Turner: culture as performance

Victor Turner and Contemporary Cultural Performance

Graham St John (ed.) New York : Berghahn (Release date, April 2008)

Upon the 25th anniversary of his passing, this collection features contributions reflecting the wide application of Victor Turner's thought to cultural performance in the early 21st Century. From anthropology, sociology and religious studies to performance, cultural and media studies, Turner has had a prodigious interdisciplinary impact. The collection of 17 essays demonstrates that, in the face of challenges from poststructuralism and postcolonial studies, Turnerian ideas remain compelling with international scholars located in a range of disciplines illustrating how these ideas have been reanimated, renovated, and repurposed in studies of contemporary cultural performance and experience.

Contributions to this collection are grouped in four thematic sections: 'Performing Culture' covering new ritual, drama, media and reflexivity; 'Rites of Passage and Popular Culture' on popular 'transition' rites and popular investment in the ideas of Turner; 'Pilgrimage and Communitas' with contributions covering contemporary manifestations; and, 'Edith Turner' on her role in the Turnerian project.

Volume contributors address themes ranging from dark communitas and techno tribalism to liminal sports and the mediatisation of social dramas, from backpacking, shopping and protest pilgrimage to what Barbara Babcock calls the "gynesis" of Victor Turner's work. Applying, critiquing and reworking Turner's cultural processualism, with attention to such diverse themes as performing "sorry business" within the context of settler and indigenous Australian reconciliation, improvised ritual-theatre within a tertiary education context, pilgrimage to the Burning Man Festival in Nevada's Black Rock Desert, and recognition of the critical role of Edith Turner in the development of the Turnerian perspective, this collection demonstrates the broad and evolving appeal of the Turnerian project.