CMS150 - Winter 2001

Housekeeping
For Thursday, read the Beckett chapter.  Skip Trask, start on Pernaud Joan of Arc book.

1. Background/bio on Turner
a. Victor Turner (1920-1983) obtained his undergraduate degree from the University of London. He went on to pursue Graduate Studies at Manchester University under the tutelage of Gluckman. He finished his degree in 1955 and subsequently took a job in the department. His field work among the Ndembu had provided anthropology with a classic, Schism and Continuity in An African Society, innovative both methodologically and theoretical.
b. His work focused on the explanation of four central ideas: (1) ritual meanings are coded social meanings; (2) ritual codes have a profound effect on the mind; (3) the social drama is a repetitive set of patterned activities; (4) liminality is the way people stretch beyond limitations of their roles. He further posits that communitas, the integrated, individual experience of cultural harmony, allows the social fabric to stay together since it allows for the structure and function of social existence (Bohannen and Glazer 1988)
c. In Schism and Continuity Turner uses the detailed case-study against a "background of generalized systemic analysis. " He thus demonstrates how particular principles of organization and certain dominant values operate through both schisms and reconciliations. Individuals and groups involved in these social dramas try to manipulate principles and values to their own objectives (Gluckman in the forward to Turner 1957:xi)

2. Turners goals as anthropologist
a. Turner tries to come up with description fo scial processes that account for both stability and change; [big criticism of "new anthropology" is a "script/drama" model that denies human agency -> my culture programs me to do x; I can’t help doing it.  Turner suggests looking at the liminal state fostered by social processes in which individuals stand apart from "social program."  NB he has a much less static view of ideology; not monolithic, at any moment always contested.  He insists on individual agency and consciousness. Historians love Turner for this insistence.  NB: "post-modern" critical theory [in history and literature" questions whether assumptions of human agency are correct: identity is socially constructed; ideology determines capacity of individual’s consciousness to imagine.
b. cf Ginzburg’s description of "context" and traditional judicial activity.  The good judge considers context only to come to a conclusion about mitigating culpability because agency is less and without agency there can be no just decision of culpability/punishment.  Judges have to have agency or they only have strict liability ­ i.e., your intent/volition is irrelevant; only question is whether you did it. [a standard completely contrary to western liberal tradition.] historians, even if they argue that identity is socially constructed and agency is impossible, can still, by describing the process of construction and workings of ideology help us imagine the histories we are trying to study. [cf. Price, Convict and Colonel: two columns providing 2 contemporary and completely contradictory accounts of same event with no comments by historian]  Could a judge even accept critical theory premises? no.
c. But for historians who want to believe in human agency; and believe that evidence can reveal a truth about a past event, Turner is nice: he => you can do two things as a historian: a) provide a description of what is stable in a culture at a given moement of historical time: 2 types: a) traditional historiography subjects: political and social institutions; e.g. laws, church; b) mentalities subjects: fairs, festivals, coming of age rituals and sociocultural values they reflect: answer q: what was it like to live at this moment of time; what would an inhabitant of this time and place think about particular questions/experiences; and Turner lets historians account for change [ why did an institution, practice, value change?] and do so at a variety of levels (fields and arenas); i.e., soc/cult change [e.g. in values] can occur because of political, economic reasons, but pol/econ change can occur because of soc/cult reasons.
d. Turner, and other sociologists [e.g. Bourdieu] have developed an analytical system dependent on conceptual tools which they think can apply to any society or culture.  E.g., Turner says that diff societies will have different root metaphors but all societies will have them.  Social dramas will look very different [bc their arguments w/in a culture about the content of a root metaphor/pardigim] in different society, but all will be articulated in similar phases.

3. A key tool for Turner is to find and describe key "root metaphors" within a culture.  First have to know what a metaphor is.  eg.: simile: my love is like a red, red rose; metaphor; my love is the morning star.  Turner insists on a dynamic, interactive understanding of how metaphors operate.  A metaphor [Turner adopting Black]: 1) metaphor has 2 distinct subjects; principal and subsidiary; 2) these subjects are systems of things rather than things as elements; i.e. each subject is a multivocal symbol; components of one system enter into a dynamic relation with components of the other [30] 3) metaphor works by applying to the principal subject a sytem of associated implications characteristic of the subsidiary subject; 4) These "implications usually consist of commonplaces about the subsidieary subject; but may consist of deviant implications established ad hoc by the author; 5) The metaphor selects, emphasizes, suppresses and organizes features of the principal subject by implying statements about it that normally apply to the subsidiary subject.

