I happen to have a handy summary of some of the major lines of Turner's
thought. It's from an unpublished paper that came out of my editing of the
posthumous papers of Barbara Myerhoff, anthropologist and student/colleague
of Turner's. Turner develops these ideas in _The Ritual Process_ (New York:
Aldine de Gruyter, 1995, first published 1969), pp. 94-203, and in _Dramas,
Fields and Metaphors: Symbolic Action in Human Society_ (Ithaca: Cornell
University Press, 1974), pp. 231-299. His own attempt to summarize in
brief, "Notes on Processual Symbolic Analysis," can be found in Victor
Turner and Edith Turner, _Image and Pilgrimage in Christian Culture_
(Oxford: Basil Blackwell,1978), pp. 243-255.  This latter is the source for
the quotations in the bloody chunk of my paper that follows. Hope it's
helpful.

>Turner developed a sort of general field theory of human cultures, a part
of which, at the risk of caricaturing an enormously complex series of
ideas, I will attempt, with his help, to describe in brief. All cultures
exhibit a tension between what Turner calls "structure" and
"antistructure." Structure allows for the planning that makes social life
possible: the planting of crops, the raising of children, etc., but its
maintenance requires hierarchy and authority, and increasingly so as a
society becomes more complex. Antistructure, which Turner calls
"communitas," on the contrary, is spontaneous and democratic; it is "a
relational quality of full unmediated communication, even communion..."

"The bonds of communitas are undifferentiated, egalitarian, direct, extant,
nonrational, existential, I-Thou (in Buber's sense). Communitas is
spontaneous, immediate, concrete, not abstract. ...It does not merge
identities; it liberates them from conformity to general norms, though this
is necessarily a transient condition if society is to continue to operate
in an orderly fashion. ...Communitas strains toward universalism and
openness, it is a spring of pure possibility. It may be regarded by the
guardians of structure as dangerous and may be hedged around with taboos,
and associated with ideas of purity and pollution. ...For it is richly
charged with affects, mainly pleasurable. It has something magical about
it. Those who experience communitas have a feeling of endless power.
...what is sought is unity, not the unity which represents a sum of
fractions and is susceptible of division and subtraction, but an
indivisible unity... Homogeneity is sought, instead of heterogeneity. The
members of the...community are to be regarded...as a simple unit, not as a
sum of segments or the ultimate product of some mode of division of labor.
They are impregnated by unity, as it were, and purified from divisiveness
and plurality."

	Structure and antistructure are dependent upon each other. Unrestrained,
anti-structure would lead to social chaos and the dissolution of the
society (in the most basic terms, everyone would starve). It could also
lead to the enforcement of a homogeneous ideology and set of practices, and
hence to totalitarianism and its remedy, violent revolution. For this
reason it must always be "a transient condition...hedged around with taboos."
	On the other hand, structure unrestrained by the intermittent presence of
antistructure would create a bland culture with little spiritual reward for
the loss of freedom inherent in any structured activity. Without the
compensation of occasions for communitas, it would not be tolerated. In
Myerhoff's words,

"Real life...is inevitably a dialectical process. It is a fluctuation
between, at one pole, mundane needs met through social structure and at the
other, the ecstacy of communion, which Turner calls communitas. To attempt
to make either of these opposed states the whole of life is perilous.
Without communitas--which must be periodic and short-lived--mundane
considerations are overwhelming--tedious, trivial business, mere survival.
The spirit starves. Without social structure, the body starves."

	Communitas "breaks into society" by means of marginal individuals like
artists, writers and philosophers, who "often look to their group of
origin...for communitas, and to the group in which they mainly live, for
their structural position;" or by means of "the powers of the weak,
countervailing against structural power, fostering continuity, creating the
sentiment of the wholeness of the total community, positing the model of an
undifferentiated whole whose units are total human beings. The powers of
the weak are often assigned...to females, the poor, autochthons, and
outcasts." 	
	Turner presents a third category of individuals by means of whom
communitas can occur, and it is particularly important for our
understanding of "Tales from Fairfax," as it was for Myerhoff's
understanding of Huichol culture in Peyote Hunt. These are the "liminal."
The term comes from Arnold van Gennep's analysis of rites of passage. A
rite of passage is the journey of individuals from one social status to
another. In between they are in a liminal state, liminars,

"stripped of status and authority, removed from a social structure
maintained and sanctioned by power and force, and leveled to a homogeneous
social state through discipline and ordeal. Their secular powerlessness may
be compensated for by a sacred power, however--the power of the weak,
derived on the one hand from the resurgence of nature when structural power
is removed, and on the other from the reception of sacred knowledge. Much
of what has been bound by social structure is liberated, notably the sense
of comradeship and communion, or communitas; while much of what has been
dispersed over the many domains of culture and social structure is now
bound, or cathected, in the complex semantic systems of pivotal, multivocal
symbols and myths, numinous systems which achieve great conjunctive power.
...In this no-place and no-time that resists classification, the major
classifications and categories of culture emerge within the integuments of
myth, symbol, and ritual."

