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Victor Turner and Contemporary Cultural Performance

VICTOR TURNER AND
C
ONTEMPORARY CULTURAL
P
ERFORMANCE
{
edited by
Graham St John
Berghahn Books
New York • Oxford

First edition published in 2008 by
Berghahn Books
www.berghahnbooks.com
©2008 Graham St John
All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purposes of
criticism and review, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any
means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any infor-
mation storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without written
permission of the publisher.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Victor Turner and contemporary cultural performance / edited by Graham St
John — 1st ed.
p. cm.
ISBN 978-1-84545-462-3 (hardback : alk. paper)
1. Turner, Victor Witter. 2. Ethnology—Philosophy. 3. Symbolic anthropology.
4. Performing arts—Social aspects. 5. Popular culture. 6. Theater and society.
7. Rites and ceremonies. 8. Pilgrimage. I. St. John, Graham, 1968–
GN345.V53 2008
306.48—dc22
2008007613
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Printed in the United States on acid-free paper
ISBN: 978-1-84545-462-3 hardback

Acknowledgements
{
This volume is dedicated to Victor Turner, whose life’s work provided the
inspiration for this collection and the various contributions to it. May the
work of this “incursive nomad” continue to inspire future generations of
anthropologists and scholars in other disciplines.
The book would not have been completed without support from the Cen-
tre for Critical and Cultural Studies at the University of Queensland, Bris-
bane, Australia, where Graham St John was a Postdoctoral Research Fellow
from January 2003 to December 2005. He is grateful to the Centre’s direc-
tor Graeme Turner for continuing support and to Centre manager Andrea
Mitchell for her excellent and most kind assistance. The School for Advanced
Research in Santa Fe, New Mexico, is also owed thanks for its support during
in 2006/07, when Graham was hosted as a Social Science Research Council
Research Fellow and SAR Resident Scholar.

vii
Contents
{
Victor Turner and Contemporary Cultural Performance:
An Introduction 1
Graham St John
Part I: Performing Culture: Ritual, Drama, and Media
1. Toward a Uniﬁ ed Theory of Cultural Performance:
A Reconstructive Introduction to Victor Turner 41
J Lowell Lewis
2. The Ritualization of Performance (Studies) 59
Ian Maxwell
3. Performing “Sorry Business”: Reconciliation and
Redressive Action 76
Michael Cohen, Paul Dwyer, and Laura Ginters
4. Liminality in Media Studies: From Everyday Life to Media Events 94
Mihai Coman
5. Social Drama in a Mediatized World: The Racist Murder
of Stephen Lawrence 109
Simon Cottle
Part II: Popular Culture and Rites of Passage
6. Modern Sports: Liminal Ritual or Liminoid Leisure? 127
Sharon Rowe
7. Trance Tribes and Dance Vibes: Victor Turner and Electronic
Dance Music Culture 149
Graham St John

viii Contents
8. Backpacking as a Contemporary Rite of Passage: Victor Turner
and Youth Travel Practices 174
Amie Matthews
9. Walking to Hill End with Victor Turner: A Theater-Making
Immersion Event 190
Gerard Boland
Part III: Contemporary Pilgrimage and Communitas
10. Of Ordeals and Operas: Reﬂ exive Ritualizing at the Burning
Man Festival 211
Lee Gilmore
11. “Shopping For A Self”: Pilgrimage, Identity-Formation, and
Retail Therapy 227
Carole M Cusack and Justine Digance
12. Turner Meets Gandhi: Pilgrimage, Ritual and the Diffusion
of Nonviolent Direct Action 242
Sean Scalmer
13. Dramas, Fields, and “Appropriate Education”: The Ritual
Process, Contestation, and Communitas for Parents of
Special-Needs Children 258
Margi Nowak
Part IV: Edith Turner
14. An Interview with Edith Turner 275
Matthew Engelke
15. Woman/women in “the Discourse of Man”: Edie Turner
and Victor Turner’s Language of the Feminine 297
Barbara A Babcock
16. Faith and Social Science: Contrasting Victor and
Edith Turner’s Analyses of Spiritual Realities 309
Douglas Ezzy
17. Challenging the Boundaries of Experience, Performance,
and Consciousness: Edith Turner’s Contributions to the
Turnerian Project 324
Jill Dubisch

Contents ix
Contributor Biographies 338
Select Bibliography 344
Index 351

1
Victor Turner and
Contemporary Cultural Performance:
An Introduction
Graham St John
{
It will take many more lifetimes to trace out the multifarious and interconnect-
ing ramiﬁ cations of the stupendous interdisciplinary web of ideas that [Victor
Turner] spun endlessly out of himself.
Barbara A. Babcock (1984: 461)
Held by Edward Bruner (1993: 332f.) to be the “archetype of the creative
spirit in anthropology,” a proliﬁ c contributor to the anthropology of ritual,
symbols, and performance, Victor 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 cul-
tural processualism in explorations of manifold cultural performances, his
legacy continued, and endures still. Inspired by the results of ﬁ eld research
conducted with wife Edith Turner on the rituals of the Ndembu of northwest-
ern Zambia, and by the post-African scholarship, cultural anthropologists,
literary theorists and other social and cultural researchers have explored the
subjunctive, reﬂ exive, and communal dimensions of the limen, that experien-
tial “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 study of ritual and the anthropologies of experi-
ence and consciousness (including that conducted by Edith Turner), have
complemented and extended Turnerian readings on the moments and sites
of culture’s becoming. This volume plays host to wide-ranging applications of
Turnerian thought in the twenty-ﬁ rst century. Here I provide an extended

2 Victor Turner and Contemporary Cultural Performance
introduction to Turner’s work before discussing the impact of Turnerian
thought and outlining the chapters in this collection.
Turner’s ethnographic method—what he called “comparative symbol-
ogy”—was shaped by a uniquely poetic sensibility. Few anthropologists, espe-
cially those writing between the 1950s and 1980s, made observations on
the social relations of their research ﬁ elds or developed theory with decla-
rations from Prospero, the poetry of Rilke and the work of Melville or in the
light of Kierkegaard’s philosophy of paradox. Yet this was the hallmark of
Glasgow-born Victor Turner, who, prior to entering the Manchester School of
British Social Anthropology under Max Gluckman, had studied poetry and
classics at University College, London from 1938 to 1941, and was himself
a poet and, variously, a Marxist, Catholic, processualist, mystic (see E. Turner
1985b; 1990). While his undergraduate studies in the classics were disrupted
by the war, a passion for literature assisted, perhaps compelled, a strategy
of repeatedly pulling away from structural-functionalism and the Marxist
anthropological script he inherited at Manchester
1
to embrace a more “in-
tuitive” and processual approach to ritual and symbols. A self-proclaimed
“incursive nomad” (1974: 18) who taught Blake and Dante alongside an-
thropological theory, who was renowned for his charismatic oratory in lec-
ture halls around the world (but particularly in the US, where Turner would
spend much of his working life), and whose “refusal to abandon the empiri-
cist creed while contributing mightily to the hermeneutic turn” (Frank Man-
ning cited in E Turner 1992b: x), Victor Turner made a prodigious impact
across a spectrum of disciplines: from anthropology, sociology, history, and
religious and theological studies, to cultural, literary, media, and perfor-
mance studies, to neurobiology and behavioral studies.
2
As a tireless inter-
disciplinarian, Turner was instrumental in the formation of ritual studies, a
subject upon which he is recognized as the last to “elicit a wide consensus”
(Grimes 1995: xvii). One of the principal reasons for this was that while car-
rying forward the Durkheimian understanding of “ritual” as an efﬁ cacious
socioreligious phenomenon serving to transfer individuals/groups from the
“profane” to the “sacred,” Turner understood symbols, ritual, and indeed
religion as processes in which individuals and collectivities were wholly
engaged. “After many years as an agnostic and monistic materialist,” he
declared, “I learned from the Ndembu that ritual and its symbols are not
merely epiphenomena or disguises of deeper social and psychological pro-
cesses, but have ontological value” (1975: 31–32; also see 1974: 57).
Experimental theater practitioner and leading performance studies pro-
ponent Richard Schechner owed a substantial debt to Turner. Indeed, a fruit-
ful exchange developed between the two: while the literary and dramatic arts
had become fertile conceptual material for Turner, anthropological mod-

Introduction 3
els of ritual would assist comprehension of theater and other performance
genres, a dialogue that proved critical to the formation of performance stud-
ies (see McKenzie 2001: 36) and indeed, what Ian Maxwell (this volume)
calls the “ritualization of performance theory.” This dialogue was particu-
larly evident in Turner’s From Ritual to Theatre (1982a) and Schechner’s Be-
tween Theatre and Anthropology (1985). Schechner was interested in Turner’s
“geneaology of performance,” possibly best articulated in the material pre-
sented in a lecture delivered at Smith College in 1982 and published as “Are
There Universals of Performance in Myth, Ritual, and Drama?” (1985g).
This was perhaps the closest to a condensation of ideas, which otherwise
lay scattered—often half-unpacked and revealing what Schechner (1987b: 7)
referred to as a characteristic “unﬁ nishedness”—within numerous research
articles and published compilations of essays and lectures, including those
(re)published posthumously by Schechner (1987a) and Edith Turner (1985a;
1992a).
3
Trespassing disciplinary boundaries with tireless enthusiasm, Turner
rarely paused to galvanize his ideas into a transparent theoretical model.
Paraphrasing Oscar Wilde, he remarked that academic clarity “is the last
refuge of the Philistines” (Babcock and MacAloon 1987: 19).
While an aggregated model was hardly Turner’s style, and while there
is no operator’s manual available for students, key ideas and trends are evi-
dent. Comparing Theodor Gaster’s approach to ritual theory with Turn-
er’s, Ron Grimes (1976: 19) identiﬁ es a “Janus-like” character to Turner’s
work, arguing that methodologically he faced, on the one hand, “towards
semantics and semiotics . . . and political anthropology or ‘processualism’,
on the other.” There is an indelible complexity to Turner’s contribution with
which students of ritual and religion have long struggled. But while Turner
“tacked” like a “sailboat beating upwind” (E. Turner 1985b: 8) into drama,
away from the earlier emersion in the semantic complexity of ritual, process
and action appears to have been at the helm all along. Turner strove to grasp
and reveal how society (symbols, conﬂ icts, performance) is actually lived by
its members, how symbolic units, social “ﬁ elds” and aesthetic genres con-
dense, evoke, and channel meaning and emotion. The path-breaking analy-
sis of the “bipolar” (sensorial and ideological) character of symbols enabled
understanding of how ritual constitutes a “mechanism that periodically con-
verts the obligatory into the desirable” (1967b: 30), and how, for instance,
healing cults like those documented in The Drums of Afﬂ iction (1968) were
affective and transformative. His work would eventually convey a fascina-
tion with the way sociocultural “structures” are produced or reproduced—
the formed, performed. And rather than pursue structural-functionalist or
depth psychological anlyses of such processes, a concern with the experien-
tial dimensions of symbolic action became paramount, an “anthropology

4 Victor Turner and Contemporary Cultural Performance
of experience” that would account for the way rituals—and later ritual-like,
or perhaps “rituoid” (F. Turner 1990: 152) performances—are critical to the
reﬂ exive (re)production of culture (not simply reﬂ ecting/expressing culture/
myth, or evidence of ‘cultural defense mechanisms’). In this approach, mean-
ing would be found in temporalized “structures of experience” (the Erlib-
nise of German philosopher Wilhem Dilthey) rather than formal categories
of thought (the “dualistic rigormortis” of the Lévi-Straussians [V. Turner
1982b: 21]). Religion was found in human action, in the expression of expe-
rience, and what would become the study of performance and experience
“was like catching the electron in motion” (E. Turner 1985b: 11; see also
V. Turner 1985d).
Since “normal social science” ignored “at least one half of human so-
ciality,” Turner sought to gaze upon interstices that “provide homes for
anti-structural visions, thoughts and ultimately behaviours” (1974: 293f.). As
outlined in The Ritual Process (1969), society is the product of the dialectical
historical relationship between “structure” (society’s status and role differ-
entiation, behavioral norms and cognitive rules) and “antistructure” (those
regions of experience in culture—outside, in between, and below structure),
between the “ﬁ xed” and “ﬂ oating worlds” (1969: vii, 201), corresponding to
“indicative” and “subjunctive moods” (1984: 21). While Turner has been
referred to as a “post-functionalist” (Flanigan 1990: 52), his scheme more
accurately reveals a structural processualism (itself conveying a sophisticated
functionalism). That such ﬂ oating worlds were necessary sources of resolution
(or redress) is at the heart of this perspective. The explorations in his later
work beyond, beneath, and between the ﬁ xed, the ﬁ nished, and the predict-
able constitutes an extensive journey into such performative moments and
spaces, pregnant margins, the cracks of society, necessary thresholds of dis-
solution through which sociocultural order is said to be (re)constituted.
The processual project recognizes that society is in-composition, open-
ended, becoming, and that its (re)production is dependent upon the periodic
appearance, in the history of societies and in the lives of individuals, of orga-
nized moments of categorical disarray and intense reﬂ exive potential. These
moments were, of course, “liminal,” a term rooted in the Latin limen (thresh-
old) used by Arnold van Gennep (1960) to describe the central phase in his
tripartite rites of passage model (separation, transition, reincorporation). Van
Gennep’s concept enabled a heuristic for concrete symbolic social action
resonating with the world literature to which Turner was exposed. Thus he
had subconsciously recognized rites of passage in the shipwreck on Caliban’s
Island, in Rosalind’s sojourn in the forest of Arden, in the quest for the whale,
Moby Dick, in the passage from guilt to redemption in Crime and Punishment,
in Oedipus at Colonnus. . . . In the journey of the Pandava brothers in the Ma-

