporates two contradictory demands: a demand that people join together and a demand that people remain somewhat separated in particular social categories (men, women, kings, subjects, etc.).  In the liminal phase of ritual, Turner argued, where social distinctions are sometimes ignored or even reversed, people could experience bonding and even make negative comments on social structure.  One of his famous examples involves female initiation among the Ndembu of Zambia, in which the girl being initiated lies motionless under a blanket, while men and women line up on either side of her and shout insults at each other, and praise the pleasures of adultery and vilify the demands of marriage.

Turner links life crisis rituals (e.g. birth, marriage initiation and death rituals) to other, less predictable social dramas, such as witch crazes. Social dramas encapsulate crises which erupt because of underlying conflicts in social premises - specific conflicts such as those between duty to one's husband and matrilineal obligation and the general conflict between community and the divisive effects of social structure. Important symbols in ritual, magic, witchcraft beliefs, etc. draw upon the human capacity for liminality, and encompass social, emotional, environmental and cognitive elements. Turner's famous analysis of the symbolism of the colours red, white and black in Ndembu ritual , and cross-culturally is an example of his mode of analysis. In this analysis, red, white and black stand for body substances (milk, semen, feces, blood) and for moral qualities (purity, death, witchcraft, ambiguity, depending on the colour) as well as for social categories (white standing for motherhood, ideal matrilineal descent, red for conflict in adult male life, etc.).  Red is an especially ambiguous symbol because both male and female blood come in good and bad forms -- blood of hunting and murder for men, blood of menstruation and childbirth for women. The witch, in Turner's terms, would be a liminal creature and the process of suspicion, detection, accusation and cure a social drama, or liminal event, analogous to other types of rituals.That is why I have placed a chart of the European witch hunts as a social drama in the European Witch Craze module.  The key features of liminality--heightened emotion, suspension of the rules of normal life, centralization of the marginal-- are present in a witch hunt, a life crisis ritual, or a really wild party. Not all of these occasions have the same results, of course - sometimes social dramas result in irreparable schism, sometimes in renewal or major social change, sometimes adjustment or perpetuation of the status quo. This course provides you with examples of all of these results.