Turner's conceptualisation of liminality came about as a result of several underlying motivations, interests, fieldwork experiences and theoretical influences (sources are from Turner unless otherwise stated). Turner:
i. disassembled 'ritual' with the aim of locating and documenting the role and meaning of objective pan-cultural performance. 'Ritual' here means rites of passage, not private liturgical rites, such as puja or communion; and is distinct from 'ceremony'. Following Dilthey (1985c), cultural meaning depends upon the expression of experience: for Turner, the meaningful action of 'Homo Performans' (1985b:187) evident 'from ritual to theatre' (1982). Such expressions (perhaps 'rituoid' [F. Turner 1990:152]) constitute many of the perennial moments by which people re-live, re-create, re-tell and reconstruct their culture (cf. Bruner 1986:9).
ii. critiqued existing approaches to ritual, granting this complex process 'ontological status' (1978:578). Not epiphenomenal, or mere 'representations', ritual, and religious symbolism in general, are a source of meaning and inspiration. Therefore, the integrative 'all purpose social glue' interpretation of the structural-functionalists (1982c:82), and reductionist psychological approaches through which the same behaviour is regarded as a 'cultural defense mechanism' or 'safety valve' (1974:57), are challenged.
iii. had a lifelong passion for dramatic performance - traced through several formative experiences and influences. Poetry, especially traditional meter, was particularly important. This is perhaps because 'meter is an ancient psychic technology to achieve that quasi-trance state of heightened awareness which [Turner] had found in ritual' (F. Turner 1990:156). A winner of prizes for his own poetry (earlier in his life), Turner was particularly fond of Blake, often quoting a line which became synonymous with his own lens on the world: e.g. 'Without Contraries is no Progression' (ibid:151). At The University of Chicago, Turner taught Blake and Dante as frequently as anthropological theory in his seminar on symbol, myth and ritual (Babcock 1987:40). Coupled with an expansive knowledge of the classics, he had an interest in an immense array of culturally diverse drama and performance traditions (E. Turner 1990). It has been said that, his mother an actress, drama was 'in his blood' (E. Turner 1985:5). Stage drama like Greek tragedy and Japanese Noh Theatre possessed 'something of the sacred seriousness of rites of passage' (1982a:11). Influenced by Grotowski and in conjunction with the performance theorist/director Schechner - he became involved in staging experimental theatre/ritual 'ethnodrama'. Following initial fieldwork in Africa - where the ritual cults of the Ndembu of Zaire were studied - Turner became a practising Roman Catholic, placing himself 'inside the heart of the human matter' (1975:32). He remarked:
Deciphering ritual forms and discovering what generates symbolic actions may be more germane to our cultural growth than we have supposed. But we have to put ourselves in some way inside religious processes to obtain knowledge of them. (ibid)
iv. inherited the Durkheimian legacy. The latter's ideas on religion as 'eminently social' (1976) filtered through to Turner via several paths. The following are four basic Durkheimian themes taken on by Turner:
· As religious (and therefore social) phenomena, and as determined modes of collective action, rituals possess essential and permanent aspects.
· 'Ritual' has a function. Periodic ritual works to sustain commitment to social solidarity and is crucial to the continuity of the group.
· Society (indeed 'the universe') is divided into two distinct and alternating domains - the 'sacred' and the 'profane' (Durkheim 1976:37-41). 'Rituals' (such as initiation into the adult, religious community) serve to demarcate individuals from normal, 'profane' existence via 'negative cults' (enforcing interdictions, abstention and renunciation), which condition access to the 'positive cult'. Since the worshipper has been modified positively, he is purified - he accesses the 'sacred' (ibid:299-310). The 'sacred' is gained by the act of leaving the 'profane', and this is created and re-created in states of exultation and collective effervescence.
· And, a theme partly inspired by Töennies, there has transpired an historical movement from the 'sacred' (communal) to the 'profane' (associational), from the 'mechanical solidarity' characteristic of 'primitive' society to the 'organic solidarity' characteristic of 'industrial' society, wherein the religious function (and hence the 'sense of the sacred') remains but is weakened.
v. was a student of Max Gluckman and the Manchester School. Challenging the distanced and static formulations of social life engineered by structural-functionalists, an interest in process, dynamics and conflict, is developed. This is clear in 'social drama' (applied to Ndembu - 1957), and later, its performative partner, 'cultural drama'. The social drama - with its phases of breach, crisis, redress, and resolution (reintegration or schism) (Turner 1974:38-42; 1984:23-4) - is society's 'primordial and perennial agonistic mode' (1982a:11). The 'cultural drama', culture's redressive mechanism, manifest as theatre, film, literature etc, provides a collective lens on ubiquitous 'social drama'. This inheritance was crucial to the entire dialectical campaign (structure/anti-structure) mounted. The human condition is perceived as the product of the necessary and 'immortal antagonism' between the 'fixed world' of structure and the 'floating worlds' of anti-structure (1969:vii). Society, he contended, 'grows through anti-structure and conserves through structure' (1974:298). Turner suggested that it is universal practice for 'social dramas' to be given the light of reflexive attention in 'cultural dramas', which then, he thought, provide fuel for renewed 'social drama'. This continuous feedback process, wherein 'life' and 'art' imitate each other, provides a perpetual cultural redressive mechanism (1982c; 1985g:291-301; Schechner 1977). Since reflexivity performs a redressive function, the redressive phase of 'social drama' was then abstracted to become a central component of 'cultural drama'.
vi. was interested in social marginality, especially - in conjunction with his wife Edith Turner - pilgrimage (cf. Turner and Turner 1978). Travel to religious and culturally significant centres on the periphery was thought to induce an experience parallel to that of liminality. To be outside the constraints of structure is also to be between. Outsiders and liminars are then cousins. Such spaces may occasion the social egalitarianism and spiritual solidarity Turner called 'communitas'.
vii. experienced the countercultural insurgence of the American 1960s which confirmed his vision of periodically creative upheavals in history. More than simply confirmational however, the sixties were undoubtedly inspirational in conceiving the 'apocalyptic agency' of communitas.
viii. desired an holistic science of 'neurosociology' (1985f). In an effort to 'abolish the sharp distinction between the classic study of culture and sociobiology' (1985g:297), Turner harboured a curiosity for neurophysiological conditions or 'ergotropic' behaviour (1985e), and 'flow states' associated with 'dramatic time' (1982a:9-10). Such conditions engender transcendent (or 'Orphic', Turner 1982c:83-4; 1992:154-5) experiences - like the shamanic experience: travelling inward yet, paradoxically, to a distant place.
ix. maintained that ritual liminality is not only capable of reinforcing the status quo, but is also a source of real social change. That which exists 'betwixt and between' structured social life is a precondition for the affirmation and/or transformation of social order. It is the powerful interstitial region via which the norms, truths and values of culture are confirmed/re-evaluated through history. Liminality's functionality is not necessarily conservative, since Turner meant that liminality facilitates the (re)production of cultural reality as it is lived and perceived by its members: both the reproduction of social structure and the production of new cultural forms. It is liminality which mediates society's becoming and this is essentially a (re)creative process.