Introduction 5
habharata, in Sita’s kidnapping and rescue in Ramayana, in Tolkien’s quest for
the ring, in C. S. Lewis’s Narnia, in Jack Kerouac and his beats in On the Road,
in unending passage from one place to another in many of the No plays of
Japan, each enacting the passage through violent earthly concerns to Nirvana—
let alone Mary Poppins and countless children’s stories with the theme of passage
to adulthood (E. Turner 1990: 167).
Excavating and reapplying this rich resonant concept, Turner understood the
limen to constitute a universally potent temporality, a “realm of pure possibil-
ity” (1967c: 97), a temporary breach of structure whereby the familiar may
be stripped of certitude and the normative unhinged, an interlude wherein
conventional social, economic, and political life may be transcended. A con-
dition of growth and potential novelty in which individuals, societies, and
cultures are periodically implicated, liminality would become the leitmotif
in Turner’s philosophy. Signiﬁ cantly, liminal conditions would be “provi-
sional of a cultural means of generating variability, as well as of ensuring
the continuity of proved values and norms” (1985b: 162). Not a “distorting
mirror” or a “cloak” for the operations of capital (as dialectical materialists
might have had it), antistructural liminality was said to “generate and store
a plurality of alternative models for living, from utopias to programs, which
are capable of inﬂ uencing the behaviour of those in mainstream social and
political roles . . . in the direction of radical change, just as much as they
can serve as instruments of political control” (1982b: 33). Thus the limen
would be culture’s revolving door—a framework enabling the possibility of
more than one exit, a protostructural domain where the abandonment of
form, the dissolution of ﬁ xed categories, and the licensed approximation
of a ludic sensibility or “subjunctive mood”—the mood of were, in “if I were
you” (1984: 20f.)—enables re-creation. Transitional rites would carry “the
essence” of liminality since, in these primitive novelty rides liminars may
be androgynous, at once ghosts and babies, cultural and natural, or human
and animal (1977: 37). And since liminality is essentially an arena of recom-
binant indeterminacy, “a fructile chaos, a storehouse of possibility” (1986:
42), it was understood to be “‘the realm of primitive hypothesis’ (Turner and
Turner 1982: 205). As Turner’s career became an exercise in enunciating
and unpacking this realm, elaborating on the limen’s diverse manifestations
and implications for diverse audiences, several themes are notable.
SOCIAL AND CULTURAL DRAMA
“Drama,” as Edith Turner noted about her late husband, “was in his blood.”
Victor’s mother, an actress, rehearsed lines in front of his high chair: “His

6 Victor Turner and Contemporary Cultural Performance
head was full of lines and verses of poetry. . . . He was reared on Shakespeare,
Aeschylus, Shaw, Flecker, Ibsen” (E. Turner 1985b: 5). And an enduring
fascination with the Icelandic Sagas, Greek tragedies, and Elizabethan stage
dramas forms a prologue to the conﬁ guration of ritual. While the “form”
of social process was identiﬁ ed as agonistic or “dramatic,” as is outlined in
research on the role of ritual in Ndembu conﬂ ict resolution and in afﬂ iction
cults (notably 1957, but also 1968 and 1975), the redressive nature of such
social processes found cultural form in the whole spectrum of performance
genres. With their phases of “breach,” “conﬂ ict,” “redress,” “resolution,”
and/or “schism,” “social dramas”—such as those apparent in Zambian vil-
lages, Brazilian Umbandistas and scandals contemporaneous with Turner’s
life in the US (such as Watergate)—are given the light of reﬂ exive attention
in “cultural dramas.” And these performances—from rites and festivals to
sports events, theater, ﬁ lm, and television, and indeed literature—in turn
provide fuel for renewed social drama. Life and art would imitate each
other according to a perpetual cultural feedback mechanism (1985g). The
redressive phase in the life of social drama is seen to have evolved as a “eu-
functional” attribute of aesthetic genres, which like “ritual frames” (Bateson
1958) or “metasocial commentaries” (Geertz 1972: 26), are thought to facili-
tate investigation, collective inquiry, especially into the historical and daily
exigencies, conﬂ icts, and contradictions of social existence. The “sacra” that
are “shown,” “done,” and “said” to initiates in passage rituals (1967c: 102),
Icelandic Sagas (1971), Japanese Buddhist Theater (1984), for instance, are
observed in this light. Variant ﬁ elds of performance from tribal ritual to
global leisure genres demonstrate the perennial reliance of culture upon
frameworks of meaningful action through which individuals—or “Homo
Performans” (“man the self performing animal” [1985c: 187])—relive, re-cre-
ate, retell and reconstruct their culture (Bruner 1986: 9). And the Turners
would be enthusiasts of global sites for the expression of experience. As
Edith conveys:
[I]n various contexts and countries, Vic and I witnessed or participated in the
Yaqui Deer Dance, Suzuki’s Japanese postmodern theatre, a Brooklyn gospel-
singing healing service, the Manhattan Pentecostals, Japanese Noh plays, and
other performances such as Kabuki, Bunraka puppet theatre, the Kagura dance
of divinity, and popular festivals, Indian Kutiyattam, and Kathakali temple
theatre, Wole Soyinka’s Yoruba theatre, Korean shamanism, Eskimo dance,
Indonesian Wayang and Topeng, postmodern Off-Off Broadway theatre, Car-
naval, Umbanda, and the Kardecism spirit cult in Brazil, the Jewish Purim and
Passover, the Samaritan paschal sacriﬁ ce, Easter at the Holy Sepulchre, Indian
tribal marriage, the Indian Sariswati, the Ik theatrt production in the USA, and
Chorus Line—the list goes on. (E. Turner 1985b: 8f.)

Introduction 7
In such performances, where individual subjects may become the object of
their own awareness, action is evaluative of social systems, and through “col-
lective reﬂ exology” society is imminent. Performances may then themselves
be active agencies of change, representing, thought Turner (1987a: 24), “the
eye by which culture sees itself and the drawing board on which creative ac-
tors sketch out what they believe to be more apt or interesting ‘designs for
living.’”
4

COMMUNITAS
For Turner, communitas was the (re)formation of affectual relationships with
co-liminars. In “spontaneous communitas,” individuals interrelate rela tively
unobstructed by sociocultural divisions of role, status, reputation, class,
caste, sex, age, and other structural niches (1982b: 48). Interaction is char-
acterized by personal honesty, openness, a lack of pretensions or preten-
tiousness. A term borrowed from Paul and Percival Goodman (1947) and
conﬁ gured to signify “a relatively undifferentiated community, or even com-
munion of equal individuals” (V. Turner 1969: 96), communitas designates
a feeling of immediate community, and may involve the sharing of special
knowledge and understanding—“a ﬂ ash of mutual understanding on the ex-
istential level, and a ‘gut’ understanding of synchronicity” (1982b: 48). This
immediate and “total confrontation of human identities” occurs between
ﬁ xed social categories (in liminality), on the edges of structured social life
(in marginality), and beneath structure (in inferiority).
5
The theme evolved
out of the life experiences of the Turners. Edith (1990: 168) notes how her
Glaswegian partner envisioned communitas in “Robert Burns—‘A man’s a
man for a’ that,’ between Huck Finn, Tom Sawyer, and Jim the slave, in
Bakhtin, in Chekhov, Jorge Amado, St. John’s Gospel and the Sermon on
the Mount, and above all, Shakespeare.” But there was also the camaraderie
experienced in the Royal Engineers defusing unexploded bombs with fellow
conscientious objectors during WWII (Turner 1975: 21), the impact of the
American counterculture of the 1960s, the inﬂ uence of Catholicism, and
the communion with Edith herself. It is clear from interviews with Edith
conducted by Matthew Engelke (2004, and this volume) that the long and in-
timate dialogue between the Turners (who shared a marriage, parenthood,
ﬁ eldwork, and a religion) was indispensable to the forging of theory. This is
apparent in Edith’s Spirit and the Drum (1987: 141), where, in a kind of com-
munion unlooked for, it is conveyed how she and Victor hit upon extraor-
dinary insights following their participation in the Ndembu “shit ritual”
Chihamba, intriguing because they appear to be insights about the universal

8 Victor Turner and Contemporary Cultural Performance
quality of revelation itself. Critical to Turner’s theory of religion, commu-
nitas was thoroughly grounded in experience, receiving its most effusive
application in the study of (Christian) pilgrimage, a ﬁ eld upon which both
Turners made a substantial contribution (Turner and Turner 1978). Itself ap-
proximating a “religious experience,” it was “almost everywhere held to be
sacred or ‘holy’ [since] it is accompanied by experiences of unprecedented
potency” (V. Turner 1969: 128).
6

In work published posthumously, communitas was discussed as the “ma-
trix of individuality,” a realm in which the “social persona” dissipates (1992:
149). As the “open morality of the individual,” this represents a challenge to
Durkheimian thought, which regards religion in a way recalling Bergson’s
concept of “closed” morality and religion—what is directed to strengthening
moral obligations. Adopting the more dynamic view, in a process wherein
the moral attributes of social personhood have been suspended, following
Kenelm Burridge (1979), Turner perceived the individual as a “moral inno-
vator” asserting autonomy, creating and destroying vested mores (1992: 159,
147). Evidence of the dialectic informing Turner, communitas was regarded
as an experience that “liberates from conformity to general norms” (1974: 52),
and normal structural activity becomes “arid” and a source of conﬂ ict if
those in it are not “periodically immersed in the regenerative abyss of com-
munitas” (1969: 139). In this scheme, communitas may become “normative”
(and/or “ideological” or prescriptive), historical eventualities that may trig-
ger further episodes of spontaneous communitas.
7
It was observed that while
“pathological” manifestations of such episodes “outside or against the law”
(e.g., rebellion) can transpire if “structure” (institutionalism, repression, etc.)
is “exaggerated,” if communitas is itself exaggerated, in for instance religious
or political movements, there may ensue “despotism, overbureaucratisation
or other modes of structural rigidiﬁ cation” (as in totalitarianism) (1969: 129).
FROM LIMINAL (RITUAL) TO LIMINOID (LEISURE)?
In the seminal essay “Liminal to Liminoid, in Play, Flow, and Ritual” (1982b,
originally published in Rice University Studies in 1974), Turner sketched a
“comparative symbology”
8
that, he argued, should be “wider” than symbolic
anthropology since it proposed ethnography not only of small-scale cultures,
but of the “symbolic genres” of postindustrial societies (1982b: 23). In this
project, evidence for which can be found in The Ritual Process (1969), anthro-
pologists were to harness “the methods, theories and ﬁ ndings of history,
literature, musicology, art history, theology, the history of religions, philoso-
phy, etc.” The ambitious project would look to the past—such as the “honor-

Introduction 9
able tradition” of predecessors like Durkheim and the Anée Sociologique, and
Kroeber and Redﬁ eld (1982b: 23f.)—in order to comprehend emergent sym-
bolic genres. “Liminality” was to undergo a conceptual transition of its own,
one aptly characterized by uncertainty. While the concept had been applied
to illuminate the central phases of transition rites common to small-scale
and agrarian societies (life crisis, afﬂ iction and initiation rites) and seasonal
and calendar rites, gazing upon the “ﬂ oating worlds” of (post)modernity,
Turner detected the presence of “quasi-liminal,” or “liminoidal” elements.
Often unacknowledged by scholars of performance, the liminal/liminoid dis-
tinction, was, like much of Turner’s work, provocative and insightful, albeit
speculative. Liminal cultural phenomena reveal the collective, integrated,
and obligatory ritual action of premodernity. While they are concerned with
calendrical, biological, and social structural rhythms or with crises in so-
cial processes emerging in feudal, industrial, and predominantly capitalist
societies with a complex social and economic division of labor, liminoid-
entertainment genres are shaped by new media technologies, rationaliza-
tion, and bureaucracy. Liminal symbols often possess a common intellectual
and emotional meaning for all participants (1982: 53f), and while liminal
events contain the potentiality for the formation of new symbols, models,
and ideas, they generally involve the “the work of the gods” (where work and
play are “intricately intercalibrated,” ibid.: 32). The liminoid, on the other
hand, occurs within leisure settings apart from work, is voluntary, plural, and
fragmentary, with liminoidality associated with marginality, conditions fo-
menting social critique, subversive behavior, and radical experimentation.
Some have acknowledged (see Lowe, and St John, this volume) the prob-
lematic nature of these categories in Turner’s historical exegesis. Whatever
their value, it appears that they are underpinned by contradictory disposi-
tions illustrating a Durkheimian legacy. The ﬁ rst disposition involves the
loss, or attenuation, and the second the resilience, or rebirth, of the sacred—
especially as it is transparent in “the orchestrated religious gestalt” of ritual
(V. Turner 1982c: 85). These are the tragic and heroic narratives. First, in mo-
dernity, the “religious sphere” has contracted, and, as a consequence, Turner
speaks of “the decline of ritual” (1983: 105), “deliminalization” (1982c: 85),
the exaltation of the “indicative mood” (ibid.: 86), and the loss of ritual’s “cul-
tural evolutionary resilience [which ceases] to be an effective metalanguage
or an agency of collective reﬂ exology” (1985b: 165). As an apparent mani-
festation of what Catherine Bell (1997: 254) identiﬁ es as the kind of “socio-
logical truism” that, since the mid-nineteenth century, would crystallize from
a “popular contention that ritual and religion decline in proportion to mod-
ernization,” aesthetic media like song, dance, and graphic, and pictorial rep-
resentation were said to have “broken loose from their ritual integument”

10 Victor Turner and Contemporary Cultural Performance
(V. Turner 1985b: 166). In modern times, where societies have grown in scale
and complexity, as the division of labor has increased, and as work and lei-
sure spheres are more clearly demarcated, the argument follows that ritual’s
power and potential for transformation has been denuded. It is largely the
perceived shift from collective, obligatory social bonds—as seen in rites of
passage—to individual voluntary association, which has foreshadowed and ac-
companied the emergence of aesthetic, fragmentary, liminoid genres (ibid.).
However, despite lengthy ruminations on ‘the Fall’, Turner was keen in later
writing to demonstrate that ‘traces of the original’ are found in the mod-
ern world, that the symbolic action of premodernity can be observed—albeit
through a miasmic ensemble of magnifying and distorting lenses such as
ﬁ lm and sports events. While ritual perishes as the mother genre, “it dies a
multipara, giving birth to ritualized progeny” (1982c: 79). At another point, it
was claimed that “free liminoid experiences are the cultural debris of forgot-
ten liminal ritual” (1982b: 55).
Not only was this essential social performance frame residual in frag-
mented memories, strong pockets of revival were detected. Assuming the task
of plural cultural reﬂ exivity, “a multiplicity of desacralised performative
genres” (1985b: 165f.) (particularly new theater, to which the Turners them-
selves were committed)
9
were thought to be emergent in the postmodern
world (1985b: 165f.), illustrating a re-turn to subjunctivity and a “rediscov-
ery of cultural transformative modes” (1982c: 86). There are signs, it was
declared, “that the amputated specialized genres are seeking to regain and
to recover something of the numinosity lost in their dismemberment” (1986:
42). Indeed in liminoid genres ritual saw undergoing revitalization, and it is
probable that Turner saw himself witness to the actualization of Durkheim’s
prophecy: “A day will come when our societies will know again those hours
of creative effervescence in the course of which new ideas arise and new for-
mulae are found which serve for a while as a guide to humanity” (Durkheim
1976: 427f.). The tragic decline of ritual (the sacred) remains a key intellectual
investment, forming the necessary background to its resurgence—its heroic
renewal in performance genres. For Turner, the depiction of modern secu-
larization becomes a strategic narrative—a condition out of which the sacred
(the authentic liminal) is rediscovered or relived. As he pointed out, “dis-
membering may be a prelude to remembering” (1982c: 86). While modern
history appeared to be the stage for an epic drama of the kind where per-
formance itself was performing tragic and heroic roles, in Turner’s ontohis-
torical melodrama, in one way or another—in fragmented and/or resurgent
forms—the sacred persists. As Grimes wrote, “the liminoid is sacred to mem-
bers of a secular society.” The remnants of liminality are now everywhere: in
the arts, politics, and advertising (Grimes 1990: 145).

