322Lecture 1-Liminality 2006
For your presentations, you will be using the framework I
will presenting this week in class. You are encouraged to also read
Victor Turner’s work, in particular:
- “Betwixt and Between: The Liminal Period in Rites de
Passage,” from Forest of Symbols, pp. 93-111.
- “Liminality and Communitas,” from The Ritual Process, pp.
94-130.
Both texts are available at the library and they are in a course kit
from Fall 2003 available on reserve.
Victor Turner defined ritual as "prescribed formal behavior
for occasions not given over to technological routine, having
reference to beliefs in mystical beings and powers." Symbols, for
Turner, are the smallest unit of ritual which still retains the specific
properties of ritual behavior. They are “storage units" filled with a
vast amount of information. According to Turner, symbols can be
objects, activities, words, relationships, events, gestures, or spatial
units. In Turner's perspective, ritual, religious beliefs, and symbols
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are essentially related. He expressed this well in another definition:
Ritual is "a stereotyped sequence of activities involving gestures,
words, and objects, performed in a sequestered place, and designed
to influence preternatural entities or forces on behalf of the actors'
goals and interests". Rituals are storehouses of meaningful symbols
by which information is revealed and regarded as authoritative, as
dealing with the crucial values of the community. Not only do
symbols reveal crucial social and religious values; precisely
because of their reference to the supernatural, they also transform
human attitudes and behavior. The handling of symbols in ritual
exposes their powers to act upon and change the persons involved
in ritual performance. In sum, Turner's definition of ritual refers to
ritual performances involving the manipulation of symbols that
refer to religious beliefs.
Ultimately, one of the most important contributions of Turner
was to help us see rituals and performances as processes, as
dynamic events that take place in time. First, ritual is part of an
ongoing social drama: it has a major function in contributing
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to a society's conflictual equilibrium. Second, ritual involves
the handling of symbols that constitute the smallest units of
ritual activity: symbols in themselves are carriers of meaning.
Third, the meanings of symbols are multiple. They give unity
to the morality of the social order and the emotional needs of
the individual.
Turner presented a processual view of ritual, and made a
distinction between several kinds of ritual: life-crisis rituals,
rituals of affliction, healing rituals, rituals of incorporation,
cyclical or calendrical rituals. Life-crisis rituals are the focus of
this lecture and of your group presentations. They refer to that
class of ritual ceremonies which mark the transition of a person
from one phase in their development to. Such phases are critical
points in the physical or social development of the ritual subject,
such as birth, puberty, marriage or death.
To talk about life-crisis rituals, Turner takes the concept of
Rites of passage from Van Gennep. In his classic work The Rites
of Passage the Belgian sociologist Van Gennep observed that “the
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life of an individual in any society is a series of passages form one
age to another”. Van Gennep coined the term “rites de passage” to
refer to those “rites which accompany every change of place, state,
social position and age.” Rites of passage therefore transform
the status of members of any social group, moving them from
one position in the social structure to another, and
distinguishing them as socially defined beings.
Van Gennep discerned an underlying pattern to all such
transition rites which consisted of three stages, each of these
elaborated by distinct subsets of ritual activity and symbolism:
Separation, Liminality and Reaggregation. The first stage was
composed of rites of separation, a pre-liminal stage exemplified
by ceremonies such as purification rites, the removal of hair, or
scarification, tattoos, and cutting. Its function is to separate
individuals from their previous social role. The next phase was
the critical liminal period (from the Greek limen, meaning
threshold), encompassing the rites of transition. During the liminal
stage, the individual undergoing the rite is symbolically
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situated “outside society”, and may be subject to certain rules or
taboos, or restrictions on his / her behaviour or movement. Van
Gennep observed that in this period the customary rules of the
society may be suspended, that is, “the rite may be seen as a
symbolic death, leading to a new rebirth.” In the ensuing
reaggregation phase, the individual is reintegrated or
reincorporated into the society in a new status or altered state,
symbolized by changes such as the lifting of previous restrictions,
the wearing of new clothes, or the sharing of a meal among ritual
participants.
Rites of passage are usually associated with tribal societies,
where such rituals are very frequent, and very elaborate, and they
have a central role in structuring the life of the individual. But we
can find similar rites of passage in so-called “secular” societies
such as in North America, where other kinds of social institution
(such as the school system) structure and accomplish much of the
same changes of status. Other examples range from more
traditional rites of passage such as puberty rites and the vision
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quests of North American indigenous peoples, to rites of passage
such as confirmations, baptisms, bar and bat mitzvahs, to
fraternity, or sports team initiations.
So a rite of passage may mark any transition in social
position, age, or condition. Now, while there are some rites of
passage where a person transitions alone or in small groups, such
as in weddings, funerals, or a club initiation, there are other rituals
which are huge collective events in which several individuals
undergo the rite together, at the same time.
