The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure

Victor Turner's The Ritual Process is one of the most influential works in the anthropology of ritual, developing the concepts of liminality and communitas out of Arnold van Gennep's earlier stage theory of rites of passage. Turner's authority rests on his own fieldwork among the Ndembu of Zambia and on the book's wide adoption across anthropology, religious studies and performance studies as the standard vocabulary for describing the in-between phase of a ritual and the leveling solidarity it can produce. Its limit is that the concepts were developed from a specific ethnographic base and have since been applied far more broadly than Turner himself tested them, so scholars debate how universally liminality and communitas travel across very different ritual traditions. Cite it confidently for the concepts themselves and for Ndembu ritual, and treat its application to an unrelated tradition as an analytical choice rather than an empirical finding already settled by this book.