Some Current Trends in the Study of Ritual in Africa - VIctor Turner

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Some Current Trends in the Study of Ritual in AfricaAuthor(s): Victor TurnerSource: Anthropological Quarterly, Vol. 38, No. 3, Special Issue on Africa (Jul., 1965), pp. 155-166Published by: The George Washington University Institute for Ethnographic Research

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SOMECURRENTTRENDSIN THE STUDYOF RITUAL IN AFRICA

VICTOR TURNER

Cornell University

To provide myself with a crude measure of the degree of schol-

arly interest now being shown in African ritual, I recently madea count of the publications in that area listed in the bibliogra-

phies of current publications in fifteen of the last eighteen num-

bers of the journal Africa-in the period from April, 1960 to

July, 1964. These consisted of books and articles whose titlesfrankly proclaimed their concern with religion, magic, ritual,

cosmology, divination and kindred topics. In these fifteen num-

bers, 253 publications of this sort were mentioned. To give yousome idea of the proportion of these publications to other kinds,there was for the same period, a total of 2,428 titles cited in the

section of the Africa bibliography, "Ethnography and Sociology,"from which the

ritualcount

was made. For what these figuresare worth this means that Africa over the past four and a half

years has listed approximately 68 publications on ritual topicsper year out of a total of 648 ethnographic and sociological booksand articles in the African field. In other words, (excluding pub-lications classified by Africa under the separate heads of "Lin-

guistics," "Education and Missions," "Government, Economic

Development, and Welfare" and "Miscellaneous," and confiningourselves to the traditional anthropological and archaeologicalfields,) we find that more than 10 per cent of the publicationsappearing in its bibliography since 1960 have been devoted tothe description and analysis of ritual.

The Africa bibliography is by no means a comprehensive one

-I could name at least a dozen articles on ritual that have ap-peared in journals published in African territories that have not

as yet been listed in Africa. These figures indicate that quite ahealthy level of interest and productivity exists in the area ofritual studies. I might mention here that many other publicationsnot ostensibly or principally concerned with religious topics payconsiderable attention to them nevertheless.

Many of the articles mentioned are purely descriptive in char-

acter, often amounting to no more than notes, on, say, divinatory

155







156 ANTHROPOLOGICALQUARTERLY

instruments and techniques, or "drunkenness in indigenous re-

ligious rites" (sic) (E.A. Nida in Practical Anthropology, Janu-

ary-February, 1959). Some of the descriptive material is, how-

ever, excellently detailed and carefully set out, as in Van Wing's"Le Kimbangisme vu par un timoin" (Zaire 12:6:1958:683-

618) or John Beattie's accounts of the Nyoro spirit mediumshipcult (JRLI 30: Dec., 1961: 11-38) and Nyoro mortuary rites

(Uganda Journal 235: 2: Sept., 1961: 171-83). Several recent

books also contain first-rate descriptive data, such as Michael

Gelfand's Shona Ritual (Cape Town: Juta, 1959), Shona Re-ligion (Cape Town: Juta, 1962), and Bronislaw Stefaniszyn'sSocial and Ritual Life of the Ambo of Northern Rhodesia (Lon-don: O.U.P., 1964). From these and similar well-documented

accounts in the classical tradition of Smith and Dale, Rattray and

Junod, reliable materials for African cross-cultural analyses and

comparative studies will be gratefully drawn.

