From Limen to Border: A Meditation on the Legacy of Victor Turner for American Cultural Studies Author(s): Donald Weber

Reviewed work(s): Source: American Quarterly, Vol. 47, No. 3 (Sep., 1995), pp. 525-536 Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2713299 . Accessed: 24/08/2012 14:23
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FromLimen to Border: A Meditation on theLegacy of VictorTurner forAmericanCulturalStudies

DONALD WEBER MountHolyokeCollege

THE FOLLOWING ESSAY ATTEMPTS TO MARK AND ACCOUNT FOR WHAT

is a better seemsto me a keytransition-perhaps term-in "displacement" forscholars thathas particular relevance recent cultural studiestheorizing inAmerican studies.I refer specifically to theslippage,or eventhevirtual of theworkof symbolicanthropologist VictorTurner as a disappearance, influence Americanstudiesscholarupon current major methodological ship.In place of his modelsof riteof passage and processualanalysiswe be called a powerof whatmight have come to recognizetheexplanatory social and cultural "borderlands"position-a mode of understanding that,to judge fromthe theme of the 1994 processes and formations meetingof the American Studies Association ("Borders and Bonds: Society and Customin a Worldof Regions"), appearsto have a shaping on current Americanstudies scholarship. Althoughthereare influence withthiscritical and theorists identified perspecnumerous literary figures tive(GloriaAnzaldua and CherieMoraga especially),in lightof therecent I want to examine (perhaps best shiftsin anthropological theorizing conrepresented by the post-modemchallenge to classic ethnography I willdiscusstheimportant tainedin theessaycollectionWriting Culture'), work of Renato Rosaldo, especially his recent Cultureand Truth,as in culturalstudiesthat of the challengesand transformations exemplary influencescholars workingin many areas associated with currently I want to in thisbriefreflection, Americanculturestudies.Specifically,
of Englishand American studiesat MountHolyoke Donald Weberis a professor in America between research involves ethnic project expression College. His current 1880 and 1960.
Vol.47, No. 3 (September Studies Association American 1995) C 1995American Quarterly, 525

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Turner's influence-toexplainwhy ofVictor the"moment" first historicize authorachievedsuch methodological anthropology his mode of symbolic ityforAmericanstudies;second,I wantto draw out Rosaldo's implicit in my notas yetfully or analyzed, recognized ofTurner (a critique critique I wantto offer a tentative of why"border" explanation view); and,finally, "liminal"(or "liminality") as a keyword-perhaps thekey has overturned in studiesscholarship Americanstudiesand in cultural word-in current general. of the 1977 American atmosphere Eighteenyears ago, the theoretical in filled withthe tropesand Boston was StudiesAssociationConvention drawn from the writingsof Victor Turner,a maverick terminology his who had developed,through symbolic and culturalanthropologist of CentralAfrica,a rich,evocative experienceamongtheNdembutribes lexicon of compellingwords and phrases("social drama,""riteof pasamongothers).In my "anti-structure," "communitas," sage," "liminality," appearedto have caughtthecollective at least,thisterminology memory in a variety of areas of of scholarsworking imagination interdisciplinary American culturestudies. I recall vividly a numberof ASA sessions werehanded ofritual toTurner's process:bibliographies devoted paradigm out along with a glossary,providedby Turnerhimself,defininghis I remember especiallya verywell attendedsession on ritual keywords. Turner's were Bercovitch writings Sacvan (at thetime, chaired by studies, havinga deep impacton him),witha majorpaperon ritualand flowby Roland Delattre.2 Between the mid-1970sand 1983, the year he died at the age of 63, themostimportant (if notthemostimportant, as perhaps Turner emerged for a host of then at least the most readilyinvoked) culturaltheorist of processualanalysishad disciplines;indeed,his specializedvocabulary studies-the found a receptiveplace in religiousstudies,performance him end his at the of thatespeciallyengaged career-literary area/field and,of course,Americanstudies. theory, Turner's for is that as I notedat theoutset, authority My sense,however, theTurnerian studieshas markedly current Americanculture diminished; social changeno longer model of social dramasas a mode of explaining retains thekindof explanatory poweritseemedto providea fewyearsago. A tellingsign of thisstriking may be foundin the indexto displacement the mammoth volume of state-of-the-art essays titledCulturalStudies, to "VictorTurner" amongits whichdoes not includeeven one reference
catalogue of "Turners" listed-although "Tina Turner" is mentioned

