On the Edge of the Bush: Anthropology as Experience (Anthropology of Form & Meaning)

THE ANTHROPOLOGY OF FORM AND MEANING

ON THE EDGE OF THE BUSH

Senior Editor J. David Sapir (University ofVirginia) Associate Editors Ellen B. Basso (University of Arizona) J. Christopher Crocker (University ofVirginia) Hildred Geertz (Princeton University) Peter A. Metcalf (University of Virginia) Renata A. Rosaldo (Stanford University)

Anthropology as Experience

Victor yarner Edith L. B. Turner, Editor

The University of Arizona Press Tucson, Arizona

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About the Author Victor Turner (1920 -1983) is recognized worldwide for his

work as an anthropologist and comparative symbologist. His research of ritual and symbolism took him initially to Africa, where he studied amongst the Ndembu, and then to India, Israel, Mexico, Ireland, and Japan as well. In 1963, he left a post at the University of Manchester to come to the United States, where he joined the faculty of Cornell University. During the next years he published The Forest cf Symbols, The Drums cfA.ffliction, and The Ritual Process. In 1977, he moved to the University of Virginia where until his death he was William R. Kenan Professor of Anthropology and Religion. In these last half dozen years, his interest shifted increasingly from ritual to theatre (where his formal studies had begun), from social processes to cultural perfor­ mances, -and from the "liminal" phase of tribal ritual to the "lirninoid" of complex, post-industrial society. His most recent book, From Ritual to Theatre: The Human Seriousness cfPlay, was published in 1982.

About the Editor Edith L. B. Turner, anthropologist, author, and poet, edited this vol­ ume of her late husband's essays from the perspective of a co-field­ worker. From the time of their first research venture to Northern Rhodesia, she worked alongside Victor Turner, pursuing her own special interest in the women of the various cultures in which they lived. Since 1983, she has been director of Comparative Symbology, Inc., and a lecturer in anthropology at the University of Virginia since 1984. In late 1985, she returned to Africa to do further research.

THE UNIVERSITY OF ARIZONA PRESS Copyright© 1985 The Arizona Board of Regents All Rights Reserved This book was set in 10/12 Compugraphic 8400 Bembo. Manufactured in the U.S.A.

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Turner, Victor Witter. On the edge of the bush. Bibliography: p. Includes index. 1. Symbolism-Addresses, essays, lectures. 2. Rites and ceremonies-Addresses, essays, lectures. 3. Ethnology-Addresses, essays, lectures. I. 'TI.Jrncr, Edith L. B., 1921 . II. Tit!_);. GN452.5.T86 1985 306

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ISBN 0-8165-0949-2

To Daniel, Benjamin,john, and Rose

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Contents

Prologue: From the Ndembu to Broadway

1

PART ONE

Processual Analysis

1. Aspects of Saora Ritual and Shamanism: An Approach to the Data ofRitual

19

2. Ritual Aspects of Conflict Control in African Micropolitics

43

3. Mukanda, Boys' Circumcision: The Politics of a Non-Political Ritual

53

4. An Anthropological Approach to the Icelandic Saga

71

5. The Icelandic Family Saga as a Genre ofMeaning-Assignment

95

6. Conflict in Social Anthropological and Psychoanalytical Theory: Umbanda in Rio deJaneiro

(I,�;)' 7. 'Process,-System, and Symbol: A New 1 r

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Antl ropological Synthesis

1 19/ 151

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CONTENTS

PART TWO

Performance and Experience

8. The Anthropology ofPerformance

177

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9 . Experience and Performance: Towards a New Processual Anthropology

205

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10. Images of Anti-Temporality: An Essay in the Anthropology of Experience

227 ----

PART THREE

Prolo gue: From the Ndembu to Broadway

The Brain

1 1 . Body, Brain, and Culture

249

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12. The New Neurosociology

275

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Epilogue: Are There Universals of Performance in Myth, Ritual, and Drama?

