Dramas, Fields, and Metaphors: Symbolic Action in Human Society

by Victor Turner

In this book, Victor Turner is concerned with various kinds of social actions and how they relate to, and come to acquire meaning through, metaphors and paradigms in their actors' minds; how in certain circumstances new forms, new metaphors, new paradigms are generated. To describe and clarify these processes, he ranges widely in history and from ancient society through the medieval period to modern revolutions, and over India, Africa, Europe, China, and Meso-America. Two chapters, which illustrate religious paradigms and political action, explore in detail the confrontation between Henry II and Thomas Becket and between Hidalgo, the Mexican liberator, and his former friends. Other essays deal with long-term religious processes, such as the Christian pilgrimage in Europe and the emergence of anti-caste movements in India. Finally, he directs his attention to other social phenomena such as transitional and marginal groups, hippies, and dissident religious sects, showing that in the very process of dying they give rise to new forms of social structure or revitalized versions of the old order.

Genres: Anthropology, Nonfiction, Religion, Philosophy, History, Psychology, Theory

309 pages, Paperback

First published October 1, 1974

About the author

Victor Witter Turner was a British cultural anthropologist best known for his work on symbols, rituals, and rites of passage. His work, along with that of Clifford Geertz and others, is often referred to as symbolic and interpretive anthropology.

Reviews

[Greg · Rating 3 out of 5]

I am not a big fan of anthropologists working solely with secondary materials, but the bulk of this book is Turner applying anthropological theories to historical events. He relies on standard historical accounts in the secondary literature and applies his own theories to the material. The primary value of this book is the methodological introduction.

[Paul Cornelius · Rating 5 out of 5]

While The Ritual Process remains Victor Turner's most important and revelatory volume, Dramas, Fields, and Metaphors brings a refinement to his arguments that places them in historical and practical contexts. Thomas Becket's confrontation with Henry II illustrates, according to Turner, the manifestation of "social drama," or conflict which leads to reconciliation or revolt and new paradigms. But by far the most interesting historical chapter is the lengthy discussion on Father Hidalgo and the beginning of Mexico's independence movement from Spain. Hidalgo and the moment of independence, says Turner, is a liminal or threshold event that created the circumstances for constructing a Mexican national identity. Following on that, Turner proceeds to unpack the social and metaphorical uses of pilgrimage. Pilgrimage, too, is liminal, where pilgrims move out of their structured environments into anti-structure, a part of the liminal condition that levels and brings people into mass harmony--which Turner describes as "communitas." Individually, pilgrims essentially find themselves on a quest to find treasure, be it of the holy kind or the personal sense of illumination and self knowledge. Other chapters find similar roles for structure and anti-structure in Hinduism and Confucianism. Turner takes the final step in applying his understanding of these social and psychological conditions to contemporary society, and he thus includes hippies (he was writing in the early 1970s), Hollywood films, and communal millenarianism as modern day projections of these conditions that are reflective of an era of social turmoil and crisis.

[John Carter McKnight · Rating 4 out of 5]

A really solid collection of longer articles building on Turner's core work, the 1969 "The Ritual Process." It's a bit more mature, in the sense of being a sharp refinement of his arguments. It's also a little less focused on his core fieldwork, so for a reader looking to apply his theories to contemporary and first-world contexts, it's more rewarding. Several of the essays are religious case studies, which I confess I skipped. The bit on pilgrimages, though, was a quite useful study of spatio-temporality, applying notions of liminality which usually apply to static times and places to a mobile context. The remainder are very solid, lucid explications of the tensions between structure and what he calls communitas, and how the liminal and liminoid - the betwixt-and-between - serve to reconcile (or expose) the tensions in the dialectic between the two.

If you're looking for good, useful anthropological theory, or a concise experience of Turner, this is the book.

[Ian Caveny · Rating 5 out of 5]

Although the interests that brought me to Victor Turner were more than a little deterred by the lengthy essays committed to Miguel Hidalgo and St. Thomas Beckett, this particular volume proved to be an eye-opener for me investigating the intersections between religion, literature, and anthropology. Most significant was how Turner unpacked Arnold van Gennep's axiomatic description of the rite of passage for the sake of diverse applications, using liminality and its resultant communitas as on-ramps for understanding so diverse phenomena as Bildungsroman, the pilgrimage, and mendicant orders.

Most intriguing was the essay entitled "Passages, Margins, and Poverty," in which Turner most explicitly lays out his commentary on liminality and communitas alongside various anti-structural orders. There is an interesting overlap here between Turner's insistence on the anti-structure's value for the structure's continuance and Charles Taylor's claim regarding the same in pre-modern societies in A Secular Age.

Altogether, I found Turner a valuable scholar to interact with, and I look forward to reading more of his work in the future!

[Chloe · Rating 3 out of 5]

'Dramas, Fields, and Metaphors' is a dense, but highly rewarding, read for scholars interested in Arnold van Gennep's work on rites of passage, and how these rites of passage play out in literature as root metaphors that explain social dramas and convey meaning.

Don't be put off by the introduction. Read it, but bookmark it to refer to later as important concepts like 'social dramas', 'communitas', and 'anti-structure' are revisited with illustrative examples.

If you like anthropology, you might enjoy the middle chapters more than I did, but as a rhetoric and literature scholar, Chapter 6 "Passages, Margins, and Poverty" and Chapter 7: "Metaphors of Anti-Structure" were the most interesting to me. You don’t need to have read van Gennep's original work on rites of passage as Turner explains the key points clearly.

In essence, 'symbols are dynamic entities, not static cognitive signs' (96), their meaning depends on the complex contexts of the communicative act and the often competing interests and priorities within this dramatic social environ. This is what makes metaphors and root metaphors worth studying as they reveal the models for understanding the world and interacting with the world that are unique to individuals and cultures based on experience.

Like I said, it's dense and it deals with complex advanced concepts. You will find yourself coming back to terms and chapters over time as you ruminate on the ideas and apply them to your field of study.

Best enjoyed in several 1-2 hour reading sessions over a few cups of coffee.

[Beatriz Vieira · Rating 4 out of 5]

lido para o TCC

[Funda Guzer · Rating 2 out of 5]

Konu halkında çok bilgi olmamasından mıdır maalesef çok karışık geldi. Israrla sonuna kadar okudum fakat maalesef sonuçta da ilgimi çeken konu olamadı. Konu hakkında uzmanlardan gelsin yorum .

[versarbre · Rating 3 out of 5]

V.Tuner is an examplar of a poet's approach to socio-political analysis. This book is basically an extension of the Ritual Processes book by applying the perspective of structure-anti-structure to a broad range of historical contexts. Still, the problem is how to analyze it in complex contemporary societies. Readers may spend the time tasting Tuner's theory in the Ritual Processes book as his own applicatory attempt here in this book (a collection of essays) is way too messy.

[sutibah · Rating 4 out of 5]

“Yet through all these changes, certain crucial norms and relationships- and other seemingly less crucial, even quite trivial and arbitrary- will persist. The explanations for both constancy and chance can, in my opinion, only be found by systematic analysis of processual units and temporal structures, by looking at phases as well as atemporal systems”.