TURNER, Victor - Ritual y drama

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Frame, Flow and Reflection:Ritual and Drama as Public Liminality

Victor TURNER

W hat, at first glance, could b e less close, less akin th an dram aand reflection? Drama dem ands a stage, actors, a heightenedatmosphere, spectators, the smell of the crowd, the roarof the greasepaint. Reflection is at least one of the thingson e does with one 's sol itude. But t o coun ter this opposi-t ion an anthropologist tends t o thin k in terms not of soli tarybut of plural reflection, or, much better, plural reflexivity,the ways in which a group or community seeks to portray,understand , and then a ct on itself . Essentially, publicreflexivity takes th e for m of a performance. T he languagesthrou gh which a gro up com mu nicates i tself to itself areno t, of course, confined t o talking codes: they include ges-tures, music, dancing, graphic representation, painting,sculpture, an d the fashioning of symbolic objects. T he yaredra m atic , tha t is literally "doing" codes. Pub lic reflex-ivity is also concerned with what I have called "liminality."Th is term , literally "being-on-a-threshold," mean s a sta teo r process w hich is betwixt-and-between th e norm al, day-today cultural and social states and processes of gettingand spending, preserving law and order, and registeringstructural status. Since liminal t im e is not controlled byth e clock i t is a t ime of encha ntm ent when anything might ,even should, happen. An other way of put t ing i t would beto say that the liminal in socio-cultural process is similarto the subjunct ive mood in verbs - ust as mundane socio-Reproduced by permission of the author and of the publisher from Performancein postmodern culture (Madison, Wisconsin: Coda Press, Inc ., 1977,. The sectionheads (except for the last) have been added by the editor.Japanese Journal of Religious Studies 614 December 1979 465


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Victor TURNERstructural activities resemble the indicative mood. Limi-nality is full of potency and potentiality. It may also befull of experiment and play. There may be a play of ideas,a play of words, a play of symbols, a play of metaphors.In it , play's the thing. Liminality is not confined in its ex-pression to ritual and the performative arts. Scientifichypotheses and experiments and philosophical speculationare also forms of play, though their rules and controls aremore rigorous and their relation to mundane "indicative"reality more pointed than those of genres which proliferatein fantasy. One might say, without too much exaggeration,that liminal phenomena are at the level of culture what vari-ability is at the level of nature.Liminal rites. Liminality is the term used by the Belgianfolklorist van Gennep to denominate the second of threestages in what he called a "rite of passage." Such rites arefound in all cultures, and are seen as both indicators andvehicles of transition from one sociocultural state and statusto another - childhood to maturity, virginity to marriage,childlessness to parenthood, ghosthood to ancestorhood,sickness to health, peace to war and vice versa, scarcity toplenty, winter to spring, and so on. He did, however, dis-tinguish between those rites performed at life-crises, suchas birth, puberty, marriage, death, and those performedat crucial points in the turning year, or on occasions ofcollective crisis when a whole society faces a major change,peace to war, health to epidemic, and so forth. The firstset were mainly performed for individuals in secret or hid-den places and related to upward mobility. The latter wereperformed for collectivities, were public in character, andoften portrayed reversals or inversions of status or confu-sion of ordinary everyday categories. Van Gennep distin-guished the three stages as (1) separation (from ordinarysocial life); (2) margin or h e n (meaning threshold), when466 Japanese Journal of Religious Studies 6 / 4 December 1979


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Frame, Flow and Reflectionthe subjects of ritual fall into a limbo between their pastand present modes of daily existence; and (3 ) re-aggregation,when they are ritually returned to secular or mundane life -either at a higher status level or in an altered state of con-sciousness or social being. I have written at length aboutinitiation rites or rites of status elevation. I am now ex-tremely interested in the other major type of rites. I usedto call it "ritual or status reversal," from the fact that inmany cultures rituals performed at major calendrical turnsportrayed turnabouts of normal social status: the poorplayed at being rich, the rich at being poor; kings and no-bles were abased and commoners wore the insignia of rule.But these ritual reversals are only part of the story. Justas important are the ways a society finds in these publicrituals of commenting on and critiquing itself. Here thereis not so much the symbolism of birth, maturation, death,and rebirth - that is, of linear developments - but ratherthe continuous presence of a metalanguange - that is, codesor presentation and expression which enable participantsand spectators to realize just how far they have fallen shortof or transgressed their own ideal standards, or even, in somekinds of ritual, to call those very ideals into question underconditions of sharp social change.

I have spoken about liminal time. I now distinguish be-tween everyday social space and liminal space. In publicmetasocial rites we have to do with public liminality, andsuch rites are often performed in the village or town square,in full view of everyone. They are not secret affairs, per-formed in caves or groves or in lodges protected fromprofanation by poisoned arrows. All performances requireframed spaces set off from the routine world. But meta-social rites use quotidian spaces as their stage; they merelyhallow them for a liminal time.T h e argument. Now the gist of my argument is simply this:Japanese Journal of Religious Studies 6 / 4 December 1979 467


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Victor T U R N E R

that for every major social formation there is a dominantmode of public liminality, the subjunctive space time thatis the counterstroke t o its pragmatic indicative texture. Thus,the simpler societies have ritual or sacred corroborees astheir main metasocial performances; proto-feudal and feudalsocieties have carnival or festival; early modern societieshave carnival and theater; and electronically advanced so-cieties, film. I am aware that this is a gross oversimplifi-cation, that there are many other performative genres,such as spectacles, parades, processions, circuses, even artexhibitions, and television, and that in each of the fourdivisions (mentioned earlier) there are many subdivisions.But to get a preliminary hold upon the relationship betweensocial processes and performative genres it is perhaps bestto start with bold strokes and attempt to fill in the finedetails later.To look at itself a society must cut out a piece of itselffor inspection. To do this it must set up a frame withinwhich images and symbols of what has been sectioned offcan be scrutinized, assessed, and, if need be, remodeled andrearranged. In ritual what is inside the frame is what is of tencalled the "sacred," what is outside, the "profane," "secular,"or "mundane." To frame is to enclose in a border. A sa-cralized space has borders. These may be permanent, inthe case of the temple, or situational, as in the case of manycentral African rituals I have observed where sacred spacemay be demarcated by an improvised fence or merely bythe anticlockwise circling of a tree or cleared area by ritualadepts. Time also enters the framing, since rituals, as vanGennep has shown, have a welldefined beginning, middle,and end. Often audible markers are used: bell-ringing,shouting, singing, percussion sounds. By such means sa-cred time is dramatically separated from secular time. Ritualtime is ordered by rules of procedure, written or unwritten.A ritual contains an explicit scenario or score. Modern views468 Japanese Journal of Religious Studies 6 / 4 December 1979


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Frame, Flow and Reflection

of ritual stress its rigid and obsessional character. But tribalrituals are anything but rigid. One should rather regardthem as orchestrations of a wide range of performativegenres, symphonies in more than music, comprising severalperformative genres. These may include dancing, gesturing,singing, chanting; the use of many musical instruments;mimetic displays; and the performance of drama duringkey episodes. All the senses are enlisted, and the symbolicactions and objects employed are in every sensory code.Since the rise of puritanism we have been inclined, in theWest, to stress the pervasively solemn and strict characterof ritual. But the majority of rituals still performed in theworld contain festive, joyful, and playful episodes and in-cidents. What Huizinga has called the "ludic" interacts withthe solemn in complex fashion. Again, while there are fixed,stereotyped sequences of symbolic action, there are alsoepisodes given over to verbal and nonverbal improvisation.Indeed, if we adopt the standpoint of culture history it isclear that full-scale rituals of this sort are the matrix fromwhich later performative genres have sprung, both seriousand entertaining.Rituals have form, but it is a special sort of form whicharises after secular social structure has been suspended toallow it to emerge. Preritual and postritual social life isgoverned by a multiplicity of laws, rules, regulations, andcustoms which make up a system of social control. Theseare for the most part culture's indicative mood, as I havesaid. 'But in ritual an even more complex situation comesinto being. On the one hand, the framing process, whichcontinues throughout the entire ritual process, since it es-tablishes and articulates the sequence of phases and episodescomposing the ritual, is subject to firm procedural, evenrubrical rules. But, on the other hand, the subjunctivityof ritual, that part of it which expresses supposition, desire,and possibility, rather than actual fact, particularly in theJapanese Journal of Religious Studies 6 / 4 December 1979 469