Studies that emphasize analysis and interpretation of ritual

and mythic data, or that interdigitate description and analysis,have by and large been concerned with two contrasting types of

social systems, and with two different, but not necessarily op-

posed categories of problems. These types are traditional, "cycli-

cal, repetitive systems" in which, as Max Gluckman has said,

"conflicts can be wholly resolved and co-operation whollyachieved within the pattern of the system" (Analysis of a Social

System in Zululand, Rhodes-Livingstone Paper No. Twenty-Eight, M.U.P. 1958: 54), and radically changing systems in

which "new types of groups and social personalities, in ever-

changing relationships with one another are emerging constant-

ly" (Ibid., p. 54). Here, in contrast to the first type, changes take

place "in the character of the relationships which constitute the

parts of the system" and in "the pattern of their interdependencewith its conflicts and cohesion." In both these

typesof

systemsinvestigators of religious processes and phenomena have de-

veloped divergent interests. One school of thought, mainly in the

French tradition of Durkheim, has set itself the task of exposingthe ideological structure of religions. The other has tended to

focus on the social situations in which religious beliefs and prac-tices significantly affect behavior.

This theoretical and methodological dichotomy was vividly







TRENDS IN STUDY OF RITUAL IN AFRICA 157

illustrated at the Third International African Seminar on African

religious systems' by the respective contribution of the British and

South African participants, on the one hand, and of their Frenchcolleagues on the other. The polarization was not complete, of

course; some French anthropologists, such as Jean Capron, who

recently published a superbly documented analysis of the re-

lationship between religious cosmology and internal cohesion inBwa village communities, (Africa, xxxii: 2: April 1962) favored

an approach which had affinities with orthodox structural-

functionalism. Yet it was clear that the British

anthropologistssought to establish the interconnections in the data in social re-

lations; their terminus a quo was the ritual situation. The French

scholars, on the other hand, attempted to elicit the logic under-

lying indigenous myths, beliefs and rituals, and exhibit the prin-

ciples of classification organizing the cosmology. Their point of

departure tended to be the vernacular text. Mme. Germaine Die-

terlen, who has made notable contributions from this standpoint,2

pointed out at the Conference that there was no real conflict be-tween these approaches since both sets of scholars addressedthem-selves to social reality and neither began with theoretical models.

Nevertheless, the dissimilar perspectives were clearly reflectedin different types of analysis. When British anthropologistsanalyzed a ritual performance, their first step was to educe fromobservational data the structure of social positions embeddedfirst in that

performanceand

secondlyin that

typeof ritual.

Theirnext procedure was to relate its structural form to other structural

features, both secular and religious, found in that society, and

finally to the structural form of the total system. It was only afterthe completion of this sociological task that they attempted, if at

all, to elicit the cultural pattern of the ritual, and to relate it tothe social structural dimensions. Moreover, when they collected

texts, these tended to relate to the rites actually observed; theywere not general accounts of cosmology, cosmogony, myths ex-

plaining initiation rites, and so on.

It was also clear that this methodology, for all its precision,

1Held at Salisbury, South Rhodesia in December, 1960. The proceedingshave been published. African Systems of Thought, M. Fortes and A. Dieter-len, eds. London: Oxford University Press, 1965.

2 1 need only mention here Les Ames des Dogon (1941); Notes sur laReligion Bambara (1951); "Myths et organization sociale en Afrique occi-dentale"

Journale Sociologique Africanistes, 1959, v. 29, 1:119-38.







158 ANTHROPOLOGICAL QUARTERLY

tended to confine analysis of ritual data to those aspects that bore

directly on social structure, and to treat as irrelevant those

"capacities" of religion, to employ Nadel's term (Nupe Religion,Glencoe: The Free Press, 1954) that relate to the explanation of

the universe, provide a theory of morality and interpret the re-

ligious experience of individuals.

