The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure [Paperback]

Whether one agrees with him or not, ritual studies as a sub-field straddling anthropology, ethnography and religious studies begins with Victor Turner, and if you want to understand it you need to know this book intimately. Whether or not ritual studies has really moved beyond Victor Turner is a hot topic of debate for those of us who deal with this area of research...but whether or not you need to know him is a given, and it all starts with this text.

Victor Turner is one of the main anthropological thinkers, along with the likes of Claude Levy-Strauss and Mircea Eliade. Unlike other such figures though he speaks deeply on a single culture, the Ndembu in Africa. From this vantage point he discusses ritual patterns both those specific to the Ndembu and those of more universal scope. His thoughts are deep and rich.

There are two important contributions Turner makes to the field.

The first is in the sense of undifferentiated community he sees in the "comunitas" which naturally lies in tension to social structure. This concept is helpful in understanding ideas of liminality and how it is induced and directed in rites of passage according to the van Gennep model.

The second is the notion of antistructure, which is the active challenging of social structures which provides room for creative interplay between society and members of it. This also allows us to interpret ritual as a creative endeavor rather than just a repetition of past patterns.

In these ways Turner moves from the more purely structuralist works of Levy-Strauss and Eliade to a slightly more fluid work, building on structuralism but treating cultures as dynamic, homeostatic systems as opposed to rigid, inflexible ones. In this regard it is not always quite clear whether to treat him as a structuralist or a post-structuralist as he seems comfortable moving between both worlds as it suits him.

This is an important book. I'd highly recommend it.

Victor Turner is one of the great names in anthropology and this is a classic work of analysis of social rituals. He takes van Gennep's theories on rites of passage to a new level, examining how different elements of festivals and rites function.

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