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absence,I wantto examinethe to accountforthisstriking twice.3 In trying as Turner relationbetweenTurner'snotionof "limen" or ("threshold," butculturally culturally dangerous and "liminality"-the oftendefined-it) creativemiddle stage of the riteof passage whereall the action (so to takesplace-and theidea that has come to social transitions speak) during
replace "liminal" in recent cultural theory, the notion of the "border." What, I want to ask, is the differencebetween a "liminar,"a liminal figure straddling "betwixt and between" (in Turner's famous phrase) structural positions, in passage between identities, and the imagination of the "border" as a zone or sphere of positionality? How, that is, does the discourse of the border challenge Turner's model of liminality?Moreover, I want to ask why the position of the border has become a more attractive and perhaps more powerful mode of cultural criticism. First, however, let me brieflyestablish some of the key contexts for understandingTurner's model of symbolic anthropology.4 The outlines of Turner's intellectual biography are now beginning to take shape, thanks to essays by Barbara Babcock, Frederick Turner,and Edith Turner. "Drama was in his blood," observes Turner's widow Edith; "he was interested in the events of life, processes he could watch During his Ndembu field work,Turnerfound himselfresisting unfolding."5 the fairlyrigid models of social formationand explanation established by the anthropological school known as British Functionalism. "Disillusioned" is how he recalls his resistance to Functionalism's authorizing narratives;in reaction,Turnerrejected "theirmodels of society and culture [which] tended to be based upon ideology" (positing a "social reality as

thanupon "social reality"(as fluid,open, rather stable and immutable")

rejected the academic taboo against crossing disciplinary boundaries; "boundary ambiguity was," Turner reflected (quoting Mary Douglas) in "The Anthropology of Performance," "regarded as an abomination."7 Instead, Turnerfashioned a new symbolic anthropologyby celebrating the unfolding,processual, dynamic dimensions of culturalchange: the shifting relations among liminality,communitas, and structure. How did Turner arrive at, where did Turner "discover," these now famous terms? Turner himself provides a partial biographical source: the family's own transition,in the early sixties, to America; theirbetwixt and between status in the fall of 1963, waiting passage to Cornell and a new life, highlighted the very theoretical issues Turner was grappling with in his research. (The first public performanceof his now classic "Betwixt and

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reading Van Gennep'sRites of Between"essay was in March 1964, after upon re-reading Passage in a 1960 edition.)Indeed, whatis remarkable Turner'searlyworkon ritualprocess,includingthe now famousessays collected in Dramas, Fields, and Metaphors,is theirrelationto the moment. historical between discursivecorrelation There is, I would argue,a significant of processualanalysisand thecultureof the 1960s-in rhetoric Turner's by at Cornell.These linkshavebeen notedbefore-mostnotably America, I sense VincentCrapanzano-but now,twenty yearslater, anthropologist communitas into/generating turning of liminality imagination in Turner's fornew social arrangethepotential levelingprocesscontaining (theritual creative of ritualized play) a profound, new forms of imagination, ments, the of a authority drawing upon of history, deep adaptation contemporary in America-to validatehis vision of social experience-his experience, offered numerous case To be sure,Turner strainand creativeupheaval.8 his theories, to illustrate butit was, in studiesof social dramasin history my view, the heady promiseof social critiqueand social regeneration the experienceof playful inscribedin the fact of the counterculture, theater to Richard (fromtheput-onof street carnivalesque performances Performing Garage-an associationwhich inShechner'srevolutionary thathelpedto shape,in laterworkin performance theory) spiredTurner's has a "Communitas imagination. anthropological indelibleways,Turner's emphasison indeed,Turner's Crapanzano;9 ringto it,"notesVincent hippy Hall describedas the "existential now,"on whatin 1969 a youngStuart
"the continuous present tense-'grooving' . . . 'tripping"' expressed for

