Introduction

Victor Turner was an anthropologist whose thinking has greatly influenced our ideas about ritual. The reading below
represents excerpts from two of his works. The first, from an article Turner wrote for the journal Science, provides a
definition of a ritual and a discussion of its characteristics. The second, taken from Turner's book The Ritual Process:
Structure and Anti-Structure, describes liminality, an important concept which he identified in one particular kind of
ritual, the rite of passage. Rites of passage celebrate the movement of a member of a society from one state or condition
to another. A graduation, for example, represents the passage of members of a school's student body out of the school
and into another stage of education or experience. Rites of passage comprise a large and important category of rituals,
but not all rituals are rites of passage. A Thanksgiving Day parade, for instance, celebrates the change of seasons from
Summer to Fall, and would be considered what Turner calls a cyclic ritual, not a rite of passage.
This reading comes from:
"Symbols in African
Ritual," Science March
16, 1972, vol. 179, 110005.

NO ONE WHO HAS LIVED FOR LONG in rural sub-Saharan Africa can fail to be struck
by the importance of ritual in the lives of villagers and homesteaders and by the fact that rituals
are composed of symbols.

A ritual is a stereotyped sequence of activities involving gestures, words, and objects,

performed in a sequestered place, and designed to influence preternatural entities or forces on
Definition of ritual:
behalf of the actors' goals and interests. Rituals may be seasonal, hallowing a culturally defined
moment of change in the climatic cycle or the inauguration of an activity such as planting,
"A ritual is a stereotyped
sequence of activities ... harvesting, or moving from winter to summer pasture; or they may be contingent, held in
response to an individual or collective crisis. Contingent rituals may be further subdivided into
performed in a
sequestered place, and
life-crisis ceremonies, which are performed at birth, puberty, marriage, death, and so on, to
designed to influence
demarcate the passage from one phase to another in the individual's life-cycle, and rituals of
preternatural entities or
affliction, which are performed to placate or exorcise preternatural beings or forces believed to
forces on behalf of the
have afflicted villagers with illness, bad luck, gynecological troubles, severe physical injuries, and
actors' goals and
interests."
the like. Other classes of rituals include divinatory rituals; ceremonies performed by political
authorities to ensure the health and fertility of human beings, animals, and crops in their
territories; initiation into priesthoods devoted to certain deities, into religious associations, or into
secret societies; and those accompanying the daily offering of food and libations to deities or
ancestral spirits or both. Africa is rich indeed in ritual genres, and each involves many specific
performances.
Turner lived among the
Ndembu, a central
African tribe, from 1950
to 1954, studying their
society and their
religious practices.

Each rural African society (which is often, though not always, coterminous with a linguistic
community) possesses a finite number of distinguishable rituals that may include all or some of
the types listed above. At varying intervals, from a year to several decades, all of a society's
rituals will be performed, the most important (for example, the symbolic transference of political
authority from one generation to another, as among the Nyakyusa (Wilson 1959) of Tanzania)
being performed perhaps the least often. Since societies are processes responsive to change,
The Nyakusa are a West
African tribe studied by not fixed structures, new rituals are devised or borrowed, and old ones decline and disappear.
Nevertheless, forms survive through flux, and new ritual items, even new ritual configurations,
Monica Wilson
tend more often to be variants of old themes than radical novelties. Thus it is possible for
anthropologists to describe the main features of a ritual system, or rather ritual round (successive
ritual performances), in those parts of rural Africa where change is occurring slowly.
The Semantic
Structure of the
Symbol