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Victor TURNERcen tral liminal phase, m ay ra ther be described in such term sas "charismatic," "num inous," "sacred reality ," "illudtemp us," "a tim e of wo nders," an d so o n . This is th e worldof the exhibition of sacra, symbols or a higher reality; ofth e dram atization of creation stories; of th e appearanceof m asked and m onstrou s figures; of th e con struction ofcom plicated shrine s; of th e revelation of figurines o r wallpaintings used to instruct and catechize naked or paintednovices undergoing initiato ry trans form ation . In times ofradical social change, some of these sacred items and sym-bolic processes burst out of the secrecy of lodges and enterthe public arena as part of the repertoire of propheticleaders who mobilize the people against invaders or over-lords threatening their d eep culture.Public rituals. But it is no t of initia tory secrets th at I wouldspeak h ere. It is o f th e great public festivals where publicevents com e under t h e lens of liminal atte nti on . Such ritualshave very frequently a satirical, lampooning, comedic quality.Furthermore, they tend to stress the basic equality of all ,even if this involves a status reversal and the setting up ofhierarchies of roles, occupied by those who are normallyunderlings, which caricature the normative indicative hier-archy's po wer, wealth, and autho rity. In my book The ritualprocess (1969: 178-188) I have mentioned a number ofthese public rituals, such as the Holi festival in the Indianvillage, Kishan Garhi, described by McKim Marriott in "Thefeast of love" (1 9 6 6 : 2 10-2 12), and th e A p o ceremony ofthe northern Ashanti of Ghana, in which there is a reversalof secular social status, and social inferiors are privilegedt o upbraid and lampoo n their "betters." Quite ofte n, how-ever, public ritual dramatizes secular, political, and legalsta tu s relationships. Even in those cases, episodes of statusreversal, including th e direct m anifesta tion of wh at I havecalled communitas, the mutual confrontation of human

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Frame, Flow and Reflectionbeings stripped of status role characteristics - people, "justas they are," getting through to each other - may strikinglyoccur. For example, the great ethnographer Henri Junod(1 962: 397404) discusses the major public rituals of theThonga of Mozambique, the %ma of bukanyi," in the fol-lowing terms: The nkanyi from which the ritual derivesits name is a large tree bearing a plum-like fruit from whicha mildly intoxicating liquor is brewed. Political hierarchyis at first in evidence here, for the rites must be inauguratedby the paramount chief, followed at the district level bysubchiefs, who pray to their deceased royal ancestors insacred woods. The term luma means that a major restriction isbeing lifted. Things are being tabooed. No one may gatherthe fruit or brew its ,beer until the rites have been inaugu-rated. When someone lumas the ban is lifted. What I havesaid about the public and visible nature of calendrical ritual -for the bukanyi is considered to mark the beginning of thenew year - is exemplified in Junod's description of whatoccurs after the chiefly prayers.

The young people are now assembled to clean up the publicsquare and all the roads. Th e ball room must be prepared!The wom en of the capital start ou t early in t he morning . . . .and they go all over the country gathering the golden fruit;this is piled up in an enormous heap on the public square.The women of the capital brew ten or fifteen huge casksof the precious liquor. . . . A convocation of the entire maleportion of the tribe is held in the capital, but the first torespond to the call must be . . . the warriors of the army,who come in full array, with all their ornaments, and carryingtheir small clay shelds . One cask of beer is selected, intowhich is thrown the black powder, the great medicine ofthe land. . . . Now com es the third act: the drinking in thevillages. Each district chief must commence to luma in thepresence of his subjects, and not until he has done so canthe people d rink freely in the villages (p. 399).

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Victor TURNER

Here I would l ike to interpolate that the various com-ponents of the national poli t ical structure, here principallythe chiefs and the warriors, have the role of first framing,then punctuat ing t he episodes of the r i tual . Structure isused in th e service of comm unitas. Th e conten t of the ri tualre la tes to the uni ty and cont inui ty of the nat ion and theland, transcending all structural opposit ions of chief andcom mo ner , men and w omen. I now wish t o re turn t o Junod 'saccount , which s t resses the Dionysian communi tas whichis the ground swell of the b u k a n y i , and which here escapesi ts Apol lonian framing by male authori ty.From thls m oment (i.e., the c h e f s prayer) there is no furtherdescription. Drinking contin ues day and night, night andday! When the supp ly is finished in one village, they goto the next. These feasts are the Saturnalia, the Bacchanalia,the carnival of the tribe (here I would criticize Junod's no-menclature: I would reserve all three of these terms forperforma tive genres in societies more complex than th eThonga). During these weeks some individuals are in a con-tinual state of sem i-intoxication. Orgies on all sides, songsand dances! . . . . How far does sexual license go duringbukanyi? Not to the point of general promiscuity as amongstthe BaPedi (another southern Bantu people) after the cir-cumcision school. How ever, many cases of adultery occur.Men and w omen forget the elementary rules of. conduc t.They attend to the wants of nature in the same places, whichis taboo under ordinary circumstances: "Nau, a wa ha tiyi," -"The law is no longer in force" (p . 401) .

But social structure, after i ts dip in communitas, emergesrenewed wh en the district .chiefs send their people to th ecapital w ith supplies of "new wine." Th is is followed bya series of r etu rn visits by th e chief to villages of his sub -jects, w ith furth er dancing , singing, and drinking.Junod , who a s ea r ly a s 1912 knew his van Gennep well,

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Frame, Flow and Reflectionwas aware of these polarities of public ritual, although hedid not, of course, use my vocabulary: "structure and anti-structure," o r "social structure and communitas." gut hedid write tha t: "These rites are . . . . dictated by the senseof hierarchy (Junod's emphasis). A subject must not pre-cede his chief, nor a younger brother the elder in the useof the new harvest, else they would kill those in authority.Such an act is against order" (p. 404). Junod then goeson to stress the idea of passage, following van Gennep:"There is a passage from one year to another . . . . thoughthe luma rites do not bear all the characteristics of a truepassage rite, like those of circumcision or moving, we mayobserve in the luma or bukanyi a kind of marginal periodof general license, when the ordinary laws are more or lesssuspended" (p. 404).Junod does not mention the use of antistructural processhere as a metasocial critique, or, even at the simplest level,as an opportunity for the common folk to speak franklyto chiefs and aristocrats. That this aspect was probablypresent is suggested by evidence from other Southern Bantu-speaking peoples. For instance, Eileen Jensen Krige (1950)finds it in the Great Umkhosi or National First-fruit Cere-monies of the Zulu of Natal. The Zulu, it must be remem-bered, had largely converted this agricultural ritual intoa grand review of the army and a celebration of the militarykingship established by Shaka, that genius of war. Never-theless the agricultural basis remains, and the king's songis said to bring rain for the crops. Krige writes:

A remarkable feature of this review of the army was thatconsiderable freedom of speech was allowed on this occa-sion, and the king could be insulted with impun ity. Variouspeople would leave the ranks of the warriors, who weremade to sit down during the discourse, and there (were)free interrogations to which the king (was) bound to reply.Japanese Journa l of Religious S tudies 6 / 4 December 1979 473


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Victor TURNERSometimes they denounced him in th e presence of all, blamedhis acts, stigmatized them as infamous and cowardly,obliged him to explain, destroyed the reasoning in his answers,dissecting them and unmasking their falsehood, then threat-ening him proudly, and ending with a gesture of contempt(p. 260).

