Victor Turner

Victor Witter Turner (28 May 1920 – 18 December 1983) 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.

Victor Turner was born in Glasgow, Scotland, son of Norman and Violet Turner. His father was an electrical engineer and his mother was a repertory actress, who founded the Scottish National Players. Turner initially studied poetry and classics at University College London.

In 1941, Turner was drafted into World War II and served as a noncombatant until 1944. During his three years of service, he met and married Edith Brocklesby Davis, who was serving during the war as a "land girl". Their five children include scientist Robert Turner, poet Frederick Turner, and Rory Turner, an anthropology professor at Goucher College.

Turner returned to University College in 1946 with a new focus on anthropology. Turner completed his undergraduate degree with distinction in 1949. He later pursued graduate studies in anthropology at Manchester University. He became a member of the Communist Party, aligning himself with Marxist ideas like conflict, social justice, process-oriented analysis, and comprehensive case studies, which were key elements of Gluckman’s "Manchester School" in British social anthropology.

Turner worked in Zambia (then Northern Rhodesia) as a research officer for the Rhodes-Livingstone Institute. It was through this position that Turner started his lifelong study of the Ndembu people of Zambia. He completed his PhD at the University of Manchester in 1955. Like many of the Manchester anthropologists of his time, he also became concerned with conflict. He developed a new concept of social drama in order to account for the symbolism of conflict and crisis resolution among Ndembu villagers.

Turner spent his career exploring rituals. As a professor at the University of Chicago in the late 1950s, Turner began to apply his study of rituals and rites of passage to world religions and the lives of religious heroes. He and his wife converted to Catholicism in 1958.

Turner explored Arnold van Gennep's threefold structure of rites of passage and expanding theories on the liminal phase. Van Gennep's structure consisted of a pre-liminal phase (separation), a liminal phase (transition), and a post-liminal phase (reincorporation). Turner noted that in liminality, the transitional state between two phases, individuals were "betwixt and between": they did not belong to the society they had previously been a part of and they were not yet reincorporated into that society. Liminality is a limbo, an ambiguous period characterized by humility, seclusion, tests, sexual ambiguity, and communitas. During liminal phases, established social classifications and cultural norms often break down. Social hierarchies tend to dissolve, and in their place emerges a sense of equality, unity, and solidarity within the group, which Turner described as "communitas." Turner suggested that societies experience a cyclical movement between stable periods of order and chaotic intervals of disorder. He particularly highlighted events like carnivals and rituals as key examples of liminal experiences.

Turner was also a committed ethnographer and produced work on ritual. He and his wife Edith L. B. Turner co-authored Image and Pilgrimage in Christian Culture (1978).