some current trends in the study of ritual in africa - victor turner
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Some Current Trends in the Study of Ritual in AfricaAuthor(s): Victor TurnerSource: Anthropological Quarterly, Vol. 38, No. 3, Special Issue on Africa (Jul., 1965), pp. 155-166Published by: The George Washington University Institute for Ethnographic Research
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SOMECURRENTTRENDSIN THE STUDYOF RITUAL IN AFRICA
VICTOR TURNER
Cornell University
To provide myself with a crude measure of the degree of schol-
arly interest now being shown in African ritual, I recently madea count of the publications in that area listed in the bibliogra-
phies of current publications in fifteen of the last eighteen num-
bers of the journal Africa-in the period from April, 1960 to
July, 1964. These consisted of books and articles whose titlesfrankly proclaimed their concern with religion, magic, ritual,
cosmology, divination and kindred topics. In these fifteen num-
bers, 253 publications of this sort were mentioned. To give yousome idea of the proportion of these publications to other kinds,there was for the same period, a total of 2,428 titles cited in the
section of the Africa bibliography, "Ethnography and Sociology,"from which the
ritualcount
was made. For what these figuresare worth this means that Africa over the past four and a half
years has listed approximately 68 publications on ritual topicsper year out of a total of 648 ethnographic and sociological booksand articles in the African field. In other words, (excluding pub-lications classified by Africa under the separate heads of "Lin-
guistics," "Education and Missions," "Government, Economic
Development, and Welfare" and "Miscellaneous," and confiningourselves to the traditional anthropological and archaeologicalfields,) we find that more than 10 per cent of the publicationsappearing in its bibliography since 1960 have been devoted tothe description and analysis of ritual.
The Africa bibliography is by no means a comprehensive one
-I could name at least a dozen articles on ritual that have ap-peared in journals published in African territories that have not
as yet been listed in Africa. These figures indicate that quite ahealthy level of interest and productivity exists in the area ofritual studies. I might mention here that many other publicationsnot ostensibly or principally concerned with religious topics payconsiderable attention to them nevertheless.
Many of the articles mentioned are purely descriptive in char-
acter, often amounting to no more than notes, on, say, divinatory
155
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156 ANTHROPOLOGICALQUARTERLY
instruments and techniques, or "drunkenness in indigenous re-
ligious rites" (sic) (E.A. Nida in Practical Anthropology, Janu-
ary-February, 1959). Some of the descriptive material is, how-
ever, excellently detailed and carefully set out, as in Van Wing's"Le Kimbangisme vu par un timoin" (Zaire 12:6:1958:683-
618) or John Beattie's accounts of the Nyoro spirit mediumshipcult (JRLI 30: Dec., 1961: 11-38) and Nyoro mortuary rites
(Uganda Journal 235: 2: Sept., 1961: 171-83). Several recent
books also contain first-rate descriptive data, such as Michael
Gelfand's Shona Ritual (Cape Town: Juta, 1959), Shona Re-ligion (Cape Town: Juta, 1962), and Bronislaw Stefaniszyn'sSocial and Ritual Life of the Ambo of Northern Rhodesia (Lon-don: O.U.P., 1964). From these and similar well-documented
accounts in the classical tradition of Smith and Dale, Rattray and
Junod, reliable materials for African cross-cultural analyses and
comparative studies will be gratefully drawn.
Studies that emphasize analysis and interpretation of ritual
and mythic data, or that interdigitate description and analysis,have by and large been concerned with two contrasting types of
social systems, and with two different, but not necessarily op-
posed categories of problems. These types are traditional, "cycli-
cal, repetitive systems" in which, as Max Gluckman has said,
"conflicts can be wholly resolved and co-operation whollyachieved within the pattern of the system" (Analysis of a Social
System in Zululand, Rhodes-Livingstone Paper No. Twenty-Eight, M.U.P. 1958: 54), and radically changing systems in
which "new types of groups and social personalities, in ever-
changing relationships with one another are emerging constant-
ly" (Ibid., p. 54). Here, in contrast to the first type, changes take
place "in the character of the relationships which constitute the
parts of the system" and in "the pattern of their interdependencewith its conflicts and cohesion." In both these
typesof
systemsinvestigators of religious processes and phenomena have de-
veloped divergent interests. One school of thought, mainly in the
French tradition of Durkheim, has set itself the task of exposingthe ideological structure of religions. The other has tended to
focus on the social situations in which religious beliefs and prac-tices significantly affect behavior.