Introduction 11
THE TURNERIAN IMPACT
During the 1980s and 1990s, on both sides of the Atlantic and elsewhere,
Turner’s ideas were received with a mix of enthusiasm, ambivalence, and
caution. Commenting on Turner’s waning inﬂ uence on American studies,
Donald Weber (1995: 533) stated that “Turnerian models of social analysis
appear less helpful, less compelling than they once did.” We could look to
several problems and tensions to explain this.
To begin with, Turner possessed an ambiguous status as a cultural theo-
rist. Acknowledging, somewhat regrettably, that “the modern is now becom-
ing part of the past” (1985c: 177), late in his writing, and independent of
the continental paradigms which would gain wide currency, he suggested
that he was inclined towards “postmodern ways of thinking” (ibid.: 185).
Given what Foster (1990: 133) identiﬁ ed as Turner’s concern for “straighten-
ing out” complexity or “getting to the bottom of [it] so that an orderly and
satisfying analysis could become feasible,” and his “somewhat mechanistic,
constricted, and impoverished” method of “decoding” the symbolic worlds
of others (ibid.: 125), objections are understandable. The continuing quest
to comprehend the ‘total’ constituents of experience (cognition, affect, voli-
tion), a “uniﬁ ed science of man” (Babcock 1987: 40) drawing him to Freud
(1978), Jung, and even sociobiology, seems consistent with a modernist proj-
ect. As Turner stated himself, while “prejudiced against system building,”
he was “not prejudiced against attempts to ﬁ nd the systematic in nature and
culture” (1985d: 206). Despite this “prejudice,” the ambiguity inhering to
this statement appears symptomatic of a postmodern turn, cues for which
are plentiful. Speculation about the experimental liminoidal cultural prod-
ucts and commodities proliferating in leisure and lifestyle spheres and in
the media and arts of post-industrial societies was consistent with post-struc-
turalist trends in the anthropological understanding of culture, ritual, and
religion. An implicit challenge to the modernist preoccupation with consis-
tency, congruence, and cognition, processual analysis forged a path beyond
British and French structuralisms. While recognition of the polysemous and
“multivocality” of symbols in groundbreaking work on ritual analysis (see
1967a) represent early cues on the trajectory, an anthropology of experience,
he contended, amounted to “the processualization of space, its temporaliza-
tion,” as opposed to the spatialization of time (what he called “spatialized
thinking” [1985c: 181]). Furthermore, there were allusions to “a multiper-
spectival consciousness,” and reference to society as “an endless crisscrossing
of processes” (ibid.: 185). The championing of disciplinary cross-fertilization
and recognition of the fragmentation of liminality into aesthetic genres, es-
pecially what he deemed the “hall of magic mirrors,” were inﬂ uential leads.

12 Victor Turner and Contemporary Cultural Performance
The semiotic, subjunctive, and reﬂ exive characteristics peculiar to ritual,
festival, and narrative genres alike would provide fuel for literary criticism
(see essays in Ashley 1990), and the contention that religion has generally
“moved into the leisure sphere” (Turner and Turner 1978: 35) would attract
students of religion, tourism, popular culture, and media. As Bennetta Jules-
Rosette (1994: 178) observes, with his later work forecasting “the advent of
postmodern culture, the dissolution of old cultural narratives, and their re-
conﬁ guration into heteroglossic performances,” Turner is a “genuinely tran-
sitional ﬁ gure” working within a signiﬁ cant period of colonial/ethnographic
change. With his oeuvre serving as a “bridge between the past and the future
in anthropological theorizing” (ibid.: 162), it appears that Turner occupied
the threshold between modern and postmodern thought.
While Turner’s structural processualism buckled from growing impres-
sions of culture as an “endless crisscrossing of processes,” a “eufunctional”
(V. Turner 1982b: 54) script preﬁ guring an “immortal antagonism” (an evo-
lutionary dialectical structuralism) persisted because, despite fragmentation
and attenuation, the liminoid (and play) performed the necessary ritual (or
“rituoid”) role in history’s drama. Thus, conveyed in essays collected in From
Ritual to Theatre, ritual remained an essential antistructural condition albeit
diversiﬁ ed and renewed in a complex grid of genres. And as this background
noise informed, for instance, the analysis of “social drama”—considered to be
“to the last simple and irradicable” (1982c: 78), or demonstrative of ritual’s
agency and telos—challenges would arise. Thus according to the “performa-
tive dimension” of history particular to Jeffrey Alexander’s (2004) “cultural
pragmatics,” Turner’s scheme does not address “post-ritual” cultural per-
formance, the elements of which have become differentiated, separated,
and “de-fused” with the growth of complex societies. In other critiques, the
resolutionary process implicit in “social drama” contrasts with instances
where rituals fail or become illogical, or where meaning remains elusive, as
in Erica Bornstein’s (2006) interpretation of a World Vision prayer meeting
in the development context of post-1990s Zimbabwe as an enactment paral-
leling the “theatre of the absurd.”
To the disquiet of recent commentators, even while ritual was function-
ally absent, or served as the context for meaningless activity, it (or drama
as ritual) remains a driving force in Turner’s historical scheme. The fan-
ciful particularity of this perspective was that ritual liminality (evolved as
liminoid) appeared to be both everywhere (in a vast range of cultural per-
formances) and nowhere (as “quasi,” perhaps not-quite-ritual, or once were
ritual). And since the sacred, the transformative, the transcendent, could
be simultaneously present/absent, possible/diminished, real/virtual, we en-
counter a particularly challenging layer in Turner’s narrative. The problem

Introduction 13
was observed by Grimes (1976: 23) who, researching Theodor Gaster and
Turner’s categories, questioned the view that contemporary symbolic acts
are best regarded as either “survivals” or “liminoid,” “since both concepts
seem to locate the primary phenomenon elsewhere,” being a “function of
their study of ritual in ancient and pre-industrial contexts from whose per-
spectives contemporary symbolic acts must be viewed as reﬂ ections, like-
nesses, or remnants of earlier or simpler ones.” In this model, while perhaps
ritual-like, commodiﬁ ed communitas and increasingly mediated events
could be evaluated as contexts for inauthentic, un-real sociality, “deprived
of direct transcendental reference” (Turner 1992: 160). Yet how would such
logic be reconciled with the advent of global media technologies (from satel-
lites and mobile telephony to virtual digital media) and consequential me-
diascapes transforming the daily lives of global populations, enabling and
enhancing the very immediacy, social spontaneity, identiﬁ cation, and sacral-
ity that Turner embraced as a human necessity?
10

Perhaps the latter demonstrate the resurgence of the limen in the present,
or that it never actually ebbed? Whatever the case, critics have noted that the
limen (especially as spontaneous communitas) seemed to be more a utopic
description of being than a heuristic device. Echoing Bakhtin’s utopianism,
social liminality “acquired transcendent value and became depicted as what
was quintessentially real, a kind of primal unity” (Flanigan 1990: 52). It has
been recognized that the ‘vibe’ of the American 1960s—the romanticism and
millenarianism of the expectant counterculture—had facilitated the concep-
tual birthing of communitas (see Grimes 1990: 21). As Vincent Crapanzano
observed (1984: 475), the concept had a “hippy ring to it.” Moreover, because
communitas was also derivative of the Turners’ Roman Catholic faith, and
was in turn a cornerstone of their approach to Christian pilgrimage, they
were reproached for interpreting performance (pilgrimage) from a theologi-
cal position, faithful commitment to which appears to have motivated Turn-
er’s late quest for a unitary “neurosociology.”
11
Indeed, in the introduction to
a special edition of Zygon dedicated to Turner, and addressing his interest in
the role of biogenetic processes in the ekstasis of communitas, Edith (1986a:
8) states: “Vic was a religious man, a Catholic; and I think it was a delight to
him before he died to know that God—Providence—had indeed provided in
the human brain an arrangement of organs with which to experience Him.”
If the limen—in this case the “cerebral commissure . . . limen or threshold
between the brain hemispheres” (V. Turner 1985f: 288)—held more design
than chance then there is little doubting that most scientists (social or oth-
erwise) were loath to accept such faith. But such disciplinary skepticism also
reveals the atheism endemic to anthropology (and cultural studies, etc,),
12

itself mirroring a Western prejudice in favor of rationalism. So when Turner

14 Victor Turner and Contemporary Cultural Performance
gave credence to visionary, mystical, or “Orphic experience” (1992: 154f.)
within marginal Western cultural realms (e.g., the transpersonal experience
of mystics, communards, and other experimentalists), he was a liminoidal
agent mounting, from within the privileged interstices of academia, a chal-
lenge to “normative” cultural frameworks that routinely delegitimate and
outlaw extraordinary experience transpiring beyond authorized religiocul-
tural frameworks, political arenas, and entertainment venues (from church
to parliament to sports stadiums and dance clubs).
13
This matter aside, critics would see the Turners’ Christian pilgrim com-
munitas highlighting an ideal and homogeneous experience at the expense
of complexity and power contestations. According to John Eade and Michael
Sallnow’s inﬂ uential approach (1991), as a “realm of competing discourses”
a pilgrimage may accentuate prior distinctions between pilgrims as much
as it dissolves difference (see also Sallnow 1981; Wheeler 1999; Coleman
2002). Competing with or complementing the limen’s implicit consensual-
ity, there emerged innovative approaches to modiﬁ ed or new pilgrimage
sites (see Coleman and Elsner 1998; Coleman and Eade 2004). Referring to
real and present sites of “otherness” and implying multitudinous discourse
and practice, Foucault’s loosely deﬁ ned “heterotopia” would be adopted as a
designation for contemporary sites existing in a problematic or antithetical
relationship with structure, although retaining the efﬁ cacy/potency inscribed
in communitas (see Hetherington 2000; St John 2001a; and see Gilmore this
volume). Others, notably Don Handelman (1993: 121), expressed reserva-
tions about the “ontological implications” of communitas, the potential dark
side of which (e.g., Nazism) he thought “frightened” Turner, who “avoided
confronting” such implications (see also Maxwell, this volume).
Weber has pointed out that the potency and ambiguity of the “border”
(and those subalterns occupying it) has, within American studies at least,
made the transcendent and apolitical limen something of a questionable
model. Indeed, the optative marginality implicit in Turner’s later digressions
is ill-suited to perspectives on colonial history and gender politics. Yet, while
an approach thought to privilege a sense of “social leveling and attendant
cultural bonding over what we now recognise as an encounter with identity
politics” (Weber 1995: 530) would offer a dissatisfactory heuristic for some,
illuminating rock concerts (Sardiello 1994), folk and countercultural gather-
ings (Newton 1988; Lewis and Dowsey-Magog 1993; Hetherington 2000; St
John 1997, 2001a, 2001b, 2001c), hip hop (Maxwell 2003: 214f.), raves (see
Takahashi and Olaveson 2003; Gerard 2004; and St John in this collection),
and Jamaican dancehall (Stanley-Niaah 2006), communitas would continue
to provide an apposite conceptual framework for extraordinary social expe-
rience. In a period when youth formations self-identify as “tribes” and fans

Introduction 15
of popular media icons as “cultic,” observers returned to Turner’s insightful
efforts to retrain the anthropological gaze upon Western culture. Theory
would be applied to elucidate “symbolic pilgrimage” (Aden 1999) and the
ofﬁ ce workplace (Letkemann 2002), to comprehend “emergency structures”
arising in the wake of natural disasters (Jencson 2001), and be instructive to
developing “strategic family therapy” (Holle 2000), “rituals of impartiality”
(D’Agostino 2001), and as Jencson suggests, “culturally appropriate” disas-
ter responses.
14
With varying faithfulness to or comprehension of the in-
tended logic, researchers have located an almost ephemeral liminality: in
sex (Moore 2003), illness (Dumit 2005), consulting activity (Czarniawska
and Mazza 2003), narrative genres (Ashley 1990), “media events” (Dayan
and Katz 1992), and sites of media production (Couldry 2000), in consump-
tion behavior and shopping malls (Zukin 1991, and Cusack and Digance
this volume), in “cyborg” subjectivities (Gough 2005), and in the cybercom-
munication of digitally virtual spaces (Shields 2003; Barbatsis, Fegan, and
Hansen 1999; Sant 2001). It is not only the digitally virtual that is considered
liminal. As “a threshold between at least one immediate lived milieu and the
distant ground of the other(s),” actualizing the ideal, realizing the possible,
and anticipating the ability of information and communication technolo-
gies to “make present what is both absent and imaginary,” according to Rob
Shields, liminal rituals have been virtual worlds all along (2003: 49, 11).
It is something of a paradox that, holding the logic of temporality, the
limen would become recognizably pervasive, so much so as to even possess
its own journals—Limen: Journal for Theory of Liminal Phenomena, and the more
recent Liminalities: A Journal of Performance Studies.
15
The theme’s currency
and circulation within performance studies and media studies would see
it become detached from its theoretical origins (e.g., Broadhurst 1999), de-
veloping a life of its own as an all-purpose tool. And, appropriated by New
Age ritual and theater practitioners, counterculturalists, Catholics, ravers,
and other popular music fans, liminality (and ritual generally) would break
free of its academic moorings. As Bell conveys, among all the signiﬁ cant
theorists of ritual, Turner has been adopted as “the authority behind much
American ritual invention,” legitimating ritual “as a universal process that
authenticates changes in traditional rites or empowers people to invent new
ones” (1997: 263). As “belief in ritual as a central dynamic in human af-
fairs,” as opposed to a belief in Christian liturgical traditions, for instance,
provides ritualists with “the authority to ritualize creatively and even idio-
syncratically” (ibid.: 264), a new paradigm is thought to have emerged. Ap-
plying these academically authorized accounts of ritual theory to ritual
practice, practitioners believe that “their rites participate in something uni-
versal. They consider what they do as fundamentally symbolic and having

