No CrossRef data available.
We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 April 2024
Perhaps in some set of legends there is a story of some book that shrank or swelled according to the capacity of the person handling it to draw knowledge from it. If so, Victor Turner’s new book is of the same stock, since, approaching it at different time, I seem to find some different message in it. Dramas, Fields, and Metaphors looks at first sight like a string of separate essays on matters ranging from the cosmology of the Dogon to the martyrdom of St Thomas Becket. On a second glance, it becomes clear that, while several of the chapters did originally appear separately, this is no mere collection of warmed-up leftovers, but does present a set of related themes which run, albeit with varying stresses and counterpointing, throughout the book. But even to describe the themes will be deceptive, since it might seem that Victor Turner has not really moved beyond the positions taken in his earlier books, notably The Ritual Process. It may be granted that Dramas, Fields, and Metaphors largely makes explicit ideas which were implicit in the earlier books; but, even so, the book is certainly not deja vu.
I write ‘the book’, and physically, there is only one book; but one has an uneasy feeling that perhaps there are three books trying to get out of this one volume, the first a treatise on sociological method, the second an attempt to apply this method to particular historical episodes and social experiences, and the third a hymn to the power and value of ‘communitas’.
1 Dramas, Fields, and Metaphors, Symbolic Action in Human Society, by Victor Turner. Cornell University Press, Symbol, Myth, and Ritual. Ithaca and London, 1974, 309 pp., £9.60.
2 Of the key ideas in this book, liminality and the nature of symbols come from The Forest of Symbols (Cornell U.P., 1967)Google Scholar, social dramas and the way in which ritual, while being manipulated for personal ends. can still impose obligations on its manipulators from The Drums of Affliction (O.U.P. for International African Institute, 1968)Google Scholar, and society, conceived as a process in which the two poles are structures and communitas, from The Ritual Process (Routledge Kegan Paul, 1969)Google Scholar.
3 Victor Turner's own definition in this book (p. 274) of structure as ‘all that holds people apart’ as opposed to communitas ‘desire for a total, unmediated relationship between person and person’ seems unsatisfactory even in terms of his own usage, since, after all, people are held together by institutions as well as by desires. I do not think it would be unfair to Turner to define structure as the defined rights and obligations that can be enforced by social sanctions, while communitas includes all that holds society together without being regarded as being of obligation.
4 Lewin's main service to the social science was to make people aware of the temptation inherent in the rather simple biological and mechanical metaphors used in theories of society.
5 Black, Max, Models and Metaphors, Cornell University Press, 1962CrossRefGoogle Scholar, Nisbet, Robert A., Social Change and History, O.U.P., 1969Google Scholar. From Turner's account, Black seems to stress the creativeness of metaphors as a source of ideas, Nisbet rather to point to their deceptiveness.
6 ‘Liminality’ is actually a term introduced by Turner to cover what Van Gennep called ‘etat de marge’ and what had been called in English ‘marginality’ or ‘marginal situation’. Turner seems to find ‘marginal’ too negative in its connotations.
7 Florian Znaniecki was a Polish sociologist who worked in America. He argued that social systems were qualitatively different from natural ones precisely by reason of the conscious participation of human beings.
8 By this I mean that a society can exist as socio‐geographical unit, as an ecosystem, as a set of power relations, as a network of person‐to‐person relations, as an assembly of ideas, part explicit, part implicit, in the minds of its members, as a shared vocabulary of symbols. The theories by which all these are to be analysed are likely at best to be loosely consistent, rather than constituting a fully integrated grand theory.
9 The concept of root paradigms is not very well developed by Turner. It is not clear how far they are seen as belonging to particular cultures, how far as belonging to the psycho‐biological foundations of human nature. Cultures without the concept of heroism or martyrdom seem to exist; see Elizabeth Colson's essay in The Translation of Culture (edited Beidelman, T. O., Tavistock, London, 1972)Google Scholar.
10 Literacy in Traditional Societies (edited by Goody, J. R., Cambridge University Press, 1969)Google Scholar has a number of suggestions as to how the spread of writing may carry with it a diffusion of magical practices and beliefs. This, rather than direct Gnostic missionary efforts, could explain the presence of Gnostic beliefs in West African religion.
11 Despite Turner's efforts to define the concept of ‘luminality’, it still seems too vague. He does not distinguish between people who possess power, but also certain specific ritual obligations, and people who do not possess power, even though they may be of some symbolic significance.
12 Preface, pages 14 to 17.
13 To judge from nineteenth‐century English fiction, the tie between brother and sister was much stronger (at least, among the propertied classes) than it is now, possibly because of the greater importance of money considerations in the arranging of marriages. Formality in one relation in a system is likely to be balanced by a stress on affection in another relationship.
14 P. 294.
15 Pp. 250, 278, 288, for references to Protestantism. Main‐stream Reformation Protestantism hardly fits Turner's argument that rejection of specific structures leads to greater stress on communitas, though the Anabaptists would. It might be fair to say that Protestants rejected much of both structure and communitas in the Catholic tradition, while looking for a new social order (as at Geneva, or in New England), which would be both structure and communitas.
16 This would seem to tie up with the question of why some societies have more means of symbolic communication than others, and how such means of symbolic expression affect social consciousness and the evaluation of truth. A world where many powers are regarded as being active is different from one in which only one source of power is recognised.
17 The nature of fieldwork means, I think, that the anthropologist's persona should appear in his work more than that of the historian or even sociologist, but less than that of the journalist or travel writer.
You have
Access