This theoretical and methodological dichotomy was vividly
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TRENDS IN STUDY OF RITUAL IN AFRICA 157
illustrated at the Third International African Seminar on African
religious systems' by the respective contribution of the British and
South African participants, on the one hand, and of their Frenchcolleagues on the other. The polarization was not complete, of
course; some French anthropologists, such as Jean Capron, who
recently published a superbly documented analysis of the re-
lationship between religious cosmology and internal cohesion inBwa village communities, (Africa, xxxii: 2: April 1962) favored
an approach which had affinities with orthodox structural-
functionalism. Yet it was clear that the British
anthropologistssought to establish the interconnections in the data in social re-
lations; their terminus a quo was the ritual situation. The French
scholars, on the other hand, attempted to elicit the logic under-
lying indigenous myths, beliefs and rituals, and exhibit the prin-
ciples of classification organizing the cosmology. Their point of
departure tended to be the vernacular text. Mme. Germaine Die-
terlen, who has made notable contributions from this standpoint,2
pointed out at the Conference that there was no real conflict be-tween these approaches since both sets of scholars addressedthem-selves to social reality and neither began with theoretical models.
Nevertheless, the dissimilar perspectives were clearly reflectedin different types of analysis. When British anthropologistsanalyzed a ritual performance, their first step was to educe fromobservational data the structure of social positions embeddedfirst in that
performanceand
secondlyin that
typeof ritual.
Theirnext procedure was to relate its structural form to other structural
features, both secular and religious, found in that society, and
finally to the structural form of the total system. It was only afterthe completion of this sociological task that they attempted, if at
all, to elicit the cultural pattern of the ritual, and to relate it tothe social structural dimensions. Moreover, when they collected
texts, these tended to relate to the rites actually observed; theywere not general accounts of cosmology, cosmogony, myths ex-
plaining initiation rites, and so on.
It was also clear that this methodology, for all its precision,
1Held at Salisbury, South Rhodesia in December, 1960. The proceedingshave been published. African Systems of Thought, M. Fortes and A. Dieter-len, eds. London: Oxford University Press, 1965.
2 1 need only mention here Les Ames des Dogon (1941); Notes sur laReligion Bambara (1951); "Myths et organization sociale en Afrique occi-dentale"
Journale Sociologique Africanistes, 1959, v. 29, 1:119-38.
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158 ANTHROPOLOGICAL QUARTERLY
tended to confine analysis of ritual data to those aspects that bore
directly on social structure, and to treat as irrelevant those
"capacities" of religion, to employ Nadel's term (Nupe Religion,Glencoe: The Free Press, 1954) that relate to the explanation of
the universe, provide a theory of morality and interpret the re-
ligious experience of individuals.