The ritual symbol is ''the smallest unit of ritual which still retains the specific properties of ritual
behavior . . . the ultimate unit of specific structure in a ritual context." This structure is a semantic
one (that is, it deals with relationships between signs and symbols and the things to which they
In this section, Turner is refer) and has the following attributes: (i) multiple meanings (significata) -- actions or objects
interested in determining perceived by the senses in ritual contexts (that is, symbol vehicles) have many meanings; (ii)
the meaning of rituals in unification of apparently disparate significata -- the essentially distinct significata are
general. That is, he
interconnected by analogy or by association in fact or thought; (iii) condensation-- many ideas,
wants to define his

methodological terms in
such a way that he can
study two specific rituals
in different societies and
apply his terms to both.
semantic -- this term
refers to meaning,
especially to the
meanings of words

relations between things, actions, interactions, and transactions are represented simultaneously
by the symbol vehicle (the ritual use of such a vehicle abridges what would verbally be a lengthy
statement or argument); (iv) polarization of significata--the referents assigned by custom to a
major ritual symbol tend frequently to be grouped at opposed semantic poles. At one pole of
meaning, empirical research has shown that the significata tend to refer to components of the
moral and social orders -- this might be termed the ideological (or normative) pole of symbolic
meaning; at the other, the sensory (or orectic) pole, are concentrated references to phenomena
and processes that may be expected to stimulate desires and feelings.
Thus, I have shown that the mudyi tree, or milktree (Diplorrhyncus mossambicensis), which is
the focal symbol of the girls' puberty ritual of the Ndembu people of northwestern Zambia, at its
normative pole represents womanhood, motherhood, the mother-child bond, a novice
,undergoing initiation into mature womanhood, a specific matrilineage, the principle of matriliny,
the process of learning "women's wisdom," the unity and perdurance of Ndembu society, and all
of the values and virtues inherent in the various relationships -- domestic, legal, and political -controlled by matrilineal descent. Each of these aspects of its normative meaning becomes
paramount in a specific episode of the puberty ritual; together they form a condensed statement
of the structural and communal importance of femaleness in Ndembu culture. At its sensory
pole, the same symbol stands for breast milk (the tree exudes milky latex -- indeed, the
significata associated with the sensory pole often have a more or less direct connection with
some sensorily perceptible attribute of the symbol), mother's breasts, and the bodily slenderness
and mental pliancy of the novice (a young slender sapling of mudyi is used). The tree, situated a
short distance from the novice's village, becomes the center of a sequence of ritual episodes rich
in symbols (words, objects, and actions) that express important cultural themes.

Dominant Symbols
in Ritual Cycles

Rituals tend to be organized in a cycle of performances (annual, biennial, quinquennial, and so

on); even in the case of contingent rituals, each is performed eventually. In each total
assemblage, or system, there is a nucleus of dominant symbols, which are characterized by
extreme multivocality (having many senses) and a central position in each ritual performance.
Associated with this nucleus is a much larger number of enclitic (dependent) symbols. Some of
these are univocal, while others, like prepositions in language, become mere relation or function
signs that keep the ritual action going (for example, bowings, lustrations, sweepings, and objects
indicative of joining or separation). Dominant symbols provide the fixed points of the total
system and recur in many of its component rituals. For example, if 15 separate kinds of ritual
can be empirically distinguished in a given ritual system, dominant symbol A may be found in l0
of them, B in 7, C in 5, and D in 12. The mudyi tree, for example, is found in boys' and girls'
initiation ceremonies, in five rituals concerned with female reproductive disorders, in at least
three rituals of the hunters' cults, and in various herbalistic practices of a magical cast. Other
dominant symbols of Ndembu rituals, as I have shown elsewhere (Turner 1961; 1966; 1969a)
recur almost as frequently in the ritual round. Each of these symbols, then, has multiple referents,
but on each occasion that it is used -- usually an episode within a ritual performance -- only one
or a related few of its referents are drawn to public attention.

Actors Experience
Symbols as Powers
and as Meanings
In this section, Turner
wants to make clear that
ritual is not just a
symbolic language. It is a
series of actions
performed by
participants who are
affected by their role in
the drama. This idea will

The second characteristic of ritual condensation, which compensates in some measure for
semantic obscurity, is its efficacy. Ritual is not just a concentration of referents, of messages
about values and norms; nor is it simply a set of practical guidelines and a set of symbolic
paradigms for everyday action, indicating how spouses should treat each other, how pastoralists
should classify and regard cattle, how hunters should behave in different wild habitats, and so
on. It is also a fusion of the powers believed to be inherent in the persons, objects, relationships,

be even more important

in the section on rites of
passage, below.