16 Victor Turner and Contemporary Cultural Performance
much in common with the equally symbolic practices of Chinese ancestral
offerings, Trobriand garden magic, or Turner’s accounts of Ndembu heal-
ing” (ibid.).
Critical scrutiny of Turner’s work demonstrates how, not long after his
death, the academy would develop an institutionalized mistrust of transcen-
dent principles and universal absolutes, triggering a decommissioning of
essentialism. Yet, as Jon McKenzie conveys in his groundbreaking Perform
or Else: From Discipline to Performance (2001: 50), poststructuralism provided
a platform for the (re)invigoration of what Philip Auslander (1994) identi-
ﬁ ed as the “transgressive” or “resistant” theme inscribed in liminality—an
approach said to have constituted something of a “liminal-norm” in perfor-
mance studies (thus often denying the either/or pivot central to Turner’s
thesis). While the conﬂ ation of liminality with “resistance” within American
performance studies led to its representation as that discipline’s “metamodel
of cultural performance” (McKenzie 2001: 90), the indeterminacy at the
root of the Turnerian perspective appeared to preclude its entry into British
cultural studies of the 1970s and 1980s. If the cultural-Marxist scholars at
Birmingham’s Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS) (see Hall
and Jefferson 1976) saw working-class youth’s subcultural “rituals” and sym-
bols (styles) deployed to resist (re)incorporation or “recuperation” (see Heb-
dige 1979), the redress/resolution of conﬂ ict integral to Turnerian “ritual”
process would appear undesirably neutral.
Setting aside the fact that the CCCS offered little deﬁ nition of “rituals”
themselves, part of the problem was that the ontologically privileged status
Turner afforded liminal ritual removed “indicative” events and processes
from focus. Thus, what Handelman calls “events of presentation” (ceremo-
nial forms like state funerals, royal pageants, and commemorative days),
whose contemporary predominance, he argues, has culminated in a hege-
mony over the transformative work associated with rites of passage (1990:
79), were effectively dismissed from analysis. Resembling Michel Maffesoli’s
(1996) inﬂ uential attention to an “underground centrality” or puissance, which
is—by contrast with institutional power or pouvoir—the “inherent energy and
vital force of the people,” Turner’s ﬁ xation with antistructure generated
models of transformation/integration uninterested in ways the “symbolic
means of production” is controlled and managed (Alexander 2004), or how
the “indicative” or “ﬁ xed world” (capital, morality, the state) is mirrored
in special ritual/ceremonial frameworks, and in processes of commodiﬁ ca-
tion and self-governmentality that may alter the limen itself. Since, as John
Sherry (2005) recognizes, liminality—or what Sherry calls “the liminate”—is
at the “absolute centre of economic and political processes” and not, as
Turner (1982b: 54) had it, at the “margins” and “interstices of central and

Introduction 17
serving institutions,” a need arises to observe branded subjunctivity, nor-
matized performance, and domesticated virtuality. While critics might over-
look how “normative” and “ideological” communitas assists understand ing
of processes of sociocultural institutionalization, this is far from the critical
heuristics in models addressing, for instance, hegemonic, patriarchal, or
disciplinary power, or indeed what might be deemed the politics of perfor-
mance. In an effort to reevaluate liminality (or at least how this trope has
become complicit with liberation), McKenzie suggests that “the subjunctive
mood of the ‘as if’ [. . .] must be understood not in opposition to an indicative
mood of ‘it is,’ but as ultimately related to an imperative mood which com-
mands ‘it must be’” (2001: 168). This mood is indeed observed to feature
strongly in, for instance, “ﬁ lmic rituals” (Westerfelhaus and Brookey 2004),
the analysis of which seems to recognize the persistent power of liminal con-
ditions to afﬁ rm the sacra, and to reinforce normative, or in the case of Fight
Club, heteronormative, values.
Cultural theorists have begun making qualiﬁ ed rereadings and renova-
tions of the limen. Setting aside the uniﬁ ed approach to the individual, ritual,
and drama, liminality has been found to resonate usefully with Felix Guat-
tari’s ethico-aesthetic paradigm. Perhaps this is resultant of a “philosophy of
immanence, for which the primordiality of Being and Subject are brought
into question and overturned in favour of what we can best term a processu-
ality which is univocal, in the sense that no categories or conceptualizations
fall outside its scope” (Arnott 2001). As a consequence, the creative possibili-
ties inscribed in spontaneous communitas render it compatible with the lan-
guage of “territorialization,” “ecologies of the virtual,” and “schizophrenic
escape,” thus describing “the advent of a line of ﬂ ight which leads away from
the plane of organization towards the non-hierarchical and relatively dis-
organized plane of immanence” (ibid.). Inspired by Foucault and Deleuze
and Guattari to submit a theory of “global performance,” McKenzie himself
reconﬁ gures liminality in the digital age as “liminautical,” which while re-
taining the efﬁ cacy of the original, jettisons the liminal/liminoid distinction.
The distinction is assumed untenable since, for one thing, occupational per-
formance management has sought to infuse the workplace with elements
of play, and for another, with increased digitization (mobile phones, faxes,
computers, and handheld information devices), business and work activi-
ties penetrate homes, cars, and vacations, to create circumstances dissolv-
ing work/play, labor/leisure distinctions, and giving shape to postindustrial
liminality. For McKenzie
[l]imen remain sites of passage and transformation, but these sites are now
themselves in passage, their transformation becoming networked over many dif-

18 Victor Turner and Contemporary Cultural Performance
ferent borders: geopolitical, societal, institutional, paradigmatic, generational
. . . At the turn of the twenty-ﬁ rst century, the citationality of discourses and
practices is passing across an electronic threshold, a digital limen. Words and
gesture, statements and behaviors, symbolic systems, and living bodies are
being recorded, archived, and recombined through multimedia communica-
tion networks. Liminal and liminoid genres are becoming cyberspatial, ﬂ ighty,
liminautic. (McKenzie 2001: 94)
McKenzie argues that these “liminautical” trajectories, or “machinic perfor-
mances,” are, in classic Turnerian, either “normative or mutational” (ibid.:
197). While a Deleuzoguattarian account of the production of subjectivity
contemplates a different “becoming” from that of Turner, and while a criti-
cal lens on “the age of global performance” contributes to advanced debates
about knowledge/power, Turner’s insistent, though for many invisible, para-
dox seems to have provided fertile grist for McKenzie’s conceptual mill.
CHAPTER OUTLINES
Despite the challenges from poststructuralism and postcolonial studies, as
is evident in interdisciplinary applications, this collection demonstrates that
the Turnerian model remains as compelling today as it was in earlier de-
cades. Investigating how the perspective has been reanimated, renovated,
and repurposed in studies of contemporary cultural performance and expe-
rience, the volume presents chapters in four parts.
Part One, “Performing Culture,” attends to reconﬁ gurations of Turn-
erian theory in response to contemporary cultural performance with par-
ticular attention to the intersections of ritual, drama, and media. In Chapter
One, “Toward a Uniﬁ ed Theory of Cultural Performance,” J. Lowell Lewis
undertakes a productive revision of Turner’s ideas in the light of shortcom-
ings and inconsistencies identiﬁ ed in the Turnerian approach. While Lewis
follows Turner, suggesting that the duality of special events vs. everyday life is
central to understanding cultural performance, some “special events” serv-
ing to reinforce structural conditions (e.g., ceremonies) are conveniently
excluded from Turner’s dialectic, while others arise “as exercises in enjoy-
ment, excitement, and illumination” (e.g., festivals) rather than as responses
to dramatic crises, and others still (e.g., games and sports) cannot be ade-
quately interpreted according to the rites of passage model. Simultaneously
reinforcing/contesting normativity, Lewis considers play (a different order
of experience than ritual) to hold greater explanatory power for many spe-
cial events than Turner’s enduring passage/redress perspective. Desiring a
balance to the “liberatory, redemptive strain” of Turner’s approach, it is

Introduction 19
further suggested that some events create “obfuscation, mystiﬁ cation, con-
fusion, sensational excess, or rampant escapism.” Arguing that communitas
may be the context for “rejection” and “revulsion” rather than liberation,
Lewis presages the approach taken by Ian Maxwell in Chapter Two. Though
not explicitly stated by the author, in “The Ritualization of Performance
(Studies)” Maxwell offers something of a response to Ron Grimes’ prefaced
question in his revised edition of Beginnings in Ritual Studies (1995: xxii): “how
are ritual processes manipulated for the purpose of abuse and oppression,
both personal and collective . . . what are the symptoms of a ‘sick’ ritual?”
Maxwell introduces readers to the sphere of Turner’s greatest inﬂ uence:
performance studies. With the assistance of Jon McKenzie, he notes how
the crucial Turner/Schechner dialogue would see the discipline’s object
and method become synonymous with liberatory efﬁ cacy. While embrac-
ing Turner’s “attempt to push towards a phenomenology of cultural perfor-
mance,” Maxwell argues that the “liberation theology of salvation” inherent
to liminality overlooks the possibility that performance can “effect radically
dystopian change,” cautioning about what is “altogether darker and danger-
ous at the heart of communitas.” While the fascistic Nuremburg rallies offer
obvious counterpoint to the grace and wholesomeness implicit to Turner’s
“communitas,” it is demonstrated that pervasive experiences outside the
“liminal-norm” can be found closer to home. Offering recollections of two
diverse Sydney performance experiences committed to memory, Maxwell’s
accounts serve to indicate the oppressive and dangerous implications of
liminal sociality, showing that performers may deviate or recoil from an oth-
erwise alluring “undifferentiated, homogenous whole in which individuals
confront one another integrally” (Turner 1969: 177).
The theme of performative efﬁ cacy lies at the heart of Chapter Three,
“Performing ‘Sorry Business’: Reconciliation and Redressive Action,” by
Michael Cohen, Paul Dwyer, and Laura Ginters. If liminality constitutes an
unsettled, unsettling, and ambiguous movement between ﬁ xed points, and
if this is as applicable to the historical trajectories of societies as it is to the
biography of individuals, then we can observe the contemporary “recon-
ciliatory” climate within settler nations like Australia approximating such
temporal unsettlement. Demonstrating inﬂ uences from Turner and Baz
Kershaw, the authors consider conditions under which the “potential socio-
political efﬁ cacy” of performance may be actualized. The circumstance with
which they are taken is “Australia’s longest running social drama”: the his-
tory of the continent’s colonization, particularly recent performances on
this stage. While settlement (involving dispossession and displacement of
indigenous inhabitants) has set in train a social drama of epic proportions,
events in the 1990s triggered an unprecedented popularizing of the “crisis”

20 Victor Turner and Contemporary Cultural Performance
and legitimate efforts at settler “redress.” While such efforts were hindered
by the Howard Government, popular performances arose within a climate
of indigenous/nonindigenous “reconciliation.” The authors critically dis-
cuss the “People’s Walk for Reconciliation” across Sydney Harbour Bridge,
contemporary indigenous theater (the productions Stolen and Aliwa ), and
the Olympic Games’ opening ceremony as diverse cultural dramas where
indigenous and nonindigenous Australians have made efforts at “negotiat-
ing together a response to what is shared in their history.”
One of the signiﬁ cant aspects of the Olympics opening ceremony—the
planet’s most popular spectacle—is the mediatization of the performance (as
an indelible part of the performance). The impact of television and other
media on contemporary social life, particularly the performative implica-
tions of this media and the imputation that media is ritual, has stimulated
research enlisting Turner’s ideas (with varying degrees of sophistication).
As Mihai Coman points out in Chapter Four, “Liminality in Media Stud-
ies: From Everyday Life to Media Events,” increasingly popular positions,
held within the discipline of media studies, that practices of media produc-
tion and consumption constitute liminal ritual are generally unconvincing
since they tend to appropriate Turnerisms without the theory and with
little or no supportive ethnographic grounding. In his own work, Coman
ﬁ nds a Turnerian framework appropriate since “the mass media creates a
liminal, subjunctive framework, a framework for symbolically experiencing
possible ways of articulating social life.” For instance, during the period of
instability in Romania (1990-1992), the mass media were both triggers and
tools for creating and maintaining liminal social conditions. Applying the
Turnerian analysis to contemporary social worlds made complex by media
and the mediatization of culture, in Chapter Five, “Social Drama in a Me-
diatized World,” Simon Cottle offers a response to problems identiﬁ ed by
Coman. As ever newer media become deeply implicated in the sociocultural
drama of the present, we could replace “each society’s” with “each era’s” in
Turner’s comment that “each society’s social drama could be expected to
have its own style” (1985a: 74). As Cottle argues, since contemporary pub-
lic rituals are “enacted on the media stage . . . performed within differenti-
ated and globalizaing media ecologies,” mediatized social dramas ensue.
Turner’s attention to extended performances unfolding in response to crises
in public life makes his approach more appropriate, according to Cottle,
than studies of “media events” and “media spectacles” in comprehending
exceptional media phenomena like what transpired in the wake of the rac-
ist murder of black teenager Stephen Lawrence (in the UK). Cottle adds an
“ebbing/reviviﬁ cation” phase to the “social drama” sequence since, as evinced
by the preﬁ x “post,” some social dramas “become embedded as historical ref-

