Symbolic or Interpretive Anthropology
1960s –1970s general reevaluation of cultural
anthropology as a scientific enterprise
From function to meaning
away from materialist theories towards idealist
theories
shift toward issues of culture and interpretation and
away from grand theories
increased emphasis on the way in which individual
actions creatively shape culture
Greater emphasis on meaning in definitions of culture
Symbolic anthropology: not a tightly organized
or clearly bounded ‘school’...
a loosely-conceived ‘project’ of a variety of
anthropologists of varied intellectual
antecedents who see the decoding of public
symbols as being the key activity of
anthropological analysis...
three main theoretical sources:
 Durkheimian sociology
 Sapir and emic theory
 psychoanalytic theory (Freud, Jung, Róheim,
Betelheim)
SYMBOLIC ANTHROPOLOGISTS
Raymond Firth
Meyer Fortes
Victor Turner
Mary Douglas
Sherry B. Ortner
Monica Wilson
Gregory Bateson
Gilbert Lewis
Barbara Babcock
Paul Rabinow
Renato Rosaldo
Barbara Meyerhoff
Terence S. Turner
Milton Singer
Maurice Bloch
Robert A. Paul
Marilyn Strathern
James Fernandez
Since symbolic anthropology is not an organized
“school”, there are no hard-and-fast dogmas or
principles
Most “symbolicists” would however agree on these two
points:
culture is, fundamentally, a symbolic system and so
analysis of cultural symbols provides the natural
point of entrée into a cultural universe
If culture is symbolic then it follows that it is used
to create and convey meanings since that is the
purpose of symbols. If meanings are the end products
of culture then understanding culture requires
understanding the meanings of its creators and users
“Believing, with Max Weber, that man
is an animal suspended in webs of
significance he himself has spun, I take
cultures to be those webs, and the
analysis of it to be therefore not an
experimental science in search of law,
but an interpretive one in search of
meaning”. (Geertz 1973:5)
Victor Turner
Scottish social anthropologist, 1920–1983
student of Max Gluckman at Manchester
1950-54 fieldwork among the Ndembu of
Zambia
early work in conflict structuralism —
Schism and continuity in an African society
[1957]...
later work in pilgrimage theory, “experiential
anthropology”, and performance theory
but central career interest = symbolic
anthropology
VICTOR TURNER
KEY MONOGRAPHS IN SYMBOLIC ANTHROPOLOGY
The forest of symbols* (1967)
The drums of affliction (1968)
Chihamba: the white spirit (1969)
The ritual process: structure and anti-structure (1969)
Dramas, fields, and metaphors: symbolic action in human
society (1975)
Process, performance, and pilgrimage: a study in
comparative symbology (1979)
Blazing the trail: way marks in the exploration of symbols
(with Edith Turner) (1992)
* collected early papers, including “Symbols in Ndembu ritual” [reading for
this course]
TANZANIA
CONGO-KINSHASA
ANGOLA
NDEMBU
MALAWI
MOZAMBIQUE
ZIMBABWE
NAMIBIA
“MATRILINEAL BELT”
NORTHWESTERN
BANTU
EQUATORIAL
BANTU
MONGO
LUBA
SOUTHWESTERN
BANTU
CENTRAL BANTU
(WEST)
MIDDLE ZAMBEZI BANTU
NDEMBU
• typical society of the “Matrilineal Belt”:
 matrilineal descent
 virilocal postmarital residence
• shifting cultivation on poor savanna land
• impermanent villages:
 new villages continually reforming
 ambitious headmen seek to attract villagers away
from their present headmen (“big man” political
process)
• individual continually being pulled in opposing
directions by conflicting matrilineal loyalties and ties
based on Fa-So relationship
• lots of ritual Lots
Social dramas
In Schism and Continuity in African Society (1957)
Based on his fieldwork among the Ndembu
Social dramas were recurrent units of social life
exist as a result of the conflict that is inherent in
societies.
social dramas have "four main phases of public
action, accessible to observation"
•breach,
•crisis,
•redressive action, and
•reintegration.
Social dramas
The first phase is "signalized by the public, overt breach or
deliberate nonfulfillment of some crucial norm regulating the
intercourse of the parties" (ibid.).
