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This is the manuscript of an entry in the Elgar Encyclopedia of Political Anthropology, edited by Arpad Szakolczai and Paul O’Connor. Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar Publishing, August 2025.
Please cite as: Deflem, Mathieu. 2025. “Victor W. Turner.” In Elgar Encyclopedia of Political Anthropology, edited by Arpad Szakolczai and Paul O’Connor. Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar Publishing.
Abstract: The work of anthropologist Victor W. Turner is reviewed in terms of its development from a structuralist perspective towards a processual symbolic approach. Originally engaged with the study of ritual as a mechanism for conflict resolution and re-integration, Turner’s work turned towards the analysis of ritual as a domain of study in its own right. Turner specifically focused on ritual practices as involving various stages, the middle stage of which involved a drastic reversal of the demands of the social order. He conceived of this stage as a period of liminality, whereby the ritual subjects find themselves in a betwixt-and-between position. During such periods, Turner argued, a state of communitas is reached to form a bond beyond the social structure towards humanity as such. The implications of Turner’s approach are discussed in terms of its move away from, yet continued relevance for, the central subject matters of political anthropology.
Keywords: communitas; liminality; religion; ritual; structuralism; symbols.
Scottish-born cultural anthropologist Victor W. Turner is primarily known for his work on rituals and symbolism, especially among the Ndembu people. Originally working from a structuralist viewpoint, over the course of his career Turner came to develop a strongly humanistic orientation to the study of ritual, religion, and other cultural expressions in social life. He also broadened his approach to apply his theoretical insights to various aspects of rituals and symbolism in modern society. Intellectually, Turner’s work, and its implications for questions of political anthropology, can be understood in contrast to its functionalist origins and the dominance of structuralism in anthropological thinking (Deflem 1991).
Victor Witter Turner was born in Glasgow, Scotland, on May 28, 1920, as the son of an electrical engineer father and a stage actress mother. Upon his parents’ divorce, a then 11-year old Turner went to live with his maternal grandparents in Bournemouth, England, where he studied classics. A conscientious objector, Turner was assigned bomb-disposal duties as a noncombatant. In 1943, he married his wife Edith, with whom he would collaborate throughout his life. The marriage produced six children, one daughter of which died in infancy.
Initially studying literature, Turner began to develop an interest in anthropology upon reading the work of Margaret Mead and A.R. Radcliffe-Brown. In 1949, he graduated in anthropology from University College London, receiving his B.A. with honors. Thereafter appointed a Research Officer at the Rhodes-Livingstone Institute in Northern Rhodesia (now Zambia), Turner conducted extensive fieldwork among the Ndembu in the early 1950s. On the basis of this research, he received his Ph.D. in 1955 from Victory University in Manchester under the mentorship of Max Gluckman. Influenced by his recognition of the centrality of religion and ritual among the Ndembu, Turner abandoned his agnosticism (along with his earlier-held sympathies for communism) and converted to Catholicism in 1957. He commenced his academic teaching career at Manchester and, in 1963, migrated to the United States, where he taught at Cornell University until 1968, the University of Chicago until 1977, and the University of Virginia until his death following a heart attack on December 18, 1983. Turner’s funeral ceremony was held according to the rites of the Roman Catholic Church, followed by a celebration in the tradition of the Ndembu. Having continued to promote anthropological work in the spirit of Turner’s approach and securing the legacy of his work, his wife Edith Turner passed away on June 18, 2016.
Turner’s foray into anthropological fieldwork among the Ndembu at the outset centered primarily on conflict, methods of conflict resolution, authority, and integration. As he explained in the book derived from his doctoral dissertation, Schism and Continuity in an African Tribe: A Study of Ndembu Village Life, Turner (1957) introduced the notion of social drama to denote four stages in the development of a social conflict: from an initial breach of norms, to a widening of this breach into crisis, a limit to the spread thereof through redressive action, followed by a re-integration and return to order.
It is within the functional scheme of the social drama that Turner (1957) initially also situated the place and function of rituals. Rituals perform a re-integrative role in the redress to social order that otherwise political and kinship systems would fulfill. In the Ndembu social order, specifically, Turner reveals that principles of matrilineal descent and virilocality function in combination: descent is traced matrilineally, but wives and daughters follow their husbands and fathers, respectively. With a relatively high divorce rate, moreover, residential mobility among the Ndembu is high and prevents the formation of large stable social networks. The political implications are considerable in that intervillage conflict is frequent and not controlled by any overarching political authority. Thus, conflict within and between villages is a relatively regular fact of Ndembu social life. To prevent a wholesale collapse of the social order, Turner observed, various mechanisms of conflict resolution are employed, among them, especially, political and legal-judicial processes and rituals. As such, in Turner’s early work, ritual is studied explicitly and exclusively in terms of its quasi-political functionality to provide the ‘social glue’ that can hold Ndembu society together. Ritual, writes Turner, “compensates to some extent for the limited range of effective political control and for the instability of kinship and affinal ties to which political value is attached” (Turner 1957, p. 291).
