Call for Contributors

Victor Turner and Contemporary Cultural Performance

(A book collection to be edited by Graham St John)

‘It will take many more lifetimes to trace out the multifarious and interconnecting ramifications of the stupendous interdisciplinary web of ideas that [Victor Turner] spun endlessly out of himself’ (Babcock 1984:461).

This collection seeks to accommodate contributions reflecting the wide application of Victor Turner’s thought to cultural performance in the early 21^st Century. A prime mover in the anthropology of ritual, symbols and performance, Turner made a prodigious impact upon a wide spread of disciplines – from religious studies to literary studies. Turner died in 1983 at the age of 63. Yet, as countless graduates and scholars maintained interest in the interstices and margins of (post)modern culture, applying and reworking Turner’s cultural processualism in explorations of manifold cultural performances, his legacy continued, and endures still. Inspired by the initial work on the Ndembu, and by Turner’s post-African scholarship, cultural anthropologists, literary theorists and other social and cultural researchers have explored the subjunctive, reflexive and communal dimensions of the limen, that experiential ‘realm of pure possibility’ apparent from ‘ritual to theatre’ and beyond. In the twenty years following his death, interventions on the interconnected performance modes of play, drama and community, and experimental and analytical forays into the anthropologies of experience and consciousness, have complemented and extended Turnerian readings on the moments and sites of culture’s becoming.

In the decade following Turner’s death Donald Weber (1995:533) stated that ‘Turnerian models of social analysis appear less helpful, less compelling than they once did’. In the early 1990s, such views reflected concern with the way that the limen was more a description of being than a heuristic device. Echoing Bakhtin’s utopianism, it had been noted that the liminal ‘acquired transcendent value and became depicted as that which was quintessentially real, a kind of primal unity’ (Flanigan 1990:52). Essentialised as such, the limen would highlight consensual and homogeneous experience at the expense of complexity and power contestations (cf. St John 2001). Despite the challenges of post-structuralism and post-colonialism, persistent deference to his ideas – evident in their application throughout studies of religion, politics and popular culture – indicates that the Turnerian model may be as compelling today as it ever was.

Investigating how Turner’s contribution has been renovated and repurposed in studies of contemporary cultural performance, this volume will be important to students and practitioners of anthropology, sociology, religion, politics, cultural studies and literary studies.

Contributors might consider one or more of the following, or other related, themes:

Communitas and Pilgrimage. Thought to most approximate the religious experience, and explained in The Ritual Process as a ‘direct, immediate and total confrontation of human identities’, ‘communitas’ has a long and tumultuous legacy. With the example set by Victor and Edith Turner, communitas would receive its most effusive application in the study of pilgrimage. Yet, it provided intellectual descendents with apposite frameworks for the elucidation of rock concerts, raves, countercultural gatherings and popular cultural events held at various global locations. Contributors might consider the breadth of this concept’s application across the social and cultural field, noting the benefits and shortcomings of the approach.

Postmodern Ritual Commenting on the fragmented character of late modern society, late in his writing Turner made speculations about the postmodern turn of culture, ritual and religion. Yet while cracks in the dialectical-structuralist model to which Turner was indebted (structure/anti-structure) were beginning to show, the shift away from this model was never quite convincing. In voluntary, idiosyncratic and experimental cultural products and commodities proliferating in the leisure sphere and in ‘the arts’ of post-industrial societies, Turner named what he called ‘liminoid’ phenomena. But if the ‘the cultural debris of forgotten liminal ritual’ (Turner 1982a:55) is now - as Ronald Grimes (1990:145) stated -‘everywhere’ (in the arts, politics and advertising), and if playing (and thus the sacred) is - as Richard Schechner (1993) observed - ephemeral, what are we to make of liminality today? Although near the end of his life Turner appeared to appreciate the ‘multiframed’ complexity of public events like the Rio Carnaval (1983), ‘ritual’ was generally privileged over other performance modes and frames. Many have identified difficulties applying unreconstructed Turnerian models of ritual to (post)modern mega-events which may be multidimensional, possessing ramified performance genres, and are not necessarily constituted by crowds of people with common objectives or goals. Can a Turnerian framework be adopted to help explain the accelerated and hyper characteristics of contemporary experience, ritual and the sacred? Is there a postmodern rite of passage and can a model of liminality assist its apprehension?

Social Drama and New Media. How might new media developments be comprehended via a Turnerian approach? Contributors could attend to the implications of the Internet and virtual reality for ‘social drama’ and ‘cultural drama’. What is the character of contemporary cultural drama, such as film, theatre and literature, which Turner held facilitated collective ‘reflexology’, performing society’s redressive function? What is the nature of ‘performance’ where ‘media events’ are experienced vicariously and characterised by virtual participation? What is the ‘sacra’ for contemporaries, and how is its enactment facilitated?