For an exemplification of these presently dissonant approachesI refer you to the volume of studies presented at the Third Inter-

national African Seminar, entitled African Systems of Thought

(1965). Here I would just like to point up their contrasting con-

sequences. If one begins with the social situation one finds dis-

crepancy and conflict, as well as a strain towards cohesion and

consistency in ritual behavior. If one begins with accounts of

cosmology, doctrine and myth, often collected from experts with

training in esoteric knowledge, in indigenous gnosis, one may

finally exhibit conceptual systems with all-embracing interpret-ative powers. The selective bias of the former perspective involves

the danger of denying the possibility that any society has a co-herent ideological structure; that of the latter of regarding the

social system as a reflection or expression of the ideology. These

are the respective distortions of exaggerated positivism and exag-

gerated idealism. Both can be avoided, in my view, by a dynamic

approach, based on the data provided by extended histories,which regards a society, to quote Dorothy Emmet, not as a close-

ly integrated systemlike an

organismor a

machine,but as a

"process with some systematic characteristics" Function, Pur-

pose and Powers, (1958). A recent exemplary treatment of ritual

in these terms may be found in John Middleton's Lugbara Re-

ligion (London: O.U.P., 1960) where an indigenous world-view

is related to the dynamic examination of an ancestor cult in the

context of competition for authority and with close reference to

the developmental cycle through which individuals and groups

pass. Here conflicts of interest and norm discrepancy are shownto be cloaked under ritual beliefs which are consistently related

to one another.

British anthropologists who have paid attention to such ritual

phenomena as symbols and beliefs are still convinced that genuine

anthropological problems are posed by the contrast between

ideological order and concrete disorder and seek to understand

therelationship

between them.The empirical study of ritual








symbolism made a great stride forward in the late 1950's with

the publication of Monica Wilson's two books on Nyakyusa re-

ligion Rituals of Kinship among the Nyakyusa (London: O.U.P.,1957), Communal Rituals of the Nyakyusa (London: O.U.P.,

1959), and of Audrey Richards' Chisungu (New York: Grove

Press, 1956), a detailed study of a single performance of the

Bemba girls' puberty ceremony. In these books the native expertswere allowed to speak for themselves, and copious texts, closelyrelated to rituals observed by the anthropologists, were provided

by them, which explained and interpreted many features of the

symbolism and liturgical action. Here no attempt was made to

impose on the contradictions of native hermeneutics a philosoph-ical or theological consistency imported from Western thought.Yet in their analyses, both of the role of ritual in standardized

and contingent life-crises and of the semantics of ritual symbol-ism, these scholars pointed the way to a clearer understandingof the relationship between secular disorder and ritual order.

For the work of these scholars on symbols,3the "molecules" ofritual, indicates that what in secular affairs (economic, politicaland jural) tends to become fractionalized through the workingof private and sectional interests, (so that moral and social norms

are divorced from their context of ideal interrelatedness and em-

ployed separately and in competition to justify the claims for

authority, status and wealth advanced by the interested parties)in ritual contexts is

reintegratedat the level of

symbolism.Audrey Richards, for example, poined out that symbols have

"multiple meanings," and Monica Wilson's informants gave her

multiple referents for each key Nyakyusa symbol.I had also, during fieldwork among the Ndembu of Zambia

become interested in the problem of the multivocality of ritual

symbols, and partly through reading Freud on this quality ofdream symbols, and partly due to the direct stimulus and en-

couragement of Monica Wilson, I began to give some theoreticalattention to it. I came to see the Frazerian magical "law of sym-pathy" as a cultural device for bringing within the orbit of a

single representation a plurality of concepts, norms, aspects of

social relations, economic processes and facts, and features ofhuman physiology and anatomy. Thus, a tree which exuded

3Note, too, the excellent studies by M. Douglas and T. Beidelman in

Africa and the South Western Journal of Anthropology.








milky latex was interpreted by the Ndembu to refer to breast

milk, breast, the mother-child relationship, motherhood, fruitful

womanhood, matriliny and a number of other concepts. Whatwas posited in the ritual situation was that these aspects of

Ndembu culture were both ideally, and at that time, in mutual

harmony. But in fact, Ndembu knew that outside the ritual con-

text mothers quarrelled with children, antagonism existed be-

tween the sexes, barren women hated fruitful women and were

regarded by the latter as witches, and that all matrilineal descent

groups were rife with conflict.