291

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PART FOUR

Reference Material

Bibliography

305

Index

319

W

hen Victor Turner died in 1983 he was in the full swing of a productive life. Our days had become so full for both of us that although it was my role to collect his papers for publication, I had not been able to work on them for some time. Now we arc able to present the first of two volumes of selected essays, chosen to represent the development of his ideas on process theory. The first six chapters are based on ethnography: it was from fieldwork that Vic drew theory, from the grassroots that he respected so much. As his principal collaborator in every field that Vic explored, I recall our life together at one level as a series of stories about the events that were steps in his development. For his readers it was a series of ideas; for me it was a life. It was just after World War II in Britain. Vic and I were living in a SY caravan, for a proper home was unobtainable due to the German P Y K bombing. However, we were determined not to be without books, so we would walk four mi��s to Rugby Town to visit the public library, wheeling a pram containing two little boys, Freddie and Bobbie. Vic had been in the army in the lowly rank of a conscientious objector, digging up unex­ ploded bombs. He continually worked with laborers and liked their type

2 • PROLOGUE

FROM THE NDEMBU TO BROADWAY • 3

of interaction. He even searched through books to find more on such real life interaction. At the library he found Coming ifAge in Samoa by Margaret Mead and The Andaman Islanders by A. R. Radcliffe-Brown; and he realized that tribal life was even more down to earth, certainly more socially integrated, than that of the British private soldier. I remember Vic as he read The Andaman Islanders suddenly resolving: "I'm going to be an anthropologist." So it was decided. First, he went back to school at University College, London, for his B.A. in anthropology. At this time Vic began to read Karl Marx and think about the dialectic-the essence of process. It so happened that Max Gluckman, professor of social anthropology at Manchester Uni­ versity, also used Marxism, especially in The Economy if the Central Barotse Plain (1941), which Vic read aloud to me while I was sewing the children's clothes. I saw the sense of this kind of anthropology and began to look forward to fieldwork. It was Max, on one of his preambulations in search of good graduate students for his new department at Manchester, who spotted Vic and offered to arrange a grant with the Rhodes-Livingstone Institute, Zambia, for fieldwork in an African tribe. Vic agreed gladly. He would be able to avoid static formalism by working out of Manchester. He was assigned the Mambwe tribe, a people in the midst of change, to study economics; but it so happened that Vic never arrived at the Mambwe homeland. While he was at the Institute he received a telegram from Max: "Suggest you change to Ndembu tribe Northwestern Province much malaria yellow fever plenty of ritual." Vic consulted me. "Of course," I said. I knew the side of Vic that loved the world of symbols­ but how did Max know? "We'll manage," I said, "We'll get shots and take quinine." And I arranged an interview with a doctor, who gave me the drugs and plenty of good advice. So here we were in Mukanza Village, making hut counts, village and garden maps, genealogies, researching personal budgets, and most impor­ tant, learning the Ndembu language. This was the "out trail," sung in poetry by Kipling; we both thrilled to the experience. We used to mutter to each other in Aldershot accents, whenever there was a titual in the village: "The drums, Carstairs, the drums!" I would reply, blocking my ears dramatically, "By gad, Fotheringay, the drums! They're driving me mad!" Then we'd go out and join them. During the years of fieldwork, Vic's training and background came into play. He had been exposed to the work of Bronislaw Malinowski and Radcliffe-Brown, and had learned that Radcliffe-Brown was a pioneer in his time, for he had broken away from pure ethnography to found a true social anthropology. And now that we were in the field we appreciated even more Max's dynamic diachronic approach, process anthropology in fact. Max had begun to outline some of the details supporting his theory, such ;1s the presence of cross-cutting ticN between divided scction11 of a