The functional role Turner initially attributes to ritual can be contributed to the context of his work in the Manchester Shool framework he had inherited from Max Gluckman, the latter having a strong hold on his students and commanding adherence against the study of ritual as a separate domain of study. Turner admitted to this restriction in Schism and Continuity, where he wrote, “I do not intend here to make a cultural analysis of Ndembu ritual but simply to isolate from the ritual complex those sociological features which are relevant in this book” (Turner 1957, p. 289). The one chapter of the book devoted to the analysis of ritual is tellingly titled “The Politically Integrative of Ritual” (Ibid., p. 288). It will become Turner’s most enduring theoretical achievement that in the further development of his work he will study ritual no longer as merely a mechanism of redress and conflict resolution but, instead, take ritual and the symbolic aspects of social life seriously in distinctly cultural terms.
From the early 1960s on, Turner wrote extensively about ritual practices, with a special focus on the development and impact of rituals in terms of their meaning and effects on the part of those who participate in ritual life. As such, it is no longer the broader functional role, but the meaning and act of rituals themselves that become the core theme of his writings (Turner 1967, 1969, 1974). Turner defines a ritual as a “prescribed formal behavior for occasions not given over to technological routine, having reference to beliefs in mystical beings and powers” (Turner 1967, p. 19). The basic ritual types include life-crisis rituals, which mark a transformation in the development of an individual, and rituals of affliction, whereby a subject is treated for a disease or misfortune. Relating to a system of beliefs (typically of a religious or mythological nature) and employing various symbols, rituals contain and exhibit authoritative and essential values of the community. A symbol is defined by Turner as the smallest unit of a ritual that still retains the specific properties of ritual behavior. Symbols can be dominant or instrumental. Dominant symbols appear in different ritual contexts but will retain their meaning consistently. Instrumental symbols, by contrast, are dependent on the specific context in which they are used.
Arguably Turner’s most important intellectual innovation in the anthropological study of ritual is his focus on the ritual process. Inspired by the work of the Belgian folklorist Arnold Van Gennep on the rites of passage, Turner identified the typical stages in the development of ritual, the middle stage of which would become central in Turner’s thinking. Van Gennep had conceived of rites of passage as involving three episodes: separation (when a ritual subject is removed from the social order); margin (when the ritual subject is in an essentially ambiguous period); and aggregation (when the ritual subject is re-integrated into the order in an altered state). Marriage and coming-of-age ceremonies are among the typical examples of such rites. Turner conceives of the middle stage as one characterized by liminality (from limen, Latin for threshold) and was struck how many of the Ndembu rituals he had observed, and initially subsumed under a functionalist paradigm, followed the same three-fold structure. The beginning and ending stages of ritual practice are interspersed by an intermittent period of seclusion when the ritual subjects find themselves ‘betwixt and between’. Turner therefore conceptually captures this development of ritual in terms of a pre-liminal, liminal, and post-liminal phase. Essentially aimed at transforming the ritual subjects from one state to the next (boy to man, girl to woman, unmarried to married), the in-between state of liminality is marked by seclusion and ambiguity. In the liminal stage, Turner observes, the ritual subjects are “neither here nor there; they are betwixt and between the positions assigned and arrayed by law, custom, convention, and ceremonial” (Turner 1969, p. 95).
The identification of the three stages of ritual is not a matter of mere empirical observation. Theoretically, Turner moves beyond the mere identification of the three stages of ritual by emphasizing the deeper meaning of the liminal state in conceptual terms of communitas and anti-structure. Adopting a focus that would lead him to study culture in complex societies, Turner maintains that the essence of ritual activity is not a celebration of the social order, but a successful albeit temporary escape from the rules and obligations of the structural demands of society in order to create anti-structure and an altogether different sense of communitas. As a new sense of belonging, communitas can be defined in opposition to social structure. While social structure refers to normatively proscribed social positions, communitas implies liminality, marginality, inferiority, seclusion, and equality. As Turner had already observed in his study of ritual life among the Ndembu, the demands and expectations of the social structure are not (no longer) in effect during the period of liminality. At the same time, Turner recognizes, this liminal escape into communitas is temporary, the fate of communitas always being a return to social structure, order, and law. Yet, structure in turn will be transformed, in an ongoing process, into new episodes of liminality and communitas.
