Acknowledging, somewhat regrettably, that 'the modern is now becoming part of the past' (1985b:177), late in his writing Turner began making noise about 'the postmodern turn'. In fact, in one essay he stressed that his own work 'for many years had inclined me ... towards postmodern ways of thinking' (ibid:185). Was Turner a theorist of the 'post' then? There are plenty of cues to support his contention. He deemed his processual analysis, with its inherent challenge to modernist (functionalist and structuralist) preoccupations with consistency, congruence and cognition as evidence of his contribution to post-structuralist theory in anthropology. His contribution, he suggested, amounted to 'the processualisation of space, its temporalisation' as opposed to the spatialisation of time (what he called 'spatialised thinking' [ibid:181]). In the same essay he made allusions to 'a multiperspectival consciousness' and even referred to 'the notion of society as an endless crisscrossing of processes' (ibid:185).

Further cues may, for the casual observer, indicate a post-structuralist perspective. The championing of disciplinary cross-fertilisation and the discursis on liminoid genres, especially that which he deemed the 'hall of magic mirrors', come to mind. The contention that '[r]eligion has generally moved into the leisure sphere' (Turner and Turner 1978:35) has attracted numerous post-structuralist thinkers and students of popular culture who have mined his ideas. However Turner's 'turn' remains unconvincing in the light of the development of postmodernism. For one thing, his approach to symbolic interpretation was not 'post'. Though acknowledging symbolic complexity, Turner did not adequately recognise what has become known as 'the crisis of representation'. According to Foster (1990:133), his concern was ultimately one of 'straightening out' complexity or 'getting to the bottom of [it] so that an orderly and satisfying analysis could become feasible'. As such, his method of 'decoding' the symbolic worlds of others is considered to be 'somewhat mechanistic, constricted and impoverished' (ibid:125). Turner's quest to understand the 'total' constituents of experience (cognition, affect, volition), a 'unified science of man' (Babcock 1987:40) drawing him to Freud (1978), Jung and even sociobiology, but notably not embodiment, is clearly a modernist project.

There is also the matter of an implicit pre-postcolonialist countercultural romanticism. Turner's notion of the 'power of the weak' is most revelatory. He noted how middle class white Americans assume the identity of the socially disadvantaged who are perceived to be a source of power since they are believed to harbour communitarian values. Subdued autochthonous people, he says, possess a 'ritual potency' (1969:99) for the west. This is an intriguing assessment of the semiotic 'power' inhering in those of a position 'beneath', especially indigenes, yet it does not extend to an awareness of the political power of essentialism - that is, the discursive strategies through which 'others' are mobilised to speak the cultural truths of non-indigenes (Lattas 1991:315). Nor does Turner attend to the critical positionality of those Weber (1995) calls 'borderlands' people. According to Weber, Turner privileges a sense of 'social leveling and attendant cultural bonding over what we now recognise as an encounter with identity politics and the border' (530).

Turner's preoccupation with the universal 'strain towards order and harmony' in social processes (1985b:183) - the resolution of disorder and ambiguity - suggests a functionalist processualism. Therefore, though Turner made forays into post-structuralist territory, he had firm anchorage in pre-postmodernist (and pre-postcolonial) thought, a reality to which the essentialist character of 'anti-structural' liminality is testimony.

In Turner's project, liminality takes its place in a dialectical system.3 Society is the product of the interplay of 'structural' and 'anti-structural' forces throughout history - liminality being anti-structure par excellence. Anti-structure simply refers to those regions of experience in culture (outside, in between and below) which are characterised by the temporary dissolution and/or re-arrangement of social structure, which is the differentiation of positions, particularly statuses and roles, in hierarchical organisation. It is the necessary antagonist in society since it constitutes potentiality - the positive, generative source of culture (Turner 1985a:171). Predisposed towards articulating anti-structural phenomena, Turner's analysis privileged these over the 'structural' forms to which they would eventually secede. Granting anti-structure ontological ascendancy, he championed one side of the dialectic.

Cultivating a utopian outlook, Turner sails close to Bakhtin's idealisation of the popular carnivalesque and its liberating dialogical discourse (Flanigan 1990). According to Flanigan, with a 'religiouslike fervor', both Turner and Bakhtin offer their views 'not as heuristic devices, but as descriptions of being'. Occupying a central place in Turner's writing, the liminal 'acquired transcendent value and became depicted as that which was quintessentially real, a kind of primal unity' (Flanigan 1990:52). Discussing three key themes in Turner's writing - the sacred, ritual and community - I intend to expose and explore the extent and implications of Turner's essentialist vision.

