Exploring the Work of Victor Turner

Abstract

Victor Turner broke anthropology free from cultural determinism when it was anchored in the reductionist theories of Durkheim. Like Tolstoy in his recognition of the origin of violence in government, Turner recognized the origin of the denaturing of cultures in culture’s own penchant for the building of social structures in order to perpetuate itself. He saw in the cracks between structures, and in the liminal gaps necessary for changes in structure, the revival of the lost immediacy of social relationships and the communitas that is its mark. Nowadays one may include signs of spirituality in those gaps, although that spirituality has been a topic previously tabooed in anthropological circles or hidden under structural analysis. Turner saw the inconvenient truth that if structuralism as a value and philosophy (plus what we now see as the violence inseparable from the political state, along with neoconservatism and neoliberalism—business doctrines multiplied by themselves ad infinitem) were to continue as the world’s philosophy, we would continue with wars and the smothering of the natural flexibility of social intercourse (see Robert Putnam 2000, who shows in stark figures how sociality in general is losing ground in our era).
 Keywords: Victor Turner, social process, rites of passage, liminality, communitas, anthropologyof experience, brain studies