The important point of these rites is to make clear a social
transformation, so that ambiguity can be reduced, and so that
cultural categories and understandings that are shared within a
society can be affirmed and legitimized, giving people peace of
mind, and a sense of wholeness in their self-understandings. These
rituals perpetuate a sense of continuity and changelessness, that is
important to the stability of the social order, and may be used to
underline and dramatize duties and obligations that people have
toward one another.
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Rites of passage are many times linked to critical milestones
in a person’s physical maturity. What is usually experienced as a
difficult and uncertain gradual process is given a meaningful
framework. We have rituals that mark transitions socially, through
the symbolic assimilation of biological development under the
cultural lenses of social maturation. In this way, social ideology is
many times naturalized and given an aura of authority and
timelessness.
Van Gennep paved the way for the work of Victor Turner,
who contributed significantly to our understanding of rites of
passage particularly in terms of the properties of the liminal period
as defined by Van Gennep.
The liminal state in Rites of Passage is a threshold, a state
betwixt and between, or what has been defined as “the ambiguous
state of being between states of being.”
Using examples from his research among the Ndembu of
Zambia, Turner explained that the symbolism associated with
those in a liminal state is rich and complex. Much of this “liminal”
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or interstructural symbolism is modeled on human biological
processes which are likened to structural and cultural processes,
and in this way, they “give an outward and visible form to an
inward and conceptual process”. Liminality is tied to invisibility,
darkness, bisexuality or to the wilderness. Since neophytes, that
is, those undergoing ritual transition, are structurally dead,
symbolism of their liminiality is typically concerned with death
and decomposition: For example, they may be dressed in black, go
naked, or may be covered in earth. They are in a state of becoming,
so the liminality of the initiands can also be expressed through
symbols of gestation or giving birth. Among Ndembu boys’
initiations, for example, they are likened to menstruating women,
and this indicates their ritual condition of ambiguity.
Another critical aspect of liminality is the submission and
obedience of the neophytes to the authority of ritual elders. They
are expected to obey their elders and to accept punishment
passively. Neophytes are reduced to a homogeneous, uniform state,
a state of complete equality among themselves, they are stripped of
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property, status or clothing indicating their previous or future rank,
or social role. Over the duration of the circumcision rite among the
Ndembu, for example, the boys share all food provided to them
equally, and they sleep together in small groups around a fire. The
intensity of this shared experience is conducive to the emergence
of an overwhelming and cathartic sense of ritual oneness, a highly
charged homongeneity and comradeship that Turner referred to as
communitas: A generalized social bond. Society in communitas is
an unstructured group of relatively undifferentiated individuals, a
communion of equal individuals who submit together to the
general authority of ritual elders.
During the liminal period, sacra (sacred knowledge), “the
heart of the liminal matter” is shown to initiands in such forms
as a secret myth, ritual objects, or special instructions. Like the
Ndembu ritual masks with monstrous features which are exhibited
to the initiands, sacra often have a distorted or exaggerated form,
with the purpose of prompting neophytes to reflect on “their
society, their cosmos, and the powers that generated and sustain
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them”. Sacra was said by Turner to be especially important in the
transformation of persons from one socially determined status to
another, inculcating them with the shared norms and expectations
associated with their new role. Sacra is not about “a mere
acquisition of knowledge, but a change in being.”
Turner distinguished analytically three (in actual ritual
performances, often interwoven) components of liminality: (1)
communication of sacra, where secret symbols are communicated
to the ritual subjects in the form of exhibitions of sacred articles
(relics, masks, instruments, "what is shown,"), actions (dancing,
"what is done") and instructions (mythical history, "what is said") ;
the symbols represent the unity and continuity of the community;
they are simple in form, but, because of their multivocality
(multiple meanings), they are often given complex cultural
interpretations; (2) ludic (playful) deconstruction and
recombination of familiar cultural configurations, which refers
to the exaggeration or distortion of the characteristics of familiar
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articles in the sacra; familiar objects are often presented in
distorted, deviant or grotesque forms (in smaller or larger shape, in
other colors); these representations force the ritual adepts to think
about their society; they provoke the ritual subjects to reflect on
the basic values of their social and cosmological order; and (3)
simplification of the relations of the social structure, in which
the only remaining structural characteristic in liminality is the
authority of the ritual instructors over the completely submissive
and obedient adepts; between the ritual subjects the sociostructural
distinctions disappear in favor of an absolute equality. It is this
third component of liminality, the "sameness" of the liminal
personae, which led Turner to develop his notion of communitas.
Because of the presence of these different components, we
can say that Liminality is:
1) A moment of ritual transformation.
2) A moment when the normal rules and the social
hierarchy of society are negated.
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3) A moment when communitas is created.
4) A period of special and dangerous power, which can be
constrained and channeled to protect and maintain the
current social order, or harnessed for social change.