events, and histories represented by ritual symbols. It is a mobilization of energies as well as

messages. In this respect, the objects and activities in point are not merely things that stand for
other things or something abstract, they participate in the powers and virtues they represent. I
use "virtue" advisedly, for many objects termed symbols are also termed medicines. Thus,
powers and symbols -when a substance is
scrapings and leaves from such trees as the mudyi and the mukula are pounded together in meal
used to treat a patient, it
mortars, mixed with water, and given to the afflicted to drink or to wash with. Here there is
is being used for its
power. When the same direct communication of the life-giving powers thought to inhere in certain objects under ritual
conditions (a consecrated site, invocations of preternatural entities, and so on). When an object
substance is used to
represent an idea or a
is used analogously, it functions unambiguously as a symbol. Thus, when the mudyi tree is used
feeling, it is used
in puberty rites it clearly represents mother's milk; here the association is through sight, not
symbolically. Ritual often
combines these uses of taste. But when the mudyi is used as medicine in ritual, it is felt that certain qualities of
motherhood and nurturing are being communicated physically.
an object. Water, for
instance, can be used to
clean away dirt, or it can
be used to symbolize a
baby's acceptance into a
religious group.

In the first case, the mudyi is used because it is "good to think" rather than "good to eat"; in the
second, it is used because it has maternal power. The same objects are used both as powers
and symbols, metonymically and metaphorically -- it is the context that distinguishes them. The
power aspect of a symbol derives from its being a part of a physical whole, the ideational aspect
from an analogy between a symbol vehicle and its principal significata.
Each symbol expresses many themes, and each theme is expressed by many symbols. The
communication by means cultural weave is made up of symbolic warp and thematic weft. This weaving of symbols and
of rituals -- a ritual can
themes serves as a rich store of information, not only about the natural environment as perceived
express the participants'
and evaluated by the ritual actors, but also about their ethical, esthetic, political, legal, and ludic
beliefs and attitudes
(the domain of play, sport, and so forth in a culture) ideas, ideals, and rules. Each symbol is a
toward their world and
their society. To
store of information, both for actors and investigators, but in order to specify just which set of
understand the meaning themes any particular ritual or ritual episode contains, one must determine the relations between
of any ritual, it is
the ritual's symbols and their vehicles, including verbal symbolic behavior. The advantages of
important to consider it
communication by means of rituals in nonliterate societies are clearly great, for the individual
in relation to the other
symbols and beliefs
symbols and the patterned relations between them have a mnemonic function. The symbolic
found in the society.
vocabulary and grammar to some extent make up for the lack of written records.
The Semantic
Dimensions
In this section, Turner
steps back from his own
perspective as an
anthropologist. Even
though the Ndembu
allowed him to
participate in their
society, as an
anthropologist he was
still an outsider. Here he
turns to the meaning the
rituals have to insiders,
that is, to the members of
the society the
anthropologist is
studying. For Turner,
this is an importnat
dimension of the
meaning of a ritual.

Symbols have three especially significant dimensions: the exegetic, the operational, and the
positional. The exegetic dimension consists of the explanations given the investigator by actors in
the ritual system. Actors of different age, sex, ritual role, status, grade of esoteric knowledge,
and so forth provide data of varying richness, explicitness, and internal coherence. The
investigator should infer from this information how members of a given society think about ritual.
Not all African societies contain persons who are ready to make verbal statements about ritual,
and the percentage of those prepared to offer interpretations varies from group to group and
within groups. But, as much ethnographic work attests, many African societies are well
endowed with exegetes.

