401 - Worship as Anti-Structure: The Contribution of Victor Turner

Worship as Anti-Structure:
The Contribution of Victor Turner
By J. Randall Nichols

Most ministers spend major portions of their professional lives dealing with highly structured ritual behavior they regularly lead but only poorly understand: the Sunday morning worship service. One looks nearly in vain for adequate literature to explore just what it is that happens, both theologically and behaviorally, in the worship experience. We have no lack of information on the history, structure, and even renovation of worship. What is missing are seriously thought-out perspectives on its personal and social dynamics as a form of ritual-mediated interaction for which momentous theological claims are made.

It should not have come as a surprise to discover that some of precisely that kind of thinking was being done not by a theologian but by a cultural anthropologist, the late Victor Turner. Moreover, Turner on more than one occasion applied himself directly to the task of understanding something of contemporary Christian worship, using the theoretical structure he had devised for approaching symbolic and ritual behavior in non-literate societies. His work seems to be somewhat controversial in cultural anthropological circles; it is virtually unknown, though badly needed, in theological ones.

The point of this essay is, then, quite modest: to introduce him to readers who are not aware of the material, and to suggest that when we look at the worship experience through the conceptual lens that Turner provides, some helpful and perhaps controversial things that have been blurry come into focus. Three questions in particular are dealt with here: (1) understanding the relationship of the worship experience to the workaday world; (2) evaluating the appropriateness of "contemporization" in modern worship; and (3) examining our perennial conflict

Dr. J. Randall Nichols is Director of the Doctor of Ministry program at Princeton Theological Seminary, Princeton, New Jersey. He is also a member of the teaching faculty as Lecturer in TheoIogy and Communication, teaching communication dynamics and preaching. He is author of the book Building the Word: The Dynamics of Communication and Preaching (Harper & Row, 1980) which received the Academy of Parish Clergy's award for "most useful-book for parish clergy published in 1980." Dr. Nichols is also a clinical member of the American Association for Marriage and FamiIy Therapy and serves as a psychotherapist on the staff of Trinity Counselling Service in Princeton.

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between the middle-class civility of worship and the biblical address to the poor, the maimed, and the oppressed.

I

Turner's theoretical structure and his work on worship is difficult to summarize because of its richness. Perhaps a few of the key elements will be sufficient to start what might become for some a continuing exploration and dialogue. His starting point is a distinction between two major modes of human interrelatedness or "society." One mode is the familiar everyday world of organization, hierarchy, more-and-less, differentiation of functions, values, and positions-in short, what we loosely call the social order. Its dominant characteristic is structure: it has shape and predictability and, even with all its vicissitudes, regularity. It is where we spend.. most of our time. Most sociological and anthropological theory has interpreted "social" to mean "social-structural" in this sense.

There is another mode of interrelatedness, however, which is characterized by what Turner calls "anti-structure." Here is a "society as an unstructured or rudimentarily structured and relatively undifferentiated comitatus, community, or even communion of equal individuals…."¹ To this other mode of social organization Turner gives the name "communitas," partly to capture the sense of a "modality of social relationship" as opposed to the more geographical or political term "community."

Communitas is a fact of everyone's experience, yet it has almost never been regarded as a reputable or coherent object of study by social scientists. It is, however, central to religion, literature, drama, and art, and its traces may be found deeply engraven in law, ethics, kinship, and even economics. It becomes visible in tribal rites of passage, in millenarian movements, in monasteries, in the counterculture, and on countless informal occasions.²

Communitas is a term and a concept that will figure centrally in our discussion.