The Sacred: Decline and Resurgence

Turner's unified historical exegesis is underpinned by contradictory dispositions that are a legacy of Durkheim.4 Two linked historical biases can be detected. The first calls attention to the loss or attenuation, and the second to the resilience or even rebirth, of the sacred - especially as it is transparent in 'the orchestrated religious gestalt' of ritual (Turner 1982c:85). These are the tragic and heroic narratives. I will discuss these in turn.

First, in modernity there is a perceived recession away from liminal toward liminoid conditions. The 'religious sphere' has contracted, and, as a consequence, Turner speaks of disintegration: 'the decline of ritual' (1983a:105), 'deliminalisation' (1982c:85), the exaltation of the 'indicative mood' (ibid:86), and the loss of ritual's 'cultural evolutionary resilience [which ceases] to be an effective metalanguage or an agency of collective reflexology' (1985a:165). 'Esthetic media' like 'song, dance, graphic and pictorial representation ... [have] broken loose from their ritual integument' (ibid:166). And, since 'anti-structure' and 'the sacred' are synonymous, a dissipating anti-structure is implicated.5 The argument follows that ritual's power and potential for transformation has been denuded. In modern times, where societies have grown in scale and complexity, as the division of labour has increased, and as work and leisure spheres are more clearly demarcated, ritual has become peripheral (Turner 1992:156). It is largely the perceived shift from collective, obligatory social bonds - as seen in rites of passage - to individual voluntary association, which has foreshadowed and accompanied the emergence of aesthetic, liminoid genres (Turner 1985a:165-6; Alexander 1991:22).

However, despite lengthy ruminations on 'the Fall', Turner was keen, especially in later writing, to demonstrate that 'traces of the original' are found in the modern world, that the symbolic action of the collective ritual performances of premodernity can be observed - albeit in the miasma of performance genres of contemporary western cultures (ie. theatre, festivals, celebrations). He argues that whilst 'ritual' has perished as a dominant genre 'it dies a multipara, giving birth to ritualised progeny' (1982c:79), an ensemble of magnifying and distorting lenses. Employing a different metaphorical strategy, he claims: 'free liminoid experiences are the cultural debris of forgotten liminal ritual' (1982b:55).6

Yet, not only was this essential social performance frame residual in fragmented and weakened forms, strong pockets of revival were detected. Assuming the task of plural cultural reflexivity, 'a multiplicity of desacralised performative genres' (particularly new theatre, but also carnival) were said to be emerging in the postmodern world (1985a:165-66). Such was claimed to evidence a 're-turn to subjunctivity and a rediscovery of cultural transformative modes' (1982c:86). There are signs, Turner declares, 'that the amputated specialised genres are seeking to regain and to recover something of the numinosity lost in their dismemberment' (1986:42). 'Ritual' was undergoing an heroic revitalisation and it is probable that Turner saw himself witness to the actualisation of Durkheim's prophecy:

A day will come when our societies will know again those hours of creative effervescence in the course of which new ideas arise and new formulae are found which serve for a while as a guide to humanity. (Durkheim 1976:427-28)

The sentiment of the tragic decline of sacred ritual remains a key trope, forming the necessary background to its resurgence - its heroic renewal. In Turner, the depiction of the lost sacred under modernity becomes a strategic narrative - a point from which it can only return. As he pointed out 'dismembering may be a prelude to remembering' (1982c:86). It is clear, then, that in Turner's historical melodrama, in one way or another - in fragmented and/or resurgent forms - the sacred persists. As Grimes wrote, 'the liminoid is sacred to members of a secular society'. The remnants of liminality - and therefore the sacred - are now everywhere: in the arts, politics and advertising (Grimes 1990:145).

Therefore 'revitilised' rituals, or perhaps what Turner might call 're-liminalisation' - which have been discerned within the framework of liminoid occasions as 'neo-liminal' events (cf. MacAloon 1984:269; and Lewis and Dowsey-Magog 1993) - do not contradict Turner's perspective. More accurately, contemporary manifestations of integrative and redressive ritual only provide evidence against Turner, as they do in Lewis and Dowsey-Magog (1993:198-99), when the entirety of his perspective is discounted. For Turner, sacred liminality remained an essential human social process as it became fragmented, diversified and renewed in a complex grid of genres.

Privileged and Transcendent Ritual

That which Turner admitted as liminal ritual assumed an ontologically privileged status in his dialectic. Further, ritual was decidedly transcendent (and/or reflexive). It is worth exploring what is excluded from this privileged domain.