Thus the highest becomes the lowest; the equality of alloutside social structure is asserted.Carnival. Instances of a similar kind could be multipliedfrom many standard ethnographies. I will now considerthe second major performative genre I mentioned earlier:carnival. I should interpolate that growing evidence con-vinces me that new ways of modeling or framing social realitymay actually be proposed and sometimes legitimated inthe very heat of performance, emerging as a sort of artifactor popular creativeness. That is why public liminality hasoften been regarded as "dangerous" by whatever powers-that-be who represent and preside over established structure.Public liminality can never be tranquilly regarded as a safetyvalve, mere catharsis, "letting off steam." Rather it is com-munitas weighing structure, sometimes finding it wanting,and proposing in however extravagant a form new paradigmsand models which invert or subvert the old. Carnival is aparticularly interesting illustration of this ambiguity. AsNatalie Z . Davis has said (Society and culture in early modernFrance, 1975: 97): "Festive life can on the one hand per-petuate certain values of the community, even guaranteeits survival, and on the other hand criticize political order."I cannot today discuss in detail how the historical religionsof the book (Judaism, Christianity, Islam) have come, byand large, to emphasize th e solemn in their official liturgicalstructures, while merely countenancing with some misgivingthe festive and ludic, as parallel "fold" processes fit for fairs47 4 Japanese Journal of Religious Studies 6 / 4 December 1979


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and feasts perhaps, but not for "serious" ritual to their majorcalendrical rituals. But to the eye of the investigator, the"solemn" and the "ludic," often regarded as equivalent tothe sacred and the profane by religious professionals, mustsurely be analyzed as polarities of the same ritual field.Solemn liturgies dramatize paradigms of axiomatic value.Festivals and carnivals allow considerable creative latitudefor collective scrutiny of the contemporaneous social struc-ture, often with lampooning liberty. People stand backfrom their lives and weigh' their quality. We have seen howin Thonga, Zulu, and other "tribal" ritual, solemn and ludicare interdigitated, penetrate one another. Now at a moreadvanced stage of the social division of labor we must turnour attention to performative genres that are specializedin the direction of festal play, however rough that playful-ness may often be.Carnivals differ from rituals in the further respect thatthey seem to be more flexibly responsive to social and evensocietal change, change in the major political and economicstructures. Strictly speaking, "carnival" refers to the periodof feasting and revelry just before Lent, including MardiGras in France, Fastnacht in Germany and Shrove Tide inEngland. The popular and probably fictitious etymologicalderivation "carne vale," "flesh, farewell," hits off its ludicand liminal quality, poised between mundance and solemnmodes of living - with more than a hint of desperation. Allthings of the flesh, including the "things that are Caesar's,"are being brought to the fore of social attention, the pleasur-able to be indulged in, and the politically and legally unjust tobe given a long hard look. It is perhaps no accident tha t thetwo best American historians of carnival in my view, NatalieDavis and Robert J . Bezucha, should consistently acknowledgetheir debt both for theory and data t o Arnold van Gennep, thespiritual father of modern cultural processualism whose Manueldu folklore fran~ais s as influential for historians as his RitesJapanese Journal of Religious Studies 6 / 4 December 1979 475


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Victor TURNERd e passage is for anth rop olog ists. Bo th have studied carnivalrather late in European history, Davis in the later middleages and the s ixteenth century, Bezucha in the nineteenthcentury. B oth have worked in Franc e, where change hasalways b een m ore reflexive, o r at least m ore self-conscious,than elsewhere. I would l ike to spend some t ime with thesescholars whose data admirably i l lustrate my case that publicl imiliminality is th e ey e and eyestalk which society ben dsround upon i t s own condi t ion, whether hea l thy o r unsound.

Essentially, Davis and Bezucha are interested in the re-sponsiveness to sociocultural change of the various ,genres,bo rn in th e Middle Ages, which Davis has catalogued as:

masking, costuming, hiding; charivaris (noisy, masked demon-strations to humiliate some wrongdoer in the community),farces, parades, and floats; collecting and distributing moneyand sweets; dancing, music-making, the lighting of fires;reciting of poetry, gaming and athletic contests - the listin all its forms and variations would be longer than the 81games in Bruegel's famous painting or the 217 games thatRabelais gave to Gargantua. They took place a t regularintervals, and whenever the occasions warranted it ; hey w eretimed to calendar of religion and season (the twelve daysof Christmas, the days before Lent, early May, Pentecost,the feast of Saint Jean-Baptiste in June, the Feast of theAssumption in mid-August, and All Saints) and timed alsoto domestic events, marriages, and other family affairs(pp. 97-98).

Post-feudal carnivals. Na talie Davis conc ern s herself in hercha pter fou r, "The reasons of m isrule," with o n e l irninalcategory of Frenc h ci tizens: unmarried men in peasantcom mu nities w h o have reached the age of pu ber ty. "Sincevil lage boys usually did not marry unti l their early or mid-dle twenties in the fifteenth through seventeenth centuries,476 Japanese Journal of Religious Studies 6 / 4 December 1979


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Frame, Flow and Reflectiontheir period of jeunesse lasted a long time and the numberof bachelors relative to the total number of men in the vil-lage was quite high" (p. 104). For carnival purposes eachyear before Lent, after Christmas, or at some other time,they elected a King or Abbott from among their midst. Thisofficiant was the head of what was widely called "an Abbeyof Misrule" (AbbC de Maugouvert), a carnival group puton "by an informal circle of friends and family, sometimesby craft or professional guilds and confraternities, and veryoften by organizations that literary historians have called'socidtb joyeuses' (or 'fool-societies' or 'play-acting so-cieties')" (p. 98). Indeed, I well remember how, on ShroveTuesday in Glasgow, students from the University, dressedin all kinds of bizarre garb, with much transvestitism, usedto take over the city and swarm aboard all its public trans-portation, bullying and cajoling the citizenry into givinggenerous alms to charity - obviously a latter day Abbeyof Misrule in action! The medieval festive Abbeys latercame to assume a political nature, and in a remarkablechapter, "Women on top," Davis shows how males in masksand female garb caricatured female attributes. It was sup-posed in the carnival frame - which here merely replicatedthe dominant thought of a patrilineal society - that wom-an's dominant attr ibute was "unruliness," or "disorder-liness." As Davis puts it : "the lower ruled the higher withinthe woman . . . and if she were given her way, she wouldwant to rule over those above her outside. Her disorderli-ness led her into the evil arts of witchcraft, so ecclesiasticalauthorities claimed; and when she was embarked on somebehavior for which her allegedly weak intellect disqualifiedher, such as theological speculation or preaching, that wasblamed on her disorderliness too" (p. 125). The Kingdomsand Abbeys of Misrule had "officers" who presided overtheir carnival behavior. Among these roles, played by men,were "Princesses and Dames and especially Mothers; weJapanese Journal of Religious Studies 6 / 4 December 1979 477