Once a breach occurs "a phase of mounting crisis supervenes"
in which the breach widens and extends the separation between
the parties.
The crisis stage has "liminal characteristics, since it is a
threshold between more or less stable phases of the social process"
(Turner, 1974:39).
The third phase of redressive action occurs to limit the spread of
the crisis with "certain adjustive and redressive mechanisms
The redressive phase is the most liminal because it is in the
middle of the crisis and the resolution.
It is in this phase that the liminal ritual may be enacted to
resolve the crisis and provide an opportunity for the final phase of
reintegration to occur.
The reintegration phase involves the resolution of the conflict by
reintegrating the disturbed group into society or by the "social
recognition and legitimization of irreparable schism between the
contesting parties"
this four-phase model fits into van Gennep's phases of rites of
passage.
Breach and crisis correspond to van Gennep's separation phase,
redress aligns with the transition phase of rites of passage and
reintegration represents van Gennep's incorporation phase
Arnold van Gennep
MUKANDA
Photos from
Victor Turner:
“Mukanda: the
rite of circumcision.” In: The
Forest of
Symbols
Ndembu circumcisers
with knives
Gate to mukanda bush. Childhood clothes left on gate
Novices
daubed
with clay
LEFT: hut where novices sleep in
the mukanda bush BELOW: iron pot in which
novices’ porridge is cooked
Novices receiving instruction from elders
Masked figure (Chizaluki) representing the authority of the ancestors
Last day of
mukanda:
initiates don
new clothes
and dance in
public for first
time as men
RITUAL SYMBOLS
Turner not concerned with all possible symbolism. All
social groups have some symbolism, down to couples
and dyads. Turner is mainly concerned with ‘cultural’
symbols or (in his term) ‘ritual’ symbols
Ritual symbols = a small number of objects which
have more or less generally shared meanings within a
community of interpretation (‘culture’)
• Milk Tree for Ndembu
• Cross for Christians
• Norwegian flag for Norwegians
• wedding garland for Greeks
PROPERTIES OF DOMINANT RITUAL SYMBOLS
1. CONDENSATION: Many things & actions are
represented in a single iconic formation
“Non-literate people have every incentive to economize on
their use of information storing messages. Since all
knowledge must be incorporated in the stories and rituals
which are familiar to the living generation, it is of immense
advantage if the same verbal categories, with their
corresponding objects, can be used for multiple purposes.”
Edmund Leach, “Ritualization in Man, in relation to
conceptual and social development.” Royal Society of
London. Philosophical Transactions. Series B. 251:403-08.
1966
PROPERTIES OF DOMINANT RITUAL SYMBOLS
2. UNIFICATION: Many disparate significata are
interconnected & unified by virtue of the
common possession of certain analogous
qualities
analogy = the mechanism whereby many
significata are able to be condensed in
one dominant symbol
PROPERTIES OF DOMINANT RITUAL SYMBOLS
3. POLARIZATION: The symbol typically
possesses two distinct poles of meaning, one
normative (moral rules of society) and the other
sensory (natural and physiological process)
All that is quintessentially “Ndembu” is
transmitted from mother to child, and so the
dominant symbol of cohesion and continuity
is symbolized by milk and the female breast
The sensory pole is ‘gross’ and may be
expected to arouse emotions (breast, penis,
blood, semen, tears)
PROPERTIES OF DOMINANT RITUAL SYMBOLS
Polarization = the linkage between the conscious
or ideological aspects of symbols and the
emotional aspects...
e.g. why certain acts (profanation, incest,
shedding of blood) instantly trigger emotional
responses
This linkage is clearly a learned response
(behavior)
TURNER: criticizes Sapir & psychoanalytically oriented writers for
ignoring the ideological pole in favor of the emotional
PROPERTIES OF DOMINANT RITUAL SYMBOLS
4. POLYVALENCE —
Dominant symbols do
not just have one
meaning (A = B) but are
invariably ‘polyvalent’ or
‘polysemic’, and link
into many domains of
the culture and at a
variety of levels
DECODING RITUAL SYMBOLS
Ritual symbols can be decoded by triangulating
between three main bodies of information:
external form and
observable
characteristics
interpretations of
ritual specialists &
lay persons
significant contexts
worked out by the
anthropologist
Ritual symbols can be decoded by triangulating
between three main bodies of information:
operational
meaning
external form and
observable
characteristics
e.g. dominant symbol used
in girls’ puberty rite, the
latex exuded by a particular
tree = milk = fertility = motherhood = the continuity
of lineages in a matrilineal society = the unity &
equality of all Ndembu
‘SIGNIFICATA’
exegetical
interpretations of
ritual specialists &
lay persons
Positional
significant contexts
worked out by the
anthropologist
ARROW: Diplorrhyncus condylocarpon, the Milk Tree
A `milk tree' growing in the
compound of a Senior Chief in
southern Zambia. Regarded as
feminine by the inhabitants of
the compound, the milk tree
twines as a palpable dependent
on its deciduous `masculine'
host.