4. How does the metaphor: George Bush is a waspy Michael Corleone work under this analysis?
a. princial is George Bush, president of US ­ system of associations; government; establishment, elite, aristocracy; insiders; loyal son
b. subsidiary is Michael Corleone, fictional "don" of Mafia family; outsider, criminal, immigrant; loyal son
c. applying subsidiary to principal first with connection of "loyal" son; [both sons take up a career they don’t want out of family loyalty to revenge a wrong done to their fathers;
d. Chris Matthews wants to emphasize and elevate Bush as loyal son; and he is ennobled by comparison [Corleone is mythic figure in american imagination];
e. But he can’t escape "deviant implications" ­ is George Bush a criminal; is American politics a closed world of criminals like Cosa Nostra; isn’t it troubling that GB could be ennobled, even re his status as son, by a comparison to a fictional crime boss?

5. Other Key terms in Turner
a. Social Process: society is best viewed as a constantly moving dynamic set of interactions and relationships between members of group.  He wants to get away from a type of anthropology that looked at "static" patterns of social activities; e.g., marriage [cf. modern historians’ frustrations with 19th positivists who said history was great men and their deeds w/in political institutions].  Even these institutions and practices according to Turner as phases in social processses.
b. Social Drama
I. def: Social dramas typically have 4 [38] phases of public actio, accesible to observation: 1) breach of regular, norm-governed soc rels; 2)crisis; 3) redressive action; [39] 4) reintegration or schism
II. phases:
i. breach
A. breach: of reg, norm-governed soc rels bt persons or groups w/in the same sys of soc rels.
B. deliberately public and provocative
C. actor always believes he’s acting on behalf of others
ii. crisis
A. if not sealed off it widens
B. until coextinsive w/ cleavage in the widest set of soc rels to which the conflict or antatgoinstic parties belong (escalation).
C. The crisis is always one of those turning pts or moments of danger and suspense, when a true state of affairs is revealed, when it is least easy to don masks or pretend that there is nothing rotten in the village.
iii. redressive action
A. redressive action: adjustive and redressive mechanism are brought to bear in order to limit spread of crisis: informal, institutionalized, ad hoc; by leading or structurally represenative members of the disturbed soc sys.
B. Escalation can occur here too: informal arb to court case
C. When one istyding social change, one shd study carefully what happens in phase three [41] and "ask whether the redressive machinery is capable of handling crises so as to restore, more or less, the status quo ante, or at least to restore peace among contending groups." If yes, ask how; if not ask why.
D. It is in the redressive phase that both pragmatic techniques and symbolic action reach their fullest expression."  The soc unit is here at its most "self conscious"
iv. reintegration/schism
A. of disturbed soc group or of the soc recog and legitimization of repp schsm bt contesting parties.
III. book re "root paradigms" and "social drama" "where conflicting groups and personages attempt to assert their own and deplete their opponents’ paradigims.

c. communitas
i. "communitas" bonds people over and above any formal social bonds, is postiive structure [members of group recog group id as good thing and conscious and willing bc of that to support group)
i. communitas is antistructural bc its bonds are undifferentiated, equalitarian, direct, nonration, I-though rels.  Structure holds people apart by defining their differences.  Communitas is most evident in liminality.
ii. The componetns of what I have called anti-structure, such as communitas and liminality, are the conditions for the production of root metaphors, conceptual archetypes, paradigms, modelfs for, and the rust.  Rooot metaphors have a "thusness" or "thereness" from which many subsequent structures may be unpacked…
iii.

d. root metaphor/root paradigm
i. We create "root metaphors" to understand our society/culture;  we understand other areas of life in terms of a first common sense understanding; -> list of structural characteristics of his root metaphor become the set of categories in terms of which he understands all new things.; // Black’s "conceptual archetype which is  a systematic repertoire of ideas which individuals apply to understand by analogy a new area.
ii. Metaphors are like symbols in that they provide a polarization of meaning: in which the subsideiary subject is really a depth world of prophetic, half-glimpsed images, and the principal subject, the visible, fully known acquires new and suprising contours and valences from its dark companion.  Bc they are "active together" the unknown is brought just a litt more into the light by the known.
e. Ritual: "A ritual is a stereotyped   sequence of activities ... performed in a sequestered   place, and designed to influence preternatural   entities or forces on behalf of   the actors' goals and   interests."
i. Rituals are moltivocal, but their referents tend to polarize bt physiological phenomena (birth, death, sex, etc) and normatival values of moral facts (kindness to children, reciprocity, generostiy).  At the ideological pole of meaning one finds ref to pricincipals of soc org.  "The drama of soc action …causes an exchange bt these poles in which bio refs are ennobled and normative refs are charged with emotional significance."
ii. This only works where there preixists a high level of communitas; recog of basic bond w/in society benal all its hierarchial and segmentary diffs and opps.  When ritual does work it achieve genuinely cathartic and soemtimes transforemative effects re character and social relations.
iii. This exchange of qualities makes desirable what is soc nec by establishing a right rel bt involuntary sentiments and the requirements of soc structure.  People are induced to want to do what they must do.  Symbol behavior actual "creates" society for pragmatic purposes (include structure and communitas).  Paradigms in ritual impel to action as well as thought.
iv. Question: can a trial be a ritual?  Socrates, Rabirius?