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Victor TURNERfind Mere Folle in Dijon, Langes, and Chilon-sur-Sabne;Mere Sot te in Paris and CompiCgne; and Mere d'Enfancein Bordeaux. . . . . In all of this there was a double irony:the young villager who became an Abbott, the artisan whobecame a Prince directly adopted for their Misrule an objectof licit power; the power invoked by the man who becameMere Folle, however, was already in defiance o f naturalorder - a dangerous and vital power, which his disguisemade safe for him to assume" (pp. 139-40).What one sees here in Davis's material is evidence of aninstitution originally committed to maintaining a cyclicalrepetitive order, in which the natures and virtues of thesexes as structurally classified are clearly figured. Never-theless, although b o t h male and female offices of the Abbeysof Misrule may be said to belong to the liminal domain ofcarnival, the female ones are quintessentially liminal, sincethey represent persons who, even in the mundane "indica-tive" world, by reason of their status inferiority and mar-ginality, have a "subjunctive"penumbra reinforced andreduplicated in the carnival setting. The danger here is notsimply that of female "unruliness." This unruliness itselfis a mark of the ultraliminal, of the perilous realm of possi-bility of "anything m a y go" which threatens any social orderand seems the more threatening, the more that order seemsrigorous and secure. The powers of the v eak - to curseand criticize - set limits on the power of the strong - tocoerce and ordain.

The subversive potential of the carnivalized feminineprinciple becomes evident in times of social change whenits manifestations move out of the liminal world of MardiGras into the political arena itself. Natalie Davis has writtenat some length of peasant movements and protests by otherkinds of groups, in which men, clad in the carnival "drag"usually associated with M2re Folle and her Infanterie, puttingon feminine "unruliness" so to speak, projected the carnival478 Japanese Journal of Religious Studies 6 / 4 December 1979


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Frame, Flow and Reflectionright of criticism and mockery into situations of real, "in-dicative" rebellion (p. 147).She gives several instances of how "ritual and festive inver-sion" was put to new overtly political uses (p. 147). In theBeaujolais in the 1770s, male peasants blackened their facesand dressed as women "and then attacked surveyors measuringtheir lands for a new landlord" (p. 147). In England, in1629, (the so-called) "Captain" Alice Clark, a real female,headed a crowd of women and male weavers dressed as wom-en in a grain riot near Maldon in Essex (p. 148). In 163 1,in the dairy and grazing sections of Wiltshire, bands of menrioted and leveled fences against the king's enclosure oftheir forests. They were led by men dressed as women,who called themselves "Lady Skimmington ." In April 18 12,"General Ludd's Wives," two weavers dressed as women,led a crowd of hundreds t o smash steam looms and burna factory in Stockport (p. 148). Among other examples,Davis cites the "Whiteboys" of Ireland, who, for almosta decade, from 1760-70, dressed in long white frocks and,with blackened faces, "set themselves up as an armed popularforce to provide justice for the poor 'to restore the ancientcommons and redress other grievances."' She says that these"Ghostly Sallies" were the prototypes of the "Molly Maguiresand the Ribbon societies of the nineteenth century" (p. 149).What has been happening, of course, is that the rebelliouspotential of the unruly female persona, hitherto confinedto the "play" world of carnival, has been put to new useby men in the traditionally masculine realm of politicalaction. As Davis writes: "On the one hand, the disguisefreed men from the full responsibility for their deeds andperhaps, too, from fear of outrageous revenge upon theirmanhood. After all, it was 'merely women' who were actingin this disorderly way. On the other hand, the males drewupon the sexual power and energy of the unruly womanand on her license (which they had long assumed at carnivalJapanese Journal of Religious Studies 6/4 December 1979 479


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Victor TURNERand games) - to promote fertility, to defend the commu-nity's interests and standards, and to tell the truth aboutunjust rule" (p. 149).Early modern carnivals. Another historian who has madeuse of popular festivity not only as an index, but also asan agency of sociocultural and political change is RobertBezucha, of Syracuse University, whose period for inten-sive study is the Second Republic in France. In a paperdelivered at the Davis Center at Princeton in 1975 he fol-lowed Maurice Agulhon (La Rdpublique au village) (1960:2 65-66) in tracing a double evolution in popular "mentalitC"during the early nineteenth century in France from tradi-tional to progressive in political life and from folklore (inthe French sense of this term, that is, as the nexus of tradi-tional customs, beliefs, and practices - Americans mightcall it "folk culture") to modernity in daily life. Theseprocesses, though parallel, were not synchronized so thatwhen villagers wished to express an advanced political idea,they often did so within the context of a folkloresque event.In doing so they carried further the normal lampooninglicense of the carnival, of which van Gennep has written:there is "the temporary suspension of the rules of normalcollective life . . . one profits from this period of traditionallicense to mock the constraints of the State and the Govern-ment to which the collectivity submits in normal times"(1938-58, vol. 1 :xx; vol. 3:981-82). How far they carriedit may be seen from the fact that most of Bezucha's datawere drawn from reports by Procureurs Gbnbraux in theArchives Nationales on incidents officially classified asaffaires politiques that occurred on Mardi Gras or AshWednesday (the key days of the Gzrzme-Gzrnaval cycle)between 1848 and 1851. Carnival contained many tradi-tional symbols and symbolic actions; these were used innew ways to express political attitudes, while new symbols,480 Japanese Journal of Religious Studies 6 / 4 December 1979


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Frame, Flow and Reflectionsuch as the Phrygian caps of the French Revolution, wereintroduced into carnival processions. Bezucha also recordsinstances of the transvestitism discussed by Davis, but thishas ceased to be a dominant symbolic motif by the timeof the brief Second Republic. Let me give two examplesfrom Bezucha's talk; one represents a critique from the Right,the other from the Left, of the rapidly changing politicalscene from Louis NapolCon's Revolution of 1848 to hisproclamation of himself as Emperor in 1852 - a periodcharacterized by increasing repression of the rural masses.The first comes from a report on the town of Uz6s in thedepartment of Gard in southern France (Popular festivitiesand politics during the Second Republic, pp. 12-13). Theyear is 1849.

February 21 was Ash Wednesday. On this day in th e Midiof France, the young people belonging to the popular class(la classe du peuple) are accustomed to hold a burlesquedivertissement whose theme is the burial of Carnival. Theycover or blacken their faces, don bizarre costumes, arm them-selves with kitchen bellows, and go through the streets ofthe town, one after the other, each trying to use the bellowson the person in front of him. At the head of th e procession,they carry a mannequin called Carimantran ( C a r h e entrant:the arrival of Lent) which they dance around at each stopand end by throwing into the w ater.This year, its authors, since they belong to the legitimistparty (seeking the restoration of the Bourbon dynasty) havenot neglected t o give to the festivities a significance whichwas insulting to the Republic. In place of a bellows, eachof them carried a broom, and at a signal they all began tosweep, raising a cloud of dust, while at the same time singinga song called "The Song of the Sweeps" (Ram oneurs).

But what gave the parody an extremely clear meaningwas another smaller group of persons preceding the sweepersand w ho, by the various emblems the y wore, obviously repre-Japanese Journal of Religious Studies 6 / 4 December 1979 481


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Victor TURNERsented the Republic (i.e., the government of Louis Napolkon).One of them rode a wretched nag and held a dirty tricoloredflag which from time to time he let trail on the ground behndhim.From time to time the sweepers would draw close tothis flag bearer, pretending to hit him with their broomsand to force him to descend and give h s place to another.In addition, five or six persons on foot and wearing clothingof various colors, in contrast to the completely white cos-tumes of the sweepers, marched in front of them with anissue of the journal La Rkfome displayed on their chests.Thus, it seemed that the white troupe was sweeping awaythe tricolored flag and those gathered around it.