Where is the other, and perhaps less familiar,, mode of relationship, this communitas, to be found and what are the people like who display it? Briefly, communitas arises out of situations of "liminality," of being "on the margin," a term borrowed from Arnold van Gennep's concept of rites de passage, The transitional experience of a rite de passage is marked by three phases: separation, margin or "limen" (meaning "threshold" in Latin), and aggregation. A participant in a rite de passage, whether in the formal sense of a manhood ritual or the informal but equally potent meaning of a life-change such as, let us say, occupational retirement, is first separated from the social structure he or she formally occupied, then experiences a period of time "on the margin" of more familiar associations, activities, and social positions

¹ Victor Turner, The Ritual Process, Cornell University Press, 1969, p. 96.
² Victor Turner, "Passages, Margins, and Poverty: Religious symbols of Communitas," Part I, Worship Vol. 46, Nos. 7 and 8, p. 393.

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during which the subject is in some way transformed and introduced to the new situation be or she will occupy next. A re-gathering or "aggregation" back into the structure of society follows and completes the process. It is the middle phase that interests us, the "liminal" period when one is neither here nor there, so to speak, in terms of social structure. One is marginal and Turner calls the experience one of liminality. The experience of marginal people, experiencing liminality, is one of communitas.

Major liminal situations are occasions on which, so to speak, a society takes cognizance of itself, or rather where, in an interval between their incumbency of specific fixed positions, members of that society may obtain an approximation, however limited, to a global view of man's place in the cosmos and his relations with other classes of visible entities.³

The two qualities most characteristic of liminality, Turner argues, are "lowliness and sacredness." The liminal state is characterized by a loss of previous caste, wisdom and social status, but a gain in sacredness and spiritual power. Witness the impoverished, vagrant holy friar, or the outcast, foolish healer of mythology and literature. Among liminal people is to be found a social equality and heteronomy that distinguishes communitas. While this is not the place for a full discussion, it may be helpful to reproduce a portion of Turner's list of the properties of liminality, on the one hand, and the contrasting properties of the social status system, on the other. Turner displays these contrasting properties (separated by a /) in oppositions such as the following: transition/state, homogeneity/ heterogeneity, communitas/structure, equality/inequality, absence of rank/distinctions of rank, sacredness/ secularity, sacred instruction/technical knowledge, heteronomy/degrees of autonomy.⁴

Structure and communitas are dialectically related, in the manner of any state/transition interaction. Daily social structure yields to communitas experience both in deliberate rituals and in serendipitous events, while communitas eventually takes on the trappings of structure, despite frequent attempts to preserve it as a perpetual state, as for instance in such disparate but intimately related phenomena as expatriate literary communities, the hippie sub-culture of the 1960s, monastic movements, and college reunions.

[F]or individuals and groups, social life is a type of dialectical process that involves successive experience of high and low, communitas and structure, homogeneity and differentiation, equality and inequality…. In other words, each individual's life experience contains alternating exposure to structure and communitas, and to states and transitions.⁵

There is a dialectic here, for the immediacy of communitas gives way to the mediacy of structure, while in rites de passage, men are released from structure into communitas only to return to structure revitalized by their experience of communitas. What is certain is that no society can function

³ "Passages, Margins, and Poverty," p. 400.
⁴ The Ritual Process, pp. 106-107.
⁵ Ibid., p. 97.

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adequately without this dialectic. Exaggeration of structure may well lead to pathological manifestations of communitas outside or against "the law." Exaggeration of communitas, in certain religious or political movements of the leveling type, may be speedily followed by despotism, overbureaucratization, or other modes of structural rigidification.⁶

A special characteristic of communitas is its power to encode itself in special symbol systems:

Liminality, marginality, and structural inferiority are conditions in which are frequently generated myths, symbols, rituals, philosophical systems, and works of art. These cultural forms provide men with a set of templates or models which are, at one level, periodical reclassifications of reality and man's relationship to society, nature, and culture. But they are more than classifications, since they incite men to action as well as to thought. Each of these productions has a multivocal character, having many meanings, and each is capable of moving people at many psychobiological levels simultaneously.⁷

When Turner wrote about worship explicitly he took this line of thinking a crucial step further: the symbols created by communitas experience tend to have the power to reinvoke that experience. It is as though they in some way "carry" the experience potentially inside themselves, so that early communitas is released--or, more properly, reenacted--when the symbols it generated are used once again in certain ways.

