Victor Turner was born in Glasgow on May 28, 1920. His mother was an actress and his father was an electronical engineer. Influenced by his mother, at eighteen he studied poetry and classics at the University College, London. His studies, however, were disturbed by World War II. During that five year period he lived near the army base in a gypsy caravan with his wife and two children. It was at this time that Victor became interested in anthropology. He then returned to college to study under some of the greatest anthropologists at that time.
At age 29, Turner earned a Bachelors Degree with Honors in Anthropology and left London. He then decided to study anthropology under Max Gluckman at the University of Manchester. Also at this time (1950-1954), Turner worked among the Nbemu, a central African tribe, studying their society and religious practices. Later, he refocused his interest to ritual; he spent the remainder of his career on this. In June 1955 he completed his Ph.D. and lectured at Manchester for several years. He wrote and published two monographs at this time along with his dissertation, Schism and Continuity in an African Society: A study of Ndembu Village Life (1957). These works presented him as a dominate figure in the Manchester School of Anthropology.
In 1961, Victor Turner became Fellow of the Center for Advanced Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University. There, he wrote The Drums of Affliction: A study of Religious Processes among the Ndembu (1968). He completed three books in 1964 while at Cornell University and conducted studies among the Gisu of Uganda. Turner became a professor of Anthropology and Social Thought at the University of Chicago in 1968.
At this time, his interests shifted to world religions and mass societies. He also began a study of modern Christian pilgrimage while at Chicago. Finally, at the University of Virginia he was a member in the Center for Advanced Studies and the South Asia Program. Victor W. Turner passed away in 1983.
A Maelstrom of Symbols, (1997) http://members.tripod.com/~shadowdrake/turner.html
Freedom, Liminality, and Social Change, (20 Jan. 1998) http://ftp.iafrica.com/s/so/solar/Liminal.html
Victor Turner, (1998) http://www.indiana.edu/~wanthro/turner.htm
Written by Meranda Turbak
Edited by Marcy L. Voelker, 2007