Here, again, we have an instance of improvisation duringperformance itself - of the int roduct ion of a new element -broom replacing bellows; an d crit ical com m entar y on cu rrentevents. Bezucha fills in for us som e feature s of the relevanthis torical and cul tural conte xts (p p. 13-16). He sees in th ed am e des soufflets ("dance of the bellows") an instance ofa class of Ash Wednesday snake dances popular in southernFrench towns, which van Gennep believed were themselvesparodies of th e processions of t h e pk niten ts, the religiousfraternities of Provence. In these dances there was m uchritual tranvestitism. Masked yo ut hs dressed in wom en'spet t icoats o r nightshir ts amu sed the spectators by t ryingto grab the persons dancing in front of them, whether toset his skirts on fire o r strew him with ashes. Bu t the 1 84 9carnival at Uzirs m ade add itio na l use of old cu sto m . T h eGard department has witnessed religious conflict from theCamisard wars of the seventeenth century t o the White Terrorof the restorat ion. After th e Revolut ion of 1 830 , the Protes-tant e l i te of Uzirs had gained c on tro l of th e town's adminis-t ra t ion and Nat ional Gu ard. When Gu izot , a Protestant ,fel l in 18 48 , power went over t o their old foes the impover-ished Cathol ic majori ty. Th e Protestants feared that a thi rd482 Japanese Journal of Religious Studies 6 / 4 December 1979


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Frame, Flow and Reflectionrestoration of the Bourbons was imm inent . In other towns,this group might have been "men of Order"; here m anysupported the Left, "the democratic and social Republic,"as a means of opposing a government they distrusted. Asin so many small towns, at Uzks, religion, politics and socialstru ctu re form ed a single sociocu ltural field. Even beforethe Carnival, "the Republican cafe" had assaulted dancingCatho lics with billiard cues, while C atholic yo u th s retaliatedby attacking Protestant homes and businesses - why doesthis script seem so familiar these days? Bezucha summarizesth e events of 18 49 as a "popular demo nstration by th e Rightagainst an elite on the Left. The costumes of the sweeperswere indeed traditional, but the color white also symbolizedth e legitimist, Catholic party. Their dance was a customaryone, but by substituting brooms for bellows and adding atricolored flag and a few copies of a newspaper they changedthe meaning of the parody. Its them e was no longer th eburial of Carnival, rather the burial of th e Rep ublic . . . thismechanism of innov ation set off a chain of violence" (p p.15-16) .Color sym bolism plays a clear role here. I wish I hadtime to speak more about i t , for I have written extensivelyon the initiatory significance of what I can only considerth e culturally "primary" colors, white, red , and black, instudies of tribal cultures. But it is im po rtantly used in pro-vincial F rance during t h e Second R epublic, as Bezucha'ssecond exam ple dem onstrates. This case is from a procur-eur 's notes on Ash Wednesday 18 49 in th e town of Issoirein the Puy-de-Dbme, in th e north . Here the Whites are pu tdo w n and the Reds prevail.

On the 21st of this month a masquerade thusly composedappeared on the main square of lsso ire: an individual wearingbourgeois clothing, his face covered with a mask of whitematerial and holding a cat tle pik in his hand, pretended t oJapanese Journal of Religious Studies 6 / 4 December 1979 483


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be a herdsman driving cat tle. Behind him were two personsjoined together by a yoke and dressed like workers, theirfaces covered b y masks of red ma terial. Following the mcame a cart pulled by a horse and containing five or six per-sons supporting a straw dummy which in this part of thecountry is called Guillaume. The allegory was highly trans-pare nt: th e bourgeois aristocracy was forcing the people[emphasis in the original text] under the yoke of its power.

At th e same time i n another part of town, another groupof maskers was going about in a cart; one person wore ared bon net an d carried a woo den staff which he jabbed i ntothe side of a straw dum m y which was wearing a white bonne t.This last m asquerade was the opp osite, or rather th e com ple-m en t, of the first allegory: it was th e people in turn takingits vengeance by th e destruction of the aristocratic bour-geoisie.

Finally, elsewhere in the town, a band of young peasantswent about shaking their fists, singing, and shouting A basles blancs! (p. 16).

Issoire had the reputation of being a turbulent town,strongly anticarlist and hostile to the bourgeoisie. The colorsymbolism had potent cultural meaning here too. Red wasnot only contra-Carlist but also pro-revolutionary. If whiteand Right stood for order, red and Left stood, not for dis-order, but for a new order based on the (often bloody) over-throw of the old order. The figure of Guillaume, the StrawMan, is interesting. Traditionally he was a buffoon or clown,who represented Turncoatism, like the Vicar of Bray in theEnglish song. He was the person who put opportunism beforeprinciple. In Bezucha's interpretation (p. 18) he had ceasedto be, as he once was, "a symbolic representation of carnival,"with its plasticity of commentary as against the rigidity ofa structure accepted by all, but was now "the personificationof the maskers' enemy, the so-called bourgeois aristocracy."He was petrified in a new structural role - if only in the484 Japanese Journal of Religious Studies 6 / 4 December 1979


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Frame, Flow and Reflectionlabile world of carnival.Four days after this Ash Wednesday parade, which st i l lpreserved many traditional features, a local chambrCe orRepubl ican club m ou nted a procession, presumably t o cele-brate the first year of the Republic, which represented aconscious combinat ion of traditional carnival allegory andelem ents of th e f2tes rdvolu tionn aires, t h e official pageantsstaged in t h e 1 79 0s. As Bezucha describes i t :

In a horse-drawn cart decorated with red cloth, green gar-lands, and the motto Honneur au travail, rode a costumedfigure representing Liberty, her (his, for Liberty was playedby a man) hands on the shoulders of The Worker and TheFarmer. Behind Liberty stood her children, Genius andInstruction; next to here were two men, one with a largeopen book and the other with a sign reading La Rkpubliquefera le tour du monde. The cart was led by a villager dressedas a Rom an herald an d followed by the figure of Time.An honor guard of ten persons preceded the cart andbehind it came five persons in chains: one was dressed asa priest or jesuit, a second in white, a third in black, andthe final two as nobles wearing signs marked Privilege intheir hat s. Completing the procession was a crowd of per-haps one hundred and fifty men, marching arm in arm andsinging La Marseillaise and Le Chant du dkpart. As theypassed the home of the retired subprefect, a peasant washeard to s hout Vive le sang! (pp. 18-19).

The thought of the gui l lot ine must have made shiversru n do w n several backs that night! Indeed , in ot he r MardiGras parades recorded by Bezucha from that period, symbolicguillotines were taken o n procession o n carts. A t Schirmeckin the Bas-Rhin department, for example, one such ' 'gui11o-tine" was accompan ied by an "executioner," wearing a redbelt an d smeared w ith a colored substance imitating bloo d.The procession s topped outside the homes of local notables,Japanese Journal of Religious Studies 6 / 4 December 1979 485


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Victor TURNERwhile the group shouted "Long live Robespierre! Longlive the guillotine!"Stage drama. The examples of public liminality I have given -calendrical rites in tribal cultures and carnivals in post-feudaland early modern culture - stress the role of collective in-novatory behavior, of crowds generating new ways of framingand modelling the social reality which presses on them intheir daily lives. Here all is open, plurally reflexive, thefolk acts on the folk and transforms itself through becomingaware of its situation and predicament. I now want to turnto a major reflexive genre, which in keeping with its originin cultures which recognize the category of "the individual"as the significant decision-making and ethical unit, attributesto individuals the authorship of its scenarios - I refer tostage drama. But stage plays are, of course, as much publicas private performative modes. They involve actors, audience,producers, stagehands, often musicians and dancers, and,most of all, their plots and messages are communicated byvarious written and oral networks to a general public whichvaries in span and composition from society to society andepoch to epoch. It is a moot point whether plays derivefrom rituals - as carnivals clearly do - or whether theyoriginated in the retelling of hunting and headhunting ad-ventures, with pantomimic accompaniments. In either casethey are liminal phenomena, with a good deal of reflexivecommentary interwoven with the descriptive narrative.Flow. In considering drama, we should consider flow. Therecan certainly be flow in ritual and carnival, but it is not socentral to these genres as framing and plural reflexivity.What is flow? My colleague at Chicago, the psychologistMihaly Csikszentmihalyi, has recently devoted a whole book(Beyond boredom and anxiety, 1975) to the study of thiselusive concept. For him flow is a state in which action

