Victor Turner

You have a new identity in this.

So him and some other people, the other guy, Victor Turner, they argued that like doing away with those rites of passages or those rituals around, you know, transitions in our lives, that's coming at a great detriment to us.

There's no clear, okay, you were this thing, now you need to be this thing.

And you have to commit to that new thing.

Maybe not a script, but there was just an expectation of it in some way.

Maybe you had to figure it out on your own, but there was an expectation for you.

This Victor Turner guy, though, he argued that...

What modern culture has done is done away with the ritual, but we never did away with that in-between phase.

But, uh, anyways, I find that pretty interesting.

So, um, a- and then one of the, the other theories that I thought I would mention to you guys is Victor Turner's theory of liminality and communitas.

So this is, um, another sort of religious studies sociological theory in that the trial itself essentially has functioned as a liminal space.

It, again, suspended, uh, threshold period where normal societal categories don't apply.

Um, but...

And, and the idea that the Lindsay Clancy case is gonna split America, we've already been split.

We're already in the liminal space, right? To use Victor Turner's theory of liminality and communitas, we already live in a space that is liminal.

You know, what is the-- what is American identity? Uh, that's why we're so fractured.

You have a new identity in this.

So him and some other people, the other guy, Victor Turner, they argue that doing away with those rites of passages or those rituals around transitions in our lives, that's coming at a great detriment to us.

There's no clear, okay, you were this thing, now you need to be this thing.

And you have to commit to that new thing.

in some way.

Maybe you had to figure it out on your own, but there was an expectation for you.

Okay? This Victor Turner guy, though, he argued that...

What modern culture has done is done away with the ritual, but we never did away with that in-between phase.

Van Gannop, he writes about rites of passages.

His work oftentimes is conflated with Victor Turner's work, and it's how do people use rituals to move through transitions.

And he talks about these three phases, separation, transition, and incorporation.

And then you have Durkheim's work on how shared rituals can create a sense of belonging.

Extasis, the peak states, and communitas, that sense of being deep connection and gathering together, that the Shakers have talked about, Shakers and Quakers, you know, lots of people have talked about and described this stuff.

That's Victor Turner's University of Chicago term for it.

So healing, inspiration, and connection.

But inspiration, aka ecstatic technologies, are addictive.

So I call these rites of affliction.

It's a term from an anthropologist called Victor Turner.

And every three years, the community deals with its tragedy.

And individual people deal with their sense of guilt and sin.

And a rite of passage is a structured cultural ritual or ceremony that marks a person's transition from one social position, age group, or identity status to another within a community.

And this is often described by a three-stage theoretical model, which was first conceptualized by ethnographer Arnold Van Genep in 1909, and later expanded by anthropologist Victor Turner in 1967.

And so most rites of passage follow a universal tripartite structure.

And this process includes separation, transition, and incorporation.

And the function of pain and endurance is physical tests such as tattooing, scarification, tooth filing, fasting, or endurance of extreme conditions were common in traditional coming of age rites.

And then anthropologically, physical discomfort serves to edge the importance of the transition into memory and improve fitness for social responsibility.

And during the liminal phase, initiates often experience intense camaraderie termed communitas by Victor Turner.

and it becomes normal social because normal social hierarchies are temporarily dissolved among the initiates and deep social bonds are formed that last through adulthood.

But this is a surface level comparison unless we can demonstrate that these journeys play a similar function.

The cultural anthropologist Victor and Edith Turner developed a few concepts explaining how pilgrimage function on an individual level and on a communal level.

The first concept is liminality.

Liminality refers to an in-between state when pilgrims embark on their journey to a sacred destination.

They go to Disney World to mark surviving cancer.

They go there for one last trip before they die.

If these Disney trips are used to celebrate weddings, mourn the dead, or mark survival from cancer, you know, moments of ultimate concern, from a functionalist perspective, the pilgrimage to Disney operates a lot like the liminality of pilgrimages as defined by Victor and Edith Turner.

Fans leave behind the routines of ordinary life and enter a liminal space where everyday roles are suspended.

The prefrontal cortex does its deepest work in the quiet of witnessing.

Liminality, the psychological state of being between two stable identities or ways of being, is consistently described in research as a period of increased silence seeking Anthropologist Victor Turner, who coined the term, described liminal states as characterized by withdrawal from ordinary social noise and immersion in a quieter engagement with existence.

Contemporary research on major life transitions finds that individuals who voluntarily seek silence during transitional periods report better adjustment outcomes than those who use social distraction.

The quiet between one chapter and the next is not lost time.