Such symbols, visual and auditory, operate culturally as mnemonics or, as communications engineers would no doubt have it, as "storage bins" of information, not about pragmatic techniques, but about cosmologies, values, and cultural axioms, whereby a society's "deep knowledge" is transmitted from one generation to another.⁸

… [U]nder favorable circumstances some structural form generated long ago, from a moment of communitas, may be almost miraculously liquified into a living form of communitas again.⁹

The vain task of trying to find out in what precise way certain symbols found in the ritual, poetry, or iconography of a given society "reflect" or "express" its social or political structure can then be abandoned. Symbols may well reflect not structure but anti-structure, and not only "reflect" it but contribute to creating it. ¹⁰

That is what accounts for the use of traditional icons, music, or language in communitas rituals, for instance, and that is what Turner argued happens in Christian worship.

It is the very archaicness and oddity of these symbols that gives them their communitas-invoking power. When Vatican II reformed Roman Catholic worship, Marshall McLuhan (himself a devout Catholic) was said to have been deeply worried that the loss of the Latin mass and its archaic trappings would destroy the worship experience, a prediction many would argue has come true. The reason for the worry is just this

⁶ Ibid., p. 129.
⁷ The Ritual Process, p. 129.
⁸ "Passages, Margins, and Poverty," p. 399.
⁹ Ibid., p. 409.
¹⁰ Ibid., p. 494.

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point of Turner's, that tampering with what seem at first blush to be outmoded, incomprehensible, and anachronistic symbols in the name of contemporaneity and understanding runs the risk of draining them of their communitas-invoking power.

Inherited [symbolic] forms will not be "dead" forms if they have themselves been the product of "free" religious or esthetic creativeness, in brief, of liminality and communitas…. Archaic patterns of actions and objects which arose in the past from the free space within liminality can become protective of future free spaces. The archaic is not the obsolete.¹¹

Turner's thought is far more complex and far-reaching than this brief summary, but perhaps we have enough of it in hand to illustrate its usefulness in understanding some dimensions of Christian worship. The chief point to be made is methodological: here is a way of understanding ritual process that takes us into the inner nature of the experience itself, going beyond the more external, taxonomical and historical approach to liturgical study we are more familiar with. Let us turn to the three questions posed at the beginning, from the vantage point of Turner's cultural anthropological approach.

II

What is the relationship of the worship experience to the workaday world? It is now common among ministers and theologians to criticize worship when it begins to be "otherworldly" and remote from the pressing concerns of society. Typically, we seek to make worship "relevant," equipping the saints for work and discipleship in the world. Under such banners as "liberation theology," perhaps, we want worship to have a more direct influence on the world of state and structure. The contrary idea of worship as a time of retreat or "sanctuary" is sometimes hard to get a hearing for these days, particularly in face of the popularity of right-wing "civil religion" and its privatizing, individualizing influence. What we may be missing, however, is Turner's notion that the heart of worship lies in its being a communitas experience which is related dialectically and perhaps paradoxically to the world of structure but is distinctly and critically different from it. Worship would be, on these terms, an anti-structural experience, and efforts to make it "relevant" and directly connected to the structural world would destroy it.

The case could be made, in other words (much as McLuhan tried to about the vernacularization of the Latin mass), that precisely what irritates some people about worship-its remoteness from social concern, its ancient language and imagery, etc.--is what gives it its unique power. A worshipper having experienced communitas is to a degree transformed and able to carry the fruits of that transformation back into the world of structure, perchance to work towards its reformation. It would then be just as fatal an error to try to make worship a staging

¹¹ "Passages, Margins, and Poverty," p. 391.

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ground for social action as it would be to run IBM as a sensitivity group.