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Frame, F low an d Reflectionfollows action according to an inner logic which seems toneed no conscious intervent ion on ou r par t ; we experiencei t as a unif ied f lowing from one moment to the next , inwhich we feel in con trol of o ur actions, and in which thereis little distinction between self an d env ironm ent, betweenst imulus and response, or between past , present , and future .He sees f low as a co m m on , thoug h by n o m eans inevi tableexperience when people act wi th tota l involvement , whetherin play and sp or t , in t h e creative experiences in art and l i tera-tu re , or in religious experiences. He assigns t o flow six attr i-bu tes or distinctive features, marking i t off from oth er interio rstates.1 . Ac tion a nd awareness are experienced as one.2 . A ttention is centered on a l imited st imulus field: ingames by formal rules and such motivational means as com-petitiveness. Ru les, m otivation s, rewards, th e will to partici-pate are seen as framing devices, necessary limitations forth e centering of a t ten t ion .

3. Loss of ego: th e "self" wh ich is ordinarily th e br ok erbetween one person's actions and another simply becomesirre levant. T he ac tor , immersed in th e f low, accepts theframing rules as binding which also bind the other actors -n o "self" is needed t o bargain a bo ut wh at should o r shouldnot be do ne or to "negot ia te" abo ut the meaning to be as-signed t o actions.

4. The actor finds himself in control of his actions andenviron me nt . He may no t know it when "flowing," bu treflecting on it "in tran qu illity" he m ay realize th at his skillswere perfectly matched t o the demand s made u pon himb y ri tual , ar t , or spo rt . Ou tside th e framed and willinglylimited flow situation such a subjective sense of controlis hard to a t ta in , du e to th e enorm ous numb er of s t imul iand cultural tasks tha t press o n us. If skil ls ou tm atc h de-man ds, bor edo m results; if skills are inad equ ate, anx iety -hence th e book's t i t le .Japanese Journal of Religious Studies 6 / 4 December 1979 487


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Victor T U R N E R5 . Flow usual ly contains coherent , noncontradictorydemands for action and provides clear, unambiguous feed-back to a person's ac tion s. Cu lture redu ces flow possibilities

to defined channels, for example, chess, polo, gambling,prescribed liturgical action, miniature painting, a yoga exer-cise, attempting a specific ascent by well-tested rock-climbingtechniques, th e practice of surgery, and so fo rth . One canthr ow oneself i n to th e cultural design of the game, ar t , pro-cedure , and k now whether one has don e well or no t whenone has completed the round of culturally predeterminedacts. Flow differs from everyday activities in t ha t i ts framingcontains explici t rules which make action and the evalua-t ion of action un pro blem atic. Th us cheating breaks flow -you have to be a believer, even if this implies temporary"willing suspension of disbelief," th at is, choosing t o believethat t h e rules are in som e way axiomatic . If m any form sof play or ri tual occur in l iminal space-t ime, that t ime isframed b y rules th at give credence t o whatever make-believe or innovative behavior, .whatever subjective action,goes o n within the frame.

6. Finally, flow is what Csikszentmihalyi calls "auto-tel ic," tha t is, i t seems t o need n o goals o r rewards outsideitself. T o f low is i t s own rew ard: i t is to be as happ y as ahuman being can be - in one sense the specific rules thattrigger an d frame flow, w heth er o f chess o r a med itat ivetechn iqu e, are irrelevant. Th is, Csikszentmihalyi concludes,is important for any study of human behavior, s ince i f i tis true i t follows that people will deliberately m anu factu recultural situations and frames which will release flow, or,as individuals, seek it ou tside their ascribed statuses or sta-t ions in l ife, if these are, for one reason or another, "flow-resistant ," th at is, conducive t o boredom o r anx iety.Frame. It is obvious that flow is an ingredient in any kindof successful cultura l perfo rm ance . But w hat is its relation-488 Japanese Journal of Religious Studies 614 December 1979


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Frame, Flow and Reflectionship to frame and reflexivity? Let us first consider ErvingGoffman's recent views on framing as expressed in his Frameanalysis (1974). Frames, for him, are "the principles oforganization which govern events" (p. 10). They are dividedinto a number of types: natural frames refer to unguidedevents, while social frames refer to "guided doings" (p. 22).Ritual, carnival, and stage drama would be "socially framed."Frames may also be primary, where the interpretation ofmeaning is imposed on a scene that would otherwise bemeaningless (p. 21), a view close to that of the phenome-nological sociologists such as Schutz, Garfinkel and Cicourel.Here social life may itself be seen as an endless negotiationabout which cultural frame of meaning should surroundand account for a given bit of behavior. I do not think thatflow can often occur in relation to primary framing unlessit can be shown early that there are prior shared under-standings about, say, the moral or aesthetic values of a givenevent or action, for negotiating often divides action fromawareness. Goffman speaks of such performative genresas movies and the theater as secondary frames. He also usesthe term fabricated frames where an activity is managed so thatone or more others has a false belief about what is goingon, as in the frame created by a confidence trickster (P. 83) .Reflection. Now I would argue that in Goffman's terms,while ritual, carnival, and theater are all socially framedguided doings, the first two genres, since they are moredeeply located in social structure, defined by Peter L. Bergerand Thomas Luckmann as the element of continuity or ob-jectification of reality (The social construction of reality:A treatise in the sociology of knowledge, 1966), owe theirflow qualities to the degree to which participants identifythemselves with the traditional scenario - the proceduraloutline - which itself may constitute a reflexive metacom-mentary on the history of the group - while flow in stageJapanese Journal of Religious Studies 6 / 4 December 1979 489


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Victor TURNERdrama comes from the fidelity with which actors conveythe dramatist's individually -based appraisal of the socialstructure. In all cases, the actors themselves are not re-flexive, since reflexivity inhibits flow, but in the flow oftheir mutually interconnected performances they conveythe reflexive message of the scenario or script. Part of thepotency of a "great performance" comes precisely fromthis : the author reflects; the actors flow. There is a fruitfultension between the opposites. The audience is "moved."A cultural problem is irradiated into full visibility for theaudience to reflect upon passionately. In ritual and carnivalit may not be too fanciful to see social structure itself asthe author o r source of scenarios. The cases presented byNatalie Davis and Robert Bezucha are interesting becausewe can detect in them social structure divided against istelf:one part authoring the downfall of another in mime andmask. No longer is social structure relatively solidary; classand gender have become self-conscious, reflexive, and onepart of the social system employs formerly shared culturalsymbols to provide a critique of others. It is at this pointthat collective reflexive genres seem to become clumsy in-struments of periodic self-appraisal for modernizing societies.Here Goffman's notion that transformation may occur be-tween frames - a process he also calls "keying," the "setof conventions by which a given activity, one already meaning-ful in terms of some primary framework, is transformed intosomething patterned on this activity but seen by the par-ticipants to be something quite else" - may be relevant.Carnival - or ritual - may key into stage drama. The formerseems to have happened, for example, in the case of theCornmedia dellxrte, whose actors, masked virtuosi ofspontaneous stage business, flourished in the atmosphereof the great fairs, such as the Fair of Saint-Germain andthe Fair of Saint Laurent in Paris. The Noh play of Japan,which took its present form in the fourteenth century, seems490 Japan ese Journa l of Religious Stu dies 6/4 December 1979


