Victor Turner
(1920-1983, Britain-United States)
Victor Turner is one of the symbolic anthropologists, who examine how people give meanings to their reality and how this reality is expressed by their cultural symbols. Turner mainly studied rituals in non-western societies and looked at the roles of the symbols in specific social situations. He believed that people in a particular society have their own symbolic system to make sense of their lives. He analyzed rituals and demonstrated the symbolic meanings that derived from social contexts. What mattered to Turner was not the symbols themselves, but the roles of the symbols in specific social situations.
One of Turner’s famous studies is his analysis on the rituals of the Ndembu, an African tribe in Zambia. The Ndembu used several kinds of trees for young women’s ritual and they attributed various symbolic meanings to these trees. For example, one kind of tree produced white liquid and another had red, each of which were considered as milk and blood respectively. Turner argued that this ritual possessed a symbolic means of teaching young women to accept their place as child bearers and not to challenge male gender roles. The ultimate goal of the ritual was to preserve the stability of the Ndembu society by securing women’s gender roles.
As the above example shows, Turner considered symbols as mechanisms for the maintenance of societies. He argued social solidarity needs to be continually reinforced and ritual symbols play important roles by keeping social orders. He believed that anthropologists are neutral observer and therefore, they can interpret customs of other cultures. He concluded that the following three kinds of information are all legitimate for symbolic analysis: observed data, informants’ interpretations, and anthropologists’ analysis.
Sources:
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McGee, R. Jon and Richard L. Warms. 2004 Anthropological Theory: An Introductory History. New York: McGraw Hill.
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Lavenda, Robert H. and Emily A Schultz. 2003 Core Concepts in Cultural Anthropology. Boston: Mc Graw Hill.