(Some other leading British anthropologists, notably Edward Evans-Pritchard and Godfrey Lienhardt, were similarly drawn to Catholicism after studying African cultures and their religious dimensions.) In their new faith and practice, the Turners also found solace after the death of their afflicted fourth child, Lucy, in her infancy in 1959. In Catholicism they found ritual, and evidently faith, to fill a void left after leaving those to which they had become exposed in Africa. Between then and 1958, he and Edith joined the Roman Catholic Church in Stockport, near Manchester. Having been active in the Communist Party of Great Britain in youth, he withdrew, disaffected, by his mid-thirties, or by about 1956, when the Soviet military crushed dissidence in Hungary, upsetting pacifists abroad.
This study took him to Africa as a Research Fellow of the Rhodes-Livingstone Institute and back to Manchester, where, upon receiving his doctorate in 1955, he stayed to write and lecture in anthropology for several years.ĭuring this period he dropped and added some important affiliations. Drawn to anthropology from about the time of the war ’s end in 1945, Victor Turner studied in London under Daryll Forde and other leaders in the discipline, proceeding for his doctorate as part of the University of Manchester department coalescing around the South African-born Max Gluckman. During the war, in 1943, he married Edith Lucy Brocklesby Davis Turner, with whom he would build a lifelong working partnership and parent six children between 19 -five to reach adulthood. His studies were interrupted by war, in which, as a conscientious objector, he served as a noncombatant soldier in London. In more than a dozen books and numerous articles he authored, co-authored, or edited, he concentrated on topics including social drama, social fields, symbolic action, symbolic multivocality (or compression), transition, liminality, communitas, and structure and anti-structure (a term he coined).īorn May 28, 1920, in Glasgow, Scotland, to a stage acting mother and an electronic engineer father, Victor Witter Turner attended Bournemouth Grammar School in England and did undergraduate study in modern and classic literature at University College, London (1938 – 1941). One of the most influential and respected anthropologists of the mid- to late twentieth century, Victor Turner made his name as an ethnographer of south-central Africa, and in doing so, became known as a theorist on social structure and process, with particular emphasis on ritual, symbol, and performance.
0 kommentar(er)