First, in concordance with a secular/sacred division, Turner made a fundamental distinction between 'ceremony' ('indicative' spectacle) and 'ritual' ('subjunctive' performance).7 Within this arrangement, he justified the analytical dismissal of what Handelman (1990) calls 'events of presentation' - the performance frameworks Handelman claims predominate in modern nation states. Quite simply, since ceremonial forms (e.g. state funerals, royal pageants, commemorative days) do not fit comfortably into Turner's dialectic, they are ignored. Therefore, while ritual's ambit had expanded in Turner's later years, it retained an exclusivity which cannot embrace the sheer plurality of contemporary cultural events.

Formal, even institutionalised, often spectatorial, public, events - in many cases requiring obligatory performances and gestures - are shunted to the periphery in Turner's historicism. It was considered that while:

simpler societies have ritual or sacred corroborees as their main meta-social performances; proto-feudal and feudal societies have carnivals and festivals; early modern societies have carnival and theatre, and electronically advanced societies, film. (1979:96)

The rationale for such a distinction and, ultimately, the sequestering of ceremonial, is that these forms are bereft of the transformative power that liminality alone possesses. Without considering liminality, 'ritual':

becomes indistinguishable from 'ceremony', 'formality' ... The liminal phase is the essential, anti-secular component in ritual per se, whether it be labelled 'religious' or 'magical'. Ceremony indicates, ritual transforms. (Turner 1982c:80)

Turner therefore agrees with Moore and Myerhoff that 'ceremony' - what they call 'secular ritual' - 'is a declaration of form against indeterminacy [and that] ... all collective ceremony can be interpreted as a cultural statement about cultural order as against a cultural void' (Moore and Myerhoff 1977:16-17). Such a definition cannot be applied to 'ritual', says Turner, for 'ritual' does not portray a dualistic struggle between order and void, cosmos and chaos, the formed and the indeterminate, with the former always finally triumphant. Liminal rituals promote the abandonment of form, the dissolution of fixed categories, and permit the unfolding of a predominantly 'subjunctive mood': the 'mood' or 'world' of 'wish, desire, possibility or hypothesis' (Turner 1982c:83). This is what Turner has in mind when he says liminality is the depths ('the abyss') 'of pure possibility', which inverts and negates, the 'indicative mood' of routine social life - the 'mood' or 'world' of 'actual fact' and 'it is so'; the world of the finished and the fixed (Turner 1982c:83; 1984:21).8

Though useful for the study of small-scale processes (micro-events), we confront significant obstacles when applying this concept to (post)modern public events. It is possible to imagine Turner appreciating this when he states that the Rio Carnaval is a 'dynamic, many levelled, liminal domain of multiframed anti-structures' (1983a:124). The underlying difficulty is the almost impossible task of categorising many events as sacred or secular, 'subjunctive' or 'indicative', 'leisure' or 'work'. Public events do not respond well to this kind of typological chauvinism. Falassi (1987:6) insists that several components of the complex 'festival morphology' will form the configuration of each event. As Manning argues, both 'ritual' and 'play' frames (corresponding to Turner's 'ceremony' and 'ritual') are combined in sequential format in contemporary cultural 'celebrations' such as festivals and sporting events (1983:22). For MacAloon (1984), mega-events like the Olympic Games possess 'ramified' 'frames' or 'moods' (e.g. games, concerts and rituals) within their spatio-temporal dimensions. As Roche (1992:581) points out, mega-events like the Games are 'multi-dimensional'. They are simultaneously 'a work experience for the participants, an unusual leisure experience for local spectators, a touristic experience for visiting spectators and a media phenomenon for media professionals and viewers'.

Second, Turner's inclination toward the transcendent and reflexive aspects of the telegraphed ritual frame signalled his inattention to the body.9 Thus the liminal body, that is subjunctive embodiment like gender disruptions, erotic contacts and physical mutations, or intercorporeal 'communions' transpiring in moments 'betwixt and between', were only ever provided cursory treatment. Though he later urged that we bring anthropology 'back into touch with the bodily as well as the mental life of humankind' (foreword to Schechner 1985: xii), Turner was not an 'anthropologist of the body'.

