Who was Victor Turner, and what are liminality and communitas?

Who was Victor Turner? #

An anthropologist of ritual, symbol and experience. He was born in Glasgow in 1920, studied poetry and classics at University College London, and returned there after the Second World War to study anthropology, taking his doctorate at Manchester in 1955. As a research officer of the Rhodes-Livingstone Institute he worked among the Ndembu of what was then Northern Rhodesia, now Zambia, from the early 1950s. The Ndembu lived by growing cassava with hoes, alongside hunting, which they held in great honour; they were farmers, not hunter-gatherers.¹

His wife, Edith Turner, worked alongside him throughout, and they converted to Roman Catholicism together in 1958. He later taught at Cornell, the University of Chicago and the University of Virginia, and wrote, among much else, Schism and Continuity in an African Society (1957), The Forest of Symbols (1967), The Ritual Process (1969), Image and Pilgrimage in Christian Culture (1978, with Edith Turner) and From Ritual to Theatre (1982). He died in Charlottesville, Virginia, in December 1983.

What is liminality? #

The in-between stage of any passage from one state of life to another. The folklorist Arnold van Gennep had shown that rites of passage move through separation, a margin or threshold, and incorporation. In his essay “Betwixt and Between: The Liminal Period in Rites de Passage”, Turner turned the spotlight on the middle stage. The person passing through it is like “a pupa changing from grub to moth”. They are “neither one thing nor another; or may be both; or neither here nor there”, and at the very least “betwixt and between” all the fixed points by which a society arranges people.²

In that stage the initiates “have nothing. They have no status, property, insignia, secular clothing, rank, kinship position”, nothing to set them apart from one another, a condition Turner called “the very prototype of sacred poverty”. They are often treated as dead, or as unborn, hidden away, painted, or made to live apart, because they are being “ground down to be fashioned anew” for their new place in life. Turner drew here on the anthropologist Mary Douglas’s point that whatever is unclear in a culture’s categories is felt as unclean and dangerous.³

Yet the liminal is not only a dangerous gap. Turner saw it as “a realm of pure possibility whence novel configurations of ideas and relations may arise.”⁴ See Who was Arnold van Gennep, and what are the three stages of a rite of passage? and Who was Mary Douglas, and what did Purity and Danger show?

What is communitas? #

The bond that grows between people who have been stripped of rank together. Already in the liminality essay Turner noticed that, whatever the authority of the elders over them, the initiates usually stand in “complete equality” with one another, and that their group is “a community or comity of comrades and not a structure of hierarchically arrayed positions.”⁵ In The Ritual Process (1969) he named this ‘communitas’, choosing the Latin word to set it apart from an ordinary ‘community’.

He described two ways in which human beings relate to one another. One is society as “a structured, differentiated, and often hierarchical system” of positions. The other is society as “an unstructured or rudimentarily structured and relatively undifferentiated comitatus, community, or even communion of equal individuals”.⁶ He called the second ‘anti-structure’, and thought every society needs both. Communitas breaks out in the gaps between structured roles, and structure takes over again afterwards.

He distinguished three kinds. Spontaneous or existential communitas is the passing, personal experience of togetherness. Normative communitas is what happens when a group tries to keep that experience going and organises itself to do so. Ideological communitas is the vision of it built into plans for a perfect society. Later, in an essay of 1974, he coined ‘liminoid’ for the in-between experiences of modern societies, in art, play, theatre and leisure, which people choose, unlike the obligatory rites of tribal life.

Did the Turners take the spirits seriously? #

Increasingly, yes. Victor Turner’s account of the Ndembu doctor Ihembi showed a healer who saw his task less as curing one patient than as healing a troubled community, bringing its buried grudges into the open so that the sick person could recover.⁷ After Victor’s death, Edith Turner went back to Zambia, and in 1985, at a healing ritual, she saw what she described as “a large, gray blob of something like plasma emerge from the sick woman’s back.” Her conclusion was that the Ndembu were right. “There is spirit stuff.” She wrote that anthropologists had been working within “the wrong paradigm, that of the positivists’ denial.”⁸

Edith Turner went on to write Communitas: The Anthropology of Collective Joy (2012), tracing communitas through festivals, music, sport, work, disaster and revolution. See Can modern humans recover an animist way of seeing and undo domestication?

How does Therapeutic Shamanism use these ideas? #

Through the betwixt-and-between places, the cracks between separations where things connect and transformation becomes possible. A rite of passage is one. In its middle, liminal stage “everything is full of potential, flux and interconnectedness. You are essentially taken apart and reformed, like a pupa in a chrysalis.” Turner reached for the same image of the grub becoming a moth. The axis mundi, the place in nature where the physical world and the unseen worlds meet, is another, and so are the moments in a journey when the landscape changes, from sea to sky or from land to underground. These are liminal moments, “in-between spaces that are neither one thing nor another. And that is where the real magic happens.” See What are the betwixt-and-between places, and why do they matter? and What is a rite of passage, and what did we lose when initiation disappeared?

Communitas, too, has a counterpart. Turner found equality flaring up in the gaps of structured, ranked societies. Therapeutic Shamanism holds that for most of human history it was the ordinary state of things, and hunter-gatherers “did not just practise and embody genuine equality, they fiercely protected it, too.”⁹ What Turner saw as a passing moment of anti-structure may be a memory of how human beings lived for hundreds of thousands of years.

Where does Therapeutic Shamanism see things differently? #

Chiefly over whose rites are taken as the pattern. Turner’s great examples, the Ndembu boys’ circumcision rite and the women’s rites, come from a farming people, and much of his later work was on Christian pilgrimage and modern theatre. Therapeutic Shamanism draws a clear line between hunter-gatherer cultures and agricultural ones, so the Ndembu rites tell us a lot about initiation among farmers, and cannot stand as evidence for how our hunter-gatherer ancestors initiated their young. And where Turner set communitas against structure, as two poles every society swings between, Therapeutic Shamanism sees permanent hierarchy as something that arrived with the FallThe Fall. The catastrophe at the root of the whole diagnosis: the shift from animist, egalitarian hunter-gatherer life to owning, agricultural Taker culture. In domesticating other species we domesticated ourselves, cutting ourselves off from Mother Earth (Power-loss) and from parts of our own nature (soul-loss). When dated precisely, the Fall begins with the first city-state cultures, around 4000 BCE (Domestication begins earlier, with the Neolithic). A sickness, not our true nature. ‘Fallen culture’ is used interchangeably with Taker culture; the Great Rupture is a looser alternate name. Read the full answer, not as a necessary half of human life. See How does animism understand power and hierarchy?

What do critics say? #

His ideas have been questioned as well as widely used. The historian Caroline Walker Bynum, studying the lives of medieval holy women, argued that his model of liminality as a dramatic reversal fits men’s stories better than women’s, which more often show continuity than a sharp break. The anthropologists John Eade and Michael Sallnow, in Contesting the Sacred (1991), argued that pilgrimage shrines are places where many groups compete over meaning, not places where communitas dissolves their differences.¹⁰

On the other side, Turner had himself described spontaneous communitas as a passing moment that groups soon try to organise into rules, and Edith Turner’s later work went on finding communitas in ordinary life, well beyond rites and shrines.