Among the characteristics of liminality, the subjects in a rite of passage are structurally ‘invisible’, as manifested in the fact that they are given a new name to denote their ‘no longer not yet’ state. Symbols are displayed to express that the liminal personae are caught in an essentially paradoxical state of not here nor there, not living nor dead, and no longer in and not yet of the social order from which they came and to which they must return. The liminal period in rites of passage is an inter-structural stage during which the characteristics of the social structure are no longer and not yet applicable. During liminality, the ritual subjects are often hidden away in seclusion or disguised, deprived of their property, name, status, rank and other characteristics that operate in society. As a group phenomenon, for instance during collective coming-of-age ceremonies, the ritual subjects are undifferentiated and treated as equal and fully obedient. It is the simplicity of the social relations during liminality that provides the link to communitas.
In direct contrast to the idea of structure, Turner’s concept of communitas implies a form of togetherness that expresses marginality, inferiority, and equality. While separated from the rest of the community, the liminal subjects are brought together in a unifying bond that extends far beyond any specific social formation to involve ‘humankindness’ as such. Not only does communitas appear where structure is absent, each is a dimension of society in a dialectical and dynamic relationship. According to Turner, indeed, structure and communitas appear and disappear, continually, in a cyclical process. “Maximization of communitas provokes maximization of structure,” Turner writes, “which in turn produces revolutionary strivings for renewed communitas” (Turner 1969, p. 129). To explain this process, Turner differentiates between three types of communitas. Existential communitas is a fully spontaneous form that is free from all structural demands. Normative communitas is more guided than the existential form by it its own demands of a social system. And ideological communitas refers to full-fledged utopian models of a new and different society, often originating from the existential form. Although distinct in nature, each form of communitas is a phase, never a permanent condition, and a decline into structure is inevitable, after which period and practices of communitas will again be invoked.
Among the concrete instances Turner discusses as examples of communitas, he not only mentions the liminality expressed in rites of passage and the rituals of African communities such as those he studied among the Ndembu, he also turns to various cultural phenomena in modern complex societies. By example, Turner mentions the hippie movement in the United States in the late sixties, pilgrimages in Christian culture, Western literature, and the rites and ceremonies of the Catholic Church. Realizing that such cultural expressions are not always distinctly ritual in nature, and therefore not as deeply liminal and anti-structural in orientation, Turner at times employs the notion of the ‘liminoid’ to denote the quasi-liminal character of cultural expressions and leisure activities in complex societies (by example, music concerts, art exhibitions, and theatre performances).
Turner’s later work was devoted to the study of various manifestations of culture and symbolism in modern society, such as pilgrimages and carnival. Interestingly and somewhat unexpectedly, in the final period of his work Turner sought to strengthen his findings on the fundamental urging for communitas and the human flight to anti-structure by relating his anthropological work to certain recent discoveries in neurobiology. Specifically, Turner (1983) drew a connection between his ideas regarding structure and anti-structure as the two basic forms of societal formations to neurobiological findings concerning the left and the right side of the brain. In the latter model (regarding the so-called lateralization of brain functions), the left hemisphere of the brain is seen to be primarily involved with logic and order (structure), whereas the right side of the brain is in charge of creativity and innovation (communitas). As such, Turner thought to have found a physiological basis for his anthropological findings on the fundamental duality and dialectic of human culture.
In terms of its place among the great traditions of anthropological thought, Turner’s processual symbolic analysis can be seen to both be influenced by, and depart from, other theoretical perspectives. Besides the move away from functionalist interpretations of ritual that imply a reductionism of culture in terms of societal integration, Turner is greatly indebted to Van Gennep’s dialectical approach of ritual and humanistic emphasis on anti-structure in the spirit of the existentialism of Martin Buber. As such, Turner’s work implies a distinct shift away from the structuralism that dominated British social anthropology in the early to mid-20th century. Against such a structuralist approach, Turner embraces the role of human agency in the making and re-making of the social order in its manifold forms. The social and the individual Turner regards as mutually constitutive and, as such, he sought to bridge sociological and psychological interpretations of culture. In turning to the study of ritual and symbolism as a study domain in its own right, Turner also moved away from a functional view of ritual (inherited from the work of Emile Durkheim) as serving to maintain the social structure. In this theoretical move, also, Turner breaks from structuralism by conceiving of rituals as processes, not states, in a social world which itself he regarded as “a world in becoming, not a world in being” (Turner 1974, p. 24). By studying ritual practices and symbols in action, it can be noted, Turner’s approach also distinguishes itself from the French structuralist school (in the vein of Claude Lévi-Strauss and others) and its focus on binary thought categories.
