Turner's Theory Of Liminality

Roy Rappaport (1999) showcases the idea that ritual is a fundamental aspect of human society. A community requires trust, and rituals are a necessary function of society, which creates that trust. For example willingly enduring a painful initiation as part of a ritual creates a sense of trust. In this essay I will discuss the theoretical works of Durkheim, Rossano and Douglas to attest to rituals preserving social order. While the works of Gluckman and Turner provide an interesting insight into reintegration through ritual, and Geertz provides an alternative view to the idea that rituals preserve and reiterate social order.

For functionalists such as Durkheim (1965) societies survive and prosper over time due to shared values. In other words,

Turner (1969) provides his own explanation of ritual and introduces the theory of ‘liminality’ and ‘communitas’. Turner explains how an individual must first be separated from society, and from the social order and structure, to fully accept the ritual and allow for deeper bonding between the participants. Next is the stage of ‘liminality’. This is the transitional period during any ritual, for example a rite of passage, in which the individual lacks any social ranking or status and remains completely unidentifiable from the group. The participants are often referred to as the “threshold people” in this stage as the experience is likened to death or being in the womb. This stage is often described as breaking an individual down to their base uniformity in order to remake them in the next stage. It is due to this that ‘communitas’ among the group is expected. ‘Communitas’ refers to the intense lifelong comradeship among the participants that remains due to this stressful experience, as referred to by Rossano (2012). At this point in the ritual, it is not actually preserving or reiterating social order. If the ritual were to end here it would actually be taking the participants from the structure of society and releasing them into “anti-structure”. However, the final stage of ritual is their reaggregation into society and therefore into social order. Once a ritual is done the participants come away with a strong bond together, which has already been described as a preservation of social order. Moreover the participants keep their sense of uniformity experienced during ‘liminality’, which reiterates social order as it means the members of the society have shared beliefs. This idea of inverting society in order to reiterate it is also touched upon by Gluckman (1952). His theory, however, is based on the idea of “rituals of rebellion”, in which social order is flipped. In