Unhappily, the religious world has largely abandoned its communitas-protecting function. A lengthy quotation from Turner makes the judgment and poses, indirectly, an invitation for new understanding of worship:

It would seem that where there is little or no structural provision for liminality, the social need for escape from or abandonment of structural commitments seeks cultural expression in ways that are not explicitly "religious," though they may become heavily "ritualized." Quite often this retreat from social structure may appear to take an individualistic form, as in the case of so many post- renaissance artists, writers, and philosophers. But if one looks closely at their productions, one often sees in them at least a plea for communitas. The artist is not really alone, nor does he write, paint, or compose for "posterity," but for living communitas. Of course, like the initiand in tribal society, the novelistic hero has to be reinduced into the structural domain, but for the "twice-born" (or "converted") the sting of that domain-its ambitions, envies and power struggles-has been removed. He is like Kierkegaard's "knight of faith" who, having confronted the structured and quantitative crowd as "the qualitative individual," now moves from antithesis to synthesis and, though remaining outwardly indistinguishable from others in this order of social structure, is henceforth inwardly free from its despotic authority and an autonomous source of creative behavior. This acceptance or "forgiveness" (to use William Blake's term) of "structure" in a movement of return from a liminal situation is a process that recurs again and again in Western literature…. It represents a "secularization" of what seems to have been originally a religious process.¹²

A careful distinction needs to be made, however: anti-structure or liminality need not be "conservative" in the popular religious sense (even though it might well be argued that the popularity of conservative, evangelical worship comes from its more effective embodiment of communitas). It is neither oppressive nor theologically retrograde to claim worship as an experience of "sanctuary" where people can lay aside their structural rights, obligations, and distinctions, and come together in communitas. Turner bears Martin Buber as meaning essentially the same thing with his term "community," and quotes him approvingly:

Community is the being no longer side by side (and, one might add, above and below) but with one another of a multitude of persons. And this multitude, though it moves towards one goal, yet experiences everywhere a turning to, a dynamic facing of, the others, a flowing from I to Thou.¹³

Such a perspective would wish that ministers spend less time trying to make their worship services relevant and socially connected, and more time taking care that the conditions for communitas are met.

¹² "Passages, Margins, and Poverty," pp. 486-7.
¹³ The Ritual Process, p. 127.

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III

What can we now make of the penchant for contemporization in worship? In many ways the point has already been made: if we are trying to create an environment in which communitas can occur, purging the liturgy of its archaic symbols can be counter productive. Virtually every modern denominational effort to reform and modernize its liturgy has met with entrenched resistance from worshippers themselves, who typically view the changes as a loss. Without arguing that change is inappropriate, one can nevertheless ask that we pay closer attention to that resistance for what it sometimes may be saying, that is, that modernization threatens worship with the loss of that special communitas quality which is its raison d'etre.

A new criterion for evaluating liturgical change and innovation might therefore be whether in a given instance it helps or hinders the movement toward communitas. Examples come quickly to mind: most worshippers tolerate and even welcome revised translations of the Bible, except when it comes to certain familiar and beloved passages such as the Twenty-third Psalm, the Lord's Prayer, or the Beatitudes. Then even the most enthusiastic modernists will dig in their heels, because with those passages we are dealing with symbols which are more centrally associated with communitas and are capable of invoking it. A liberal, independent congregation of Unitarian bent dislikes singing many of the old familiar hymns because their lyrics go against the theological grain with militaristic or sexist imagery. But this same congregation insists on keeping the old hymn tunes and writing new lyrics for them, again because the music itself is freighted with communitas.

Even within a worship experience it could be argued that there is alternation between states and transitions, so that in one moment worship is more structural while later it is more liminal, Turner's approach would bid us do a finer-grained analysis of which is which, knowing in advance that the transitional, communitas portions of worship are going to be the more fragile when it comes to contemporization and change.

