Radical Doubt by Mady Schutzman

Author:Mady Schutzman
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor & Francis Ltd
Published: 2018-07-06T16:00:00+00:00

Ritual practice: liminality and communitas

Where exactly within ritual structure did Durkheim, and subsequent anthropologists who advanced his research and insights, locate the superlative occasion when the real and the really-made-up work their magic and induce a heightened potential? Anthropologist Arnold Van Gennep, best known for his book Rites of Passage (precursor to Victor Turner’s The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure), saw the liminal stage as the fundamental transformative domain of the ritual sequence.

Liminal space is in-between space, that realm in which a familiar identity is stripped away while another remains inaccessible, undefined. Within traditional rites of passage – those collective occasions that mark and fashion a person or group’s shift in status – the liminal phase is when initiates are temporarily unscripted, lost.14 It is characterized by an extended period of intense estrangement, or “antistructure,” and precedes a reincorporation into social norms. On the occasion of puberty rites, for instance, this phase precedes the formal induction into a set of predefined social beliefs, practices, and codes that define adulthood (in that culture). To maximize susceptibility to these norms, the young inductees are immersed into an obligatory liminality – replete with anguish and fear – before they are reintegrated. But this liminal phase has socially transformative promise as well.

Victor Turner, adapting the work of Durkheim and Van Gennep, refers to the shared experience of people experiencing liminality together as communitas. He declines to use the word “community,” noting that the liminal state is, in fact, the very position from which assumptions about community are questioned, made suspect. Community, he says, is precisely what those in liminal space are not. Communitas is marked by indeterminacy and rife with potential. While in many societies, the vulnerability of liminality is used to more effectively impose conventions, Turner is advancing a more contemporary and radical use. The in-betweenness of communitas, he posits, is a source of power, no matter how profoundly disorienting the experience of it may be. It is dangerous terrain for the community at large, as it represents all the restlessness and aching fantasies, dissociations, and discomforts that are already part of the community (and that the community cannot or does not want to tackle). Liminality evokes unconscious dissatisfactions with prevailing order; it harbors anxieties, inchoate emotions, longings for individual expression, and the freedom to perform the socially objectionable. Within communitas, rumblings of revolution are unearthed and tasted.

The initiation rite of Hopi children of the Kachina cult into adulthood illustrates the complexity and promise of antistructural states. The Hopi have exploited liminality’s potential by prolonging and sustaining its lessons within the very fabric of community life and the crafting of beliefs. For the Hopi, disillusionment is a vital ingredient in the preparation of children for a meaningful religious life. Up until the time that children are ten years old, Kachinas are superhuman visitors, not unlike Santa Claus or the Tooth Fairy for many North American children. These Kachinas arrive at the opening of Hopi ceremonies and enthrall the crowd, particularly the youth, heightening a sense of unity between the human world, the natural world, and the spirits.

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