A typical rite of passage is the installation rite that Turner
discusses in the chapter “Liminality and Communitas”, from
the book The Ritual Process. This rite took place among the
Ndembu in Northwest Zambia, and involved the installation of
the Kanongesha, a senior Ndembu chief. The ritual, particularly its
liminal component, involved the building of a small shelter a
mile from the chief’s capital village. The chief was taken there
and systematically made fun of and insulted by ritual
functionaries, before his installation was finally celebrated. The
central part of the ritual is what Turner would call a period of antistructure. That is, liminality involves the literal and symbolic
marginalization of the person undertaking the ritual. During
liminality, the status of the participant is deliberately made
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ambiguous, so that the ritual process can be separated from normal
social life. The symbolism of the installation ritual suggested that
the Ndembu chief was dead, and his social identity was negated.
For Turner, this period of liminality is critical in the ritual process,
and as we saw, it involves the development of communitas, that
transcendent feeling of social togetherness. This generalized bond,
that transcends social structure is represented by symbolic
inversion during the liminal phase. During this phase of the
installation, the Ndembu chief became something like a slave, and
was therefore forced to confront the mutual dependence of
different strata of society. Because he becomes literally nobody, he
can be abused and insulted by anybody. He therefore submits to
the authority of nothing less than the total community. With all
structural relations abandoned, he becomes a blank slate for the
collective knowledge that reconstructs him as chief.
Turner is best known for his unparalleled contribution to
understandings of the working of ritual symbolism. Note that this
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applies not only to rites of passage, that is, life-crisis rituals, but to
other types of rituals as well, such as rituals of affliction. Turner
promoted anthropological interest in the role of ritual,
understanding ritual as an active process concerned with the
resolution and negotiation of conflict and contradiction, and with
its role in perpetuating and also changing the social order.
Rituals provide decisive keys to the understanding of how
people think and feel about relationships, and about the natural and
social environments in which they operate.
Turner’s work on the properties of ritual symbols did much
to illuminate the efficacy of rituals. For him the symbol is “the
smallest unit of specific structure in ritual”. His work is known
for the interest it provoked in the pragmatics (use) of symbols.
Ritual is the ideal setting in which one can see symbols “in action”;
how their spectrum or fan of meanings (that is, referents) work
together in dynamic ways to bring about certain changes in the
social order, such as changing someone’s status from child into
adult, or healing tensions in the social group. According to Turner,
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these ritual transformations, whether individual or collective, they
are made possible by the communicative properties of the symbols
themselves. These symbols also contribute to the ritual’s capacity
to bring about extraordinary psychological states.
Ritual symbolism has a semantic structure, that is, the
relationship between symbols in a given ritual is organized like a
language. Among the most important of the attributes of ritual
symbolism is the property of “condensation”, which has various
interrelated meanings:
1) Symbols are multi-vocal: they can mean many things at once.
2) Ritual symbolism allows for the unification of apparently
different meanings.
3) Ritual symbolism also allows for the polarization of
meanings.
So symbols at the same time allow different meanings to be
interconnected due to their analogous qualities, or by association in
people’s thought or experience. They also allow people to produce
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symbolic contrasts in order to emphasize certain points in the
ritual.
In any culture’s ritual system, certain symbols can be seen as
“dominant symbols”, which are recurrent symbols
characterized by pronounced multivocality, expressing the
shared values on which social life depends. Turner demonstrated
how Ndembu ritual symbols refer to the essential needs of social
survival (in Ndembu society, these are hunting, cultivation, and
sexual reproduction). Dominant symbols for the Ndembu are
always species of trees, each associated with a particular color. The
mudyi or “milk tree” for example, is called like that because it
secretes a milky latex. For the Ndembu this tree condenses a wide
range of associations, including women’s breasts, motherhood, the
principle of matriliny, and the unity and continuity of Ndembu
society.
Turner underlined the importance of the emotions stimulated
by a symbol’s association with human physiology, for example,
red being associated with blood, in understanding how symbols
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operate to transfer strong emotions to the social order. This kind of
association he called the sensory or “oretic” pole of meaning. He
established that dominant symbols have two opposed poles of
meaning. One is this “oretic”, sensory pole of meaning, the
aspect of the symbol that stimulates our senses, and emotions, and
is connected to our physiology, and the ideological or
“normative” pole of meaning, which makes reference to the
principles of social organization of a group, to its norms and
values. He claimed that it is in the interaction of normative and
oretic poles generated by dominant symbols that the extraordinary
character of ritual events is generated. So ritual symbolism has the
power to move and channel emotion through the interaction of
these two poles.
The tremendous energy generated in collective gatherings is
actually transferred to the ideological pole of meanings, and the
effect of this is to fuse the socially obligatory with the desirable.
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