IV

Our final question moves in a rather different direction, but Turner's work is equally helpful for it. No one can fail to notice that the biblical address, emphatically so in the New Testament, is to the poor, the maimed, and the outcast. The sometimes violent contrast, for example, of a highly paid modern executive listening to Jesus say "Blessed are the poor" has been the stuff of both low humor and real theological concern. How do we deal with the apparent contradiction that in the New Testament the gospel is addressed to the kinds of people who are clearly not most of us? How do we cope with the fact that if we find ourselves in the New Testament, we will most likely do so as the Pharisees?

The strain of biblical imagery encompassing the poor, sinners, the ill,

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widows, servants, children, women, and people of low estate can be read in two ways. In the first place, of course, Jesus really is talking to those kinds of people and no hermeneutical trick will alter the fact. "Poor" is not a metaphor for anything in the texts themselves: poor is poor. There is another completely consistent way of reading that imagery, however: the people it describes are all marginal people in terms of the current social structure, just as Jesus himself takes the role of a marginal person much of the time. From this perspective, then, the emphasis is not on the rich variety of sociological labels but rather on the inter- relatedness of the imagery: what is being described as the native soil of the gospel is liminality in whatever form it occurs. "Unless you receive the kingdom as a little child," "There is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female," "He receives sinners and eats with them," "Blessed are you when people curse and revile you" are all affirmations of liminality as the condition for hearing and receiving the gospel.

Now the point must be made, at the risk of a certain unpopularity, that what the Bible is talking about is not economic, sexual, chronological, or physical in and of itself, and that any one of us is capable of being in a marginal, liminal situation. That, in fact, is precisely what worship viewed in this way seeks to do: put us in touch with our liminality in whatever form it is found and allow us to come together in an experience of communitas. That is no license to ignore or gloss over the real and pressing issues of poverty, race, oppression, sexism, or ageism. But by the same token, concern for those issues is no license to exclude from communitas people who do not happen to be poor, female, old, black, or downtrodden. That point is no better illustrated than in Turner's vivid descriptions of the ritual "marginalizing" of tribal chieftains and shamans, wherein those who in the world of structure are soon to be on top of the heap, are brought low and made sacred in communitas precisely in order that they may be equipped to function in their new states.

There are two ways in which worship can involve us in marginality. First, if sensitively and intelligently done, it can address and draw out those aspects of our real, everyday existence which in fact are already liminal--whether it be poverty, illness, loss of a job, divorce, bereavement, dislocation or anything else. That is preeminently a pastoral dimension. Second, however, the ritual experience itself can create a liminality in its "here and nowness" so that no matter who or what we were upon entering the sanctuary, we are thrust into communitas. Both are exceedingly potent dynamics, and both the opportunity for ministry and the risk of it are high.

That is precisely why, however, an analytical resource such as Victor Turner's approach is so appealing and so needed. It offers opportunity for understanding both the uniqueness of Christian worship as the work of the gospel and the connectedness of our experience with all people seeking transcendent truth and freedom in whatever time, place, and fashion.

409 - Worship as Anti-Structure: The Contribution of Victor Turner

The great historical religions have, in the course of time, learned how to incorporate enclaves of communitas within their institutionalized structures--just as tribal religions do with their rites de passage-and to oxygenate, so to speak, the mystical body by making provision for those ardent souls who wish to live in communitas and poverty all their lives. Just as in a ritual of any complexity there are phases of separation from the reaggregation to the domain of social structure (phases which themselves contain many structural features, including symbols which reflect or express structural principles) and a liminal phase representing an interim of communitas with its own rich and elaborate symbolism, so does a great religion or church contain many organizational and liturgical sectors which overlap with and interpenetrate the secular social structure but maintain in a central position a sanctuary of unqualified communitas, of that poverty which is said to be 'the poetry of religion' and of which St. Francis, Angelus Silesius, the Sufist poets, Rumi and Al-Ghazali, and the Virasaiva poet Basavanna were melodious troubadours and jongleurs.¹⁴

¹⁴ "Passages, Margins, and Poverty," pp. 492-3.