During the past twenty years of intellectual boundary-crossing and widespread borrowing between fields, Turner's notions of "liminality" and the "processual" have been adopted by many theorists of art and society. This is the first volume to place individual Turner concepts into the context of his entire career and to spell out their implications for literary studies.

During the past twenty years of intellectual boundary-crossing and widespread borrowing between fields, Turner's notions of "liminality" and the "processual" have been adopted by many theorists of art and society. This is the first volume to place individual Turner concepts into the context of his entire career and to spell out their implications for literary studies.

In the twenty years following Victor Turner's death, interventions on the interconnected performance modes of play, drama, and community (dimensions of which Turner deemed the limen), and experimental and analytical forays into the anthropologies of experience and consciousness, have complemented and extended Turnerian readings on the moments and sites of culture's becoming. Examining Turner's continued relevance in performance and popular culture, pilgrimage and communitas, as well as Edith Turner's role, the contributors reflect on the wide application of Victor Turner's thought to cultural performance in the early twenty-first century and explore how Turner's ideas have been re-engaged, renovated, and repurposed in studies of contemporary cultural performance.

Seminar paper from the year 2004 in the subject Ethnology / Cultural Anthropology, grade: 1,0, University of Heidelberg (Institut für Ethnologie), course: Anthropology and Literature, language: English, abstract: In 1999, a very postmodern movie entered the programs of movie theatres: Being John Malkovich. In this extraordinary piece of film, unemployed puppeteer Craig Schwartz makes a bizarre discovery. Being hired as a file sorter, Schwartz discovers a little door in the 7 1/2 story of his new workplace, which leads right into the brain of actor John Malkovich. He can see, hear, smell and feel what Malkovich does. What a desirable notion for an anthropologist. No more speculation about the motives, norms, relations or beliefs that makes humans think and do certain things. Beyond ethnography, it could be even more fascinating to find out what the fathers of our own professional lineage caused them to perceive the anthropological subject in specific ways. The following account is foremost an experiment in the creative possibilities of rethinking anthropological theory. I want to gain an insight into the life and work of Victor Turner by partly playing his role in this paper. How do I legitimize this unconventional analysis? I see it as a logical consequence of postmodern thinking and practice. If the “Self” and the “Other” are categories of thought rather than discrete entities, I see no reason why I should not speak with the voice of the Other. Also, as we are diagnosed to be subjective, why not include subjective fictional elements in our writing? My paper does not follow the exact rules of general scientific writing as to coherence, style and precision of facts. But in a Batesonesque experiment I apply his method of loose and strict thinking (Bateson 1973: 47-49) to approach the life and work of Victor Turner. By participating in the identity and biography of Victor Turner I observe his specific way of thinking. The major part of the paper deals with Victor Turner ́s personal and academic life which are closely linked to his notions of culture, ritual and the anthropological subject. The final section will briefly discuss the connections of (auto)biography and anthropology from a theoretical viewpoint.

Examines the concept of play in Western thought, with special emphasis on the relationship between aesthetics and ethics, and envisions literary discourse as contributing to an alternative mentality based on peace rather than power.

In The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure, Victor Turner examines rituals of the Ndembu in Zambia and develops his now-famous concept of "Communitas." He characterizes it as an absolute inter-human relation beyond any form of structure.The Ritual Process has acquired the status of a small classic since these lectures were first published in 1969. Turner demonstrates how the analysis of ritual behavior and symbolism may be used as a key to understanding social structure and processes. He extends Van Gennep's notion of the "liminal phase" of rites of passage to a more general level, and applies it to gain understanding of a wide range of social phenomena. Once thought to be the "vestigial" organs of social conservatism, rituals are now seen as arenas in which social change may emerge and be absorbed into social practice.As Roger Abrahams writes in his foreword to the revised edition: "Turner argued from specific field data. His special eloquence resided in his ability to lay open a sub-Saharan African system of belief and practice in terms that took the reader beyond the exotic features of the group among whom he carried out his fieldwork, translating his experience into the terms of contemporary Western perceptions. Reflecting Turner's range of intellectual interests, the book emerged as exceptional and eccentric in many ways: yet it achieved its place within the intellectual world because it so successfully synthesized continental theory with the practices of ethnographic reports."

Feminist Literary and Cultural Criticism explores inter-disciplinary connections across Cultural Anthropology, Geography, Psychology, and feminist literary criticism to develop a theoretical framework for spatial criticism. Using the spatial gynocritics framework developed in the book, it analyzes selected texts from five different genres–short-story, novel, film, cartoons, and OTT series, created by women. The creators discussed in the book constitute a transnational collectivity of women that shares common concerns about gender, environment, technology, and social hierarchies. They comprise a geographically and linguistically diverse group from India, Uruguay, Spain, Argentina, and the USA. The book offers immense potential for a comparative study on numerous aspects, among which the present work concentrates on the treatment of Space, demonstrating that spatial logic and grammar are essential elements of the feminist praxis. The book reveals the unexamined potential in the women creators’ praxis of destabilizing, decentring, and destroying the ascribed centres around which social arrangements are structured. Moreover, the book offers valuable analytic tools that add to scholarship in literary theory, comparative cultural studies, comparative literature, gender studies, feminist criticism, and interdisciplinary humanities. It is an indispensable aid to students and faculty in these areas of study, enabling them to critique texts from a fresh perspective.

Turner looks beyond his routinized discipline to an anthropology of experience . . . We must admire him for this.-Times Literary Supplement

The rapprochement of anthropology and literary studies, begun nearly fifteen years ago by such pioneering scholars as Clifford Geertz, Edward Said, and James Clifford, has led not only to the creation of the new scholarly domain of cultural studies but to the deepening and widening of both original fields. Literary critics have learned to "anthropologize" their studies—to ask questions about the construction of meanings under historical conditions and reflect on cultural "situatedness." Anthropologists have discovered narratives other than the master narratives of disciplinary social science that need to be drawn on to compose ethnographies. Culture/Contexture brings together for the first time literature and anthropology scholars to reflect on the antidisciplinary urge that has made the creative borrowing between their two fields both possible and necessary. Critically expanding on such pathbreaking works as James Clifford and George Marcus's Writing Culture and Marcus and Michael M. J. Fischer's Anthropology as Cultural Critique, contributors explore the fascination that draws the disciplines together and the fears that keep them apart. Their topics demonstrate the rich intersection of anthropology and literary studies, ranging from reading and race to writing and representation, incest and violence, and travel and time. This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1996.

Six essays explore the making of human identities and agency in English communities between the Great Plague and about 1600. They also focus attention on the processes of understanding past cultures and their texts. Among the topics are court politics, sacred and secular drama, and women. Paper edition (2416-9), $15.95. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR