Материал: Nigel Rapport, Joanna Overing, Social and Cultural Anthropology - The Key Concepts (2000)

LIMINALITY

became objects of their own reflection and fantasy. Here was, in Eliade’s words (1959), a ‘still centre’ to the universe from which all the current classificatory trappings of the socio-cultural milieu could be looked at askance. However, being strictly managed by their officiantkeepers when in a transitionally amorphous and identity-less state, initiates’ rebirth took the apposite and required directions; as far as possible, their reflections and fantasies were manipulated and directed (their bodies coerced, even humiliated), so that their new world-views were as appropriate to their statuses as their old ones.

Like Gluckman and Douglas, then, Turner, in this early work, enunciated a conservative vision concerning the structural nature of socio-cultural life, and the play of ritual liminality within this. It was not that the cake of custom was broken per se, so much as that individuals temporarily or permanently came to have their positions within the social structure changed. While rites of passage might radically affect initiates, the social system to which they returned remained, as a whole, unchanged; individuals may change, episodically, thanks to the creative processes of ritual, but the structures of social systems on the whole did not.

It was as if rituals carried health warnings. Human beings could not bear the (polluting) effects of supernatural power, of formlessness beyond human apprehension, on a routine basis or for too long. After their ‘time-out’, therefore, ritual participants were returned to social systems whose structures came to be validated afresh. Nevertheless, as a religious believer himself, Turner did wish to emphasize the favourable aspects of the ritual state. If everyday life was a matter of social-structural positions and identities, then the creativity of ritual process opened up an antistructural recognition of life beyond such arbitrary distinctions. Washed clean of particular and parochial statuses, initiates had the opportunity temporarily to enter a state of pure being, to engage with one another as representatives of a generic humanity Turner coined the term communitas to describe a sense of heightened togetherness which people might feel with one another once the superficial clothing of age, status, occupation, gender and other differences had been removed.

Then Turner came to broaden his focus, beyond the Ndembu and beyond rites of passage narrowly defined. He argued (1974, 1982a, b, 1986) that the phenomenon of liminality—or ‘the liminoidal’, as he came to call it by way of distinction—could be seen to apply to a great variety of institutions, practices, movements, situations, roles and persons: from churches to shrines and priests, pilgrims, monks and nuns, ascetics and hermits, even hippies, kibbutzniks, new-age travellers and revolutionaries. In different ways, extents and durations, all of these

233

LIMINALITY

shared in a condition of ‘sacred marginality’, their nature characterized by something of the anti-structural, the transitional and processual, the creative and re-formative, the reversing, resistant and rebellious, the communal and communing. They stripped themselves of normative everyday identities and refrained from normal practices in order to achieve vantage-points from which the social structure could be critiqued and re-formed. They deliberately held the everyday social structures of others in abeyance, opting out of status-bound, positionoriented lives, even if this meant taking on the stigmata of the lowly, poor and unkempt, the vagrant and ostracized, the mad and simple.They voluntarily abstained from participation in and membership of those social structures within which most mainstream life was conducted so that they may replace social-structural obligation and differentiation with a sense of true human bonds, based on personal relations of love, equality, spontaneity and freedom.

From being a transitional passage between social states, then, the liminal developed in Turner’s work and appreciation to being an ongoing (asocial) state in itself. Not only was this always and everywhere present, in some shape or form, in human socio-cultural milieux, but, for Turner, it represented the best of those milieux. It was where people related to one another as full human beings over and above their sociocultural exclusivities, and it was where they distilled the creativity and energy with which they created and re-created society and culture, and returned to them reinvigorated, preparing to keep giving them another try. Refusing social-structural distinction, classification and hierarchy, fragmentation and compartmentalization, the limin(oid)al was always a threat, always polluting and undercutting, always presenting a view upon the global and cosmopolitan, the universal and eternal. Hence, the guardians of social structure always attempted to police the liminoidal, if not out of existence then out of sight (time, mind) and seriousness in terms of everyday life.The power of the liminoidal might be recognized as of periodic use by these policemen, but it was also something whose application and provenance had to be carefully controlled, whose representatives were to be co-opted, wherever possible, into (marginal) positions within the social structure.

However much co-optation occurred, though, Turner concluded, however much church or hippy or punk ‘leaders’ and the groups they ‘represented’ became institutionalized parts of the socio-cultural milieu (and spoke on behalf of the status quo rather than its re-formation), there remained the sense in which every socio-cultural milieu continued to be characterized by an ongoing dichotomy between structure and antistructure. Every individual life, indeed, partook of this dichotomy in an

234

LIMINALITY

oscillatory fashion. For while the creative and rebellious and personalizing and communitarian spark may light up some individuals’ lives more than others’, it was a potentiality inherent to them all; every individual life had the potential to see beyond the conventionally normative and divisive, and every individual life shared in the necessity to experience this otherness at some time and to some extent. All were rebels, poets, humanists at some moments; all felt the power of social authority, property, wealth, tradition, status and fashion, but all also recognized the potentially far greater power of human overcoming and at-oneness.

In imaging the co-optation and routinization of liminality, but also its dialectical rebirth, Turner comes to appear quite Weberian, where uncategorizable ‘charismatic’ authority episodically affords the insights whereby socio-cultural milieux advance but where this authority inevitably comes to be routinized, institutionalized, in a ‘traditional’ or a ‘rational—legal’ form. Perhaps this is also why Turner (1982a:132–53) comes to soften the stark distinction between structure and antistructure and talk of their similarities. Hence, there may be different kinds of communitas which liminality can give onto: ‘existential’, ‘ideological’ and ‘normative’. These latter might initially sound self- contradictory—how could the generic human bond of communitas be conceived of in the same terms as ideologies or norms?—but what Turner has in mind is the way that the spontaneous communitas felt by those who together ‘drop out’ of the social system must evolve into something more routine (even if still voluntaristic and ‘free’) if it is to maintain itself over time. Hence, the Franciscan monastery, the hippy commune and the kibbutz.

Turner may be criticized for the religious underpinning and romantic overtones which he gives to the concept of limin(oid)ality. He may be taken to task for an overemphasis on everyday life as structured, static and inhumane, and on ‘sacred marginality’ as humanistic, spontaneous and creative. The institutions and officers of the sacred have, after all, the habit of being at least as hierarchical, divisive, formal, fixed, narrow and inflexible as those of the socialstructural, and not necessarily so otherworldly in their orientations either (cf. Mandelbaum 1966; Stirrat 1984).

Nonetheless,Turner’s exposition of a liminal cognition, identity and practice beyond the social-structural status quo has proved very fruitful. In the anthropological study of play (Schwartzman 1978), of performance (Hughes-Freeland 1997), of literature (Ashley 1990), of creativity (Rosaldo et al. 1993), of existential individuality (Burridge 1979), of celebration (Manning 1983), of pilgrimage (Eade and

235

LITERARINESS

Sallnow 1991) and of deviant subcultures (Marsh et al. 1978), Turner’s version of the liminal-cum-liminoidal can be seen to have offered significant leads.

See also: Alterity, Children, Humanism, Irony

LITERARINESS

Since the 1960s, an appreciation of the contingencies of anthropological representation has steadily grown. Since the 1980s, with the so-called ‘literary turn’, this has become a major preoccupation. Representation, it is said, inevitably serves certain interests and purposes. Furthermore, the means of construing representations is tantamount to a particular construction of data; socio-cultural reality per se is a matter of representation. Anthropologists, in short, have come to treat writings— their own as well as others’—as ‘situated texts’.

Traditionally, anthropological texts purported, or at least aimed, to simply present a true and detached view of the world. But texts do not simply come from nowhere, and they do not give onto an unbiased reality; inevitably they represent historico-socio-cultural documents. Indeed, the very claim to truth represents a particular rhetoric, a narrative and stylistic technique, which has served to obscure the links between those representations, the ‘knowledge’ they construct, the relations of power they embody, and the interests they further. Far from a true view of the world, here is simply one institutionalized way of being which is not intrinsically better than any number of other ways; truth being a ‘docile servant’ (Goodman 1978:18), there was no monopoly on ways in which a construction of reality might be seen to ‘fit the facts’.

By way of the ‘literary turn’, then, there has been a move away from an innocent focus upon the analysis of ‘others’ to an analysis of the processes by which anthropology comes to order, express, disseminate— in a word, inscribe—its analyses of others to the point where, for some, the questioning and self-doubting has endangered the practice of the writing per se. Looked at more positively, however, an anthropological consciousness of its acts of writing has caused a freeing-up of those practices and a willingness to experiment: a seeking out of genres which does not pretend to disinterestedness but best serves certain interests. Through a mixing of genres, a ‘blurring’ of distinctions and connections between genres and disciplines, there has been more of an open

236

LITERARINESS

embracing of the power, creativity and beauty potentially to be found in all genres of representation (cf. Geertz 1983:19).

To continue this exposition, a narrative may be woven which begins from three important literary-anthropological texts: Works and Lives.The Anthropologist as Author by Clifford Geertz (1988), Writing Culture. The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography edited by George Marcus and James Clifford (1986), and Anthropology as Cultural Critique. An Experimental Moment in the Human Sciences by George Marcus and Michael Fischer (1986).

Works and Lives: I

‘“What does the ethnographer do?”’, Geertz asks himself rhetorically: ‘—he writes’ (1973:19). However, in Works and Lives, Geertz discovers a certain nervousness in the state of current anthropological writing, a lack of confidence and persuasiveness in its traditional claim to explain others. Engaging others in the field and then representing them in the academy has become far more visible, and is felt to be incongruous and uncomfortable.As Strathern puts it (1991:8–11), anthropology finds itself in a new ‘aesthetic’ wherein the traditional fieldworker and author who claims authentically to translate his or her particular observations of a culture or society no longer convinces.

The nature of the difficulty is both moral and epistemological, Geertz continues.The moral difficulty concerns logistics of ‘going there’ which were laid largely in the context of colonialism, but whose power asymmetries can be seen to be replicated today; still anthropologists act as unrequested, lifelong spokespersons-cum-experts for groups of people with fewer Western ‘resources’, whom they briefly meet in some ‘peripheral’ environment. And yet, such colonialist trappings are a far remove from the reorganization of ethnic political relations in which many anthropologists would nowadays hope to see themselves involved. The epistemological difficulty concerns a questioning of what description of ‘there’ means. Words offer no transparent medium of representation, and anthropological analyses represent constructions which are not automatically more truthful or accurate or impartial or scientific or objective than native ones.

In short, where once the discipline of anthropology shared complex institutional connections with Western colonial expansion on the one hand, and a salvational belief in the power of pure science on the other, now anthropologists find they can no longer act convincingly either as transcontinental mediators or as transcultural theoreticians. Is anthropological representation of the other decent? Is it even possible?

237