In the operational dimension, the investigator equates a symbol's meaning with its use -- he
observes what actors do with it and how they relate to one another in this process. He also
exegetic dimension of
ritual - the explanations records their gestures, expressions, and other nonverbal aspects of behavior and discovers what
values they represent -- grief, joy, anger, triumph, modesty, and so on. Anthropologists are now
of the meaning and
significance of a ritual
studying several genres of nonverbal language, from iconography (the study of symbols whose
given by insiders those
vehicles picture the conceptions they signify, rather than being arbitrary, conventional signs for
who participate in it
them) to kinesics (the study of bodily movements, facial expressions, and so forth as ways of
operational dimension of communication or adjuncts and intensifiers of speech). Several of these fall under the rubric of a
ritual - the
symbol's operational meaning. Nonexegetical, ritualized speech, such as formalized prayers or
anthropologist, who is
invocations, would also fall into this category. Here verbal symbols approximate nonverbal
outside the society,
records what is done in symbols. The investigator is interested not only in the social organization and structure of those
individuals who operate with symbols on this level, but also in what persons, categories, and
the ritual, and how the
participants behave and groups are absent from the situation, for formal exclusion would reveal social values and
feel
attitudes.
positional dimension of
ritual - the
anthropologist, who is
outside the society,
relates the symbols
found in a ritual to other
symbols found in the
society and the culture

In this section, Turner

discusses the
relationship of myth and
ritual. Some
anthropologists have
argued that myth and
ritual are very closely
related, and that every
ritual is the acting out of
a myth. However, in the
part of Africa Turner
studied, there are rituals
for which the culture
does not know a myth. It
could be argued that
such rituals once were
related to a myth that has
been forgotten by the
society. Turner does not
comment on this issue.

In the positional dimension, the observer finds in the relations between one symbol and other
symbols an important source of its meaning. I have shown how binary opposition may, in
context, highlight one (or more) of a symbol's many referents by contrasting it with one (or
more) of another symbol's referents. When used in a ritual context with three or more other
symbols, a particular symbol reveals further facets of its total "meaning." Groups of symbols may
be so arrayed as to state a message, in which some symbols function analogously to parts of
speech and in which there may be conventional rules of connection. The message is not about
specific actions and circumstances, but the given culture's basic structures of thought, ethics,
esthetics, law, and modes of speculation about new experience.

In several African cultures, particularly in West Africa, a complex system of rituals is associated
with myths.4 These tell of the origins of the gods, the cosmos, human types and groups, and the
key institutions of culture and society. Some ritual episodes reenact primordial events, drawing
on their inherent power to achieve the contemporary goals of the members of the culture (for
example, adjustment to puberty and the healing of the sick). Ritual systems are sometimes based
on myths. There may coexist with myths and rituals standardized schemata of interpretation that
may amount to theological doctrine. But in wide areas of East and Central Africa, there may be
few myths connected with rituals and no religious system interrelating myths, rituals, and
doctrine. In compensation, there may be much piecemeal exegesis of particular symbols.

A good way to appreciate the excerpt below is to consider it an application of the principles Turner explained in the
excerpt given above. Here he considers the meaning of ritual and describes a general set of characteristics he finds in the
rituals of many societies.
Form and Attributes
of Rites of Passage Van Gennep defined rites of passage as "rites which accompany every change of place, state,
social position and age." He has shown that all rites of passage are marked by three phases:
This reading comes from:
separation, margin ( or limen, signifying "threshold" in Latin), and aggregation. The first phase
The Ritual Process:
Structure and Anti(of separation) comprises symbolic behavior signifying the detachment of the individual or group
Structure
from an earlier fixed point in the social structure. During the intervening liminal period, the
characteristics of the ritual subject are ambiguous; he passes through a cultural realm that has

Rites of passage
represent one group of
rituals that first allowed
Turner to notice the
importance of liminality,
a concept he defines
below.

none or few of the attributes of the past or coming state. In the third phase (reaggregation or
reincorporation), the passage is consummated. The ritual subject is in a relatively stable state
once more and by virtue of this, has rights and obligations vis--vis others of a clearly defined
and structural type.

Liminality

The attributes of liminality or of liminal personae (" threshold people ") are necessarily
ambiguous, since this condition and these persons elude or slip through the network of
classifications that normally locate states and positions in cultural space. Liminal entities are
neither here nor there; they are betwixt and between the positions assigned and arrayed by law,
custom, convention, and ceremonial. As such, their ambiguous and indeterminate attributes are
expressed by a rich variety of symbols in the many societies that ritualize social and cultural
transitions. Thus, liminality is frequently likened to death, to being in the womb, to invisibility, to
darkness, to bisexuality, to the wilderness, and to an eclipse of the sun or moon.