Many of these tensions and antagonisms received ritual repre-

sentation, not at the level of exegesis but of standardized behavior

with reference to this tree, which was the pivotal symbol of the

girl's puberty rites. Women jeered at men, the girl novice's

mother was excluded from crucial phases of the rites, her matri-

lineal kin mimed hostility to her bridegroom's kin, and so on.

None of this hostility appeared in the orthodox exegesis of the

symbols however.On the basis of studying the relations between symbol, be-

havior and exegesis in other Ndembu contexts I came to consider

that plurality of reference at the symbolic level was one index of

an important function of ritual-that of resolving contradictions

of norm and interest in non-ritual activity fields. Ritual periodi-

cally centralizes what secular activities disperse and confound.

Notonly

does it centralize but itplaces

inright

relation-accord-

ing to the evaluative yardsticksof the given culture-norms, con-

cepts, relationships and standardized behavioral patterns that

have become autonomous, disparate or disorderly. A major in-

strument both of centralization and ordering may be found in

the pivotal ritual symbols-a class to which major social attention

is paid in any ritual system and which comprises its major struc-

tural elements.'

4Papers in which I have developed this argument include: "Ritual sym-bolism, mortality,and social structureamong the Ndembu," Rhodes-Living-ston Journal, ManchesterUniversity Press, 1961, volume 30. "Ndembu di-vination: its symbolismand techniques"Rhodes-LivingstonJournal, Man-chester University Press, 1961, volume 31. "Chihamba the white spirit"Rhodes-LivingstonJournal, Manchester University Press, 1962, volume 33."Three symbolsof passage in Ndembu circumcision ritual" In Essays in theRitual of Social Relations. M. Gluckman, ed., Michigan University Press,1962. "The interpretationof symbolsin Ndembu ritual" In Closed Systemsand Open Minds. M. Gluckman and E. Devons, eds., Edinburgh,Oliver and

Boyd, 1964.








Fortes5 in his recent work on ancestor worship in patrilinealsocieties has stressed that it is the experience of filial dependence,

as recognized and interpreted by the culture, that provides thematerial for the code of symbolism and ritual by means of which

reverence for authority can be regularly affirmed and enacted. He

seems to be moving towards Freud for help when he goes on to

argue that this experience is marked by ambivalence and this is

reflected in the images of the ancestors and the attributes givento them in at least Tale ancestor worship. He has also many perti-

nent things to say about ancestor worship being "a body of re-ligious beliefs, ritual practices and rules of conduct which serves

to entrench the principle of jural authority and its corollary,

legitimate right, as an indisputable and sacrosanct value-principleof the social system."

R. E. Bradbury, who has also worked in a West African patri-lineal society, the Edo of Benin, is another who has stressed the

close identification of father and son-in this case senior son-as

a key to understanding Edo mortuary ritual. "So close an identi-

fication," he writes, "tends to conflict, jealousy and suspicionwhile both are alive . . . while . . . the mortuary rites resolve the

relationship in its ideal form." (African Systems of Thought).In the setting of a matrilineal society Elizabeth Colson has

published two remarkable studies of ancestor cults, one amongthe Valley Tonga, the other among the Plateau Tonga, relating

many features of these cults to aspects of the social structure.Within the field of study of repetitive social systems, Cambridge

anthropologists such as Fortes, and Jack Goody6 have examined

factors making for order in social relations and for the transmis-

sion of corporate solidarities down the generations despite divisive

interests. The "Manchester School" inspired by Max Gluckman

has continued to emphasize the ritual handling of conflict in

social relations.Daryll

Forde' has called attention to theintricate

meshing of ecological and psychological with sociological factors

in accounting for some functions of supernatural beliefs. Some-

5 "Pietas in ancestor worship" (The Henry Myers Lecture, 1960) Journalof the Royal Anthropological Institute, 1961, volume 91, part 2 and "Somereflections on ancestor worship in Africa" African Systems of Thought, 1965.