For an exemplification of these presently dissonant approachesI refer you to the volume of studies presented at the Third Inter-
national African Seminar, entitled African Systems of Thought
(1965). Here I would just like to point up their contrasting con-
sequences. If one begins with the social situation one finds dis-
crepancy and conflict, as well as a strain towards cohesion and
consistency in ritual behavior. If one begins with accounts of
cosmology, doctrine and myth, often collected from experts with
training in esoteric knowledge, in indigenous gnosis, one may
finally exhibit conceptual systems with all-embracing interpret-ative powers. The selective bias of the former perspective involves
the danger of denying the possibility that any society has a co-herent ideological structure; that of the latter of regarding the
social system as a reflection or expression of the ideology. These
are the respective distortions of exaggerated positivism and exag-
gerated idealism. Both can be avoided, in my view, by a dynamic
approach, based on the data provided by extended histories,which regards a society, to quote Dorothy Emmet, not as a close-
ly integrated systemlike an
organismor a
machine,but as a
"process with some systematic characteristics" Function, Pur-
pose and Powers, (1958). A recent exemplary treatment of ritual
in these terms may be found in John Middleton's Lugbara Re-
ligion (London: O.U.P., 1960) where an indigenous world-view
is related to the dynamic examination of an ancestor cult in the
context of competition for authority and with close reference to
the developmental cycle through which individuals and groups
pass. Here conflicts of interest and norm discrepancy are shownto be cloaked under ritual beliefs which are consistently related
to one another.
British anthropologists who have paid attention to such ritual
phenomena as symbols and beliefs are still convinced that genuine
anthropological problems are posed by the contrast between
ideological order and concrete disorder and seek to understand
therelationship
between them.The empirical study of ritual
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TRENDS IN STUDY OF RITUAL IN AFRICA 159
symbolism made a great stride forward in the late 1950's with
the publication of Monica Wilson's two books on Nyakyusa re-
ligion Rituals of Kinship among the Nyakyusa (London: O.U.P.,1957), Communal Rituals of the Nyakyusa (London: O.U.P.,
1959), and of Audrey Richards' Chisungu (New York: Grove
Press, 1956), a detailed study of a single performance of the
Bemba girls' puberty ceremony. In these books the native expertswere allowed to speak for themselves, and copious texts, closelyrelated to rituals observed by the anthropologists, were provided
by them, which explained and interpreted many features of the
symbolism and liturgical action. Here no attempt was made to
impose on the contradictions of native hermeneutics a philosoph-ical or theological consistency imported from Western thought.Yet in their analyses, both of the role of ritual in standardized
and contingent life-crises and of the semantics of ritual symbol-ism, these scholars pointed the way to a clearer understandingof the relationship between secular disorder and ritual order.
For the work of these scholars on symbols,3the "molecules" ofritual, indicates that what in secular affairs (economic, politicaland jural) tends to become fractionalized through the workingof private and sectional interests, (so that moral and social norms
are divorced from their context of ideal interrelatedness and em-
ployed separately and in competition to justify the claims for
authority, status and wealth advanced by the interested parties)in ritual contexts is
reintegratedat the level of
symbolism.Audrey Richards, for example, poined out that symbols have
"multiple meanings," and Monica Wilson's informants gave her
multiple referents for each key Nyakyusa symbol.I had also, during fieldwork among the Ndembu of Zambia
become interested in the problem of the multivocality of ritual
symbols, and partly through reading Freud on this quality ofdream symbols, and partly due to the direct stimulus and en-
couragement of Monica Wilson, I began to give some theoreticalattention to it. I came to see the Frazerian magical "law of sym-pathy" as a cultural device for bringing within the orbit of a
single representation a plurality of concepts, norms, aspects of
social relations, economic processes and facts, and features ofhuman physiology and anatomy. Thus, a tree which exuded
3Note, too, the excellent studies by M. Douglas and T. Beidelman in
Africa and the South Western Journal of Anthropology.
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160 ANTHROPOLOGICAL QUARTERLY
milky latex was interpreted by the Ndembu to refer to breast
milk, breast, the mother-child relationship, motherhood, fruitful
womanhood, matriliny and a number of other concepts. Whatwas posited in the ritual situation was that these aspects of
Ndembu culture were both ideally, and at that time, in mutual
harmony. But in fact, Ndembu knew that outside the ritual con-
text mothers quarrelled with children, antagonism existed be-
tween the sexes, barren women hated fruitful women and were
regarded by the latter as witches, and that all matrilineal descent
groups were rife with conflict.
