Victor Witter Turner (May 28, 1920 – December 18, 1983) was a Scottish anthropologist. May 28 is the 148th day of the year (149th in leap years) in the Gregorian calendar. ... 1920 (MCMXX) was a leap year starting on Thursday. ... In the Gregorian calendar, December 18 is the 352nd day of the year (353rd in leap years), with 13 days remaining until the end of the year. ... 1983 (MCMLXXXIII) was a common year starting on Saturday of the Gregorian calendar. ... See Anthropology. ...

Born in Glasgow, Scotland, Turner initially studied poetry and classics at the University College London, but during World War II his interest in anthropology was sparked and he pursued graduate studies in anthropology at Manchester University. Turner's interest in 'social drama' has self-acknowledged roots in the precedent of Kenneth Burke and Erving Goffman. Glaswegian redirects here. ... University College London, commonly known as UCL, is a college of the University of London. ... Combatants Allied powers: China France Great Britain Soviet Union United States and others Axis powers: Germany Italy Japan and others Commanders Chiang Kai-shek Charles de Gaulle Winston Churchill Joseph Stalin Franklin Roosevelt Adolf Hitler Benito Mussolini Hideki Tōjō Casualties Military dead: 17,000,000 Civilian dead: 33,000... Anthropology (from Greek: ἀνθρωπος, anthropos, human being; and λόγος, logos, knowledge) is the comparative study of the physical and social characteristics of humanity through the examination of historical and present geographical distribution, cultural history, acculturation, and cultural relationships. ... University of Manchester Motto: Cognitio Sapientia Hvmanitas Knowledge, wisdom, humanity. ... Kenneth Burke (May 5, 1897–November 19, 1993) was a major American literary theorist and philosopher. ... Erving Goffman Erving Goffman (June 11, 1922 – November 19, 1982), was a sociologist and writer. ...

During the period of 1950-1954, Turner studied the Ndembu tribe in central Africa with his wife Edith Turner. While observing the Ndembu, Turner became intrigued by ritual and rites of passage. He completed his PhD in 1955. Like many of the Manchester Anthropologists of his time, he also became concerned with conflict, and created the new concept of social drama in order to account for the symbolism of conflict and crisis resolution among Ndembu villagers. Turner spent his career exploring rituals. As a professor at the University of Chicago, Turner began to apply his study of rituals and rites of passage to world religions and the lives of religious heroes. A ritual is a set of actions, performed mainly for their symbolic value, which is prescribed by a religion or by the traditions of a community. ... A rite of passage is a ritual that marks a change in a persons social or sexual status. ... The University of Chicago is a private university located principally in the Hyde Park neighborhood of Chicago. ...

Turner gained notoriety by exploring Arnold van Gennep’s threefold structure of rites of passage and expanding theories on the liminal phase. Van Gennep's structure consisted of a pre-liminal phase (separation), a liminal phase (transition), and a post-liminal phase (reincorporation). Turner noted that in liminality, the transitional state between two phases, individuals were "betwixt and between": they did not belong to the society that they previously were a part of and they were not yet reincorporated into that society. Liminality is a limbo, an ambiguous period characterized by humility, seclusion, tests, sexual ambiguity, and communitas. Communitas is defined as an unstructured community where all members are equal. Arnold Van Gennep was born 23 April 1873 at Ludwigsbourg in Germany and died in 1957 at Bourg-la-Reine in France. ... This article does not cite its references or sources. ... Communitas a Latin noun referring either to an unstructured community in which people are equal, or to the very spirit of community. ...

Turner was also a superb ethnographer who constantly mused about his craft in his books and articles. Eclectic in his use of ideas borrowed from other theorists, he was rigorous in demanding that the ideas he developed illuminate ethnographic data; a theorist for theory's sake he was not. A powerful example of his attitudes can be found in the opening paragraph of the essay “Social Dramas and Ritual Metaphors” in Victor Turner (1974) Dramas, Fields, and Metaphors: Symbolic Action in Human Society. There he writes,

In moving from experience of social life to conceptualization and intellectual history, I follow the path of anthropologists almost everywhere. Although we take theories into the field with us, these become relevant only if and when they illuminate social reality. Moreover, we tend to find very frequently that it is not a theorist’s whole system which so illuminates, but his scattered ideas, his flashes of insight taken out of systemic context and applied to scattered data. Such ideas have a virtue of their own and may generate new hypotheses. They even show how scattered facts may be systematically connected! Randomly distributed through some monstrous logical system, they resemble nourishing raisins in a cellular mass of inedible dough. The intuitions, not the tissue of logic connecting them, are what tend to survive in the field experience.

Turner's work on ritual has stood as one of the most influential theories in anthropology during the twentieth century; but recently this "Turnerian Paradigm" has been challenged. With reference to his concept of communitas, John Eade and Michael J. Sallnow's (1991) work Contesting the Sacred directly opposes it (briefly, as idealised); and more recently a compilation of essays on pilgrimage edited by John Eade & Simon Coleman, Reframing Pilgrimage: Cultures in Motion (2004) have suggested that the work has rendered pilgrimage neglected as an area of anthropological study, due to Turner's assertion that pilgrimage was, by its liminal nature, extraordinary and not part of daily life (and therefore not a part of the make up of everyday society). This article includes a list of works cited or a list of external links, but its sources remain unclear because it lacks in-text citations. ...

Performance Studies scholar Richard Schechner pulled from Turner's theories on social drama and liminality, and the two worked collaboratively until his death. Turner's work has resurfaced in recent years (90's - 00's) among a variety of disciplines, proving to be an important part of the social sciences. Performance studies is a growing field of academic study focusing on the critical analysis of performance and performativity. ... Richard Schechner (b 1934) is University Professor/Professor of Performance Studies at the Tisch School of the Arts, New York University, editor of TDR: The Drama Review, and artistic director of East Coast Artists. ...

Edith Turner, Victor Turner's wife, has also both built upon and developed innovative ideas that complement notions of liminality, communitas, and the ritual process. She is currently a lecturer at the University of Virginia and the editor of the journal Anthropology and Humanism.

Books

• The Forest of Symbols: Aspects of Ndembu Ritual (1967), Cornell University Press 1970 paperback: ISBN 0-8014-9101-0
• Schism and Continuity in an African Society (1968), Manchester University Press
• The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure (1969), Aldine Transaction 1995 paperback: ISBN 0-202-01190-9
• Dramas, Fields, and Metaphors: Symbolic Action in Human Society (1974), Cornell University Press 1975 paperback: ISBN 0-8014-9151-7
• Image and Pilgrimage in Christian Culture (1978), Edith L. B. Turner (coauthor), Columbia University Press 1995 paperback: ISBN 0-231-04287-6
• From Ritual to Theatre: The Human Seriousness of Play (1982), PAJ Publications paperback: ISBN 0-933826-17-6
• Liminality, Kabbalah, and the Media (1985), Academic Press
• The Anthropology of Performance (1986), PAJ Publications paperback: ISBN 1-55554-001-5
• The Anthropology of Experience (1986), University of Illinois Press 2001 paperback: ISBN 0-252-01249-6

External links

• Victor W. Turner by Meranda Turbak
• Victor Turner by Beth Barrie
• Ritual, Anti-structure, and Religion: A Discussion of Victor Turner's Processural Symbolic Analysis