It will take many more lifetimes to trace out the multifarious and interconnecting ramifications of the stupendous interdisciplinary web of ideas that [Turner] spun endlessly out of himself. (Babcock 1984:461)

In social and cultural theory, Turner made a deep impression on both sides of the Atlantic. He stamped his influence on social and cultural anthropologies in England and the US respectively. Along with Geertz, he contributed to the development of symbolic anthropology, and attracted plenty of interest from outside the discipline (especially literary, performance and cultural studies). Yet, despite making significant inroads upon diverse fields,1 Turner rarely paused to galvanise his ideas into a transparent theoretical 'model', a 'Turnerian system or semiotics of culture'. Indeed, paraphrasing Oscar Wilde, academic clarity, he remarked, 'is the last refuge of the Philistines' (Babcock and MacAloon 1987:19). The approach and style of this 'incursive nomad' (Turner 1974:18) betokens a somewhat anomalous theoretical position. A 'post-functionalist' (Flanigan 1990:52) he may have been, yet Turner was clearly a pre-poststructuralist. An architect of strong processualism, his writing, at least the later material, betrays the workings of a sophisticated functionalism.

Turner's wide ranging project constituted an attempt to comprehend how socio-cultural systems (what he - in reference to the English as opposed to the French tradition - called 'structures') are produced and reproduced. We might identify the process as socio-cultural (re)production. Since 'normal social science' was said to ignore 'at least one half of human sociality' (1974:293-4) - thereby constituting 'an obdurate evasion of the rich complexities of cultural creation' (Turner 1969:viii) - Turner sought to gaze upon interstices which 'provide homes for anti-structural visions, thoughts and ultimately behaviours' (1974:293). That such times and spaces are regarded as necessary sources of resolution, is the crux of Turner's perspective. Meta-explorations beyond, beneath and between the fixed, the finished and the predictable, his later work consists of an extensive journey into such times and spaces, pregnant margins, the cracks of society, necessary thresholds of dissolution and indeterminacy through which socio-cultural order is said to be (re)constituted. And, through observation of culture unkempt and unclothed, in its drunken, ludic and inchoate moments, one may obtain a clear apprehension of the ordered world.

His project is founded upon a sense that society is in-composition, open-ended, forever becoming, and that its (re)production is dependent upon the periodic appearance, in the history of societies and in the lives of individuals, of organised moments of categorical disarray and intense reflexive potential. This is most powerfully articulated as liminality, a concept which has sparked the imagination of cultural observers attempting to apply meaning to a phalanx of public time-space zones demarcated from routine life, yet harbouring unquantifiable social possibilities. It is in such zones of experience - the 'realm of pure possibility' (Turner 1967a:97) - where the familiar may be stripped of its certitude and conventional economics and politics transcended. They are occasions where people, often strangers to one another, may achieve an ineffable affinity, where sacred truths are imparted and/or social alternatives explored.

Liminality has its roots in the Latin limen (threshold), a term used by van Gennep to describe the middle phase of rites of passage. Writing in 1909, van Gennep grouped together all rituals 'that accompany a passage from one situation to another or from one cosmic or social world to another' (1960:10). He divided transitional rites into three phases: 'separation', 'margin' (or limen) and 'reaggregation', for which he also used the terms 'preliminal', 'liminal', and 'postliminal'. He suggested that, in different rites, the symbolic elements of one phase may feature predominantly. The first phase, that of separation, is comprised of 'symbolic action signifying the detachment of the individual or group from an earlier fixed point in the social structure or from a set of cultural conditions, or both' (Turner and Turner 1982:202, my emphasis). Here, as Turner reminds us, separation 'demarcates sacred space and time from profane or secular spacetime' (1982b:24). The third phase represents 'desacralisation', the participant's celebrated return to society as a transformed or reborn individual - perhaps with new status, roles and responsibilities (or simply an altered attitude or outlook on life). Yet, for Turner, the central or liminal phase ('social limbo'), representing moments 'betwixt and between' fixed cultural categories, was most critical. Such clusters of rites as the life-death cycle, crisis and seasonal rites were reckoned socially significant moments 'betwixt and between', matrixes where elements of structural organisation are temporarily suspended or rearranged.