Many of these tensions and antagonisms received ritual repre-
sentation, not at the level of exegesis but of standardized behavior
with reference to this tree, which was the pivotal symbol of the
girl's puberty rites. Women jeered at men, the girl novice's
mother was excluded from crucial phases of the rites, her matri-
lineal kin mimed hostility to her bridegroom's kin, and so on.
None of this hostility appeared in the orthodox exegesis of the
symbols however.On the basis of studying the relations between symbol, be-
havior and exegesis in other Ndembu contexts I came to consider
that plurality of reference at the symbolic level was one index of
an important function of ritual-that of resolving contradictions
of norm and interest in non-ritual activity fields. Ritual periodi-
cally centralizes what secular activities disperse and confound.
Notonly
does it centralize but itplaces
inright
relation-accord-
ing to the evaluative yardsticksof the given culture-norms, con-
cepts, relationships and standardized behavioral patterns that
have become autonomous, disparate or disorderly. A major in-
strument both of centralization and ordering may be found in
the pivotal ritual symbols-a class to which major social attention
is paid in any ritual system and which comprises its major struc-
tural elements.'
4Papers in which I have developed this argument include: "Ritual sym-bolism, mortality,and social structureamong the Ndembu," Rhodes-Living-ston Journal, ManchesterUniversity Press, 1961, volume 30. "Ndembu di-vination: its symbolismand techniques"Rhodes-LivingstonJournal, Man-chester University Press, 1961, volume 31. "Chihamba the white spirit"Rhodes-LivingstonJournal, Manchester University Press, 1962, volume 33."Three symbolsof passage in Ndembu circumcision ritual" In Essays in theRitual of Social Relations. M. Gluckman, ed., Michigan University Press,1962. "The interpretationof symbolsin Ndembu ritual" In Closed Systemsand Open Minds. M. Gluckman and E. Devons, eds., Edinburgh,Oliver and
Boyd, 1964.
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162 ANTHROPOLOGICAL QUARTERLY
Fortes5 in his recent work on ancestor worship in patrilinealsocieties has stressed that it is the experience of filial dependence,
as recognized and interpreted by the culture, that provides thematerial for the code of symbolism and ritual by means of which
reverence for authority can be regularly affirmed and enacted. He
seems to be moving towards Freud for help when he goes on to
argue that this experience is marked by ambivalence and this is
reflected in the images of the ancestors and the attributes givento them in at least Tale ancestor worship. He has also many perti-
nent things to say about ancestor worship being "a body of re-ligious beliefs, ritual practices and rules of conduct which serves
to entrench the principle of jural authority and its corollary,
legitimate right, as an indisputable and sacrosanct value-principleof the social system."
R. E. Bradbury, who has also worked in a West African patri-lineal society, the Edo of Benin, is another who has stressed the
close identification of father and son-in this case senior son-as
a key to understanding Edo mortuary ritual. "So close an identi-
fication," he writes, "tends to conflict, jealousy and suspicionwhile both are alive . . . while . . . the mortuary rites resolve the
relationship in its ideal form." (African Systems of Thought).In the setting of a matrilineal society Elizabeth Colson has
published two remarkable studies of ancestor cults, one amongthe Valley Tonga, the other among the Plateau Tonga, relating
many features of these cults to aspects of the social structure.Within the field of study of repetitive social systems, Cambridge
anthropologists such as Fortes, and Jack Goody6 have examined
factors making for order in social relations and for the transmis-
sion of corporate solidarities down the generations despite divisive
interests. The "Manchester School" inspired by Max Gluckman
has continued to emphasize the ritual handling of conflict in
social relations.Daryll
Forde' has called attention to theintricate
meshing of ecological and psychological with sociological factors
in accounting for some functions of supernatural beliefs. Some-
5 "Pietas in ancestor worship" (The Henry Myers Lecture, 1960) Journalof the Royal Anthropological Institute, 1961, volume 91, part 2 and "Somereflections on ancestor worship in Africa" African Systems of Thought, 1965.