social group, and the countervailing tendencies that corrected otherwise harsh or dysfunctional systems. Vic was looking for just this. He was interested in the events of life, processes he could watch unrolling. Thus we aimed in the field for an extremely close-up view of process, a view informed by Vic's growing knowledge of Ndembu social structure and regularities. The striving of the Ndembu-their consciousness, their activity-seemed to ramify into innumerable complexities at whatever level of affairs they were engaged in, whether it was disputes over matrilineal descent and succession, problems of slavery, social change, marriage, chieftainship, or ritual. The organic interconnections of human life were visible in motion, in operation. Vic did n� _nly_�:Jct�lLlik.� .a theater gQ�J;._He loved sitting in the men's hut �h th;;- �alabashes; he . kne� that the "plays" he observed were serious-and that we ourselves in Western society should be more intimately concerned with our fellows, as the Ndembu were. In the second year of fieldwork, once we had started to focus on ritual, on rites of passage, on Ndembu awareness about their own rituals and about the spirit world, the theory of functionalism, that these rituals were designed as some kind of all-purpose social glue and reflected structural patterns, began to look inadequate. We had been reading Meyer Fortes and his work on the Tallensi, which indeed portrayed a dynamic system, but as Portes showed it, one entirely revolving around social structural require­ ments. One day-the scene is imprinted on my mind-we were walking ;�eross an old village site where Mukanza Village used to be (for the Ndembu move their villages every five or six years). No vestige of walls or house timbers remained, just a wide stretch of sand where grew little wild round cucumbers and mossy flowers. Vic started to talk. How could the ritual we were studying (it was Chihamba, in which we were being initiated as novices) be an expression of social structure? If expression were all that was needed, why did such complex cults of ailliction as ( :hihamba spring into existence? There was no call for such extraordinary phenomena in the existing social system. Social glue may be needed, but not this cultural marvel. Radcliffe-Brown's theory was not enough. He H>IW culture merely as a derivative of social structure. Ralph Linton, the American anthropologist (1936), was right, for he considered the social Nystcm to be part of the total culture. It was something new for Vic to di�cst, and it became for him a shift in emphasis. He need not explain the l'iddling talk of the demigod in Chihamba, and the curious way artifice was mingled with belief, even in the very making of the contraption that n·prcsented the god, as an expression of the social structure. He could now extend his field into psychology and religion. He would study ritual Nymbols in their own right-but of course he would not neglect to recog­ ni:r.c them as factors in social action, " a positive force in an activity field" __

(1%7:20).

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PROLOGUE

Fieldwork became our delight. Arriving at a distant village we would be greeted by the whole population, shaking hands and thumbs with us and clapping. I would find the women's kitchens, while Vic sat in the meeting hut with the men. If you listened you could hear the warm deep buzz of voices over the beer calabashes. They liked Vic. The women took me to visit their girl initiate in her seclusion hut, while our own three children played around the cooking fires. On the way home Vic and I discussed the going-into-seclusion ceremony of the previous week. "What's interesting," said Vic, "is the name of the spot where she was laid down under the milk tree. 'The Place of Death.' Then she becomes a 'baby,' and is carried backwards into her seclusion hut. She's sacred, and mustn't touch the earth.'' "The hut's sacred too. Her white beads-her 'children' ­ are in the roo£ She mustn't look up.'' And so we would go on, testing out ideas and listening for clues to help interpretation. When we returned from the field, we entered the theoretical environ­ ment of the Manchester School, functionalism. Max took Vic aside and warned him that his dissertation had to be on the social organization of the Ndembu (which appeared as Schism and Continuity in 1957). "Until you've mastered that, you're in no position to analyze ritual." Max had a very intense relationship with his students, a rewarding but sometimes uncom­ fortable one for those that felt his tensions. For preference he gathered around him those who changed him and pushed him on a course of theory that he was about to adopt anyway. That course was the further develop­ ment of process theory. It was A. L. Epstein (Bill) who gave Max the idea oflaw as process, hence Max's book Thejudicial Process (1955)-an idea for which he was ready. Social process was in the air continually from Max himself, who was a follower of Marx and the dialectic rather than Radcliffe-Brown's structuralism. Most strongly of all, process emerged from Vic's work. Vic by temperament was opposed to formalism and structure, whether British or French. He enjoyed what was earthy, what was fecund, growing, seminal. Many were the conversations between Bill Epstein, Max, and Vic. Max was a South African, a colonial, not wedded to tradition, fresh with ideas, not seeking after the prestige of the double­ barreled Radcliffe-Brown. One night in 1955, when I was nursing a sick child, Vic and Bill went off to the Victoria Arms. They both had be.en struggling with their dissertations. We had amassed heaps of facts, figures, maps, and genealogies, but they were getting stale on us. Was this the right soil to produce a living account? Vic and Bill drank their beer and from what I can gather cursed away at the impossibility of grafting the quan­ titive method onto Malinowski's "living talc" method. Vic did not want to submit tables of regularities illustrated by apt little stories. He saw the Ndembu system for what it was: full of anom:tlics, the fau lt lines that bred conflict. On his desk lay m:tny field reports of conflict, recorded under