he theflow of culturalrevitalization the millenarian expectation, Turner Communitas has, for Turner,an ascribed to the ritualprocess itself.10 of structure, the interstices in apocalypticagency;it "breaksin through in Ritual or of liminars, at the edges structure, marginality." liminality; in TheRitualProcess,possess theradical as Turner calls them "edgemen," "The essence of indeedof deconstruction." of cultural critique, potential Turnerexplained in the late 1970s, "is to be found in the liminality," liminars have the powerto "revealthe release fromnormalconstraints"; all culturally constructed worlds, the indeterminacy underlying freedom, and imaginative capacities."1 thefreeplay of mankind's cognitive of liminality over and enlargedhis theory Turner extended, elaborated, "liminoid," "liminal" from atone pointdistinguishing theyears, phenomena societies."3 Of of the ritualprocess in postindustrial the latter expressive and turns to theseimportant shifts essay could be devoted course,an entire

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in Turner'sdevelopingvision; instead,let me cite three instancesof in orderto begin to suggest on liminality reflections Turner'scontinuing "committed" (to forcurrent is now problematic thewaysin whichtheterm theorists: invokeRosaldo's term)borderland
Liminality is both more creative and more destructivethan the structural man, invites norm.In eithercase it raises basic problemsforsocial structural him to speculation and criticism.But where it is socially positive it presents, directly or by implication, a model of human society as a homogenous, communitas,whose boundaries are ideally coterminous with unstructured those of the human species.14 I see liminality, in tribalsocieties ... as the provisionof a culturalmeans of of proved values as well as of ensuringthe continuity generatingvariability, and norms."5 state of liminalitythere is the state of As well as the betwixt-and-between and by to the condition of being eitherpermanently outsiderhood,referring of any given system, or arrangements ascription set outside the structural oneself apart or temporally set apart,or voluntarily setting being situationally role-playingmembersof thatsystem. fromthe behavior of status-occupying, Such outsiderswould include, in various cultures,shamans, diviners,mediums, priests,those in monasticseclusion, hippies, hoboes, and gypsies. They should be distinguished from "marginals," who are simultaneously (by or achievement) of two or more groups ascription,optation,self-definition, and culturalnormsare distinctfrom,and ofteneven whose social definitions secondopposed to, one another.These would include migrantforeigners, generationAmericans, persons of mixed ethnic origin,parvenus (upwardly fromcountryto city,and women in a changed, mobile marginals),migrants about such marginals is that they nontraditionalrole. What is interesting often look to their group of origin, the so-called inferior group, for communitas,and to the moreprestigiousgroup in whichtheymainlylive and in which they aspire to higher status as their structuralreferencegroup. fromthe perspective Sometimes theybecome the radical criticsof structure warmer and of communitas,sometimes they tend to deny the affectionally more egalitarian bond of communitas.... Marginals like liminarsare also betwixt and between, but unlike ritual liminars they have no cultural assurance of a finalstable resolutionof theirambiguity."6

assertions of problematic Let me pointoutwhatare,I believe,a number Turner in lightof on liminality. embeddedin thesevariations Re-reading Rosaldo's quarrel,expressedin his recentbordertheorizing highlights in Motion,"notonly Culture "The Erosionof Classic Norms"and "Putting with Turnerbut also with the latent imperialistproject of "classic" in general.17 ethnography

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Perhapsthe first aspectof Turner's thought to notehereis theimplicit ofTurner's visionof cultural consensualdimension changethrough riteof passage. For all the emphasis on rupture and breach,Turner'ssocial imagination is compelledby thescene of re-incorporation, of re-aggregaofpassage. In thisrespect theworkofritual tionas thetelosofrite symbols theorist Ortner has pointedout) is to "resolve (as anthropological Sherry to forge"the processof and (now I quote Turner) social contradictions" renewal."'8 whatwe now term regenerative Emptiedof,reducedfrom his theliminar is shorn of his structured subjectposition, (i.e., political)status in theflowofcommunitas, theaim ofwhichTurner as he merges defines as of proved values and norms."At some level, Turner's the "continuity modelof social dramais transcendent, ahistorical and apolitical; ultimately it is unableto recognizethecontested, chargedpoliticalvalencesembedvisionof liminality ded in thephrase"provedvalues,"forTurner's issuing communitas followedby a regenerative return to strucin "homogenous" tureis essentially utopian."9 of Yet perhapsthe most problematic aspect of Turner'simagination office is embedded in the and the cultural of liminars liminality long forthere Turner encounters passage from Dramas, Fields,and Metaphors, resistance toincorporation on thepart ofthose"marginals" a (bewildering?) tojoin theritual consensus. These figures-"migrant who somehowrefuse foreigners, second-generation Americans, personsof mixedethnic origin" their outsideof thetranscendent communitas amongthem-somehowfind warmer and moreegalitarian vision;they"tendto denytheaffectionately Turner that he is privileging notrealizing bondof communitas," confesses, his sense of social levelingand attendant cultural bondingover whatwe now recognize as an encounterwith identity politics and the border. Indeed, the passage marksa scene of "encounter" betweenTurnerand who resistincorporation; those"marginal" (now read as "border")figures Turner could not,it appears,"see" theborder beforehis eyes. The radical criticismthat issues from these marginalsin their resistanceto the
dominant culture ("structure" in Turner) adamantly refuses the "stable

