THE PERFORMANCE

STUDIES READER
Second Edition

Edited by Henry Bial

Routledge
I Taylor &. Francis Group

LONDON AND NEW YORK

Michael Atwood Mason’s “ ‘The blood that runs through the veins’ ” (1993) and Alyda
Faber’s “Saint Orlan” (2002) provide detailed descriptions of contemporary ritual practice.
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Mason examines a traditional Afro-Cuban ritual, Santena Dilogun divination, exploring how
it can provide comfort and reassurance to those in crisis. Faber, by contrast, considers an
oppositional ritual, the violent manipulation of religious imagery by French performance
artist Orlan. Finally, in this section. Jack Santino’s “Performative commemoratives: the per­
LIMINALITY AND COMMUNITAS
sonal, and the public” (2004) considers an emerging class of rituals which are designed for
public display, and which invite participation from a general audience. Such performances, Victor Turner
which often memoriahze victims of violence, challenge traditional notions of communitas and
suggest new understandings of the relationship between ritual and performativity.
Taken collectively, these essays show us that the colloquial use of “ritual” to mean proforma
or “without impact” is far from the truth. Ritual, both as a cultural practice and as a lens
through which to imderstand performances of various kinds, continues to shape om- lives, Form and attributes of rites of passage
and to affect communities large and small throughout the world.
In this chapter I take up a theme I have discussed briefly elsewhere (Turner, 1967: 93—111),
note some of its variations, and consider some of its further implications for the study of
culture and society. This theme is in the first place represented by the nature and charac­
teristics of what Arnold van Gennep (1909) has called the “liminal phase” oUites de passage.
Van Gennep himself defined rites de passage as “rites which accompany every change of place,
state, social position and age.” To point up the contrast between “state” and “transition,”
I employ “state” to include all his other terms. It is a more inclusive concept than “status” or
“office”, and refers to any type of stable or recurrent condition that is culturally recognized.
Van Gennep has shown that all rites of passage or “transition” are marked by three phases:
separation, margin (or limen, signifying “threshold” in Latin), and aggregation. The first
phase (of separation) comprises symbolic behavior signifying the detachment of the indi­
vidual or group either from an earlier fixed point in the social structure, from a set of
cultural conditions (a “state”), or from both. During the intervening “liminal” period, the
characteristics of the ritual subject (the “passenger”) are ambiguous; he passes through a
cultural realm that has few or none of the attributes of the past or coming state. In the third
phase (reaggregation or reincorporation), the passage is consummated. The ritual subject,
individual or corporate, is in a relatively stable state once more and, by virtue of this, has
rights and obligations vis-a-vis others of a clearly defined and “structural” type; he is
expected to behave in accordance with certain customary norms and ethical standards
binding on imcumbents of social position in a system of such positions.

Liminality
The attributes of liminahty or of liminal personae (“threshold people”) are necessarily
ambiguous, since this condition and these persons elude or shp through the network of
classifications that normally locate states and positions in cultural space. Liminal entities are
neither here nor there; they are betwixt and between the positions assigned and arrayed
by law, custom, convention, and ceremonial. As such, their ambiguous and indeterminate
attributes are expressed by a rich variety of symbols in the many societies that ritualize

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social and cultural transitions. Thus, liminality is frequently likened to death, to being in position or office. This is not simply, as Fortes (1962: 86) has cogently argued, a matter of
the womb, to invisibility, to darkness, to bisexuality, to the wilderness, and to an eclipse of giving a general stamp of legitimacy to a society’s structural positions. It is rather a matter
the sun or moon. of giving recognition to an essential and generic h\unan bond, without which there could be
Liminal entities, such as neophytes in initiation or puberty rites, may be represented no society. Liminality imphes that the high could not be high unless the low existed, and
as possessing nothing. They may be disguised as monsters, wear only a strip of clothing, or he who is high must experience what it is hke to be low. No doubt something of this
even go naked, to demonstrate that as hminal beings they have no status, property, insignia, thinking, a few years ago, lay behind Prince Philip’s decision to send his son, the heir
secular clothing indicating rank or role, position in a kinship system — in short, nothing that apparent to the British throne, to a bush school in Australia for a time, where he could learn
may distinguish them from their fellow neophytes or initiands. Their behavior is normally how “to rough it.”
passive or humble; they must obey their instructors imphcitly, and accept arbitrary punish­
ment vdthout complaint. It is as though they are being reduced or groimd down to a
uniform condition to be fashioned anew and endowed with additional powers to enable Dialectic of the developmental cycle
them to cope with their new station in life. Among themselves, neophytes tend to develop
From all this I infer that, for individuals and groups, social hfe is a type of dialectical process
an intense comradeship and egalitarianism. Secular distinctions of rank and status disappear
that involves successive experience of high and low, communitas and structin*e, homogeneity
or are homogenized. The condition of the patient and her husband in Isoma had some of
and differentiation, equality and inequality. The passage from lower to higher status is
these attributes — passivity, humihty, near-nakedness — in a symbolic miheu that repre­
through a hmbo of statuslessness. In such a process, the opposites, as it were, constitute one
sented both a grave and a womb. In initiations with a long period of seclusion, such as the
another and are mutually indispensable. Fimthermore, since any concrete tribal society is
circumcision rites of many tribal societies or induction into secret societies, there is often a
made up of multiple personae, groups, and categories, each of which has its ovm develop­
rich proliferation of liminal symbols.
mental cycle, at a given moment many incumbencies of fixed positions coexist with
many passages between positions. In other words, each individual’s life experience contains
Communitas alternating exposure to structiu'e and communitas, and to states and transitions.