The liminar is in a state of "transience," which is the "archmetaphor for
that which lies outside structure or between structures, or is a dissolvent
of structure. Transience is exemplified by the liminal religious man who
has renounced world and home, moving from village to village--the pilgrim,
or the hero of the ‘quest' tales, who goes on a long journey to seek his
identity outside structure." 
	Turner's understanding of communitas was rather more nuanced than it
appears to be in this brief summary. Over time he added modifiers that
allowed for its manifestations in less than wholly spontaneous fashion: he
was, after all, trying to include in his schema as many phenomena as
possible. What he called "spontaneous communitas" became only one possible
kind."<

Turner outlines his classification of the types of communitas in "Notes on
Processual Symbolic Analysis." Turner was cautious about extending his
system unmodified into modern technological societies, and he invented the
term " liminoid" to describe social events, like artistic performance or
pilgrimage, that occur in those societies and mimic liminal phenomena to
some extent. Turner developed his ideas about liminoid phenomena in
"Liminal to Liminoid," in his From Ritual to Theatre (New York: Performing
Arts Journal Publications, 1982), and in "Liminality, Kabbalah and the
Media," Religion (1985), vol. 15, pp. 205-217, especially pp. 212-216.




At 09:21 PM 10/8/2000 BST, Chris Goode wrote:
>
>
>Hello playmates,
>
>It's a long-ass while since I've been here in any but the fleetingest of
>lurker-modes - and, ah, but I've missed yous; hope you haven't forgotten all
>about me and started going out with one of them rough boys instead.
>
>I'm going to try to be less entwined in all - I admit that I was, for a
while,
>powerless over britpo, and my life had become unmanageable -
>
>but I just wanted to lob something in about the liminality piece that's been
>bubbling through of late - and which I haven't followed sufficiently closely
>to feel that I can wade in like some colossal mutant e-heron; nonetheless,
>this ginger bit:
>
>I've just finished working with the Leeds-based performance group Unlimited
>Theatre on their new piece, 'Scream If You Wanted To Go Faster', and in
>setting out on the process of making it, in the spring, one of the things I
>insisted they should take a look at was Victor Turner's work around van
>Gennep's early formulation of the <rite de passage>. It had a considerable
>effect on the finished piece, and on their working practices throughout the
>process. I'm utterly convinced that the implications of Victor Turner's stuff
>haven't really been worked through in performance with anything like the
>rigour they could stand. (There may be some exceptions to this centred around
>Schechner, Kaprow, Oldenburg etc. in the US in the late 60's: I don't know
>that work well enough - in so far as one ever could now - to be sure.)
>
>What interests me very much - and I'm trying to write something on this at
the
>moment, which I (presumptuously) suppose might wind up in some future QUID or
>other - is what happens, what the implications are for poetry in particular,
>if one posits a relation between the van Gennep / Turner model of <rite de
>passage> - I can't recall off the top of my head the precise terms that they
>use, but it's something like separation -> transition (liminal phase) ->
>recuperation; and the Nida-style model of translation between languages,
or at
>least its psychological / preparational epiphenomena - i.e. what it's like to
>move the complex of senses within and outside a language unit between source
>and target.
>
>I'm writing very clumsily tonight (as you'll have spotted) but perhaps
I'll be
>clearer in the long run. I think what I'm moving towards is considering - as
>others in this discussion have sort of pointed to - the act of poetry as
being
>partly made out of decisions about how far you can prolong or maintain the
>liminal phase both in the writing / working process and also in the act of
>then communicating the results or the sense of that work. I have a feeling
>that most of the differences of opinion (about poetry as an act) that I've
>ever seen expressed on this list are essentially about the relations between
>liminality and closure. 
>
>But: what those early anthropological / theatre-anthropological models
>apparently don't allow for is a recuperation that doesn't dispel and resolve
>the liminal, whereas I get the feeling that most poets would aver a creative
>tension between liminality and closure: which is *not itself* a 'liminal'
>tension. So we must above all, comrades, be careful how we use this very
>attractive word. Poor Unlimited Theatre can now barely get through five
>minutes without declaring that, ah, yeah, that's fucking liminal, that.
>Liminality is not the same thing as ambiguity, or irony, or metaphor, or
>suspension.
>
>But that's all one, my rant is done, and I'll strive to make some toast now I
>think perhaps.
>
>Feeling already as if I've never been away, xt help me, and us all,
>
>Chris
>
>-----------------------------------------
>
>Chris Goode
>Director, signal to noise
>24 Newport Road
>London E10 6PJ
>
>____________________________________________________________________
>Get free email and a permanent address at http://www.netaddress.com/?N=1
>
>
>



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