The limen became the leitmotif in Turner's theoretical firmament (see Appendix B.1), denoting a complexity of interwoven processes (see 'modalities' below), and versatile in application. Responsible for consolidating 'liminality' in social and cultural theory, he defined it thus: 'a fructile chaos, a storehouse of possibilities, not a random assemblage but a striving after new forms and structures, a gestation process' (Turner 1986:42). In an early preoccupation, Turner applied the concept to illuminate the central phases of two clusters of transition rites common to premodern cultures:

1. Life cycle (or crisis) rites: rites of transition, often private, such as rites which mark birth, puberty, marriage and death; rites of affliction such as divinatory and curative rites which tend to possess a socially therapeutic function (cf. Turner 1967b:359-93); and rites of status elevation such as rites of initiation, inclusion into political office and membership to secret societies, clubs etc. These rites often involve seclusion, humiliation and ordeals, the leveling or stripping of normal distinctions and the lowering of the liminary's status (prior to elevation) (Turner 1969).

2. Seasonal (calendar) rites: collective and public celebrations of agricultural events of the round such as sowing, first fruits and main harvest, or the celebration of cosmic events such as the solstices, equinox and the intersection of solar and lunar cycles. Related are public rites which mark a transition from one wider social state to another (such as from war to peace) or which mark the end of natural disasters. These rites often provide occasion for the legitimate performance of illicit behaviour (inversion) by the 'structurally inferior' which includes temporary saturnalia, lampooning, derision and mockery of the 'structurally superior' and which may be accompanied by age and sex role reversals (cf. Bakhtin 1968; Babcock 1978). It is said that these momentary irregularities, which make the 'low high and the high low', reaffirm regularity (Turner 1969:76; Gluckman 1954). All of these rites are often festive, celebratory occasions.

Both clusters feature ludic recombinations of cultural forms in every imaginable (and sometimes unimaginable) way(s). The known is often defamiliarised, the 'natural' transmuted into the 'unnatural' - (e.g. a disguise may combine human, animal, and vegetable fragments, as in initiation rites) - and conventional reality may be exaggerated or distorted (for the purpose of satire or burlesque mockery, as in seasonal events [Turner 1982b:27]). Liminality is 'the realm of primitive hypothesis' (Turner and Turner 1982:205), it is ritual's hermeneutic (Kapferer 1991:xi) since such ludic 'dislocation' (Da Matta 1984) and categorical juxtaposition encourages speculation and enhances understanding of the social world.

Yet, as Turner came to perceive substantive commonalities in ritual and performative phenomena in premodern, modern and postmodern cultures, 'the liminal' was telegraphed beyond description of the mid-phase of passage and seasonal rites in small scale and agrarian societies. In (post)modern culture, further to the attenuated continuation of such liminal rites, Turner descried the presence of 'quasi-liminal' or 'liminoid' cultural phenomena (such as carnival, festival, sport events, theatre, ballet, film, the novel, television and 'the arts' in general).

The liminal/liminoid concepts harbour important differences. Liminal cultural phenomena are perceived to be the collective, integrated, and obligatory ritual action of premodernity - tribal and early agrarian cultures. They predominate in societies possessing what Durkheim called 'mechanical solidarity'. They are concerned with calendrical, biological and social structural rhythms or with crises in social processes. They are enforced by necessity but contain the potentiality for the formation of new symbols, models and ideas. They are 'collective representations' - 'symbols having a common intellectual and emotional meaning for all the members of the group', yet they are the antithesis - inverse, reverse, negation - of quotidian, 'profane' collective representations (Turner 1982b:53-4). Such activity is often called 'the work of the gods' and here work and play are 'intricately intercalibrated' (ibid:32).

Liminoid phenomena emerge in feudal, but predominantly capitalist societies with a complex social and economic division of labour, and are perceived to involve the voluntary and idiosyncratic action of moderns. With a stress on individuality and open-ended processes, they are seen to occur within leisure settings apart from work, are experimental and exploratory, plural and fragmentary, developing along the margins of society, forming social critique and providing the potential for the subversion of the status quo. They are also commodities (1982b:53-5), and, to a considerable degree, are 'deprived of direct transcendental reference' (Turner 1992:160). The crucial difference here is that the liminoid is said to be freer than the liminal (1982b:55).2

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