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Victor Turner

(28 May 1920 – 18 December 1983)

Victor Turner was a British cultural anthropologist best known for his work on symbols and rites of passage, and why people continue to perform these functions. Turner was also heavily involved with the concept of liminality and performance in theatre.

Born in Scotland to Violet and Norman Turner in 1920, Victor wanted to study poetry and classic literature at University College London. However, in 1941, Turner was drafted into WWII as a noncombatant and a conscientious objector (New World Encyclopedia). During the war, he met his future wife (and fellow scholar) Edith Lucy Brocklesby Davis, who was a “land girl” (meaning she worked in agriculture). In 1943, the two were married and had five children together. After the war, Turner returned to University College London where he completed his studies with distinction before moving on to graduate studies in anthropology at Manchester University. One of Turner's main focuses was the social hierarchy of the Ndembu tribe of Northern Rhodesia (now Zambia) and it was the focus on his dissertation- of which he completed in 1955 (St. John). In 1958, after diving heavily into religious rites and rituals the world over, both Turner and his wife converted to Catholicism, which also impacted Turner and his wife's writings later in life, focusing on performance liminality, which are studies that he would be associated with today.

Turner passed away on December 18, 1983 at the age of 63 in Virginia. According to the Royal Anthropological Institute and the copy of Turner's obituary that exists on the site, “Pilgrimage and festival were his [Turner's] two strong later interests. How lucky he was to have written so fully on both. The particular blessing was to have followed an integrating train of thought all of his life and to have held to it joyfully. For all the hard work and serious thought, a joyous personality is the memory that Victor Turner leaves behind him” (“Victor Turner”).

"A Review of "Ethnopoetics""

From the jump, readers are told that Turner's article “reviews the proceedings of “the first international symposium on ethnopoetics” as gathered by Michel Benamou and Jerome Rothenberg in a special issue of Alcheringa (Benamou 1976) (337). In particular, Turner is focusing on the proposed intersection between ethnography and poetics, focusing on how cultural performances and symbolic expressions come together and can be analyzed. Throughout all the arguments and ideas, Turner's position is how these ideas work into his work on liminality. According to Turner, “In my own technical vocabulary I would see ethnopoetics as a “ liminal” phenomenon. By this I mean that it is in a “ threshold” position, a betwixt-and-between state, like the seclusion phase in a tribal rite of passage in which the novices have been stripped of their antecedent status and have not yet acquired a new one and to which the categories and classifications of their previous sociocultural state have ceased to apply” (341). Finally, one of Turner's final points is that if disciplines and scholars are serious about integrating ethnopoetics into their fields, it would mean taking aspects, like acting and performance, as something that needs to be taken seriously in terms of study.

Liminality and Communitas

Since ethnopoetics resides in a liminal, or threshold space, ethnopoetic works act as “destabalizing agent… subverting established social constructs” and allow for “a space where humans may escape the socializing processes of performance and existence that is demanded in spaces that dictate social aggrandizement” (Bierdz, Tereszewski 346). As a result of the liminality deeply imbedded in ethnopoetics, one major focus is communitas, a shared landscape with “commonalities and a sense of belonging between people who are in liminal spaces (Fisher et. al. 254). This concept involves breaking down boundaries between cultures and dominant cultural narratives to seek intersectionality and new translations of cultural meaning. According to Turner, the communitas present in ethnopoetics serves to “make new models from the outpoured cultures of all people—particularly formerly oppressed or colonized kinds of people” (341-342).

Performative Nature

Although poetry not originally intended for oral performance can be considered ethnopoetic, the “reflexive potential [of Ethnopoetics] is actualized most patently in the performative genres” (340). This is because oral performative works are often intended to question the culture they imitate through their very act of imitation. Deeply held societal beliefs and assumptions about humankind can be examined from an outside perspective through the act of performance. Thus, “culture is remirrored by one of its own extensions—ritual or art” (340). In this way, ethnopoetic works act as liminal spaces in their ability to draw people into an in-between where they can examine their own actions and those of others from a third-person perspective. Crucially, Turner claims, “The more we are aware of the multiplicity of Others, the more we become aware of the multiple ‘selves’ we contain, the social roles we have ‘internalized’” (340).

Hall of Mirrors

A crucial metaphor used to describe the importance of performance for ethnopoetics is that of a hall of mirrors. At the crux of ethnopoetics is the multiplicity of difference within history. This difference might be imagined, as proposed by Turner, as a hall of magical fun house-esque mirrors. These mirrors all play different roles, “some of which enlarge, others diminish, some distort and some have images from all the others and passes them on transmuted or transmogrified.” This idea is present throughout the Serpent and the Fire anthology, which includes a large breadth of translational choices, from direct translation of one language to another to the act of transcreation, which reimagines and poeticizes the original work within the new cultural context. Turner specifies, “Within each culture is its own hall of mirrors: the social division of labor, beginning with sex-and-age-role oppositions, is charged with reflexivity, for although we are all members of one another, we are different members, both biologically and culturally” (340).