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From Ritual to Theatre: The Human Seriousness of Play
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Complete Terminology Glossary

From Ritual to Theatre: The Human Seriousness of Play Victor Turner
glossary terminology definitions

Problem This Solves

Turner coins, borrows, and redefines a large vocabulary of technical terms. Without precise definitions at hand, it is easy to conflate related but distinct concepts (liminality vs. liminoid, communitas vs. flow, ritual vs. ceremony). This glossary provides quick lookup for all key terms.

Turner's Own Coinages

Antistructure: The liberation of human capacities of cognition, affect, volition, and creativity from normative constraints of social statuses and roles. Not mere negation but positive creative liberation. (Ch. 2)

Anergic: Non-work; the opposite of ergic. Characterizes leisure as a non-work phase in the life of a person who also works. (Ch. 2)

Comparative Symbology: The study and interpretation of symbols using comparison as method; narrower than semiotics, wider than symbolic anthropology; encompasses symbolic genres across both tribal and industrial societies. (Ch. 2)

Communitas: An unmediated relationship between concrete, historical, idiosyncratic individuals; preserves individual distinctiveness; opposed to norm-governed social structure. Three forms: spontaneous (direct, immediate, "magical"), ideological (theoretical descriptions of spontaneous communitas, already distanced by memory), normative (perduring social system attempting to foster spontaneous communitas permanently). (Ch. 2)

Cunicular: From Latin cuniculus (tunnel). When the liminal threshold is protracted, it becomes a tunnel -- acquiring positive and active qualities beyond mere transition. (Ch. 2)

Deliminalization: The process by which industrialization fragmented the integrated ritual gestalt into specialized performative genres (theatre, opera, novel, sport, etc.). (Ch. 3)

Ergic: "Of the nature of work." Coined to describe how the Protestant ethic colonized leisure, making even play work-like. (Ch. 2)

Ethnodramaturg: An anthropologist who crafts dramatic scripts from ethnographic data, advising production on sociocultural structures and meanings. (Ch. 4)

Hermeneutical Catherine Wheel: The cyclical interpretive process: ethnography to script to enactment to revised ethnography -- "a merciless critique of ethnography." (Ch. 4)

Liminoid: From Greek eidos (form, shape), meaning "resembling the liminal." Post-industrial analogue of the liminal: creative, experimental activity in leisure time; voluntary rather than obligatory; individual rather than collective. (Ch. 2)

Matricial Mirror: The mutual mirroring between social drama and stage drama is not exact ("planar") but generative; at each exchange, something new is added and something old is lost. (Ch. 5)

Performing Ethnography: Converting ethnographic data into playscripts and enacting them for cross-cultural understanding. Three stages: ethnography into playscript, script into performance, performance into meta-ethnography. (Ch. 4)

Pragmatic Reflexivity: The movement from ethnography to performance as a way of dissolving Cartesian dualisms; not narcissistic self-reflection but embodied cross-cultural understanding. (Ch. 4/5)

Protostructural System: Reframing of "antistructure" (via Sutton-Smith): the latent system of potential alternatives from which novelty arises; "the precursor of innovative forms... the source of new culture." (Ch. 2)

Pseudo-Liminal: Cultural productions (especially satire) that appear transgressive but judge against existing normative standards, thereby reinforcing them. "Satire is a conservative genre because it is pseudo-liminal." (Ch. 2)

Redressive Machinery: The set of juridical and ritual mechanisms a community deploys in the third phase of social drama: courts, divination, sacrifice, therapeutic ritual, communal ceremonies. (Intro)

Retribalization: The attempt by industrial polities to re-impose a single belief system and ritual-like social control mechanisms; "oppression" per Blake. (Ch. 5)

Rituals of Affliction: Rituals performed when illness or misfortune is attributed to invisible causes (ancestral spirits, witchcraft); an orchestration of symbolic actions across all sensory codes. (Ch. 5)

Social Drama: A four-phase processual unit of social conflict: breach, crisis, redress, reintegration or schism. A spontaneous, cross-culturally isolable unit of social process. (Intro)