6 Death, Property and the Ancestors. London, 1962.

7 "The context of belief: a consideration of fetishism among the Yako"Frazer Lecture for 1958, Liverpool University Press, 1958.








what out of stepwith theseapproachescertainanthropologists tOxford have devotedmuch attention to the problemof why sets

of African religiousbeliefs should take the form they do. Theiremphasis is on the nature and meaning, rather than on thefunction of religiousbeliefs.Lienhardt, or example, n his Divin-

ity andExperience: heReligionof theDinka, (London: O.U.P.,

1961) tries to explain the typical Dinka divinityas "a unifying

concept linkingdiverseareasof experience,and as an underlying

principle representing he fundamental nature common to allmembersof an

apparentlyheterogeneouslusterof

phenomena."8To my mind the weaknessof Lienhardt'sotherwisebrilliantly

original approach consists in its partial neglect of the jural-structural component in "experience"and, incidentally, like

Dewey, Lienhardtappearsto mean by "experience"what most

anthropologistswould call "culture."In stressinghe considerabledegreeof autonomyof Niloticbe-

lief systemsvis-a-vissocial organization,Lienhardt,and to some

extent Evans-Pritchardn Nuer Religion, (Oxford: The Claren-don Press, 1956), are regardingsuch systemsas if they were

specialized,and hence readilyisolable,sectorsof culture,like re-

ligions in complex societies with a markeddivision of labor. In

fact, there is in the socialprocess n small-scalecommunitieswith

multiplex social relations a dialectical relationshipbetween itssecular and ritualphaseswhich can only be severedanalytically

at the expenseof comprehension f the total phenomenon-theprocessiveunit which embracesphasesof both types.

I have barely eft myselftime enoughto sketchin outline someof the researchcurrentlybeing conducted on ritual in radicallychangingsocial systems.During a trip this summerto Zambiaand SouthernRhodesia,I becameconvincedthat a rich crop of

problems s ripe for the harvesting n the field of contemporaryreligiousmovements. The Lenshinamovement in Zambia had

just attained internationalprominenceand had been drasticallypunished for intransigenceby the new government.At Man-chester one of my formergraduatestudents,NormanLong, hadjust returnedto Lusaka from a sustained period of fieldworkamong the Watchtower Sect (Jehovah's Witnesses) the Lala

8 Robin Horton's accurate summation of Lienhardt's argument in a reviewof "Divinity and experience" Africa, January, 1962, xxxii, part 1.








tribe of SerenjeDistrict;he now proposes o examine their rela-tive economic prosperity n terms of Weber'shypothesisabout

the role of the Protestantethic in promotingthe economicvir-tues of thrift, industryand temperance.Later,at an anthropolo-

gical fieldworkers'conferenceunder the chairmanshipof Pro-

fessorClyde Mitchell at the UniversityCollegeof Rhodesiaand

Nyasaland,I heard papers presentedon the nature and inheri-

tance of leadershipamongthe rapidlygrowing WapostoriSect in

Shona territory.Reports by Audrey Richards, C.M.N. White,

Max Marwick,BarryReynoldsand othersof witch-findingmove-ments in Zambiaand Malawi had previouslyarousedmy inter-

est. Both at the Third InternationalAfrican Seminar,in 1960,and at the AmericanEthnologicalSociety'smeeting, in spring,1964, on religiousproblems,I had heard a number of percipient

papers,notablyby Bengt Sundkler(whose bookBantu Prophetsin South Africa, Butterworth, 2nd. edition 1961 London:

O.U.P., put the whole study of separatist ectsin focus), by the

late DerekStenning,by the BelgiananthropologistAlbertDoutre-

loux of Salzburg,and by IgorKopytoffat Pittsburg,all of which

began to persuademe that these religiousmovementswere of

paramountresearchmportance oday.'