Liminal entities, such as neophytes in initiation or puberty rites, may be represented as

possessing nothing. They may be disguised as monsters, wear only a strip of clothing, or even
go naked, to demonstrate that as liminal beings they have no status, property, insignia, secular
clothing indicating rank or role, position in a kinship system -- in short, nothing that may
distinguish them from their fellow neophytes or initiands. Their behavior is normally passive or
Isoma- a ceremny Turner humble; they must obey their instructors implicitly, and accept arbitrary punishment without
studied among the
complaint. It is as though they are being reduced or ground down to a uniform condition to be
Ndembu
fashioned anew and endowed with additional powers to enable them to cope with their new
station in life. Among themselves, neophytes tend to develop an intense comradeship and
egalitarianism. Secular distinctions of rank and status disappear or are homogenized. The
condition of the patient and her husband in Isoma had some of these attributes -- passivity,
humility, near-nakedness -- in a symbolic milieu that represented both a grave and a womb. In
initiations with a long period of seclusion, such as the circumcision rites of many tribal societies
or induction into secret societies, there is often a rich proliferation of liminal symbols.
Communitas

What is interesting about liminal phenomena for our present purposes is the blend they offer of
lowliness and sacredness, of homogeneity and comradeship. We are presented, in such rites,
with a "moment in and out of time," and in and out of secular social structure, which reveals,
however fleetingly, some recognition (in symbol if not always in language) of a generalized social
bond that has ceased to be and has simultaneously yet to be fragmented into a multiplicity of
structural ties. These are the ties organized in terms either of caste, class, or rank hierarchies or
of segmentary oppositions in the stateless societies beloved of political anthropologists. It is as
though there are here two major "models" for human interrelatedness, juxtaposed and
alternating. The first is of society as a structured, differentiated, and often hierarchical system of
politico-legal-economic positions with many types of evaluation, separating men in terms of "
more " or " less." The second, which emerges recognizably in the liminal period, is of society as
an unstructured or rudimentarily structured and relatively undifferentiated comitatus, community,
or even communion of equal individuals who submit together to the general authority of the ritual
elders.
I prefer the Latin term "communitas" to "community," to distinguish this modality of social
relationship from an " area of common living." The distinction between structure and communitas
is not simply the familiar one between "secular" and "sacred," or that, for example, between
politics and religion. Certain fixed offices in tribal societies have many sacred attributes; indeed,
every social position has some sacred characteristics. But this "sacred" component is acquired
by the incumbents of positions during the rites of passage, through which they changed
positions. Something of the sacredness of that transient humility and modelessness goes over,
and tempers the pride of the incumbent of a higher position or office. Liminality implies that the
high could not be high unless the low existed, and he who is high must experience what it is like