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Frame, Flow and Reflectionto have developed out of several earlier performative genres.One was Gigaku, a form of entertainment brought fromKorea early in the seventh century A.D., which "made useof music, dance, masking, and miming and was often of asatirical nature, but was part, nevertheless, of religious fes-tivals" (H enry W. Wells, "Noh" in The reader's encyclopediaof world drama, 1969 :6O2). Other major theatrical genreshave carnivalesque origins, such as Greek comedy whichhas been conjectured to originate in a processional cele-bration with a song or dance a t entrance, a debate or dis-pute , and an address to the onlookers - characters areridiculed and represen ted as absu rd or offensive. MedievalEuropean comedy has been held to have been affected bythe carnivalesque Feast of Fools, which itself derived inpart f rom th e Roman Saturnalia . H.J. Rose thus describesth e Saturnalia (1 94 8: 77 ): "During it there were no socialdistinctions, slaves had a holiday and feasted like their mas-ters, and all restrictions were relaxed . . . civilians and soldiersalike celebrated it, it was usual t o choose by lot a Lord ofMisrule (Saturnalicius princeps, ' leading man of the Satur-nalia') and gifts were exchanged."The liminal and the liminoid. Stage dramas are genres thatI would be inclined t o call "liminoid," "liminal-like," ra the rtha n "liminal"; th at is, the y are historically conne cted withand often displace rituals which possess true liminal phases,and they also share im po rtant characteristics w ith liminalprocesses an d s tate s, such as "subjectivity," escape fromth e classifications of everyday life, symb olic reversals, de-struction - at a deep level - of social distinctions, and thelike; nevertheless, lirninoid genres differ from liminal phasesin ways which indicate major differences in the societiesof which the y respectively cons titu te ma jor mode s of re-flexive stocktaking.Liminoid genres - which would include th e writing ofJapanese Journal of Religious Studies 6 / 4 December 1979 491


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Victor TURKERnovels and essays, the painting of portraits, landscapes andcrowd scenes, art exhibitions, sc ulp ture, arch itectu re, andso on, as well as individually written plays - contrast withliminal ph eno m ena in th e following ways. Liminal phe-nomena tend to dominate in tribal and early agrarian so-cieties; they are collective, concerned with calendrical,biological, and social stru ctura l cycles; they are integratedinto the total social process; they reflect the collective ex-perience of a com mu nity over tim e; and they may be saidt o be "functional" o r "eufunctional," even when they seemt o "invert" status hierarchies found in the nonliminal do m ain.Liminoid phenomena, on the other hand, flourish in societiesof more complex structure, where, in Henry Maine's terms,"contract has replaced status" as th e major social bo nd ,where people voluntarily enter into relationships insteadof being b orn into them . Perhaps they begin to appear inwhat Georges Gurvitch calls "city-states on their way tobecoming empires" (of the Graeco-Roman, Etruscan andUm brian type ) and in late feudal societies. But they be-come really prominent mainly in Western Europe in nascent,capitalistic societies, with the beginnings of industrializationand mechanization, and the emergence of socioeconomicclasses. Liminoid pheno men a m ay be collective (an d, whenthey are so, are often derived, like carnivals, parades, spec-tacles, circuses, and t h e like , from liminal predecessors)or individually created - though, as I said, they have masso r collective effects. Th ey are no t cyclical bu t interm it-tent, generated often in times and places assigned to theleisure sphere. Liminoid ph eno m ena , unlike liminal phe-nomena, tend to develop apart from central political andeconomic processes, along the margins, in the interstices,o n th e interfaces of central and servicing institu tion s - heyare plural, fragm entary (re presen ting, in som e cases, th edismemberment, or sparagmos, of holistic, pivotal, pan-societal rituals) and often experim ental in character. Fu r-492 Japanese Journal of Religious Studies 6/4 December 1979


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Frame , Flow and Reflectionthermore, since they are often assigned to individuals asscenario writers the y tend t o be mo re idiosyncrat ic andqu irk y, more "spare, original and strange" than liminalphen om ena. Their symbols are closer to the personal-psychological than to the objective-social typological pole.Cliques, schools , and coter ies of l iminoid authors and ar t is tsemerge, bu t these are bonded more by o pta t ion , by choice,than b y obligation - in the liminal case, persons have toundergo r i tual by vir tue of their natal s tatus . Co mp eti t ionemerges in the later liminoid do m ain ; individuals and schoolsco m pet e fo r the recognition of a "public" an d are regardedas ludic offerings placed for sale on a free market - at leastin nascent capitalistic and d em ocratic-liberal societies. Limi-noid phenomena, unlike l iminal , do not so much invert assubvert quotidian and prestigious structures and symbols.This subversive quali ty inheres in many s tructural and anti-structural perspectives, for example, ritual liminality reassertsitself against secularization in the m anifestos of An ton inArta ud. Let me qu ote here and there f rom The theateran d i ts D o u b le ( 1 9 5 8 ) :

Where alchemy, through its symbols, is the spiritual Doubleof an operation which functions only on the level of realm atter, th e theater mu st also be considered as the Doub le,not of this direct, everyday reality of which it is graduallybeing reduced to a mere inert replica - as empty as it issugar-coated - but of another archetypal and dangerousreality, a reality of which the Principles, like dolphins, oncethey have shown their heads, hurry to dive back into theobscurity of the deep (p. 48).

Here Artau d seems t o see theatrical reflexivity as beinga confrontat ion of modern quotidian real i ty with the " in-human" ( t o use his term ) dep th of the fecund and primordialdepths of a "cosmos in turmo il," subverting thu s ou r glibaccep tance o f surface, rational realities. Subversion forJapanese Journal of Religious Studies 6 / 4 December 1979 493


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Victor TURNERA rta ud implies a curious "retribalization," no t disakin t oJung's. We seek for replenishment from the m yt hs whichcoi l wi thin us and must ou t . Fo r Artaud , Oriental theater ,for ex am ple the Bal inese, had a therapeut ic effe ct : i t brok e"through language in or de r t o to u ch life." Subv ersion of tentakes the form of ra t ional cr i t ique of the establ ished order -from various stru ctu ral perspectives: didacticism is explicitin the theater of Shaw, Ibsen, Str indberg, and Brecht , im-plici t in th e work of Pinter, Becket, an d Arrabal. Dram a,and oth er l iminoid genres and media , exposes th e injustices ,inefficiencies, immoralities, alienations, and the like, heldt o be generated by mains tream mod ern econom ic and po-litical struc tur es and processes.Of course, l iminal and l iminoid phenomena have alwayscoex isted, thoug h in various ratios. Religions, clubs, fra-ternities, secret societies, in modern societies, have theirinitiation rituals w ith liminal phases. In tribal societies,the re a re l iminoid games and experim ental practices- in artand dance. Bu t th e trend from liminal to l iminoid is dis-cernible , as are those from s ta tus to con tract , mechanicalt o organic sol idar ity , and so on .Put t ing our ini t ia l terms together we might say thatliminal genres put much stress on social frames, plural re-flexivity, and mass flow, shared flow, while liminoid genresemphasize idiosyncratic framing, individual reflexivity, sub-jective f low, and see the social as problem no t datu m .Postscript. I have recently been in earnest dialogue withDr. Richard Schechner, co-Director of the PerformanceGroup, who is both a theoris t of drama and a producer ofplays - ou tstand ing in b ot h capacit ies. Dr. Sch ech ner , l ikeJerzy Grotowski, is professionally concerned with the re-lat ionship betw een ri tual an d dra m a. Grotowski 's art icle"The theatre 's New Testam ent" is, inde ed, included in avolume published in 1976, Ritual, play, and performance,494 Japanese Journal of Religious Studies 6 / 4 December 1979