Introduction 21
erence point, political benchmark, and cultural residue” long after “schism/
reintegration.”
Part Two, “Popular Culture and Rites of Passage,” attends to studies of
contemporary transition rites. Unfortunately, Turner never really did get
to “make more precise these crude, almost medieval maps I have been un-
rolling of the obscure liminal and liminoid regions which lie around our
comfortable village of the sociologically known, proven, tried, and tested”
(1982b: 55). Offering insights on passage experience within the contempo-
rary, popular media studies can illuminate inconsistencies in Turner’s spec-
ulative and “crude” liminal/liminoid distinction (in which television is cast
as liminoidal). Take, for example, the popular “reality TV” series Survivor. A
game involving selected contestants who elect to give up their normal lives
(family, friends, home, job, etc.) for up to forty days of isolation, personal de-
privation, and collective ordeals in “primitive conditions,” and with viewers
choosing to invest their commitment, the program is technically liminoidal.
However, since it is a powerful pedagogical vehicle for transmitting the rules
and appropriate conduct of market capitalism (ruthless individualism, cor-
poratism, and acquisitive materialism) to both players and home viewers,
the series approximates deﬁ nitive aspects of the liminal experience.
While ﬁ lm and television studies could offer useful insights in this area,
an interrogation of Turner’s liminal/liminoid (and the supporting “ergic-
ludic/anergic-ludic” dichotomy) is taken up here by Sharon Rowe. Disputing
Turner (and diverging from Lewis, this volume), in Chapter Six, “Modern
Sports: Liminal Ritual or Liminoid Leisure?” Rowe argues that modern
sports events are decidedly liminal phenomena. In Turner’s scheme, as secu-
lar leisure phenomena characterized by optative practice, sports are inca-
pable of “supporting a context sufﬁ cient to sustain the shared beliefs and
visions” linking participants/spectators to a transcendent reality. But identi-
fying the various “collective” dimensions of sport, and its equivalence to the
“eufunctional” aspect of liminal phenomena, Rowe argues that sports events
possess a “doubled double-edged capacity to present ourselves to ourselves
in our sheer potentiality while at the same time conserving cherished im-
ages of what we are.” Exemplifying the dynamic Turner characterized by
the term “ergic-ludic” (work-play), sport’s paradoxical context of choice and
duty is shared with other realms of contemporary cultural performance.
In Chapter Seven, “Trance Tribes and Dance Vibes,” my investigation
of a subgenre of electronic dance music culture, trance (or psytrance), is
informed by Turnerian insights despite noted discrepancies in the liminal/
liminoid formulations. One of Turner’s principal insights, developed during
the radical cultural upheaval of the 1960s, was that liminality/communitas
potentiates a freedom from (routine/convention/structure) and a freedom to

22 Victor Turner and Contemporary Cultural Performance
(experience and explore otherness/alternatives). Not only have there evolved
performance genres dedicated to facilitating such freedoms, but counter-
cultures are inventing dance “rituals” (“trance parties”) in order to (re)live
a “tribal” experience (“the vibe”). While participation is voluntary, par-
ticipants commit to the party “vibe” and defer to various cultural authori-
ties. And while trance dance parties reclaim the sacred via a dedication to
changelessness, they are, all the same, transitional worlds generative of al-
ternative cultural forms.
If “experience” is the realm to which Turner gravitated, then it is rea-
sonable to assume that his anthropology would be appealing for studies of
contemporary youth, for whom experience constitutes an ultimate concern. In
Chapter Eight, Amie Matthews investigates an increasingly popular leisure
pursuit through which young people seek and obtain experience. In “Back-
packing as a Contemporary Rite of Passage: Victor Turner and Youth Travel
Practices,” Matthews indicates that backpacking in one response to grow-
ing desires for the experience of freedom (personal liberty) and authenticity
(“realness”) necessitated by the “ambivalence, uncertainty, and sense of loss
felt under modernity.” Extended overseas travel is regarded as a “secular
rite of passage” for young people, a liminoidal process involving the rapid
acquisition of experiential knowledge within extraordinary and sometimes
risk-laden circumstances potentiating “a sense of solidarity and community
between a diverse group of individuals,” and assisting “the development of
reﬂ exive and potentially cosmopolitan youth identities.” The experiences of
“breaking out,” “living large,” and “being more” identiﬁ ed within backpack-
ing resonate with the commitment to “going hard” and being “out there”
that I identiﬁ ed among trance habitués, and since involvement in the latter
may also involve travel (backpacking) and risk taking, the connection is not
coincidental.
In an example of passage ritual within an educational (as opposed to
leisure) context, in Chapter Nine, “Walking to Hill End with Victor Turner:
A Theater-Making Immersion Event,” Gerard Boland introduces what he
calls a “weekend immersion event” experienced by all three years of un-
dergraduate cohorts in a unique theater/media studies course run by Bo-
land at Charles Sturt University, NSW, Australia. Operating for over ﬁ fteen
years and now becoming known as the “Hill End Project,” the event is both
invented ritual and normative communitas within a higher learning con-
text. Boland employs Turner’s ideas to interpret the process by which young
theater students are transformed (ideally) into courageous, creative, and
co operative practitioners, through a serious of “neoliminal” performances,
or “physical, psychic, and social threshold crossings,” involving site-speciﬁ c
and improvised theater near Bathurst’s Turon River and in the context of

Introduction 23
a historic gold mining town, Hill End. While Boland’s “Walkers,” like Mat-
thews’s backpackers, are removed from the routine and transferred to an
alternative experiential interzone, their passage is a unique component of
a higher educational requirement suggesting that, by comparison to back-
packing and other optative adventures of contemporary life, this invented
ritual possesses strong liminal characteristics. This unique pedagogical
ritual, where student neophytes traverse unpredictable and challenging ter-
rain, represents a theatricalized threshold with signiﬁ cant social and cul-
tural implications.
Discussion of travel and passage in the contemporary carries to Part
Three, “Contemporary Pilgrimage and Communitas” where contributions
comment upon the intersections of communitas, pilgrimage, and passage.
A signiﬁ cant destination for alternative experience transpires annually in
Nevada’s Black Rock Desert at the countercultural festival known as Burn-
ing Man. In Chapter Ten, “Of Ordeals and Operas: Reﬂ exive Ritualizing at
the Burning Man Festival,” Lee Gilmore demonstrates the applicability of
the Turnerian perspective to Burning Man in a way that also problematizes
the paradigm. Burning Man possesses traits characteristic of a rite of pas-
sage (and/or pilgrimage), including the “release from mundane structures,”
the movement of “Burners” from “center to periphery,” participant ordeals,
a “homogenization of status,” reﬂ ection on the meaning of basic religious
and cultural values, and reaggregation in “decompression” events. Yet, as
Gilmore observes, since Burning Man’s temporary desert city imports and
replicates civic infrastructure and urban comforts, separation from the mun-
dane may be cursory. Furthermore, since participants frame and construct
their experience of the event in multitudinous ways, and class and status
differences are reproduced in situ, communitas is jeopardized and under-
mined by the event’s “deeply heterogeneous” (or “heterotopic”) character.
While Gilmore is cautious, the resonance between Turnerian theory and the
event is striking. She recognizes that Turnerisms often “speak” so viscerally
to participants precisely because the formulations were in part shaped and
buoyed by the counterculture from which Burning Man and its participants
draw heritage. As a site for the “recursive absorption of ritual theory” in con-
temporary efforts to create innovative rites “ideologically positioned outside
of more traditional religious contexts,” Burning Man illustrates the cultural
ﬁ ltration of Turnerian thought, with on-site performances demonstrating
how popular theory has authorized “contemporary ideas about what ritual is
and how it should transpire.”
While Burning Man offers a liminal break from the marketplace, it
could be argued that the marketplace is the “realm of pure possibility” since
individualism has altered what we understand and experience as religious

24 Victor Turner and Contemporary Cultural Performance
practice and the sacred has become uncoupled from institutional religion.
In a world where consumption has a critical role in the re-production of (the
now sacred) Self, the temples to what Russell Belk refers to as “consump-
tion sacredness” are shopping malls. In Chapter Eleven, “Shopping for a
Self: Pilgrimage, Identity Formation, and Retail Therapy,” Justine Digance
and Carole M Cusack argue that the quest for Self drives “shopping pil-
grims” toward these sacred centers of the West. “Consumption pilgrimage”
is investigated in the context of a secondary school girl’s Formal Fashion
Spectacular at Sydney’s Queen Victoria Building (reinvented as a shopping
plaza), which the authors argue is a site of fragmentary communitas and
potential transformation. This is a liminal world where dominant symbols
(what the authors calls “tribal identiﬁ ers”) appear to be corporate logos, and
“consumers regard shopping as a quest for contemporary answers to peren-
nial problems.”
Leaping (wildly) from “shopping pilgrims” seeking the sacred Self in
malls to protest pilgrims seeking sacrality in Gandhian Satyagraha, the fol -
lowing chapter demonstrates the broad application of the Turnerian pilgrim-
age model. If political techniques are diffused, translated, and reinvented
across national boundaries, how are these processes organized and per-
formed? According to Sean Scalmer, translation is often the work of pilgrims,
and reinvention “relies upon the unity gained through public rituals.” In
Chapter Twelve, “Turner Meets Gandhi: Pilgrimage, Ritual, and the Diffu-
sion of Nonviolent Direct Action,” Scalmer draws on the Turners’ approach
to pilgrimage and communitas to enable comprehension of the diffusion
of Gandhian Satyagraha (or nonviolent direct action) from India to Britain
in the mid-twentieth century, and its reinvention in the Easter Alderston
nuclear reactor marches from 1958, which themselves had a formative im-
pact on social movement activism in the 1960s and after.
Spontaneous communitas has been found to arise at diverse sites. Margi
Nowak found it manifested in an “online community” that enabled par-
ents of children with ‘invisible’ behavior-affecting disabilities to share their
“narratives of vulnerability” and become courageous critics of the state. As
Nowak argues in Chapter Thirteen, “Dramas, Fields, and ‘Appropriate Edu-
cation,’” confronted with the difﬁ cult and painful task of ensuring their spe-
cial-needs children an “appropriate” education within the bureaucratic US
school system, one feature of such a community is that it provides parents
whose disabled children are entering the education system access to “par-
ent advocates” experienced in the discourse of the educational, medical,
and legal systems. As Nowak comments, once “scared neophytes” become
experienced advocates through the assistance of the virtual communities,
they may become ardent critics of the education system, and thus perform

Introduction 25
important roles in escalating conﬂ icts with their respective school districts,
conﬂ icts that take the form of a social drama.
Part Four addresses the critical role of Edith Turner in the Turnerian
project. The contributions need some introduction. Victor Turner married
Edith Davis in 1943, precipitating an extraordinary relationship. While
Turner had many colleagues, none were more intimate and central than
Edith, who admits to being a “principal collaborator in every ﬁ eld that Vic
explored” (1985b: 1). Edith’s own anthropological research career spans di-
verse ﬁ elds, from the Ndembu of Zambia to Catholic Pilgrimage in Mexico
and the Iñupiat of North Slope Alaska. With her publication rate and lec-
ture appearances growing proliﬁ cally following Victor’s death she would
publish her own monographs, beginning with The Spirit and the Drum (which
had been written 33 years before its publication in 1987), becoming a signiﬁ -
cant ﬁ gure in the anthropology of consciousness and editor of the journal
Anthropology and Humanism.
But it is the inter-Turnerian dialogue that is of interest here, a dialogue
that appears to complicate what is held to be Turnerian. The Turners co-
authored their ﬁ rst scholarly article in 1953 (Turner and Turner 1955), a feat
not repeated until the late 1970s (Turner and Turner 1978). While their names
rarely shared the authorial byline—a result of several factors, not the least of
which was Edith’s nonprofessional status (the “anthropologist’s wife”) (see
Engelke 2001: 124–133)—Edith was nevertheless the coauthor of everything
Victor wrote (see Engelke 2004). Given this extraordinary circumstance, the
intellectual boundary between the Turners was fuzzy and complex. As Victor
completed his PhD dissertation (and in preparing other publications), Edith
notes how she responded with enthusiasm to being “conscripted to draw up
the tables, to correct them endlessly, to put together satisfyingly complex ge-
nealogies” (1985b: 5). The exchange of notes and ideas was also critical. For
instance, “Social Dramas in a Brazilian Umbanda” (Turner 1987b) clearly
illustrates how Victor relied upon his wife’s keen and sensitive eye (as re-
vealed in her detailed ﬁ eld notes, which he drew upon extensively). And,
herself infected by his enthusiasm with the implications of brain research for
ritual (and thus of scientiﬁ c—neurobiological and biogenetic—research for
understanding religion), Edith would speak and write on the subject with
comparative zest following his death (see E. Turner 1986b). Moreover, the
Turners shared a life that was extraordinary in range and intensity. Their
experience of ritual during the initial ﬁ eldwork in Africa inspired the move
toward Roman Catholicism, a decision that, Victor explained, enabled (via
pilgrimage) assimilation “inside the heart of the human matter. . . . Decipher-
ing ritual forms and discovering what generates symbolic actions may be
more germane to our cultural growth than we have supposed. But we have

26 Victor Turner and Contemporary Cultural Performance
to put ourselves in some way inside religious processes to obtain knowledge
of them” (1975: 32). Recognition of this intimate exchange and commonal-
ity of experience compels a reimagining of what is generally regarded as the
Turnerian approach.
Originally called “Kajima” after the Ndembu village of the Turners’ sec-
ond ﬁ eld period (1954–55), and employing an intimate ﬁ rst-person narra-
tive developed outside the stylistic demands of anthropology, The Spirit and
the Drum was intended to be a humanistic “companion piece” alongside the
more scientiﬁ c Schism and Continuity (Engelke 2001: 128). Having returned,
some thirty years later, to the Ndembu village in which ﬁ eldwork was initially
undertaken, and participating in the ihamba healing rituals, Edith would
produce an ethnography, Experiencing Ritual (1992), diverging markedly
from Victor’s sometimes positivist account of the same ritual (see V. Turner
1967d). Her account of witnessing the ihamba spirit removed from the pa-
tient Meru marked the emergence of an experiential anthropology challeng-
ing the discipline to open its boundaries to experience that, by the standards
of most ethnographers, is beyond the “ordinary” (see Young and Goulet
1994). Challenging anthropology’s secularist fundamentalism (E. Turner
1994: 91), Edith’s radical methodology pushed beyond disciplinary taboos
(1992c) and cleared the way for a humanistic anthropology of consciousness.
Developing linguistic competence, plunging beneath the surface of symbols,
her ethnography would demonstrate a commitment to conveying cultural
worlds and performances faithful to the sensibilities of those who dwell in
those worlds (see E. Turner 1996, 2005, 2006).
Matthew Engelke’s “Interview with Edith Turner” (Chapter Fourteen)
offers a fascinating prologue to this section. The chapter reproduces an inter-
action
16
that touches on signiﬁ cant aspects of Edith’s life and demonstrates
“how the dynamics of gender and marriage affect the production of anthro-
pological work.” The interview not only reveals Edith’s role in the ﬁ eld,
editing Victor’s work and complicity in Victor’s intellectual development
(especially the idea of “communitas”); it also provides insight on her immer-
sion in the “human story” of the Ndembu (and others she has lived among
as an ethnographer). While her approach diverges from Victor’s, she regards
her work as an “extension” of his experiential, intuitive, and generative ap-
proach (such as was conveyed in Chihamba the White Spirit [1962]). As she
elsewhere explains (1985b: 4), opposed to formalism and structure, whether
British or French, Victor “enjoyed what was earthy, what was fecund, grow-
ing, seminal.” Inscribed in the core themes of liminality and communitas,
the trait illustrates what one of Victor’s foremost students, Barbara Babcock,
suggests is the “gynesis”—the “putting of Woman into discourse”—in his work.
Most accounts of Turner list inﬂ uences including Durkheim, Gluckman,

