Articles with the keyword ritual

• Bruce Kapferer

  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

• Peter Metcalf

  Unravelling Ritual: Victor Turner and the problems of exegesis

  Suomen Antropologi: Journal of the Finnish Anthropological Society Volume 33(4) 2008: 62-70

  Abstract

  As a pioneer in the interpretation of ritual, Victor Turner showed us how to
  access other peoples’ deepest understandings about the nature of life. In the
  process, he encountered problems of presentation that ethnographers still have
  to confront. This paper explores Turner’s solutions to these problems, and how
  subsequent authors have modified them.

  Keywords ethnography, ritual, Victor Turner