to be low.
MYSTICAL
DANGER AND
THE POWERS OF
THE WEAK

One may well ask why it is that liminal situations and roles are almost everywhere attributed with
magico-religious properties, or why these should so often be regarded as dangerous,
inauspicious, or polluting to persons, objects, events, and relationships that have not been
ritually incorporated into the liminal context. My view is briefly that from the perspectival
viewpoint of those concerned with the maintenance of " structure," all sustained manifestations of
communitas must appear as dangerous and anarchical, and have to be hedged around with
prescriptions, prohibitions, and conditions. And, as Mary Douglas (1966) has recently argued,
that which cannot be clearly classified in terms of traditional criteria of classification, or falls
between classificatory boundaries, is almost everywhere regarded as "polluting" and
"dangerous" (passim).
To repeat what I said earlier, liminality is not the only cultural manifestation of communitas. In
most societies, there are other areas of manifestation to be readily recognized by the symbols
that cluster around them and the beliefs that attach to them, such as " the powers of the weak,"
or, in other words, the permanently or transiently sacred attributes of low status or position.
Within stable structural systems, there are many dimensions of organization. We have already
noted that mystical and moral powers are wielded by subjugated autochthones over the total
welfare of societies whose political frame is constituted by the lineage or territorial organization
of incoming conquerors. In other societies -- the Ndembu and Lamba of Zambia, for example - we can point to the cult associations whose members have gained entry through common
misfortune and debilitating circumstances to therapeutic powers with regard to such common
goods of mankind as health, fertility, and climate. These associations transect such important
components of the secular political system as lineages, villages, subchiefdoms, and chiefdoms.
We could also mention the role of structurally small and politically insignificant nations within
systems of nations as upholders of religious and moral values, such as the Hebrews in the
ancient Near East, the Irish in early medieval Christendom, and the Swiss in modern Europe.
Many writers have drawn attention to the role of the court jester. Max Gluckman (1965), for
example, writes: "The court jester operated as a privileged arbiter of morals, given license to
gibe at king and courtiers, or lord of the manor." Jesters were "usually men of low class -sometimes on the Continent of Europe they were priests -- who clearly moved out of their usual
estate.... In a system where it was difficult for others to rebuke the head of a political unit, we
might have here an institutionalized joker, operating at the highest point of the unit ... a joker
able to express feelings of outraged morality." He further mentions how jesters attached to many
African monarchs were "frequently dwarfs and other oddities." Similar in function to these were
the drummers in the Barotse royal barge in which the king and his court moved from a capital in
the Zambezi Flood Plain to one of its margins during the annual floods. They were privileged to
throw into the water any of the great nobles "who had offended them and their sense of justice
during the past year" (pp. 102-104). These figures, representing the poor and the deformed,
appear to symbolize the moral values of communitas as against the coercive power of supreme
political rulers.
Folk literature abounds in symbolic figures, such as "holy beggars," "third sons," "little tailors,"
and "simpletons," who strip off the pretensions of holders of high rank and office and reduce
them to the level of common humanity and mortality. Again, in the traditional " Western," we
have all read of the homeless and mysterious "stranger" without wealth or name who restores
ethical and legal equilibrium to a local set of political power relations by eliminating the unjust
secular " bosses " who are oppressing the smallholders. Members of despised or outlawed
ethnic and cultural groups play major roles in myths and popular tales as representatives or
expressions of universal human values. Famous among these are the good Samaritan, the Jewish
fiddler Rothschild in Chekhov's tale "Rothschild's Fiddle," Mark Twain's fugitive Negro slave
Jim in Huckleberry Finn, and Dostoevsky's Sonya, the prostitute who redeems the would-be
Nietzschean "superman" Raskolnikov, in Crime and Punishment.

LIMINALITY,
LOW STATUS,
AND
COMMUNITAS

The time has now come to make a careful review of a hypothesis that seeks to account for the
attributes of such seemingly diverse phenomena as neophytes in the liminal phase of ritual,
subjugated autochthones, small nations, court jesters, holy mendicants, good Samaritans,
millenarian movements, "dharma bums," matrilaterality in patrilineal systems, patrilaterality in
matrilineal systems, and monastic orders. Surely an ill-assorted bunch of social phenomena! Yet
all have this common characteristic: they are persons or principles that (1) fall in the interstices of
social structure, (2) are on its margins, or (3) occupy its lowest rungs.
Prophets and artists tend to be liminal and marginal people, "edgemen," who strive with a
passionate sincerity to rid themselves of the clichs associated with status incumbency and roleplaying and to enter into vital relations with other men in fact or imagination. In their productions
we may catch glimpses of that unused evolutionary potential in mankind which has not yet been
externalized and fixed in structure.
Communitas breaks in through the interstices of structure, in liminality; at the edges of structure,
in marginality; and from beneath structure, in inferiority. It is almost everywhere held to be
sacred or "holy," possibly because it transgresses or dissolves the norms that govern structured
and institutionalized relationships and is accompanied by experiences of unprecedented potency.
The processes of "leveling" and "stripping," to which Goffman has drawn our attention, often
appear to flood their subjects with affect. Instinctual energies are surely liberated by these
processes, but I am now inclined to think that communitas is not solely the product of
biologically inherited drives released from cultural constraints. Rather is it the product of
peculiarly human faculties, which include rationality, volition, and memory, and which develop
with experience of life in society -- just as among the Tallensi it is only mature men who undergo
the experiences that induce them to receive bakologo shrines.
The notion that there is a generic bond between men, and its related sentiment of
"humankindness," are not epiphenomena of some kind of herd instinct but are products of " men
in their wholeness wholly attending." Liminality, marginality, and structural inferiority are
conditions in which are frequently generated myths, symbols, rituals, philosophical systems, and
works of art. These cultural forms provide men with a set of templates or models which are, at
one level, periodical reclassifications of reality and man's relationship to society, nature, and
culture. But they are more than classifications, since they incite men to action as well as to
thought. Each of these productions has a multivocal character, having many meanings, and each
is capable of moving people at many psychobiological levels simultaneously.
There is a dialectic here, for the immediacy of communitas gives way to the mediacy of
structure, while, in rites de passage, men are released from structure into communitas only to
return to structure revitalized by their experience of communitas. What is certain is that no
society can function adequately without this dialectic. Exaggeration of structure may well lead to
pathological manifestations of communitas outside or against " the law." Exaggeration of
communitas, in certain religious or political movements of the leveling type, may be speedily
followed by despotism, overbureaucratization, or other modes of structural rigidification. For,
like the neophytes in the African circumcision lodge, or the Benedictine monks, or the members
of a millenarian movement, those living in community seem to require, sooner or later, an
absolute authority, whether this be a religious commandment, a divinely inspired leader, or a
dictator. Communitas cannot stand alone if the material and organizational needs of human
beings are to be adequately met. Maximization of communitas provokes maximization of
structure, which in its turn produces revolutionary strivings for renewed communitas. The history
of any great society provides evidence at the political level for this oscillation.