Many Bantu peoples strongly
associated this tree with
womanhood because of the
thick white, milk-like sap
which the live wood exudes
when cut. the blood-red sap of
the so-called `
A fresh cut in the milk tree showing the milky white sap
that gives the tree its common name
A fresh, bright scarlet cut on a `blood tree' in Kangaba, Mali
marked that wood as masculine
Ritual symbols can be decoded by triangulating
between three main bodies of information:
operational
meaning
external form and
observable
characteristics
exegetical
interpretations of
ritual specialists &
lay persons
Positional
significant contexts
worked out by the
anthropologist
Get the “official” and
the lay perspective:
document any
possible
layering of
meanings,
from exoteric to
esoteric
Ritual symbols can be decoded by triangulating
between three main bodies of information:
operational
meaning
external form and
observable
characteristics
in some specific
ritual contexts, Milk
Tree =
• unity of
women
• the novice
herself
• loss of child
by mother
exegetical
interpretations of
ritual specialists &
lay persons
Positional
significant contexts
worked out by the
anthropologist
Ritual symbols can be decoded by triangulating
between three main bodies of information:
operational
meaning
external form and
observable
characteristics
in some specific ritual
contexts, Milk Tree =
• unity of women
• the novice
herself
• loss of child by
mother
Tree implies certain
cleavages in
Ndembu
society
exegetical
interpretations of
ritual specialists &
lay persons
Positional
significant contexts
worked out by the
anthropologist
classic contrast between
what people say
and what they do —
e.g., despite the ideology of Ndembu unity,
actually the Milk
...in the Nkang’a ritual, each person or group in successive
contexts, sees the milk tree only as representing her or
their own specific interests and values at those times.
However the anthropologist, who has previously made a
structural analysis of Ndembu society, isolating its
organizational principles, and distinguishing its groups and
relationships, has no particular bias and can observe the
real interconnection and conflict between groups and
persons. What is meaningless for an actor playing a
specific role may well be highly significant for an observer
and analyst of the total system.
On these grounds, therefore, I consider it legitimate
to include within the total meaning of a dominant ritual
symbol, aspects of behavior associated with it which the
actors themselves are unable to interpret, and indeed of
which they may be unaware...
Victor Turner, “Symbols in Ndembu ritual”
Erockson & Murphy 2001: 364
By including esoteric meanings, Turner departs
from earlier theorists of symbolism, for whom
only the exoteric meanings (shared by everyone)
were truly “public symbolism” (Nadel, Wilson)
But esoteric meanings are a significant part of
most knowledge systems...
are particularly clear in Central African initiation
systems...
• at various points in initiation ceremony, the novice
is presented symbolically encoded information...
• memorized by rote — much of the symbolism is
undisclosed & will never be formally disclosed
• however even by the end of the bush school, some
novices will have figured out by context, or by
recognizing an image presented earlier in a song
learnt later
• those who show a talent for grasping the more
elusive meanings become the officiating priests,
witchdoctors, and bush school instructors of future
generations
• thus the populace sorts itself out in various strata
of intellectual and/or spiritual “depth”
 most people content to live in a universe of
signs and symbols whose meanings are
known to others, but not them
 a self-selected few become guardians of the
society’s symbolic resources
OTHER KEY CONCEPTS IN TURNER’S
APPROACH TO RITUAL SYMBOLISM
1. liminality — extensive elaboration of van
Gennep’s notion of liminality in rites of passage
2. communitas & structure — ‘structure’ inherently
hierarchical & liminality inherently
communal/egalitarian