6 Death, Property and the Ancestors. London, 1962.
7 "The context of belief: a consideration of fetishism among the Yako"Frazer Lecture for 1958, Liverpool University Press, 1958.
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TRENDS IN STUDY OF RITUAL IN AFRICA 163
what out of stepwith theseapproachescertainanthropologists tOxford have devotedmuch attention to the problemof why sets
of African religiousbeliefs should take the form they do. Theiremphasis is on the nature and meaning, rather than on thefunction of religiousbeliefs.Lienhardt, or example, n his Divin-
ity andExperience: heReligionof theDinka, (London: O.U.P.,
1961) tries to explain the typical Dinka divinityas "a unifying
concept linkingdiverseareasof experience,and as an underlying
principle representing he fundamental nature common to allmembersof an
apparentlyheterogeneouslusterof
phenomena."8To my mind the weaknessof Lienhardt'sotherwisebrilliantly
original approach consists in its partial neglect of the jural-structural component in "experience"and, incidentally, like
Dewey, Lienhardtappearsto mean by "experience"what most
anthropologistswould call "culture."In stressinghe considerabledegreeof autonomyof Niloticbe-
lief systemsvis-a-vissocial organization,Lienhardt,and to some
extent Evans-Pritchardn Nuer Religion, (Oxford: The Claren-don Press, 1956), are regardingsuch systemsas if they were
specialized,and hence readilyisolable,sectorsof culture,like re-
ligions in complex societies with a markeddivision of labor. In
fact, there is in the socialprocess n small-scalecommunitieswith
multiplex social relations a dialectical relationshipbetween itssecular and ritualphaseswhich can only be severedanalytically
at the expenseof comprehension f the total phenomenon-theprocessiveunit which embracesphasesof both types.
I have barely eft myselftime enoughto sketchin outline someof the researchcurrentlybeing conducted on ritual in radicallychangingsocial systems.During a trip this summerto Zambiaand SouthernRhodesia,I becameconvincedthat a rich crop of
problems s ripe for the harvesting n the field of contemporaryreligiousmovements. The Lenshinamovement in Zambia had
just attained internationalprominenceand had been drasticallypunished for intransigenceby the new government.At Man-chester one of my formergraduatestudents,NormanLong, hadjust returnedto Lusaka from a sustained period of fieldworkamong the Watchtower Sect (Jehovah's Witnesses) the Lala
8 Robin Horton's accurate summation of Lienhardt's argument in a reviewof "Divinity and experience" Africa, January, 1962, xxxii, part 1.
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164 ANTHROPOLOGICAL QUARTERLY
tribe of SerenjeDistrict;he now proposes o examine their rela-tive economic prosperity n terms of Weber'shypothesisabout
the role of the Protestantethic in promotingthe economicvir-tues of thrift, industryand temperance.Later,at an anthropolo-
gical fieldworkers'conferenceunder the chairmanshipof Pro-
fessorClyde Mitchell at the UniversityCollegeof Rhodesiaand
Nyasaland,I heard papers presentedon the nature and inheri-
tance of leadershipamongthe rapidlygrowing WapostoriSect in
Shona territory.Reports by Audrey Richards, C.M.N. White,
Max Marwick,BarryReynoldsand othersof witch-findingmove-ments in Zambiaand Malawi had previouslyarousedmy inter-
est. Both at the Third InternationalAfrican Seminar,in 1960,and at the AmericanEthnologicalSociety'smeeting, in spring,1964, on religiousproblems,I had heard a number of percipient
papers,notablyby Bengt Sundkler(whose bookBantu Prophetsin South Africa, Butterworth, 2nd. edition 1961 London:
O.U.P., put the whole study of separatist ectsin focus), by the
late DerekStenning,by the BelgiananthropologistAlbertDoutre-
loux of Salzburg,and by IgorKopytoffat Pittsburg,all of which
began to persuademe that these religiousmovementswere of
paramountresearchmportance oday.'
