Victor Turner

In this course

Turner appears here as a theorist of ritual liminality and ceremonial structure, though the excerpts don't directly quote him—they apply his conceptual framework to analyze the biphasic Zinacanteco calendar as a system of "unwiring and rewiring" social order through ritual performance. His work on how ceremonies oscillate between formality and transgression, structure and anti-structure, enables the author to read the year-end ceremonies as a dialogue that temporarily suspends and reconstitutes the social system. The reading uses Turnerian liminality implicitly to explain how ritual creates zones where normal hierarchies invert before social order regenerates.

Mentioned in 1 reading