Social/Plural Reflexivity: The ways in which a group tries to scrutinize, portray, understand, and then act on itself; generated in the redressive phase of social drama. (Ch. 3)

Star Group / Star-Groupers: The group with which a person identifies most deeply. Star-groupers are the main protagonists of social dramas who develop "to an art the rhetoric of persuasion and influence." (Ch. 3)

Structural Turbulence: Built-in social tension from contradictions between a society's organizing principles (e.g., matrilineal descent vs. virilocal marriage among the Ndembu). (Ch. 3)

Borrowed and Adapted Terms

Ausdruck (Dilthey): "Expression." From ausdrucken ("to press or squeeze out"); how performance draws forth what is normally sealed up in sociocultural life. (Intro)

Bedeutung (Dilthey): "Meaning." Arises in memory and cognition of the past; grasps the full relation of part to whole in life. (Intro/Ch. 3)

Efficacy-Ritual vs. Entertainment-Theater (Schechner): Binary poles of performance: transformative intention vs. pleasurable diversion. Maps onto liminal vs. liminoid. (Ch. 5)

Emic / Etic (Pike): Emic = internal, culture-specific categories; Etic = external, cross-cultural categories. (Ch. 3)

Erlebnis (Dilthey): "What has been lived through." A unit of distinctive experience charged with cognition, emotion, and volition; instinct with inherent processual structure. (Intro)

Exu (Yoruba/Umbanda): Trickster deity of the Crossroads; "Lord of the Limen and of Chaos"; personifies indeterminacy as "the abyss of possibility." (Ch. 3)

Flow (Csikszentmihalyi): Holistic sensation of total involvement; action follows action without conscious intervention. Individual and within-structure; distinct from communitas which arises between persons. (Ch. 2)

Lila (Hindu): "Sport" or "play"; the sacred-playful quality of divine activity, as in the Krishna dance. (Ch. 2)

Meonic (Berdyaev): The quality of indeterminacy -- potentiality, the possibility of becoming. (Ch. 3)

Not-Me to Not-Not-Me (Schechner via Winnicott): The actor's journey from blueprinted role (not-me) to realized role (not-not-me) through a liminal rehearsal phase. (Ch. 4/5)

Objectiver Geist (Dilthey): Culture as "objectified mind" -- the ensemble of expressions making individual experience available to society. (Intro)

Orc-Urizen Cycle (Blake via Frye/Erdman): The spiralling struggle between revolutionary energy (Orc) and repressive law (Urizen) -- structure vs. communitas in historical conflict. (Ch. 2)

Person vs. Individual (Burridge): Person = content with the status quo; Individual = moral critic envisioning alternative orders. Individuality = the oscillation between the two. (Ch. 5)

Rites of Passage (van Gennep): Three-phase ritual structure: separation, transition/limen, reaggregation/incorporation. (Ch. 2)

Root Paradigms: Deep cultural narratives that go "beyond the cognitive and even the moral to the existential domain"; compel actors in crisis to follow certain action courses. (Ch. 3)

Social Metacommentary (Geertz): "A story a group tells itself about itself" -- or a play a society acts about itself. (Ch. 5)

Twice-Behaved Behavior / Restored Behavior (Schechner): Performance behavior that is rehearsed, previously known, or generated by rules; always doubled, inescapably reflexive. (Ch. 5)

Wert (Dilthey): "Value." Inheres in the affective enjoyment of the conscious present; disconnected moments "like a chaos of harmonies and discords." (Intro/Ch. 3)

Zweck/Gut (Dilthey): "End/Good." Arises from volition, referring to the future. (Ch. 3)

Ndembu Terms

Kaheka (pl. tuheka): Story; a narrative that is part told, part sung, with audience joining in sung refrains. (Ch. 3)

Kudiyongola: Gossip; from kuyong'a ("to crowd together"); a perennial source of cultural genres. (Ch. 3)

Malomba / Ilomba: Snake-familiars / individual familiar; human-faced serpents that eat the "shadows" of enemies. A "Frazerian external soul." (Ch. 4)

Nsang'u: Chronicle, factual record, autobiographical account, eye-witness report, or "news." (Ch. 3)

Related References