Introduction 27
van Gennep, Dilthey, Csikszentmihalyi, even Rilke, Blake, Shakespeare. But
in Chapter Fifteen, “Woman/Women in ‘the Discourse of Man’,” not only is
Woman ﬁ guratively signiﬁ cant in Turner’s anthropology of the generative,
indeterminate, and either/or, but as Babcock suggests, the voices and ideas
of actual women were critical in his intellectual development. While these
include his mother and Babcock herself, of course principal amongst these
inﬂ uences was Edith, who, not only the “indicative mother” of his children
and much of his work (being heavily involved in ﬁ eld and library research,
writing, and editing), was also his work’s “subjunctive mother.”
Responding to an apparent “oscillation between methodological athe-
ism and respect of religious experience” in the Turners’ work, in Chapter
Sixteen, “Faith and (Social) Science: Contrasting Victor and Edith Turner’s
Analysis of Spiritual Realities,” Douglas Ezzy attends to epistemological is-
sues at the heart of the anthropological enterprise. While Victor’s earlier
anthropology was shaped by a perspective that would “implicity denigrate”
Ndembu religion as “mistaken and ethically inferior,” he resisted the athe-
istic implications endemic to structural functionalism, striving to record,
via social drama, ritual’s “ontological status.” Yet, as Ezzy points out, such
status seems to have only applied to “certain types of religious experience”
consistent with Victor’s Christian faith. Thus, while the revelatory Chihamba
ritual appears to resemble communitas (a concept owing something to the
experience of Christian mystics like Eckhart), “secular anthropological dis-
course” is the privileged model in the case of Ndembu divination rituals.
Yet, thrown into the ﬁ eld and undisciplined in anthropological methodol-
ogy, Edith Turner appears to have been placed in a unique position to write
unfettered by the “endemic methodological atheism” with which her spouse
struggled. While, according to Ezzy, her approach to ritual has not been un-
inﬂ uenced by her Catholic faith, Edith developed an experiential methodol-
ogy that would reveal the signiﬁ cant role of altered states of consciousness in
religious experience. Offering the kind of “respectful interpretative frame”
required to supersede anthropology’s “methodological atheism,” Edith (and
in other ways, Victor) are seen to have made important contributions to the
interpretation of religious experience.
In the ﬁ nal contribution, Chapter Seventeen, “Challenging the Bound-
aries of Experience, Performance, and Consciousness,” Jill Dubisch relates
just how Edith Turner’s approach made its signiﬁ cant contribution to Turn-
erian theory, anthropological method, and the study of cultural performance.
While Dubisch recognizes that Edith’s reﬂ exive, engaging, and revelatory
narrative style constitutes a radical departure from standard anthropology,
more radical, she argues, is the way such style is deployed to “illuminate
and expand” our understanding of Turnerian theory. Edith’s work demon-

28 Victor Turner and Contemporary Cultural Performance
strates how the ﬁ eld experience embodies theory, and, as Dubisch conveys,
since she takes extraordinary ritual experience (that of others and her own)
seriously, such an approach enhances our understanding of “communitas,
ritual, symbol, social process.” Enlarging the boundaries of what constitutes
anthropological analysis, the approach assists Dubisch in taking her own
experiences seriously (e.g., visions experienced during her research on heal-
ing modalities, and in particular during her associated Reiki training). It is
concluded that by developing “an anthropology through experience” and an
“anthropology through ritual,” Edith has moved in directions Victor only
hinted at, meanwhile furthering the Turnerian project in ways he would
have surely approved.
While the Turnerian framework has left an extraordinary legacy, per-
haps the most intriguing quality is what Schechner identiﬁ ed as its “unﬁ n-
ishedness.” His sometimes “crude, almost medieval maps” are, for some,
a probable cause for infuriation, yet the incompleteness of Victor Turner’s
work and career has inspired many to continue blazing the trail—including,
of course, Edith Turner herself. Invariably, attention to the shortcomings
and inconsistencies in Victor Turner’s approach are swiftly qualiﬁ ed with a
recognition that our comprehension of culture, performance, and religion
would be considerably deﬁ cient in his absence. In response to the challenge
of understanding contemporary cultural performance, and in recognition
of the persistent relevance of its heuristics, the chapters in this collection
demonstrate the broad and evolving appeal of the Turnerian project.
NOTES
1. Turner submitted his PhD dissertation (published as Schism and Continuity, 1957)
and would work as a Senior Fellow and Senior Lecturer at Manchester.
2. Turner’s enormous cross-disciplinary sphere of inﬂ uence is illustrated by the
appearance of various volumes indebted to his work (e.g., literary studies—Ash-
ley 1990; pilgrimage—Morinis 1992; psychoanalysis—Schwartz-Salent and Stein
1991; neurophenomenology—Laughlin, McManus, and d’Aquil 1990), and spe-
cial journal editions published posthumously, including Seneviratne (1983) and
Bouissac (1985). For speciﬁ c examples of Turner’s cross-disciplinary inﬂ uence,
see Olaveson (2001: 92). He also had an impact on American Studies, indeed
becoming a Visiting Professor of American Studies at the University of Minne-
sota in 1980. Roland Delattre (personal communication) recalls that the audi-
torium at the 1977 ASA convention in Boston was “packed to spilling over” in
anticipation of Turner’s response to Delattre’s address.
3. See Frank Manning (1990) for a comprehensive, yet incomplete, list of Turner’s
publications, and Henry Barnard (1985) for a useful annotated bibliography

Introduction 29
of Turner’s published work to 1975. For a reasonably comprehensive review of
his work, see Matieu Deﬂ em (1991). Barbara Babcock and John MacAloon’s
commemorative essay (1987), Edith Turner’s prologue to On the Edge of the Bush
(1985b), Benjamin Ray’s entry on Victor Turner in the Encyclopedia of Religion
(1993: 94–96), and Matthew Engelke’s extended analysis (2004), provide good
primers.
4. Symptomatic of Turner’s enlisting of the natural sciences to assist the under-
standing of ritual, “corresponding to open-endedness in biological evolution”
(1974: 15), cultural drama is perceived to be evolutionally advantageous. Ac-
cordingly, liminality provides culture with an adaptive response to changing
historical circumstance, to the trenchant contradictions and conﬂ icts of daily
existence.
5. Turner suggested that communitas is closely associated with the lowering of
status. He extended this concept metaphorically to cover such themes as: the
relationship between those undergoing ritual transition; “religions of humil-
ity” (e.g., Franciscan, Vaisnavism); institutionalized poverty (such as that taught
by Buddha or Gandhi) and other monastic and mendicant states (these states
are described as “permanent liminality” and are an attempt to bring about
sustained “normative communitas”); the middle-class countercultural move-
ments of the 1960s and 1970s; the status of autochthonous people; “submerged”
kinship links; and Christian pilgrimage (1969; 1973; 1974; Turner and Turner
1978).
6. As a timeless condition or “a place that is not a place,” the pan-human modal-
ity of communitas is perceived to be manifest, for example, in Zen Buddhism’s
“prajna” (“intuition”) and Confucianism’s “jen” (“love, goodness, benevolence,
humaneness and man-to-man-ness”) (Turner 1974:46, 283).
7. French anthropologist Roger Bastide’s theory of the “instituent” “immanence of
sociality” operating in response to the “instituted” (with institutional religion in
turn forming out of normative instituency) demonstrates a curious parallel with
Turner’s theory. According to François Gauthier (2004: 67), in Bastide’s scheme
“when instituted forms no longer provide for the vividness of the instituent
experience we witness the appearance of savage quests for the vivid fervour of the
instituent that shun any regard for domestication.” There are further parallels
with the universal sociality of Michel Maffesoli’s “orgiasm” (1993), which could
be identiﬁ ed as corporealized communitas (see St John 2001a).
8. See also the “Encounter with Freud” (1978) and essays gathered in E. Turner
(1992a), including “African Ritual and Western Literature” (chapter 4) which
compares the Chihamba initiation ritual and Dante’s Purgatoria, and the “Kan-
nokura Festival at Shingu” (chapter 6).
9. Inﬂ uenced by Grotowski and in conjunction with Schechner, the Turners be-
came involved in staging experimental Theater/ritual “ethnodrama” with their
students.
10. Of course, Turner does not hold a monopoly on perspectives on ritual, and the
role of media in complicating and extending what we regard as ritual (includ-

30 Victor Turner and Contemporary Cultural Performance
ing liminality) has been undergoing serious analyses (see Hughes-Freeland and
Crain 1998; Couldry 2003).
11. Forging a holistic anthropology and freakishly astride disciplines, Turner adopted
psychological and biological perspectives on ritual with the aim of abolishing
“the sharp distinction between the classic study of culture and sociobiology”
(1985g: 297). The “geology” of the brain and nervous system suggested the sym-
biotic coadaptation of biogenetic and sociocultural processes, or a “dual control”
of genotypes and culturetypes (1985e). “The New Neurosociology” (the title of
an essay presented in 1982 at Smith College), to which Turner was latterly com-
mitted, held sympathy with Maclean’s “triune brain” theory, Jung’s archetypes,
the collective unconscious and individuation (see 1985f.), and the potential com-
plementarity of the brain’s hemispheres, the fundamental union of which was
an expression, according to Schechner, of Turner’s “utopian wish” (1987b: 14).
12. Which, as Doug Ezzy explains (this volume), is itself a “religious/philosophical”
faith masquerading, through methodology, as unbiased objectivity.
13. Also, while spontaneous communitas has been found to compare favorably with
Durkheim’s “collective effervescence” (Olaveson 2001), since Turner made only
an incomplete riposte to the anomalies in Durkheim’s theory of religion (where
ritual appeared to be both social and asocial), it remains uncertain as to how
his theory advances upon the latter. While acknowledging that a phenomeno-
logical perspective would shed light on the transpersonal (and thus astructural)
character of communitas, this development was cut short by Turner’s death.
14. The utility of such conceptual architecture should not be underestimated in
an era when “natural” and “non-natural” disasters (e.g., the Asian tsunami of
December 2004 and especially 9/11) have triggered and continue to require
extraordinary local/global responses.
15. For Limen, see http://limen.mi2.hr/. The journal’s brief period of activity (there
were two editions) might be considered to be consistent with a liminal logic. For
Liminalities, see http://www.liminalities.net.
16. Originally Engelke (2000), though part of a larger project (see Engelke 2001 and
2004).
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39
PART I
{
Performing Culture:
Ritual, Drama, and Media

Other documents randomly have
different content

CHAPTER XIII.
AT CAUGHNAWAGA.
The lacrosse match proceeded all the same, though M. Rouget
had withdrawn the patronage of his presence. The interest felt in the
second game was greater than that in the first. Every one with
money to stake was on the qui vive; the chances were considered
even now, whereas in the first innings, every one believed in
Caughnawaga, and odds had to be given to tempt the few down-
hearted Upper Canadians to back Brautford. The second game
ended like the first, to the general surprise, and again Brautford's
success was largely due to the clever stripling, who, bounding about
the field as nimbly as the ball itself, was always where he was most
wanted, and calmly did the best thing to do at the time. "Who is the
little one?" was asked on every hand; but no one was ready with an
answer other than the obvious one, "Injun, like the rest," till a
squaw--one of the many who circulated among the crowd, brown as
horse chestnuts, with little beads of eyes and broad flat faces,
arrayed in moccasins and blankets, yellow, red, and blue, selling
bark and bead work--vouchsafed the laconic information, "name
Paul."
The third game was longer and more obstinately contested than
either of its predecessors. Caughnawaga braced itself for a supreme
effort, under the reproaches of its backers and the taunts of the very
squaws. The best of five were to take the stakes. If Brautford won
this third, the match was over, and Caughnawaga "knocked into a
cocked hat." The players fought their most strenuous on either side,
with tight set teeth and wicked-looking eyes, which boded ill for joint

or limb which should happen within the swing of a lacrosse.
Caughnawaga was desperate, following up its capture of the ball
with a compact rush, and interposing their wiry bodies recklessly
between it and the uplifted sticks of the other side. Rushing and
scuffling, they had carried it nearly to their goal, another lick, and
the game were won; when, in front, there leaped the redoubtable
Paul, scooped it up on his netting, and threw it back over their
heads.
It was done in a moment, while yet the rush and impetus were
unstemmed; an instant later and he was stumbled upon and run
down by his eager opponents, trampled on and stunned, before they
could stay themselves in their rush. They tripped over him and fell in
a heap, while the Brautford men caught the ball in the undefended
middle and had little opposition in carrying it to the other goal.
"Brautford! Hurrah for Brautford!" The Caughnawaga's heard the
shout while they were still disentangling and picking themselves up,
a defeated band. They picked themselves up and slunk away like
cats, that, raiding a dairy, are suddenly drenched and discomfited by
an ambushed milker. Only Paul was left on the ground, stunned and
unable to rise.
His comrades were the first to miss him; and they, perhaps, were
reminded of him by their backers in the crowd, for triumph is a self-
engrossing passion, and glory so sweet a sugar-stick, that, while
sucking it, we are not too likely to go in search of the comrade to
whom the most of it is due.
"Where is the young 'un?" was questioned in the crowd. "Where
is Paul?" and the crowd turned to the now deserted portion of the
field where he had last been seen. He was there still. A squaw in a
red blanket was beside him; she had raised his head and was
chafing his temples. Another squaw--a young one, this--was seen
fetching water to pour on him. But now the crowd was interested,
they had gathered round him, and soon carried him into the