offered in the "affectually warmer"and resolutionof theirambiguity" in "more egalitarian" space conjured the ritualprocess. (What does this of "mixedethnicorigin"bond withless emotion?Is mean? Do liminars somehowless "authentic"? theirchoice of a morelocal cultural identity untiltheyacceptthoharmonious remain Will their identities "ambiguous" of "true"communitas?) resolutions theother These questionssoundfrom side of theliminalthreshold; they

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emergefromthe politicized,postcolonialrealm of the border-an emindeed, incorporation; resist "marginals" landscapewhereTurner's battled the professional to (who refuse join outsiders where academic a space in oppositionto classic normsof consensus) now writeethnographies "flow"createdby literary by the subversive newlyempowered narration, borderanthropoloitself.Rosaldo, as a committed narrative postmodern (for on a number of issues, mostimportantly gist,has challengedTurner mypurposes)on how Turner "reduce[s]complexhumandramasto mere structural principles";Rosaldo of supposedlyexplanatory illustrations to over referred of whatTurner hears,thatis, a languageof social control, twentyyears ago as the "steeringfunction"in social process, of a models of ritual of regulation latentin Turnerian dangerousmechanism
analysis.20

valid? Again, it would, no doubt,requirea Are Rosaldo's criticisms critique. Rosaldo's briefbut stringent to fully engage separate essay Instead,let me focus on a curiousinstancein Turnerwhere Rosaldo's on the concernperhapsfindssome validation.In one of his manyriffs Shakespeare's Prospero (from The liminal, Turnerinvokes, tellingly, In most currentRenaissance Tempest)as a "master of liminality."21 a figure of-and for-imperialism, is takenas a figure criticism, Prospero to master. to shapeoutcomes, (To be sure,Prospero, who seeks to control, a liminalfigure, but etc. is himself twocountries, cultures, caughtbetween His as antagonist readpejoratively, archetypal imperialist.) he is invariably themarginal he is a hybrid inhabits theborder; figure, Caliban,by contrast, by seizing the lanempowerment who claims political and imaginative To speak of Prosperoin whatI taketo be culture. guage of thedominant Turner unwittingly betrays-as Rosaldo senses in his own positiveterms, dimechanistic "steering" darker, readingof Turner'sethnography-the In general, mensionresidingin the processualmodel of incorporation. of social Rosaldo observes,"Turner'sconclusionsemphasizeprinciples dramatizes.... structure more thanthe humanprocesses he so thickly human ofregulating behavior."22 thushavethefunction Culture and society communitas In additionto the politicalcontestbetweenreintegrative unstrucof theborder("homogenous, filiations and theresistive/resistant
tured communitas" in Turneris perceived as a potential coercive threatto Rosaldo's marginals claiming difference), what also drives the border critique of Turner's anthropological model is the implicit apolitical consciousness of the ritual liminar, his or her refusal to recognize the historically contingent power coordinates that inhere in positionality.

