Articles with the keyword liminality
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Beyond Symbolic Representation: Victor Turner and variations on the themes of ritual process and liminality
Suomen Antropologi: Journal of the Finnish Anthropological Society Volume 33(4) 2008: 5-24
Abstract
Victor Turner’s celebrated work The Ritual Process published in 1969 provided a radically new perspective on the study of ritual. It was a major departure from the dominant theoretical schools of the time that had discussed ritual primarily in terms of representation, reproduction, or mystification. In Turner’s thinking ritual was re-conceived as a crucible for the emergence of original meaning, of new ways of structuring relations and for reorienting experience. Moreover, his concern reached well beyond the exploration of ritual as such and was ultimately aimed at the understanding of the possibilities and potentialities of human being. This article focuses on Turner’s major contribution to the study of ritual and attempts to extend in some ways the direction to which the path that he blazed was leading. Ideas concerning the dynamics and virtuality of ritual are developed in relation to Turner’s concepts of process and liminality.
Keywords dynamics, liminality, process, ritual, Victor Turner, virtuality
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Exploring the Work of Victor Turner: Liminality and its later implications
Suomen Antropologi: Journal of the Finnish Anthropological Society Volume 33(4) 2008: 26-44
Abstract
Victor Turner broke anthropology free from cultural determinism when it was anchored in the reductionist theories of Durkheim. Like Tolstoy penchant for the building of social structures in order to perpetuate itself. He saw in the cracks between structures, and in the liminal gaps necessary for changes in structure, the revival of the lost immediacy of social relationships and the communitas that is its mark. Nowadays one may include signs of spirituality in those gaps, although that spirituality has been a topic previously tabooed in anthropological circles or hidden under structural analysis. Turner saw the inconvenient truth that if structuralism as a value and philosophy (plus what we now see as the violence inseparable from the political state, along with neoconservatism and neoliberalism—business doctrines multiplied by themselves ad infinitem) were to continue as the world’s philosophy, we would continue with wars and the smothering of the natural flexibility of social intercourse (see Robert Putnam 2000, who shows in stark figures how sociality in general is losing ground in our era).
Keywords anthropology, communitas, liminality, rites of passage, social process, Victor Turner