refreshment tent, where whisky, the sporting man's nostrum, was
used to restore him.
The notable Indians on the ground, the elders who did not join in
youthful sports, had gathered to look at the youth who had done so
well, and who might yet, for anything they could know, come forth
one day, a champion of their race. For who can tell what fancies may
be cherished by the red man? The white does not sympathize with
them, and therefore he puts them away, behind his impenetrable
stolidity of bearing, which might conceal so much, but more
frequently and with equal success hides nothing at all. They were
once possessors of the land, in so far, at least, as being there, for
they shared it with the beasts. Traditions of the physical prowess of
their fathers are handed down among them, and who can tell but, in
their dreams, they may look forward to a hero like those of old to
arise and vindicate their place among the whites.
Our old friend, Paul, of long ago, was a leading figure among
these elders, and one of evident consideration. A tall man, grown
fleshy from ease and lack of exercise, the violent exercises of his
youth, with his straight black hair threaded plentifully with white--a
"respectable" Indian, one seemingly well to do. The token of his
respectability was likewise that which deprived him of every vestige
of dignity or grace, to wit, a suit of rusty black clothes. It is the
queer tribute of respect which men of other races pay to our
European civilization. They cast away their native braveries and
picturesqueness of apparel, and accept the clothing of the white
man taken at its baldest and worst. An Indian, a Japanese, or a
negro, goes into full dress by putting on a chimney-pot hat and black
raiment, resembling that worn by undertakers' mutes, never well-
fitting, never well cared for, and harmonizing vilely with his dusky
skin, while his own natural instincts can arrange combinations so
suitable and becoming.
Paul stepped forward to where the lad lay, and surveyed the
shapely limbs. He was conscious now, but still dull and stupid, and

not averse to being a centre of interest. Paul laid his hand on his
brow, and felt his chest, and thought he was as fine a man of his
years as he ever beheld. The squaw in the red blanket looked up at
him, while she continued to chafe the boy's hands, and seemed
greatly moved; but it would have been unworthy of a "respectable"
Indian of Paul's standing, to take notice of a squaw on a public
occasion like the present. He moved away, and out of the throng in
time, preparing to smoke a pipe in quiet. The squaw in the red
blanket followed him, and when she had got him well out of notice,
that his lordly superiority might not be ruffled by the familiarity in
public, she laid her hand on his arm, and said, "Paul."
Paul turned his sleepy eyes that way, but it was only a squaw, a
strange squaw. He had nothing to say.
"Your son!" said the squaw, touching his arm again. He stopped
at that, and she pointed over her shoulder with her thumb to the
crowd they had come from.
"Mine?"
"Yours, Paul."
"Who are you?"
"His mother--Fidèle--Your squaw."
"My son? Where born?"
"Brautford. You bade me go to Brautford."
"Ouff." It would have been undignified for a man like Paul to say
more. It meant all he had to say, too, very likely. For, doubtless,
language which is never uttered ceases to be given birth to in the
mind. He turned, however, with Fidèle, and both walked back to the
tent.

The lad was better now. Refreshment was going on, the people
seeing him able to dispense with their care, had turned their
attention to sustaining themselves. He got up and joined his mother
coming in, and they went out again to a quiet place, followed by
Paul, that his parental feelings might be gratified with an interview,
without compromising his dignity by an exhibition before the world.
It seemed an unnecessary precaution. Paul's feelings, if he had
any, were under far too good control to lead him into impropriety. He
sat down with them on a deserted bench, however, questioned them
both, and finally accepted his son and his long absent spouse to his
heart; that is to say, he bade them follow him to Lachine, and then
conducted them across the river, and to his home in Caughnawaga.
Thérèse had ruled there as mistress from the day Fidèle had gone
away. That was so long ago now, that it had never occurred to her
that her sister would return, and the Père Théophile, a wise ruler,
who, while his flock did their duty according to what he considered
their lights, and were duly submissive, did not unnecessarily fret
them with abstract questions of affinity, ignored any irregularity,
collected the church dues from them, and christened the children.
There were but two of these, and girls both, to the intense
disappointment and mortification of Paul. Imagine his satisfaction,
then, to find himself in possession of a well-grown son of fifteen
years--well-grown, and such a player at lacrosse. Was it not he
alone, and not the Brautford band in general, who had beaten the
Caughnawagas? And now he would be of the Caughnawagas
himself, and Paul would make much money, in bets and otherwise,
out of his son's fine play.
He received, then, his new-found family into his home and
established them there with honour. Young Paul, with the privileges
of a "buck," lolled about the place, eating, sleeping, smoking all day
long, like his father. Fidèle sat by the hearth in her blanket and
smoked her pipe, while the household drudgery, now doubled by the
addition to the household, trebled by the presence of a squaw

claiming to be first wife, criticizing, ordering, and doing no work, fell
on Thérèse and her girls--to cut and carry wood, draw water, dig
potatoes, cook, and share the leavings, after the more considered
members had eaten their fill. It was hard lines.
The village was speedily aware of the accession to its inhabitants.
That same evening the crest-fallen lacrosse players were told that
old Paul had recognized young Paul as his son, and brought him
away from the Brautford band to themselves; and all the bucks in
the Reservation came to welcome the certain winner of games, and
congratulate his father. The middle-aged squaws recollected Fidèle,
and came to praise her son, squatting round the hearth in their
blankets with lighted pipes, while poor Thérèse, deposed from her
motherhood of the house, stole out to the garden-patch to dig and
bewail her fate.
It cannot be supposed that the relations of the two squaws could
be cordial when they found themselves alone together. Their being
sisters made it none the less intolerable to be, or to have been,
supplanted. Thérèse felt injured now, and Fidèle remembered the
wrongs and the jealousy of fifteen years. It was not many days
before they came to blows, scolding, screaming, scratching, and
pulling handfuls of each other's hair, till a crowd of squaws had
gathered from the surrounding cabins; when Paul, the lord and
master, appeared upon the scene, and, in the grand heroic manner
of the wilderness and its uncontaminated sons, took down his cudgel
from the wall, and belabouring them both with soundness and
impartiality, commanded them to desist. Was it not shocking, dear
lady? Yet, it was only one of those shocking things which have been
going on from the foundation of the world--which are going on still,
in Egypt, Russia, and elsewhere. The strong use a stick to the weak,
and order, of a sort, is maintained. We know better, and have
changed all that, and we go on improving, though it may still be a
question how it is going to answer in the end. It is the weakest and
the shrillest voiced, with us, who rule. The burly and the peaceable
stop their ears, and yield to escape the din. By-and-bye we shall

have all the ignorant to make our laws and instruct us. Shall we be
better off, I wonder? When every one is master, who will serve?
When all become commissioned officers, who will be left to fill the
ranks?
There was worse yet in store for Thérèse, however. Fidèle must
needs go to mass in that well-watched community. In Brant she
could please herself, but in Caughnawaga there were ladies of the
convent to be pleased, who were so bountiful. Fidèle's re-
appearance came thus officially before the Père Théophile. Scandal
must be prevented, Paul could not be permitted the luxury of two
wives at once, however capable he might be of keeping them both
in order. More, it was the newcomer, in this case, who was the lawful
wife. Thérèse must go, and he laid his injunction on Paul
accordingly. Paul was submissive; one squaw was enough to mind
his comfort, and it mattered not which, though, if anything, the
boy's mother would suit the best. He obeyed with promptitude, and
after administering a parting beating, he turned the three forlorn
ones out of doors.
When a turkey comes to grief, through sickness or accident, the
rest of the flock are apt to set upon it and peck it to death. It is a
Spartan regimen, and encourages the others to keep well. The spirit
prevailing in Caughnawaga was in so much Spartan or turkey-ish--it
is a spirit not unknown at times in more cultured circles. Nobody
dreamed of coming forward out of natural kindness; and, as a
matter of duty, there was too much of the improper in the whole
story, for any one brazenly to claim praise from the ladies of the
convent for sheltering homeless ones such as these. It seemed
irreverent, even, to suppose it could be a Christian duty to succour
them.
The outcasts walked down the village street, hiding their faces in
their blankets, bruised and ashamed. No one spoke to them or pitied
them. The squaws, their daily companions, sitting at their doors,
sewing, smoking, idling, looked steadily at them as they went by;

some with a wooden stolidity which showed no sign of recognition,
some with a spiteful and vindictive leer. Thérèse had been better off
than many of them, but who would change places with her now?
The dusk was falling, and the nights were growing chilly now;
there might be frost before morning. The gleam of firelight, the
twinkle of lamps, shone through cabin windows and from open
doors, but no one bade them enter. There was heavy dew in the air,
the herbage was soaked with moisture, and therefore they would
not turn aside into the bush, to drench themselves among the
dripping leaves, and be chilled to the bone with hoar frost,
perchance, ere morning. They went forward to the river-side, and
out upon the pier, where the water swept smoothly by, murmuring
monotonously in a sombre passionless sough, black as their own
desolate misery, still and undemonstrative as themselves.
They huddled themselves together under the lee of some bales
and boxes, their chins upon their knees within their blankets, and
there they crouched and shivered, all through the livelong night,
sleeping at times or drowsing, but always motionless, with the sound
of the mighty river in their ears, promising nothing, regretting
nothing, yet consoling in its changeless continuance--a life, and one
in harmony with their own, a seeming sympathy, when all the world
beside had cast them off.

CHAPTER XIV.
THÉRÈSE'S REVENGE.
The daylight had returned, but the sun was not yet up, and the
air was cold, when a heavy hand was laid upon the sleeping squaws,
and shook them roughly.
"What are yez doin' here? Stailin' is it ye're afther, eh?"
"Sleep here all night," was Thérèse's answer, as she slowly
regained her feet. She was stiff with cold. "No home to go to--come
here."
"A shindy at home was it? Turned out of doors is it ye are? Sarves
ye right, maybe. But it's a could sleepin' place, al the same, and wan
niver knows. The gates won't be opened these two hours, but ye
can come in this way. Here's an empty luggige room, where yez
cuddn't do no harm ef ye wanted."
He ushered them in, closed the door behind them, and turned the
key with a knowing wink.
"Oi'm clair of yez now, me beauties. The pollisman can do as he
thinks best when he comes on at sivin o'clock. Oi've catched them if
they're wanted, an' that's as much as they kin expect from a night
watchman."
The police sergeant arrived at his appointed time. The squaws
had accepted their confinement with a contented mind, and were
asleep. Under the shelter of a roof and on a wooden floor, they could

stretch themselves at length, which was grateful after the cramped
position of the night.
Their apathetic indifference convinced the man of authority that
their tale was true; they had come on the pier while the gates were
open the evening before, and fallen asleep. It was wrong, as he
assured them, and he could take them up for it; but to what good
end? he asked himself. He was a virtuoso in malefactors, and did not
care to encumber himself with a capture out of which so little credit
with his superiors could be got, as three squawks sleeping on a pier.
"Look out, now!" he said, shaking his finger at them. "I let you off
this time, but if"--another shake of his finger--"but if ever--I--catch-
you here again--you may look out for squalls."
Thérèse had lifted her head in dull indifference; but at the sound
of his voice her face changed. She looked at him. It was now long
ago since she had heard that voice before--when she was quite a
girl, the speaker quite a young man--but the occasion was a
momentous one. It was when she had been arrested by mistake
instead of Fidèle. If only it had been Fidèle indeed; and if Fidèle had
been punished then as she deserved, she would not have come back
again, like the hungry ghosts of the long forgotten dead, to push the
living from their stools and bring them to ruin.
There kindled a red coal down deep at the bottom of Thérèse's
eyes and made them glow and burn, and the surging blood rose to
her weather-beaten cheek and reddened it behind the scarce
transparent; skin the lips parted, and the white teeth glistened, and
for the moment Thérèse in her fury looked handsomer, if in an evil
way, than she had ever done in her youth. It was no apathetic face
now, carven in walnut wood, but rather the features of a snake-
haired fury, as one may see them at times in the caverns of a red-
coal fire.

She laid her hand upon the sergeant as he was turning to go,
after having discharged his prisoners.
"I know you," she said, as he turned in surprise. "Remember
me?"
"You? Where have I seen you? When was it?"
"Long ago--enfante perdue--Remember now?"
"What? You the woman that stole the child, and the nuns got off?
Yes, I remember you. You should be at the Isle aux Noix now, I do
believe. Look out, as I said a little ago, or you'll go there yet, some
day. Don't you be expecting the ladies will do as much for you next
time."
"Enfante encore perdue?"
"To be sure. Do you know where it is?"
"Morte," grunted Thérèse, with a wicked flash of her eye--"ze
bones."
"Murder? Do you say it was murdered? Did you see it done? Did
you do it yourself?"
"No. Fidèle and Paul."
"Will you swear out an information. There is a reward still out. It
has not been withdrawn that ever I heard. If I get you that reward,
is it a bargain that I am to draw it for you and keep half? Is it a
bargain?"
"Bargain."
"And you will swear an information?"
"Vill swear."