STATUS
REVERSAL: THE
MASKING
FUNCTION

The liminality of a life crisis ritual humbles and generalizes the aspirant to higher structural status.
In composite rituals like the Ndembu rites for the installation of a chief-to-be, this humbling of
the candidate also exemplifies the power of structural inferiors in a rite of status reversal. In the
first aspect, an individual's permanent structural elevation is emphasized; in the second, stress is

laid upon the temporary reversal of statuses of the rulers and ruled.
In Western society, the traces of rites of age- and sex-role reversal persist in such customs as
Halloween, when the powers of the structurally inferior are manifested in the liminal dominance
of preadolescent children. The monstrous masks they often wear in disguise represent mainly
chthonic or earth-demonic powers -- witches who blast fertility; corpses or skeletons from
underground; indigenous peoples, such as Indians; troglodytes, such as dwarves or gnomes;
hoboes or anti-authoritarian figures, such as pirates or traditional Western gun fighters. These
tiny earth powers, if not propitiated by treats or dainties, will work fantastic and capricious
tricks on the authority-holding generation of householders -- tricks similar to those once
believed to be the work of earth spirits, such as hobgoblins, boggarts, elves, fairies, and trolls.
In a sense, too, these children mediate between the dead and the living; they are not long from
the womb, which is in many cultures equated with the tomb, as both are associated with the
earth, the source of fruits and receiver of leavings. The Halloween children exemplify several
liminal motifs: their masks insure them anonymity, for no one knows just whose particular
children they are. But, as with most rituals of reversal, anonymity here is for purposes of
aggression, not humiliation. The child's mask is like the highwayman's mask -- and, indeed,
children at Halloween often wear the masks of burglars or executioners. Masking endows them
with the powers of feral, criminal autochthonous and supernatural beings.
Anna Freud has had much that is illuminating to say about the frequent play identification of
children with fierce animals and other threatening monstrous beings. Miss Freud's argument -which derives its force, admittedly, from the theoretical position of her own mighty father -- is
complex but coherent. What is being given animal guise in child fantasy is the aggressive and
punitive power of the parents, particularly the father, and especially with regard to the wellknown paternal castration threat. She points out how small children are quite irrationally terrified
of animals -- dogs, horses, and pigs, for example -- normal fear, she explains, overdetermined
by unconscious fear of the menacing aspect of the parents. She then goes on to argue that one
of the most effective defense mechanisms utilized by the ego against such unconscious fear is to
identify with the terrifying object. In this way it is felt to be robbed of its power; and perhaps
power may even be drained from it.
For many depth psychologists, too, identification also means replacement. To draw off power
from a strong being is to weaken that being. So, children often play at being tigers, lions, or
cougars, or gunmen, Indians, or monsters. They are thus, according to Anna Freud,
unconsciously identifying themselves with the very powers that deeply threaten them, and, by a
species of jujitsu, enhancing their own powers by the very power that threatens to enfeeble
them. There is in all this, of course, a traitor-like quality -- unconsciously one aims " to kill the
thing one loves " -- and this is precisely the quality of behavior that generalized parents must
expect from generalized children in the customs of the American Halloween. Tricks are played
and property is damaged or made to look as though it has been damaged. In the same way,
identification with, the jaguar figure in the myth may indicate the potential fatherhood of the
initiand and hence his capacity to replace structurally his own father. Interestingly, this
relationship between theranthropic entities and masks and aspects of the parental role is be
made both at rituals of status elevation and at culturally defined points of change in the annual
cycle.
Life crises provide rituals in and by means of which relations between structural positions and
between the incumbents of such positions are restructured, often drastically. Seniors take the
responsibility for actually making the changes prescribed by custom; they, at least, have the
satisfaction of taking an initiative. But juniors, with less understanding of the social rationale of
such changes, find that their expectations with regard to the behavior of seniors toward them are
falsified by reality during times of change. From their structural perspective, therefore, the
changed behavior of their parents and other elders seems threatening and even mendacious,
perhaps even reviving unconscious fears of physical mutilation and other punishments for