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of and recognition is missingin Turner is a conception What,therefore, power,the fight thebattleover narrative as political contestation: culture over who gets to (re)tell the story,and from which position. Thus modes of Analysis" challengestraditional Rosaldo's chapter"Narrative in School's elevation, Manchester including the narrative, ethnographic social drama[s]"as its (and, by association, Rosaldo's phrase,of "unified termis, of The problematic mode of exposition. Turner's)characteristic ways of challengeto Turnerian forRosaldo's ultimate course, "unified," indeed an embrace of "the involvesa recognition, doing anthropology identities."23 social analyst'smultiple ways of For all his later nods to what Turnercalled "postmodern "to view speaks of the temptation thinking"-indeed,a recentreviewer seems far reanthropology [Turner]as a pre-postmodernist"-Turner's like Rosaldo, who theprojectof borderlands anthropologists movedfrom
insist, in James Clifford's words, on a self-reflexivenarrative mode-"a

"A number of scholars whilelookingat culture."24 stateof beingin culture in "now write as Rosaldo noted 1990, in historyand anthropology," based on race,class, communities of minority academicsand as members As a result,Rosaldo claimed, "The gender,and sexual orientation." scholars are undergoing changein partbecause once sovereign disciplines of who are both in with natives objects analysis mustnow engage dialogue narrative Such a criticalperspective, resisting and analyzingsubjects."25 an claimingthe borderas the political space conferring incorporation, different from Turner's doubleness etc.),is radically (or tripleness, enabling and a new,"unambigucommunitas seekingtranscendent ritualliminars, of interdisciplious" self. Claimingthe borderamountsto a declaration theborder, porousand open,emergesas a nary-and narrative-freedom:
zone capable of nourishing a rich grid of "crisscrossed" (Rosaldo's own keyword), multiple identities,a celebration of ambiguity as the condition of the postmodern self, and is now the space of real (i.e., political, and not

potential.26 "pure,"as in Turner)

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ofborder as compensation theory forpolitical explainedaway-the advent In light of the groupsin theacademy.28 erasure on thepartof marginalized and capacious imagination, of spirit collectivetestimony to his generosity I would like to think that Turner would have welcomedthesechallenges, to theconceptof liminality, seeing in critique revisions, and adjustments thatissues in ferment the dialecticalprocess of culturaland intellectual what was fecund, new consciousnesses."He enjoyed what was earthy, us of her husband's (1960sgrowing,seminal,"Edith Turnerinforms I would like to thinkthatTurner nourished?)cosmic consciousness.29 of the would have recognized-and indeedembraced-the richpotential as a powerful regenerative-critical forceforrearranging border perspective social relations democratic lines. along moreopen,fluid, invocation of his appealing despitethefrequent Still,it seemsclearthat in our to speak of "liminal"situations rhetoric (how manyof us continue less Turnerian models of social analysisappear less helpful, teaching?), thantheyonce did. It maybe thatTurner's originalvision of compelling studiesscholvacuumin American social processfilleda methodological school; afterall, Bruce arshipafterthe exhaustionof the myth-symbol forthathegemonicapproachto cultural Kuklick's now-famous obituary it maybe thatthediscourseof theborder analysiscame in 1972. In turn, is of themoment. simply, My point, mayonlybe thetheoretical paradigm thatVictorTurner's upon Americanstudies,once legacyto and influence so pervasive-and persuasive-seems no longerable to persuadeus, or positionsalong the various bordersthat dislodge us fromour current studies. comprisethe alwaysfluidscene of American

NOTES
thisessay I would like to thankJay For generous advice and suggestionsin preparing Fliegelman, Rudolf Janssens,Amy Kaplan, Michael P. Kramer,Lucy Maddox, Jeffrey Rubin-Dorsky,and Brook Thomas. 1. James Cliffordand George E. Marcus, ed., WritingCulture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography(Berkeley, 1986). 2. I should mentionthatI, too, foundTurner's theoriesof ritualprocess to possess formidableexplanatorypower: his models of cultural-socialpassage, the "subjunctive mood" expressive of communitas's utopian potential,and the ideological leveling that I was engaged can follow in the wake of culturalbreach appeared to explain everything and in my subsequentresearchon in early American literature by as a graduatestudent