In attempting to comprehend contemporary public events employing Turner's ideas we meet significant difficulties. Attending to the transcendent and reflexive (numinous and ideational) potentials, though not the corporeality (the physicality), of such moments leads to unbalanced accounts. In order to right this imbalance, other theorists prove useful. Bakhtin's approach to 'the people's second life' of carnival, articulating the world-body correspondence of 'grotesque realism', comes immediately to mind. Though Turner acknowledges Bakhtin himself, his non-material interests are clearly betrayed. 'Perhaps we are only now,' Turner stated:

beginning to learn the ambiguous, ludic language of what Bakhtin calls 'the people's second world', a language as much of verbal as of non-verbal signs and symbols, always pregnant with good sense, always rich in metaphors and other figurative expressions, often scatological to counterbalance the chilling refinement of spiritual and political repression, but always charged with communitas, the likely possibility of immediate human communion. (Turner 1983b:190)

Here, Turner's bent towards the cognitive dimensions of 'the peoples second world', towards the 'ludic language' of 'figurative expressions' is evident. Turner's liminaries were more preoccupied with reflexive semiotica than gratifying erotica. What of the ludic body, of carnality? What of 'communions' of mutual gratification?

More recently, authors subscribing to a social 'eroticism' of Bataillian dimensions have appeared on the theoretical landscape offering useful material for the study of public events. They include Maffesoli, whose 'passional logic' of the social 'orgiasm' (1993) is said to animate the social body, achieving its ultimate climax in the festival, and Bey who holds that the immediate events he calls temporary autonomous zones (or TAZs) (1991a) are characterised by the struggle for physical 'presence' and a certain group jouissance.

Significant public events in Australia, like the Woodford/Maleny Folk Festival, the AFL Grand Final and the Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras, cannot be adequately scrutinised via a paradigm encumbered by the exclusivity and strictures of Turner's ritual frame. Each of these events are work, leisure and tourist experiences, as well as media events. They feature ramified performative 'frames' or 'moods'; involve ascribed and voluntary behaviour; may be solemn and festive; induce passivity or ecstasy. Sequential/ramified arrangements contextualise swings between the indicative ('straight') and the subjunctive (ludic) moods, and may be either to different participants - they fuse 'ceremonial' and 'ritual' performance as Turner sees these. Participants may also access the numinous, interrogate their social universes and become abnormally embodied in such celebrational frames. A single event, such as any of those mentioned above, may then be a sensual meta-performance/narrative. In this way, such polydimensional events are schizoid in the sense that they oscillate between genres, 'moods', 'frames' and embodiments, or hold simultaneous combinations.

Although it is possible some of these problems may be resolved with Turner's later use of 'celebration' or the 'celebratory frame' (1982d) - which seems to blanket ritual, ceremony and festival - the implications of coinciding performance zones in a single event, and the contortions of the liminal body unique to such moments, went largely uninvestigated. Indeed, never losing sight of the transcendent vision, for Turner, 'celebration' approximates Durkheim's 'effervescence' - 'generated by a crowd of people with shared purposes and common goals' (1982d:16).

Homogeneous Community and Apoliticism

Although the process of social drama has furthered the understanding of political process, and although one of Turner's main preoccupations was variability and social change, as recent commentators have pointed out (e.g. Weber 1995), Turner steered towards the explication of passage structure and homogeneity at the expense of open-ended political manoeuvring and contestation within event frameworks. Symptomatic of an 'essentially utopian' approach, as Weber suggests, there is an 'implicit consensual dimension' in Turner's vision of cultural change - one which renders the consciousness of the ritual liminar implicitly apolitical (ibid:531). This conservative political paradigm is most evident in the development of the concept of communitas and its application to the study of pilgrimage.

Searching for ritual analogues between 'tribal' and 'historical' religious liminality, Victor, along with Edith Turner, encountered pilgrimage (especially Christian) upon which was applied a swag of already well refined theoretical tools - a predisposition to account for the cultic practice of pilgrims as part of an historical/biographical dialectic (Marx/Gluckman), and as a form of social unification (Durkheim). In all the 'higher' religions, Turner saw pilgrimage as 'the ordered antistructure of patrimonial-feudal systems' replicating processes already observed in tribal societies: 1. the liminal stage of rites of passage and, 2. the inclusiveness of earth and fertility cults (1974:204,206). Parallel with these latter cults, pilgrims are members of a religious community in a state of 'flow', 'impregnated by unity ... purified from divisiveness and plurality' (Turner and Turner 1978:255). Such an 'inclusive, disinterested and altruistic domain' (1973:208), was deemed an exemplary state of communitas, or more precisely, 'normative communitas' which meant that, in the major religions, pilgrimage was 'organised into a perduring social system'. Turner, therefore does acknowledge that:

the mere demographic and geographical facts of large numbers of people coming at set times and considerable distances between the pilgrim's home and sacred site themselves compel a certain amount of organisation and discipline. The absolute communitas of absolute anarchy does not obtain here. (Turner 1973:195)