The work of Victor Turner counts among the most read contributions in modern anthropology, especially with respect to the study or religion and ritual (Salamone and Snipes 2018). It is primarily because of the richness of its ethnographic orientation that Turner’s work has found much acclaim. Turner’s theoretical orientation, scattered as it is in its presentation and, indeed, developmental in nature, is somewhat lacking in systematic qualities. As a result, Turner cannot be said to have produced many followers devoted to advancing his anthropological perspective on the basis of a ‘Turner School’. But Turner’s processual model of analysis has nevertheless inspired research in a variety of areas of scholarship, such as the history of religion, medical anthropology, theological studies, and indeed political anthropology.
It is readily observable that in the development of his thought and research Turner turned away from the study of political processes. This abandonment of an explicit political anthropology was in no small part due to the excessive concentration on authority and social organization and integration in the conventional British structuralist approach of Gluckman and others. Whether they be Marxist or Durkheimian in orientation, such perspectives would typically approach the study of ritual in reductionist terms to contemplate on the broader societal and political functions of ritual life. Moreover, as Turner (1969, pp. 5-6) lamented, ritual activity was within such a framework more often than not altogether neglected in favor of analyses of kinship, economy, and judicial and political systems. Initially influenced and even dominated by this kind of functional structuralism, Turner would abandon this perspective following his exposure, empirically, to the ubiquity of ritual among the Ndembu and, theoretically, the work of Van Gennep and others who took ritual seriously.
As a result of its development towards a concern with ritual and process, Turner’s work is marked by a move away from the subject matters that are central in political anthropology. Even in his early work Schism and Continuity, in which the functional aspects of ritual prevail, Turner mentions, but does not independently study in any detail, political and legal-judicial processes as alternative mechanisms of redress besides ritual. Turner also did not devote much attention in his research to the ritual and symbolic aspects of politics. He wrote only a very short paper on the subject in a volume he co-edited on political anthropology (Turner 1966). Still written largely in the style of Schism and Continuity, Turner here mainly argues for the processual nature of social organization over the course of a succession of conflicts and conflict resolution. He thereby also remarks that political power in this developmental cycle is reinforced whenever political and religious leaders occupy a leading function in ritual practices. As such, Turner shows that ritual strengthens political authority, but he did not investigate the symbolic aspects of politics itself.
Moving beyond the micropolitics of ritual, a symbolic anthropology of broader political processes and institutions and their accompanying rituals can surely be developed in the tradition of Turner’s thought. It can be instructive and insightful, for example, to contemplate on the liminal aspects of political revolutions (Thomassen 2012). Turner explicitly allowed for such an application of his conceptual model when, discussing the cyclical nature of structure and communitas, he described the continual drift towards communitas as a “revolutionary” striving and thereby also argued that “the history of any great society provides evidence at the political level for this oscillation” (Turner 1969, p. 129). Relatively neglected as a theme of study in anthropology, revolutions reveal their inherent liminal nature in that they often deliberately imply a radical reversal of existing hierarchies. Typically enacted on behalf of some notion of ‘the people,’ revolutions also invoke the unwavering support of the crowd, the members of which are expected to participate collectively, without distinction and beyond stratification, in revolutionary action. Under the leadership of charismatic figures, revolutionary movements also require strong emotional identification and subjugation of any individuality to the common cause, even to the point of engaging in violence. Political revolutions, in other words, can be seen as historical moments of communitas and liminality, and are accordingly endowed with all due ritualistic behavior. More broadly, then, while there are good reasons to suggest that cultural anthropologists should never altogether abandon the study of politics, with Turner’s perspective in mind one can also argue that it is also and always appropriate for political anthropologists to take symbolic culture in relation to and within politics seriously.
Bibliography
Deflem, Mathieu. 1991. "Ritual, Anti-Structure, and Religion: A Discussion of Victor Turner’s Processual Symbolic Analysis." Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 30(1):1-25.
Salamone, Frank A. and Marjorie M. Snipes (Editors). 2018. The Intellectual Legacy of Victor and Edith Turner. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books.
Thomassen, Bjørn. 2012. “Notes towards an Anthropology of Political Revolutions.” Comparative Studies in Society and History 54(3):679-706.
Turner, Victor W. 1957. Schism and Continuity in an African Society: A Study of Ndembu Village Life. Manchester: Manchester University Press for Rhodes–Livingstone Institute.
Turner, Victor W. 1966. “Ritual Aspects of Conflict Control in African Micropolitics.” Pp. 239-246 in Political Anthropology, edited by Marc J. Swartz, Victor W. Turner, and Arthur Tuden. Chicago: Aldine Publishing.
Turner, Victor W. 1967. The Forest of Symbols: Aspects of Ndembu Ritual. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
Turner, Victor W. 1969. The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
Turner, Victor W. 1974. Dramas, Fields, and Metaphors: Symbolic Action in Human Society. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
Turner, Victor W. 1983. “Body, Brain, and Culture.” Zygon 18(3):221-245.