behavior not in accordance with parental will. Thus, while the behavior of seniors is within the
power of that age group -- and to some extent the structural changes they promote are for them
predictable -- the same behavior and changes are beyond the power of juniors either to grasp
or to prevent.
To compensate for these cognitive deficiencies, juniors and inferiors, in ritual situations, may
mobilize affect-loaded symbols of great power. Rituals of status reversal, according to this
principle, mask the weak in strength and demand of the strong that they be passive and patiently
endure the symbolic and even real aggression shown against them by structural inferiors.
However, it is necessary here to revert to the distinction made earlier between rituals of status
elevation and rituals of status reversal. In the former, aggressive behavior by candidates for
higher status, though often present, tends to be muted and constrained; after all, the candidate is
"going up" symbolically, and, at the end of the ritual, will enjoy more benefits and rights than
heretofore. But, in the latter, the group or category that is permitted to act as if it were
structurally superior -- and in this capacity to berate and belabor its pragmatic superiors -- is, in
fact, perpetually of a lower status.
Clearly, both sociological and psychological modes of explanation are pertinent here. What is
structurally " visible " to a trained anthropological observer is psychologically " unconscious " to
the individual member of the observed society; yet his orectic responses to structural changes
and regularities, multiplied by the number of members exposed to change generation after
generation, have to be taken into cultural, notably ritual, account if the society is to survive
without disruptive tension. Life-crisis rites and rituals of reversal take these responses into
account in different ways. Through successive life crises and rites of status elevation, individuals
ascend structurally. But rituals of status reversal make visible in their symbolic and behavioral
patterns social categories and forms of grouping that are considered to be axiomatic and
unchanging both in essence and in relationships to one another.
Cognitively, nothing underlines regularity so well as absurdity or paradox. Emotionally, nothing
satisfies as much as extravagant or temporarily permitted illicit behavior. Rituals of status
reversal accommodate both aspects. By making the low high and the high low, they reaffirm the
hierarchical principle. By making the low mimic (often to the point of caricature) the behavior of
the high, and by restraining the initiatives of the proud, they underline the reasonableness of
everyday culturally predictable behavior between the various estates of society. On this account,
it is appropriate that rituals of status reversal are often located either at fixed points in the annual
cycle or in relation to movable feasts that vary within a limited period of time, for structural
regularity is here reflected in temporal order. It might be argued that rituals of status reversal are
also found contingently, when calamity threatens the total community. But one can cogently
reply by saying that it is precisely because the whole community is threatened that such
countervailing rites are performed -- because it is believed that concrete historical irregularities
alter the natural balance between what are conceived to be permanent structural categories.