Liminoidal Youth and Rave Culture. Cultural studies theorists have routinely overlooked or misapprehended the ‘subjunctive mood’ of youth - the world of ‘wish, desire, possibility or hypothesis’ condensed as playing (Turner 1982b:83). For instance, from the cultural Marxist perspective in which cultural studies is rooted, ludic spaces and events are at worst irrational, frivolous and inconsequential, at best they are a shallow or lesser form of ‘resistance’. Yet is disapproval, even hostility, warranted where play – ‘the subjunctive’ - is central to being young, or youthful? And is it justified when play has become so thoroughly integral to youth subcultural expression, as most famously witnessed in the global dance, or rave, milieu – within which ‘make-believe’ or ‘fantasy’ is the context for subterranean community, millenialist desire, and non-traditional youth religiosity? Might the ‘liminoid’ assist clarification of carnal and transgressive festal cultures like rave? Furthermore, as a youth cultural performance, does rave and its various tributaries evidence the ‘re-tribalisation’ or ‘re-liminalisation’ Turner had hypothesized in, for instance, major sports and tourist events?

‘Apocalyptic Agency’ Redux? If, as Weber (1995:528) notes, it was ‘the heady promise of social critique and social regeneration’ inscribed in the counterculture and the playful carnivalesque of the American sixties which provided the principle stimulus for the ‘apocalyptic agency’ of Turner’s ritual liminality (especially that found in ‘communitas’), then could today’s ‘global justice’ movement, whose catch-cry is ‘We Are Everywhere’, possibly provoke its re-animation? Could anti-World Trade Organisation events such as The Battle for Seattle, or May Day actions, Reclaim the Streets and other contemporary ‘carnivals of protest’ mounted in opposition to neo-liberalism, re-ignite a model which Weber himself indicated went into retreat in the face of the rising interest in ‘identity politics’ throughout the 1980s and ‘90s?

Edith Turner. A significant contributor to the anthropology of ritual symbols and consciousness, does Edith Turner’s work complicate that which we might regard as ‘Turnerian’? Given the collaborative labor of the Turner’s – from their formative Ndembu field experience to Catholic pilgrimage – we would be amiss to forget Edith’s contribution to the ‘Turnerian’ project. What has been Edith Turner’s contribution to the (Victor) Turnerian perspective, and how has she advanced or shifted it?

References:

Babcock, B. 1984. ‘Obituary: Victor W. Turner (1920-1983)’. Journal of American Folklore 97: 461-64.

Flanigan, C. C. 1990. ‘Liminality, carnival, and social structure: The case of late medieval Biblical drama’. In K. Ashley (ed.) Victor Turner and the Construction of Cultural Criticism: Between Literature and Anthropology, pp.42-63. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Grimes, R. 1990. ‘Victor Turner’s definition, theory and sense of ritual’. In K. Ashley (ed.) Victor Turner and the Construction of Cultural Criticism: Between Literature and Anthropology, pp.141-46. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Schechner, R. 1993. The Future of Ritual: Writings on Culture and Performance. London: Routledge.

St John, G. 2001. ‘Alternative cultural heterotopia and the liminoid body: beyond Turner at ConFest’. The Australian Journal of Anthropology, 12(1): 47-66.

Turner, V. 1982a. ‘Liminal to liminoid, in play, flow, ritual: an essay in comparative symbology’. In V. Turner, From Ritual to Theatre: The Human Seriousness of Play, pp.20-60. New York: Performing Arts Journal Publications.

Turner, V. 1982b. ‘Social dramas and stories about them’. In V. Turner, From Ritual to Theatre: The Human Seriousness of Play, pp.61-88. New York: PAJP.

Turner, V. 1983. ‘Carnival in  Rio: Dionysian drama in an industrialising society’. In F. Manning (ed.) The Celebration of Society: Perspectives on Contemporary Cultural Performance, pp.103-24. Bowling Green OH: Bowling Green University Press.

Weber, D. 1995. ‘From limen to border: a meditation on the legacy of Victor Turner for American cultural studies’. American Quarterly 47(3):525-36.

Contributions will form chapters in an edited collection to be published in 2005. Contributors should submit abstracts (of no more than 300 words) by March 1 2004, with full chapters (of no more than 7000 words) to be submitted by August 1 2004.

For further details please email Graham St John at:

g.stjohn@uq.edu.au

 

Graham St John is Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Centre for Critical and Cultural Studies at the University of Queensland, where he is working on a critical ethnography of Australian activist youth formations. Recent publications include the edited collections Rave Culture and Religion (Routledge, 2004) and FreeNRG: Notes From the Edge of the Dance Floor (Common Ground, 2001).