"Where shall I find you?--to-morrow morning, say?"
Thérèse shook her head despondingly, and looked at her children.
"Hungry."
"Who's your buck?"
"Paul was."
"I know Paul. Has he turned you off?"
"Got Fidèle."
"Aha! That's it, is it? And you know where those bones are?
Sure?"
"Svear."
"Then you'll get even with them yet, my beauty. And, stay, here's
a dollar for you. You say you're hungry, and Paul has turned you out
of doors. Be on the Lachine side of the ferry this evening. I may
have to lock you up, but you'll be well used."
That evening, at sunset, the police landed Paul and Fidèle, both
handcuffed, on the Lachine wharf, where Thérèse joined the party of
her own accord, and they all proceeded by train to Montreal.
Thérèse could not refrain from uttering one cluck of triumph as she
passed her late master and looked at his bonds, while he shot her a
look of fury and strained at his handcuffs in a way which showed it
was well that they were strong; and then all the party subsided into
the stony stillness of their ordinary demeanour.
There was nothing very striking in the first examination which
followed. Thérèse recollected having seen a small grave dug in the
back kitchen, and an empty box laid beside it. Then Fidèle had come
in and exchanged clothes with her, and then she (Thérèse) went
away. Neither Fidèle nor the baby had been seen afterwards. She

herself had been taken up and accused of stealing the child, but it
had been shown that she had not left Caughnawaga on the day of
the kidnapping, and she had been acquitted. After that Paul had
taken her as his squaw, and they had lived together ever since. A
fortnight ago Fidèle had returned, and since then she had suffered
much ill-usage, and finally been turned out of doors.
The evidence seemed sufficient, but in court it would need as
corroboration the finding of the bones; therefore, there was a
remand, and two days later the prisoners were brought before the
magistrate again. The persons sent to dig under the floor had found
a box, which was produced, and a thrill of hushed excitement ran
through the court room; the male prisoner, even, threw aside his
sullen stolidity, turned to the constable in charge, and spoke a few
words. The constable conveyed the message to the Crown attorney,
who addressed the magistrate, and he forthwith appointed counsel
for the defence, leaning back in his chair, and allowing the young
avocat a few minutes to converse with his client. The lawyer listened
to Paul, shook his head, raised his hand in remonstrance, and spoke
soothingly; but the red man's anger, having once found voice, grew
fiercer and more determined every moment. He shook out his long
straight hair as a furious animal will toss his mane, and gnashed his
teeth, while his usually dull eyes blazed like living coals. He put aside
the arguments and remonstrances of his adviser with a gesture of
impatience, and, looking to the magistrate, rose to his feet. The
advocate, seeing that his client was impracticable, preferred to take
the work upon himself, and addressed the bench.
He told "that, in spite of all which he could say, the prisoner--the
male one--while disclaiming art and part in the crime of murder, was
resolved to claim from the court that he should not stand his trial
alone, or in company only with the ignorant squaw who sat at his
side. Whatever had taken place--and here, in tribute to his own
professional credit, he must be permitted to say that it was sorely
against his wish and advice that he was now driven to admit that
anything had taken place, and he would have defied the learned

counsel opposite to prove that there had, and more, to bring it home
to these much-injured Indians--it was but right that the instigator
should be brought to stand his trial by the side of his instruments,
and he claimed of the court to permit the prisoner Paul to swear an
information against Ralph Herkimer, financier, broker, banker,"--"and
bankrupt," some one muttered--"for conspiring with and suborning,
and inciting by promise of gain, the prisoner Paul to steal, kidnap,
abduct, and make away with the infant daughter of George Selby,
professor of music, in the city of Montreal." He told "how the said
Herkimer had continued to pay an annual stipend or pension to the
said Paul during many years, till, on pressing the said Paul to make
away with the said child, Paul had declared that he could not, and
the said stipend or pension had ceased to be paid from that day
forward."
It was with enhanced interest that, when this had been settled,
and a warrant ordered to issue for Herkimer's apprehension, the box
was placed on the table, and the lid ordered to be removed.
His worship, the magistrate, arranged his spectacles on his nose,
the county attorney compressed his lips to steady his nerves, lest
the sight of horror to be disclosed should disturb his delicate
sensibilities; and, then, as the lid came away, there appeared--what
might once have been a lock of hay! Time and mildew had done
much to destroy it, the shaking it had undergone since it was
disturbed had contributed yet more towards returning it to its primal
condition of dust; but hay it was, most surely, though even as they
looked it seemed crumbling away under the light and the freer air.
The finders had identified the box. It was manifestly the one
referred to by the chief witness. But where were the bones? Where
any evidence of murder? Not a morsel was there of bone, or even a
lock of hair.
The magistrate shrugged his shoulders. He was a disinterested
party, and could appreciate without alloy of personal feeling the
humour of his court holding inquest upon an empty box. The Crown

prosecutor bit his lip, infinitely disconcerted, and the sergeant of
police looked foolish. There was still the charge of kidnapping,
however, that was sworn to by the chief witness, whose evidence,
after all, was confirmed by the box. It was a grave, a box, and a live
baby which she had seen, and she had not said that she saw the
murder. The male prisoner's own statement and confession, after
being warned, was also in evidence against him. His counsel turned
and looked at him, as much as to say, "I told you so; but you would
speak out, notwithstanding my advice. Now, take the consequence."
Paul was more surprised than anybody at the discovery of
emptiness within the box. His jaw actually dropped in amazement,
notwithstanding the natural rigidity of his facial muscles. He might
have got off, it almost seemed; but then there would have been no
information laid against Herkimer, and ever since the day he had
been dismissed with contumely from his office before all those
sniggering clerks, his fingers had been itching to be at the man's
throat, and only prudence had restrained them. Fidèle's face
remained unchanged, for, naturally, she was not surprised; but there
came a twinkle of childish humour into her face to see how all those
arrogant whites had been fooled by a poor squaw.
Thérèse was disappointed, but not more than her experiences as
a squaw had long taught her to bear. The down-trodden are not
much crushed when an expectation gives way. Her foes, it was true,
were not to be tried for their lives, but they were still to be locked
up, and punished in some sort later on, while she herself, an
indispensable witness, would be well cared for till all was settled.

CHAPTER XV.
THE SELBYS.
George Selby was notified at once, of course, that the inquiry into
his child's disappearance had suddenly and unexpectedly revived
itself, after so many years, with the prospect of solving the mystery,
if not of restoring the lost one.
It was an old wound now, that sudden evanishment of the
sweetest blossom which had shone upon their lives. His wife and he,
each in pity to the other, seldom spoke of it, and therefore there
appeared a skinning over or partial healing to have come; but it still
bled inwardly, saddening, and oppressing with unspoken grief. In the
fifteen years of their bereavement his wife had been brought down
from youth and strength and beauty to premature old age. Within
the last twelvemonths a change had come. As she had told him,
peace and resignation had come to her, the sad peace of the
mourners who resign their loved ones, believing it is well with them,
though knowing they shall no more meet on earth; and her health
had greatly improved. "Why, then," thought George, "should he
disturb her?--revive the deadened misery and cause relapse? There
would be doubt and anxiety while the inquiry was in progress, and,
alas! there was little that could be called hope to look for at the
conclusion." Therefore he said nothing to Mary, but he did not fail to
present himself at the examination before the magistrate. It was a
horrid idea that their innocent darling should have been murdered
by Indians, though it was relieved by the consolatory thought that in
all those years of mourning to the parents the child's troubles had

long been of the past; and he said nothing when he went home
after the first day's inquiry.
The next day of examination was one of the most painful George
Selby had ever known. He shrank into an unnoticed corner when the
box was brought into the court-room--shrank from it, but could not
tear away his eyes. And then he listened to Paul's accusation of his
Mary's nephew, and for the first time he divined the motive of the
seemingly wanton and inexplicable crime. Oh! how deeply in his
heart he cursed the detestable money of that domineering old man,
who, not satisfied with having his way in life, must needs strive to
impose it after death, working misery and soul destruction upon his
nearest kin. He shivered and clasped his hands before his eyes when
the lid was to be lifted from the box. He heard the drawing of the
nails, the creak and giving way of each one in its turn, and then
there was a stillness; but after that there came no sigh of horror, the
air thrilled with a movement of disappointment, felt rather than to
be heard, and he came forward and peered into the faces of the
crowd. The one additional horror was to be spared him of being
called on to recognize his child's remains in the presence of curious
strangers.
He peered intently at the prisoners, one of whom had virtually
confessed but a moment before. He noted Paul's amazement and
confusion. He noted that the squaw by his side remained calm, save
that there stole a look of mockery into her face, as she surveyed the
court, and he felt sure that that woman was not a murderess. It was
his heart which was on the strain, and enabled him to see and read
the reality untrammelled by judgment's frequent errors, wrong
deductions, and misinterpretations. He could discern that of which
the professional experience of officials took no note, for the heart is
clearer sighted than the head.
With them there was a juridical problem to be solved by pure
reason, an indictment to be made, presentable before a judge and
jury--a proposition that the prisoners at the bar were guilty of a

specific offence, with evidence in proof. "Where is my child?" was
the ruling thought which filled George Selby's mind. The squaw at
the bar was the stealer. So much was proved by the witness under
oath, and by the implied admission of her fellow prisoner. But she
had not murdered the child, though perhaps it had been intended
that she should; so much could be drawn from her tranquillity and
the confusion of her companion. He felt that he must question that
squaw forthwith, and after the prisoners had been formally
committed to stand their trial, he obtained speech of her through the
assistance of the police sergeant, who took care to elicit an
assurance that the reward, advertised fifteen years before in a
placard of which he produced a copy, would still be paid when the
baby's fate was discovered.
"Mary," George said to his wife that evening when they met. "I
have news."
"News, George? News of what?"
"The news we have been waiting for all these years. The squaw is
found at last--the right one. She is sister of the one who was taken
up at the time. The two changed clothes. That accounts for the
confusion at the trial. Those who identified her recognized the
clothes. Those who swore to her being in Caughnawaga that day
spoke truth, too."
"Oh, George!" with a weary sigh; "Is it all to be gone through
again? The misery and the pain? Yet now I feel so sure my precious
one is at peace, in the arms of God, that I think I can bear it. It is
well the discovery, whatever it may be, did not come earlier to
embitter our grief."
"And yet, my dearest, already something which will shock you has
come to light--the instigator of the wrong is named. His accomplice
accuses him. That wretched fortune of your most misguided brother

has been at the root of all our trouble. That men who find
themselves so little wise in directing their own courses, should strive
to perpetuate their folly, by imposing their will on others after they
are dead!"
"You mean that it was Ralph? I have often suspected that; but it
seemed so merciless and inhuman a thing to do, that I have blushed
for shame at my suspicions, even when alone, and cast the thought
behind me. Poor wretch! Look at him now!--shamed and
dishonoured--run away to the States--afraid to show his face in
Canada! Martha and the boy are to be pitied in belonging to him, for
they are good; but they do not know him, and no one will be ruffian
enough to enlighten them. Martha is back at St. Euphrase again.
Susan had a letter from her to-day. The house there is settled on
her, it seems, and she wants to give it up to the creditors, but Ralph
says she must not, and that before long he will be on his feet again,
and pay everybody."
"I fear Ralph meant worse than merely to set the child aside, and
it is no thanks to his intentions if he has not innocent blood on his
hands."
"Hush! George. It is right you should tell me the facts, but do not
draw inferences. Judge not."
"My dear, I judge no one; but I have seen the squaw. She tells
me she was ordered to make away--to bury. The very box, which
was to have been used, was produced in court--produced as it had
been dug out from under the kitchen floor, and you may fancy how
my heart died within me at the sight; but when the box was opened,
it was found to be empty, and the squaw has told me that when she
came to look at our angel, she found it was impossible to obey the
inhuman command. She buried the empty box and carried the child
away. She speaks of a road with trees, and a valley with a broad
river, and says that she laid the baby upon the stoop of a house
before going down the hill. She says she recollects the house

perfectly. A police sergeant, who seems to have charge of the case,
says he believes it must be near St. Euphrase, and the sheriff has
allowed me to take him and his prisoner there to-morrow. I have
ordered a carriage, and we will endeavour to take her over the old
ground."
"Something will come of it, George, I feel sure. Take me with you,
dearest; it will be maddening to live through the interminable hours
between now and your return. Let me come with you."
"There will not be room, dear. A squaw out of jail would not be
pleasant company in a carriage. They are not over tidy, remember.
For myself, I shall sit with the driver."
"Then I shall take the early train to St. Euphrase, and go to
Judith's. Be sure you come to me as early as ever you can, I shall be
faint with impatience."

CHAPTER XVI.
BETSEY AS GOOD FAIRY.
When Mary Selby and her sister Susan arrived at the Rectory of
St. Euphrase, next morning, the family mind was already excited by
other news; so much so, that, notwithstanding this was the first visit
Judith's sisters had ever paid, and it was unexpected, they were
received precisely as if they had dropped in from the next street,
and their coming were an every-day occurrence. The family capacity
for surprise had been forestalled.
"Only think!" cried Betsey, the irrepressible; "young Jordan has
been here--Randolph, you know. I know him quite well; was at a
party at their house, when I stayed with you last winter--knew him a
little, before then, but not much. Well, he tells Uncle Dionysius here-
-that's not here, exactly, but in the study--that he ran away with
Miss Rouget, the seignior's daughter. Stuck-up looking thing she is.
No complexion to speak of; a snub nose. Yes, indeed, Aunt Judy, it is
a snub. Nez retroussé, is it? That's because she's Miss Rouget de La
Hache, and a kind of a somebody; though folks do say they've lost
their money all the same--like better folks who make less moan. But,
anyhow, Randolph ran away with her--fixed a fire-escape on to her
bedroom window, and down she came, bag and baggage, in the
dead of the night; and everybody in the house fast asleep. They
went to New York, and were married before a squire, and now they
have come home, and are staying with Mrs. Jordan, at The Willows.
And they are going to be married all over again, from the beginning-
-twice over again, I should say, for he has just been speaking to
Uncle Dionysius, and now he has gone to the Roman Catholic priest,

with a letter from an archbishop, and no less, bidding him raise no
difficulties, but just do it. Think of that! Is it not impressive? The
same two people to be three times married, and always to one
another! I suppose there will be no getting out of that, anyhow, as
long as they live. If even they were to go to Chicago, I suppose it
would take three divorce suits to separate them. They can only
dissolve one marriage at a time, so I have heard. What do you think.
Miss Susan?"
"I never was married, my dear. I have suffered too much from
neuralgia for some years back to be able to think of marrying, or
anything else."
"Well! That's not me, now. If I was to have neuralgy, I'd want a
man to take care of me, all the more, 'pears to me. I'm 'takin' steps,'
as uncle there says, to get the man right off; and then the neuralgy
may come if it wants to, I can't help it."
Both visitors' eyes were fixed on the speaker. The recollections of
their own youth furnished no such amazing expression of maidenly
opinion. Betsey coloured a little, coughed, and began once more,
while her uncle and aunt, taught by experience, sat silent, waiting till
she should talk herself out of breath.
"The fact is, Mrs. Selby, I'm to be married immediately; as soon,
that is, as I can get ready, and that depends mostly on Mademoiselle
Ciseau. She'll have to make my gown, and she says she's over head
and ears in orders, between so many deaths and all the marriages;
for you know Matildy Stanley's going to marry--more proper if she'd
be making her soul, at her time of life, than thinking of sich--and
that chit Muriel--set her up--she's to be married the same day as her
aunt, though they ain't no kin at all, nohow, to one another, and
Matildy knows it. I call it going before their Maker with a lie in their
right hand--goin' to church to be married, and tellin' such a story."
"But who are the bridegrooms, Betsey?"

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