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religious language and the question of the rhetorical linkage between the Great Awakening and the American Revolution. 3. See Lawrence Grossberg,et al., eds., Cultural Studies (New York, 1992), 767. 4. In the largestsense, my subjectinvolves theuses-or appropriation-of anthropoto forma logical theoryby scholars in American studies,of which this essay attempts practice would brief,recentchapter.The fullernarrativetracingthis interdisciplinary have to include, for example, the ways thatfiguressuch as Boas, Redfield,Benedict, Mead, Kroeber, perhaps the Lynds (as a model of communitystudies), etc. have influenced work in American studies. The essay would need to ask why certain anthropologistsattain a kind of methodological and interpretiveauthority?Most recentlythatnarrativewould need to address the ongoing debates about the relations between historyand anthropology(especially the impact of Geertz and the rise of history-Rhys Isaac and the Melbourne Group is perhaps the prominent ethnographic example. In the past, Geertz and Turner have, incorrectlyI believe, been linked togetheron this subject; as anthropologistSherryOrtnerhas explained, Geertz and (Weber via Parsons for genealogies in anthropology Turnerderive fromverydifferent Geertz, Durkheim with a Marxist inflectionvia Max Gluckman for Turner). My observationsremainlimitedto the impact and legacy of Victor Turnerand the implicit such as Renato Rosaldo. On the bordertheorists revisionsof his workby contemporary influence of the Melbourne Group upon ethnographicpractice, see CliffordGeertz, New LiteraryHistory21 (1990): 321-35 (and Rosaldo's "Historyand Anthropology," Agnew, "History and reply to Geertz in the same issue, 337-41); Jean-Christophe Anthropology:Scenes froma Marriage," Yale Journal of Criticism3 (1990): 29-50; and Rhys Isaac, "On Explanation, Text, and TerrifyingPower in Ethnographic overview of History," Yale Journal of Criticism6 (1993): 217-36. For an important see SherryOrtner,"Theory in Anthropologysince recenttheorizingin anthropology, the Sixties," Comparative Studies in Society and History26 (1984): 126-66 (see 12830 on the different genealogies of Geertz and Turner). 5. Edith Turner,"Prologue: From the Ndembu to Broadway," in Victor Turner,On the Edge of the Bush: Anthropologyas Experience (Tucson, Ariz., 1985), 5, 3. For more informationon Turner, see Barbara A. Babcock, "Victor W. Turner (19201983)," Journal ofAmerican Folklore 97 (1984): 461-64; Barbara A. Babcock, "'The Comparative Arts and All Things Common': Victor Turner's LiteraryAnthropology," Criticism: An Annual Journal 9 (1987): 39-46; Barbara A. Babcock and John J. Macaloon, "Victor W. Turner(1920-1983)," Semiotica 65 (1987): 1-27; and Frederick in the Work of Victor Turner, "'Hyperion to a Satyr': Criticism and Anti-Structure of Cultural Criticism,ed. Kathleen M. Turner,"in VictorTurnerand the Construction Ashley (Bloomington,Ind., 1990), 147-62. 6. Victor Turner,"The Anthropologyof Experience," in On the Edge of the Bush, 179. Sherry Ortner asserts that "despite the relative novelty of Turner's move to withBritishsocial anthropological symbols . . . thereis in his work a deep continuity concerns" ("Theory in Anthropology,"131). 7. Victor Turner,"Anthropologyof Performance,"179. to political analysis was deeply influencedby the political 8. "Turner's commitment life of the American 1960s, and it was during this decade that he wrote several explicitly political analyses," observe Babcock and Macaloon (11). For the Turners' life at Cornell, see Edith Turner,"From the Ndembu to Broadway." 9. Vincent Crapanzano, "Liminal Recreations" (a review of Turner's From Ritual to Theater [1982]), TLS, 27 Apr. 1984, 473. Crapanzano offersthe following toughminded reading of Turner's experience in the 1960s: "It may be thata few monthsat