Kopytoff'spaper entitled "Classifications f Religious Move-

ments; Analyticaland Synthetic",recentlypublishedas part of

the transactionsof the American Ethnological Society, is of

major theoretical interest. In it he follows M. M. Ames "Re-actionsto Stress: A ComparativeStudyof Nativism",Davidson

Journal of Anthropology, (1957: 3:17-30) in suggestingthat

ideology and "movement"should be treated as separate phe-

nomena, since movementis a dimensionof social structureand

type of social activity.He goes much furtherthan Ames, how-

ever, when he arguesthat "apt" labels for such movements,as

for instance"millennarian,""nativistic,""revitalistic,""Chilias-

tic," etc. shouldbe droppedand a more analyticalclassification,

treating each movement as a cluster of several kinds of traits

of more or less equal importance,should be substituted.What

9 See also the work of M. J. Field on modern Ashanti shrines and their

priests and clients, despite its psychiatric emphasis. Search for Security, Lon-don: Faber, 1960. Also, F. H. Welbourn in Uganda and Kenya, East Afri-can Rebels; A Study of Some Independent African Churches, London: Stu-

dent Christian Movement Press, 1961.








he proposes in fact, is the formal abandonment of the syntheticview of movements which seeks to catch a few of their sub-

jectively striking features in a vivid epithet, such as "CargoCults," and of the "bounded-space" matrix model that goes with

it. Next he explores the possibilities of an analytical, profile ap-

proach that would make explicit on what aspect or dimension

of the movement a theory is being constructed and in terms of

which elements these movements are being compared. "By re-

fusing to treat different movements," he says, "as varieties of a

species, any theory dealing with but a particular aspect is notextended to other aspects or to movements which are similar

only in this one aspect, thus avoiding unwarranted generalizationsas well as spurious contradictions." The seed of this approachwas shown in the course of Kopytoff's research among the Suku

of the Congo, where he studied the "Holy Water" movement,which he came to see could not be regarded as merely somekind of "syncretic" or "acculturative" movement, with Chris-

tian elements and ideas being assimilated to African ones, since

"Holy Water" represented but the last of a series of Suku move-ments of similar structure and ideology, obviously indigenous in

character, though with a few exotic borrowings. A new typo-logical basis was clearly required.

The "selected dimensions" or religious movements which

Kopytoff tentatively enumerated in the appendix to his paper

may, with a little modification, be fruitfully utilized in compara-tive work in changing African communities. But it must also beremembered that a great number of Africans still belong to ortho-dox Christian bodies, so that sociological and ideological studiesof church organization, ritual and patterns of ancillary churchactivities should also be undertaken, both in relation to separatistchurches and in their own right. B. A. Pauw, of Grahamstown

University in South Africa, has blazed the trail in such researchwith his Religion in a Tswana Chiefdom (London, O.U.P.,1960).

If I may be allowed a final few words on what I consider to bean urgent research need in Africa, I would put in a plea forthe immediate collection of data on traditional cults and life-crisis ceremonies in areas least affected by modern change, with

special emphasis on their symbolism and with the recording of







166 ANTHROPOLOGICALQUARTERLY

vernacularexegeticaltexts, whereverpossibleon tape. This will

be a very precioushoard of rare information before long, and

anthropologistsand historiansof the future may blame us bit-terly if we neglect this evanescentwealth. I would not be too

concerned if such data were collected out of alignment with

sociological data, for cultural beggars can hardly be choosers

when cash, coca-colaand the Beatlesare conquering he world.I know that it is not too easy to get funds nowadaysfor this

sort of "non-applied"researchbut we simply must not let that

part of the culturalhistoryof mankind which only lives now inthe faulty memories of elderly people become blotted out on

account of a short-sightedutilitarianism.If this sounds like a

shrillerreplicationof the warningsgiven by Boas and Malinow-

ski a generationor so ago it has more of a Last Judgment ringabout it.

Some Current Trends in the Study of Ritual in Africa - VIctor Turner

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