FROM THE NDEMBU TO BROADWAY

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5

Max's instructions. These occasions of conflict had troubled the Ndembu bitterly-long, complex, repeated, reverberating conflicts, not little stories. The term "extended case" was an understatement. At some point along the developing process of conflict, the ideals that the Ndembu truly sought were often revealed. To explain Vic's ear for social life as a play, it would help to go back to his childhood. His mother was an actress, and used to rehearse her lines in front of his high chair. His head was full of lines and verses of poetry. Once when his mother took him to the dairy for milk, where a crowd of respectable Glasgow matrons in coal scuttle hats were waiting to be served, wee Victor suddenly shrilled out: "For lust of knowing what should not be known, we take the golden road to Samarkand!" All the coal scuttle hats turned around. "Lust? Wha's the wee laddie talkin' aboot? Lust?" His mother got him out of there pretty quick. Drama was in his blood. He was reared on Shakespeare, Aeschylus, Shaw, Flecker, Ibsen. Ibsen's plays were like Ndembu trouble cases; out of each of them shone some emerging truth, that the courage of Nora was a good in itself, that the pious Brand was possessed by a demon, not God as he thought. Vic was preoccupied with the character of his old friend, the sorcerer Sandombu, and with the odd personality of Kamahasanyi, both marginal characters made suddenly central as the focus of conflict. Their stories and the rituals involved in them were fascinating to the Ndembu­ these events were their great product. A new term was needed. Vic and Bill with their beer mugs before them wrestled with the problem. "Social drama,'' said Vic. "Of course." Returning home he wrote out his paper for Max's seminar next day, introducing the new concept. Next morning he made the wearisome journey south by bus to the mid city, then a change of buses and two miles south in the rush hour to the dusty seminar room. With controlled excitement he read the story of Sandombu: and he ana­ lyzed its stages-breach, crisis, redress, reintegration-the social drama as the window into Ndembu social organization and values. Now you see the living heart. Max sat, his hands folded on top of his bowed bald head. When it was over he raised his head, his eyes burning. "You've got it! That's it." Vic came home radiant. He had brought his dissertation to life after all. He quickly finished it, and then very rapidly it was put into press production, for Max recognized its value and had no trouble at all con­ vincing Manchester University Press of the same. I was conscripted to draw up the tables, to correct them endlessly, to put together satisfyingly CO!Jlplcx genealogies-while all the time both of us felt impatient to write the girl's initiation, Chihamba, and other ritual processes of the Ndembu. At last the time came for Vic to return to his previous insight at the old' site of Muk1mza Vilhlgc, his resolve to study ritual symbols in their

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FROM THE NDEMBU TO BROADWAY • 7

PROLOGUE

own right, then an almost untouched sphere. Both of us worked on the symbolic system until we understood it as one understands a language, though this was a language of things, of relationships, of patterns, never quite translatable into words. Vic began to write and deliver a number of papers explaining the analytic tools we were developing for dealing with symbols. These included the concept of the dominant and instrumental symbol, the condensation of meanings and multivalence of a symbol (derived from Edward Sapir, 1934), the unification of disparate significata within a symbol, its polarization into ideological and orectic poles (derived from Freud), and the manifest, latent, and hidden senses of a symbol. In "Chihamba, the White Spirit: A Ritual Drama of the Ndembu" (first pub­ lished in 1962) he wrote, ''At one time I employed a method of analysis essentially derived from Durkheim via Radcliffe-Brown. I considered the social function of Chihamba with reference to the structural form of Ndembu society. But this method did not enable me to handle the com­ plexity, asymmetry, and antinomy which characterize real social proc­ esses, of which ritual performances may be said to constitute phases or stages. I found that ritual action tended thereby to be reduced to a mere species of social action, and the qualitative distinctions between religion and secular custom and behavior came to be obliterated. The ritual sym­ bol, I found, has its own formal principle. It could be no more reduced to, or explained by, any particular category of secular behavior or be regarded as the resultant of many kinds of secular behavior, than an amino-acid molecular chain could be explained by the properties of the atoms inter­ linked by it. The symbol, particularly the nuclear symbol, and also the plot of a ritual, had somehow to be grasped in their specific essences. In other words, the central approach to . the pro�letr1_()f__ rit� aLh