The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure

Citation

Turner, V. (1969). The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure. Aldine Publishing Company.

Chapter Summary

The book is short, about 230 pages in the Routledge listing, and has five chapters. It grew out of a series of lectures. In it Turner examines rituals of the Ndembu of Zambia and develops the concept of communitas, which the publisher glosses as an absolute inter-human relation beyond any form of structure. He extends Arnold van Gennep's notion of the liminal phase of rites of passage to a more general level and applies it to a wide range of social phenomena.

Chapter 1: Planes of Classification in a Ritual of Life and Death

The first chapter is an Ndembu case study. By its title it examines the planes of classification at work in a ritual of life and death.

Chapter 2: Paradoxes of Twinship in Ndembu Ritual

A second Ndembu study, on twinship. The title signals that the chapter is concerned with the paradoxes that twinship raises in Ndembu ritual.

Chapter 3: Liminality and Communitas

The theoretical centre of the book. Here Turner takes the liminal phase of rites of passage, the threshold period between one status and another, and links it to communitas. The title pairs the two concepts for which the book is best known.

Chapter 4: Communitas: Model and Process

The fourth chapter develops communitas further, as the title says, as both a model and a process. This fits the publisher's statement that Turner applies the liminality argument to a wide range of social phenomena.

Chapter 5: Humility and Hierarchy: The Liminality of Status Elevation and Reversal

The last chapter concerns rituals in which status is raised or reversed. It applies the liminality argument to the relation between humility and hierarchy, in line with the publisher's statement that rituals can be arenas where social change emerges and is absorbed into practice.

Key Concepts

Chapters 1–2

• Planes of classification: the term in the title of Chapter 1, applied to the ordering of symbols in an Ndembu ritual of life and death.
• Ndembu ritual: the ethnographic material from Zambia on which the early chapters rest.
• Paradox in ritual: the contradictions that the chapter on twinship finds in ritual treatment.

Chapters 3–5

• Liminality: the threshold phase of a rite of passage, extended by Turner from Van Gennep's scheme to social phenomena in general.
• Communitas: the relation the publisher describes as an absolute inter-human relation beyond any form of structure.
• Structure and anti-structure: the contrast named in the subtitle, which the book uses to link ritual to social structure.
• Status elevation and reversal: the rituals through which people are raised in status or have it inverted.

Critical Analysis

Strengths

• A concept with a long reach. The publisher describes the book as a small classic and says it shows how the study of ritual behaviour and symbolism can serve as a key to social structure and process. Turner extends liminality, taken from Van Gennep, to a wide range of social phenomena.
• Ethnography and theory together. Roger Abrahams, in the foreword to the revised edition, writes that Turner argued from specific field data, and that the book earned its place because it synthesised continental theory with ethnographic reports. Two of the five chapters are Ndembu studies, so the theory is tied to material.
• A different view of ritual. The publisher notes that rituals were once thought of as vestigial organs of social conservatism; Turner treats them as arenas in which change can arise. This offers a useful counterweight to readings of ritual as only reinforcing order.
• Compact. With five chapters the book can be read in a few sittings.

Limitations

• Very narrow ethnographic base. The two case-study chapters concern the Ndembu, while the later chapters generalise. Readers should ask how far the concepts fit other societies.
• An unconventional, wide-ranging argument. The book began as lectures, and Abrahams calls it "exceptional and eccentric in many ways", reflecting Turner's range of intellectual interests. Readers should expect a distinctive argument, not a textbook survey.

Where It Fits in the Course

Within the kinship, religion and ritual course, The Ritual Process is a primary text on ritual theory. Stephenson's Ritual: A Very Short Introduction and Bielo's Anthropology of Religion: The Basics are short introductions that explain how scholars have approached ritual and religion, and are the right preparation. Stein and colleagues' The Anthropology of Religion, Magic, and Witchcraft offers ethnographic cases at an introductory level.

Douglas's Purity and Danger is the closest classic companion: it too is a classic about ritual and symbolism, but its subject is purity and pollution rather than transition and status. Bell's Ritual Theory, Ritual Practice is a later survey of how scholars have conceived of ritual and proposes understanding it as practice, and is a natural next step. Carsten's After Kinship and Lancy's The Anthropology of Childhood cover the course's family and kinship side.

How to Use This Book

The book suits undergraduates or graduate students with a basic grounding in the anthropology of religion, and anyone who wants the source of the terms liminality and communitas. Turner builds on Van Gennep's notion of the liminal phase of rites of passage, so a short introduction to ritual will help.

A practical order: start with Chapter 3, the theoretical core, and then read Chapter 4 to see how communitas is developed. Go back to Chapters 1–2 for the Ndembu material that grounds the argument, and finish with Chapter 5 on status elevation and reversal. If time is short, Chapters 3–4 are the essential pair.

While reading, list the features Turner attributes to liminal states and to communitas, and test them against a rite of passage or pilgrimage you already know. Then compare with Douglas: where Douglas asks how societies classify and keep things apart, Turner asks what happens in the threshold phases between statuses.