However, such organised cults are 'essentially inclusive and universalistic' in Turner's model. All are like siblings. There is always a tendency towards a form of sociality which 'strips actors of their social personae and restores their essential individuality' (Eade and Sallnow 1991:4).10

The Turnerian model has been 'tested' and challenged by ethnographers in various cultural settings. To begin with, Werbner demonstrates that cults are fields of micro-politics which may herald 'new power divisions' (1989:295). Not straightforwardly inclusive, the Mwali cult of God Above is characterised by 'the dynamic tension between inclusiveness and exclusiveness' (ibid:296). In addition, Turner's insights have been debated as pilgrimage has been subject to thoroughgoing analysis (Eade and Sallnow 1991:4-5; Morinis 1984:258, 273-4; 1992b). In a study of Bengali pilgrimage practices, Morinis (1984:273) argues they are not those in which 'the structural bonds of the home community are sundered by a joyful, levelled communitas relationship among the participants'. Morinis points toward the various motivations held by pilgrims - such as seeking cures and personal salvation. The existence of different levels of meaning and behaviour give rise to a rather less consensual quality of experience than that which Turner promoted.

Furthermore, that such phenomena reinforce social, cultural and religious distinctions rather than occasion their dissolution, is a recurring theme in the pilgrimage literature. Sallnow, in a study of Andean Pilgrimage in the Cuzco area of southern Peru, found that such regional devotions were occasioned by nepotism, factionalism, endemic competition and inter-community conflict (1981:176). Rather than become attenuated, the boundaries separating various groups involved - sponsored community and ethnic groups - were accentuated. Discussing the Sri Lankan pilgrimage site at Kataragama, Pfaffenberger (cited in Reader 1993:12) reveals how pilgrimage to the shrine serves to underline and reaffirm the differences between Hindus and Buddhists, and between Hindu castes. Bowman (1991) reaches similar conclusions in a study of the super shrine of the Holy Land, Jerusalem: 'There are as many Jerusalems as there are religious denominations visiting the city ... Here Judaism, Islam, and a variety of Christianities jostle with one another in an atmosphere of deep suspicion and sometimes outright hostility' (Eade and Sallnow 1991:10,13). Bowman demonstrates how Greek Orthodox, Roman Catholic, and Christian Zionist arrive with different understandings of the sacred. 'The sacred center par excellence of the Christian tradition paradoxically becomes the global focus for the display of its deep and pervasive doctrinal schisms' (ibid:14).11

These examples demonstrate that pilgrimage destinations are contested sites where conflicting interpretations and reinforced divisions frustrate the realisation of communitas. Researchers have thus regarded Turner's emphasis on unrestricted fellowship with caution. The problem, according to Weber, is that Turner lacks 'a conception and recognition of culture as political contestation: the battle over narrative power, the fight over who gets to (re)tell the story, and from which position' (Weber 1995:532). This contrasts with the approach of Abner Cohen who regards cultural performances like the Notting Hill Carnival as 'politico-cultural' processes, 'intimately and dynamically related to the political order and to the struggle for power within it' (1993:4).12 Though interested in the play of power relations, Turner was more interested in 'the interplay of discrepant psyches than of the social cleavages wrought by political and economic contradictions and conflicts' (Parkin 1996: xix). Pilgrimages are not neutral fields independent of the distribution and operations of power. For MacClancy (1994:34), political mechanisms are indeed integral to such processes.

Turner regards pilgrimages as symbolic forms whose meaning, if at times relatively opaque, is already given. But the elite controlling the performance of the ritual can manipulate the multivocality of the usually employed symbols and forms for their own interested ends. By exploiting the discourse they can try to dictate how the event is to be interpreted. (MacClancy 1994:34)13

Moreover, as Eade and Sallnow (1991:5) posit, the paradigm imposes 'a spurious homogeneity' upon a phenomenon which is culturally and historically 'polymorphic'. They argue that, at best, the Turnerian approach takes pilgrimage as either supporting or subverting the status quo - a scenario wherein complex combinations are not considered. Eade and Sallnow counteract this support/subversion dichotomy by reformulating pilgrimage as 'a realm of competing discourses' (ibid).14 They therefore adopt a pluralistic model which emphasises the multiple cultic constituency of such events and their conflicting representations. Pilgrimage is:

above all an arena for competing religious and secular discourses, for both the official co-optation and the non-official recovery of religious meanings, for conflict between orthodoxies, sects, and confessional groups, for drives towards consensus and communitas, and for counter-movements towards separateness and division. (Eade and Sallnow 1991:2)