Kopytoff'spaper entitled "Classifications f Religious Move-
ments; Analyticaland Synthetic",recentlypublishedas part of
the transactionsof the American Ethnological Society, is of
major theoretical interest. In it he follows M. M. Ames "Re-actionsto Stress: A ComparativeStudyof Nativism",Davidson
Journal of Anthropology, (1957: 3:17-30) in suggestingthat
ideology and "movement"should be treated as separate phe-
nomena, since movementis a dimensionof social structureand
type of social activity.He goes much furtherthan Ames, how-
ever, when he arguesthat "apt" labels for such movements,as
for instance"millennarian,""nativistic,""revitalistic,""Chilias-
tic," etc. shouldbe droppedand a more analyticalclassification,
treating each movement as a cluster of several kinds of traits
of more or less equal importance,should be substituted.What
9 See also the work of M. J. Field on modern Ashanti shrines and their
priests and clients, despite its psychiatric emphasis. Search for Security, Lon-don: Faber, 1960. Also, F. H. Welbourn in Uganda and Kenya, East Afri-can Rebels; A Study of Some Independent African Churches, London: Stu-
dent Christian Movement Press, 1961.
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TRENDS IN STUDY OF RITUAL IN AFRICA 165
he proposes in fact, is the formal abandonment of the syntheticview of movements which seeks to catch a few of their sub-
jectively striking features in a vivid epithet, such as "CargoCults," and of the "bounded-space" matrix model that goes with
it. Next he explores the possibilities of an analytical, profile ap-
proach that would make explicit on what aspect or dimension
of the movement a theory is being constructed and in terms of
which elements these movements are being compared. "By re-
fusing to treat different movements," he says, "as varieties of a
species, any theory dealing with but a particular aspect is notextended to other aspects or to movements which are similar
only in this one aspect, thus avoiding unwarranted generalizationsas well as spurious contradictions." The seed of this approachwas shown in the course of Kopytoff's research among the Suku
of the Congo, where he studied the "Holy Water" movement,which he came to see could not be regarded as merely somekind of "syncretic" or "acculturative" movement, with Chris-
tian elements and ideas being assimilated to African ones, since
"Holy Water" represented but the last of a series of Suku move-ments of similar structure and ideology, obviously indigenous in
character, though with a few exotic borrowings. A new typo-logical basis was clearly required.
The "selected dimensions" or religious movements which
Kopytoff tentatively enumerated in the appendix to his paper
may, with a little modification, be fruitfully utilized in compara-tive work in changing African communities. But it must also beremembered that a great number of Africans still belong to ortho-dox Christian bodies, so that sociological and ideological studiesof church organization, ritual and patterns of ancillary churchactivities should also be undertaken, both in relation to separatistchurches and in their own right. B. A. Pauw, of Grahamstown
University in South Africa, has blazed the trail in such researchwith his Religion in a Tswana Chiefdom (London, O.U.P.,1960).
If I may be allowed a final few words on what I consider to bean urgent research need in Africa, I would put in a plea forthe immediate collection of data on traditional cults and life-crisis ceremonies in areas least affected by modern change, with
special emphasis on their symbolism and with the recording of
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166 ANTHROPOLOGICALQUARTERLY
vernacularexegeticaltexts, whereverpossibleon tape. This will
be a very precioushoard of rare information before long, and
anthropologistsand historiansof the future may blame us bit-terly if we neglect this evanescentwealth. I would not be too
concerned if such data were collected out of alignment with
sociological data, for cultural beggars can hardly be choosers
when cash, coca-colaand the Beatlesare conquering he world.I know that it is not too easy to get funds nowadaysfor this
sort of "non-applied"researchbut we simply must not let that
part of the culturalhistoryof mankind which only lives now inthe faulty memories of elderly people become blotted out on
account of a short-sightedutilitarianism.If this sounds like a
shrillerreplicationof the warningsgiven by Boas and Malinow-
ski a generationor so ago it has more of a Last Judgment ringabout it.