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Garage can turnany professorinto a porte-parole for bohemia, but the Performing distinguishingthe event from its gloss, its ideology, its Turner often had difficulty exegesis. In a way, he was trappedin the fantasiesof his own Anglo-Americanculture, with its modernistemphasis, its faith in the novel and the new, its celebration of inventiveness" ("Liminal Recreations," 473). In this passage, Crapanzano begins the kind of historicizingof TurnerthatI tryto build on this essay. 10. Stuart Hall, "The Hippies: An American 'Moment,"' in Student Power, ed. JulianNagel (London, 1969), 182, 173. Hall's astonishingessay atteststo the powerful forcontemporary academic "outsiders." of thecounterculture fascinationand attraction Despite voicing some skepticism concerning hippie "lifestyle," Hall nevertheless sensed in this revolutionarymoment the historical potential of new social arrangeof popular cultureobserves, "thatfuture ments."It is in Utopia," the emergenttheorist project is possibilities are rehearsed.... it is of such dreams that the revolutionary made" (201, 202). 11. Victor Turner,The Ritual Process (Chicago, 1969), 128, 12. Victor Turner,"Process, System,and Symbol," in On theEdge of theBush, 161. 13. Victor Turner, "Liminal to Liminoid in Play, Flow, Ritual: An Essay in Comparative Symbology,"in From Ritual to Theatre: The Human Seriousness of Play (New York, 1982), 20-60. 14. Victor Turner,"Liminal to Liminoid," 47. 15. Victor Turner,"Process, System, and Symbol," 162. 16. Victor Turner, Dramas, Fields, and Metaphors: Symbolic Action in Human Society (Ithaca, N.Y., 1974), 232-33. ("Passages, Margins, and Poverty" [delivered Aug, 1967]; pub. 1972; emphasis added). 17. Renato Rosaldo, Culture and Truth: The Remaking of Social Analysis (Boston, 1993). 18. Ortner,"Theory in Anthropology,"131; Victor Turner,"Process, System, and Symbol," 159. 19. A separate essay could be writtenabout the relation between the 1960s and figure,whose personal disilluTurner's own charismaticaspect as visionary-shaman sionment and dissent from the structures (of anthropology)he inheritedmade him models and theoretical influentialfor an American studies seeking interdisciplinary remarksCrapanzano, "may legitimacy."The descriptionof certainritesof transition," (Crapanzano, reflect less the realityof the ritualthanthe cultureof the anthropologist" Hermes' Dilemma and Hamlet's Desire: On the Epistemology of Interpretation [Cambridge,Mass., 1992], 261). In addition,the implicitconsensual model of cultural process in Turnermade his theoriespopular duringa period in American studies when centuryand the chartingof "continuities,"from,say, the Puritans to the nineteenth beyond, shaped areas of scholarship. 96, 97. It should be 20. Rosaldo, "PuttingCulturein Motion," in Cultureand Truth, remarked,however, that Rosaldo does view Turner as an oppositional figurein the See "The Erosion of Classic Norms," in Culture and challenge to classic ethnography. Truth,40-41. 21. Victor Turner,"Process, System,Symbol," 161. 22. Rosaldo, Culture and Truth,96, 97. 23. Ibid., 141, 194. 24. Victor Turner,"The Anthropologyof Performance,"185. James Clifford,The Literature,and Art (CamEthnography, Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-Century in his to Turneras "pre-postmodernist" refers bridge,Mass., 1988), 9. Dan Jorgennsen findsthat review of the Ashley collection on Turnerand culturalcriticism;Jorgennsen

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Turner's influence is, generally, not apparent in most of the essays (American 94 [1992], 196-97). Anthropologist 25. Rosaldo, "Response to Geertz,"New LiteraryHistory21 (1990): 340; 341. More recently, Rosaldo has commented on the relation between cultural studies and 96 (1994): 524in "Whose Cultural Studies?" AmericanAnthropologist anthropology 29. 26. See the essay "Border Crossings," in Culture and Truthfor Rosaldo's fullest "Crisscrossed by multipleidentities"is on expression concerningborderanthropology. 216. In this respect, Ortner's criticismof symbolic anthropology's "underdeveloped See "Theory sense of the politics of culture"seems relevantto Rosaldo's intervention. in Anthropology," 132. James Clifford's qualification of Turner's ethnographic narrativeseems relevanthere as well: "Overall, Turner's ethnographiesare unusually polyphonic,openly builtup fromquotations.... He does not,however,do theNdembu in different voices.... All the voices of the fieldhave been smoothedinto expository prose of more-or-lessinterchangeable'informants"'(The Predicamentof Culture,49). It is against such narrativesmoothings that Rosaldo, following Clifford and other postmodern ethnograhers,advocates the reflexive border position, which always contains a multitudeof voices and personalities. 27. See Babcock, "Victor W. Turner,"461. of some of my colleagues 28. In makingthese observationsI draw on the reflections during (especially JosephineLee) in theFive College Faculty Seminaron bordertheory the 1993-94 academic year. 29. Edith Turner,"From the Ndembu to Broadway," 4.