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edited by Schechner and Mady Schuman. Grotowski, quitefrankly, regards his theater as a type of rite de passage, aninitiation rite, for modern man. For him "it is necessaryt o abolish the distance between actor and audience byeliminating the stage, removing all frontiers" (p. 189). Theplay is to become the liminal phase of an initiatory scenariodirected to the spectator (hardly a spectator any more,rather a participant) "who does not stop at an elementarystage of psychic integration, content with his own petty,geometrical, spiritual stability, knowing exactly what isgood and what is evil, and never in doubt. For it was notto him that El Greco, Norwid, Thomas Mann and Dosto-yevsky spoke, but to him who undergoes an endless processof self-development, whose unrest is not general but di-rected towards a search for the truth about himself andhis mission in life" (p. 188). Clearly, it is to the modernindividual Grotowski addresses himself, to the man con-fronted by a preponderance of "liminoid" genres. ButGrotowski wishes to "reliminalize" or "retribalize" if notall modern men, at least that handful which could consti-tute a cult group of shamans. In answer to the question:"Does this imply a theatre for the elite?" Grotowski answers:"Yes, but for an elite which is not determined by the socialbackground or financial situation of the spectator, nor eveneducation. The worker who has never had any secondaryeducation can undergo this creative process of self-search,whereas the university professor may be dead, permanentlyformed, moulded into the terrible rigidity o f a corpse . . . .We are not concerned with just any audience, but a specialone" (p. 188).Grotowski's anti-intellectual bias, evidenced here, is notthe most important component to his Poor Theater, heirto the Polish Laboratory Theater of Wroclav. His is a sortof secular Franciscanism with, indeed, latterly, the require-ment that neophytes must travel to a sacred mountain inJapanese Journal of Religious Studies 6 / 4 December 1979 495


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Victor TURNERPoland, as pilgrims, on foot, to work with his core groupof actor-adepts, if they wish to be "stimulated into self-analysis" (p. 189). Clearly, Grotowski is still working withina liminoid frame, since he is prepared to admit the validity,however limited, of other types of theater. But within thisframe he wishes to use what the anthropological eye clearlydetects as a sequence of initiatory rituals as a means ofcreating a community of "saved" persons, who in findingthemselves through the psychic discipline and carefullydesigned physical exercises of Grotowski's rehearsal pro-cedures, also find others, thus gradually disseminating whatBerdyaev would have called "an aristocracy of the spirit"throughout a world of "alienated" individuals. The limi-noid character of his enterprise is revealed by his reversalof the tribal ordering - in which liminal rites indicate an-tecedent social structures and form thresholds betweensignificant states and statuses of those structures. Grotowskiuses his "rites" (I use quotes to mark their liminoid characteras the constructions of a postmodern man) to create firstexistential communitas, then normative communitas. Hebegins with the "threshold" and generates the structureson either side of it. This is how the founders of millenarianmovements have operated - Wovoka for the Ghost Dance,Isaiah Shembe in South Africa. Evangelizing fervor per-vades Grotowski's vocabulary: "the theater's New Testa-ment," the "holy actor," "secular saints like Stanislawski" -even though he protests that one must not take the word"holy" in a religious sense (p. 190).Schechner now takes a more detached stance towardsthis ritualltheater issue. For him "the entire binary 'ef-ficacylritual-entertainment/theater7 is performance." "Per-formance," the generic term, comprehends "the impulseto be serious and to entertain; to collect meanings and topass the time; to display symbolic behavior that actualizes'there and then' and to exist only 'here and now'; to be496 Japanese Journal of Religious Studies 6 / 4 December 1979


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Frame, Flow and Reflectiononeself and to play at being others; to be in a trance andto be conscious; to get results and to fool around; to focusthe action on and fbr a select group sharing a hermetic lan-guage, and to broadcast to the largest possible audiencesof strangers who bu.y a ticket" (p. 2 18). However, I thinkthat if we are to prehend more full'y than before the dy-namics of sociocultural process, we have to see culturalperformances as constituting the reflexivity of human groupsand to see growing reflexivity embodied in a developmentalsequence of cultural genres. Schechner's "performance"is a fairly precise labelling of the items in the modern pot-pourri of liminoid genres - but it indicates by its verybreadth and tolerance of discrepant forms that a level ofpublic reflexivity has been reached totally congruent withthe advanced stages of a given social form - Western capi-talist liberal democracy.As a personal footnote I would like to add that I see theliminoid as an advance in the history of human freedom.For this reason I relish the separation of an audience fromperformers and the liberation of scripts from cosmologyand theology. The concept of individuality has been hard-won, and to surrender it to a new totalizing process ofreliminalization is a dejecting thought. As a member ofan audience I can see the theme and message of a play asone among a number of "subjunctive" possibilities, a variantmodel for thought or action to be accepted or rejected aftercareful consideration. Even as audience people can be"moved" by plays; they need not be "carried away" bythem - into another person's utopia or "secular sacrum,"to use Grotowski's phrase. Liminoid theater should presentalternatives; it should not be a brainwashing technique. AsBlake said: "One Law for the Lion and the Ox is Oppres-sion."Japan ese Journa l of Religious Studies 614 December 1979


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Victor TURNERREFERENCES

AGULHON,Maurice1960 La Ripublique au village. Paris : Plon.

ARTAUD,Antonin1958 T h e theater and its Double, M. C. RICHARDS,transl. New York : Grove Press.

BERGER,Peter L; and Thomas LUCKMANN1966 T h e social construc tion of reality : A treatise i nth e sociology of knowledge. Garden City, New

York : Doubleday Anchor Books.BEZUCHA,Robert

1975 Popular festivities and politics during the SecondRepublic. Paper delivered at the Davis Center,Princeton University.

CSIKSZENTMIHALYI,ihaly1975 Beyond boredom and anxiety. San Francisco :

Jossey -Bass.DAVIS,Natalie Z.

1975 Society and culture in early modern France.Stanford : Stanford University Press.

GOFFMAN,Erving1974 Frame analysis. New York: Harper and Row,Colophon Books.

JUNOD,Henri1962 Life of a South African tribe, vol. 1. New York :

University Books (originally published in 1912-1913).

KRIGE,Eileen Jensen1950 T h e social system of the Zulus. Pietermaritzburg :

Schuter and Shooter.MARRIOTT,McKim1966 The feast of love. In M. SINGER, d., Krishna:Myths, rites, and attitudes. Honolulu : East-West

Center Press.ROSE, H. J.

1948 Ancient Roman religion. London : Hutchinson.SCHECHNER,, and M. SCHUMAN,ds.1976 Ritual, play and performance. New York : Sea-

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Frame, FIow and Reflectionbury Press.

TURNER,Victor1969 The ritual process. Chicago : Aldine.

VAN GENNEP,Arnold1837-58 Manuel du folklore frangzis contemporain, 7 vols.Paris : Picard.

WELLS,Henry W.1969 Noh. In T h e reader's encyclopedia of w orld dr am a.New York : Thomas Crowell.

Japanese Journal of Religious Studies 6 / 4 December 1979

Documents

TURNER, Victor - Ritual y drama