What is interesting about liminal phenomena for oiu- present purposes is the blend they
offer of lowliness and sacredness, of homogeneity and comradeship. We are presented, in
The liminality of an installation rite
such rites, with a “moment in cind out of time,” and in and out of secular social structure,
which reveals, however fleetingly, some recognition (in symbol if not always in language) of One brief example from the Ndembu of Zambia of a rite de passage that concerns the
a generalized social bond that has ceased to be and has simultaneously yet to be fragmented highest status in that tribe, that of the senior chief Kanongesha, ■will be useful here. It will
into a multiphcity of structmal ties. These are the ties organized in terms either of caste, also expand oxir knowledge of the way the Ndembu utilize and explain their ritual symbols.
class, or rank hierarchies or of segmentary oppositions in the stateless societies beloved The position of senior or paramoimt chief among the Ndembu, as in many other African
of political anthropologists. It is as though there are here two major “models” for hiiman societies, is a paradoxical one, for he represents both the apex of the structured pohtico-
interrelatedness, juxtaposed and alternating. The first is of society as a structured, differen­ legal hierarchy and the total community as an imstructured imit. He is, symbolically, also
tiated, and often hierarchical system of politico-legal-economic positions with many types the tribal territory itself and all its resources. Its fertihty and freedom from drought,
of evaluation, separating men in terms of “more” or “less.” The second, which emerges famine, disease, and insect plagues are bovmd up with his office, and with both his physical
recognizably in the liminal period, is of society as 2in unstructiu*ed or rudimentarily struc­ and moral condition. Among the Ndembu, the ritual powers of the senior chief were
tured and relatively undifferentiated comitatus, community, or even communion of equal limited by and combined "with those held by a senior headman of the autochthonous Mbwela
individuals who submit together to the general authority of the ritual elders. people, who made submission only after long struggle to their Ltmda conquerors led by
I prefer the Latin term “communitas” to “community”, to distinguish this modality of the first Kanongesha. An important right was vested in the headman, named Kafwana, of the
social relationship from an “area of common hving.” The distinction between structiire Humbu, a branch of the Mbwela. This was the right to confer and periodically to medicate
and communitas is not simply the familiar one between “secvJar” and “sacred,” or that, the supreme symbol of chiefly status among tribes of Lrmda origin, the lukanu bracelet,
for example, between politics and religion. Certain fixed offices in tribal societies have made from human genitalia and sinews and soaked in the sacrificial blood of male and
many sacred attributes; indeed, every social position has some sacred characteristics. But female slaves at each installation. Kafwana’s ritual title was Chivwikankanu, “the one who
this “sacred” component is acquired by the incumbents of positions dming the rites de dresses with or puts on the lukanu” He also had the title Mama yaKanongesha, “mother of
passage, through which they changed positions. Something of the sacredness of that transient Kanongesha,” because he gave symbolic birth to each new incumbent of that office. Kafwana
humility and modelessness goes over, and tempers liie pride of the incumbent of a higher was also said to teach each new Kanongesha the medicines of witchcraft, which made him

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feared by his rivals and subordinates — perhaps one indication of weak political ku-Jwa. The chief-elect, clad in nothing but a ragged waist-cloth, and a ritual wife, who is
centralization. either his senior wife (mwadyi) or a special slave woman, known as lukanu (after the royal
The lukanu, originally conferred by the head of all the Lunda, the Mwantiyanvwa, who bracelet) for the occasion, similarly clad, are called by Kafwana to enter the kafu shelter just
ruled in the Katanga many miles to the north, was ritually treated by Kafwana and hidden by after simdown. The chief himself, incidentally, is also known as mwadyi or lukanu in these
him during interregna. The mystical power of the lukanu, and hence of the Kanongesha-ship, rites. The couple are led there as though they were infirm. There they sit crouched in a
came jointly from Mwantiyanvwa, the political foimtainhead, and Kafwana, the ritual posture of shame (nsonyi) or modesty, while they are washed with medicines mixed with
course: its employment for the benefit of the land and the people was in the hands of water brought from Katukang’onyi, the river site where the ancestral chiefs of the southern
a succession of individual incumbents of the chieftainship. Its origin in Mwantiyanvwa Lunda diaspora dwelt for a while on their journey from Mwantiyanvwa’s capital before
symbolized the historical unity of the Ndembu people, and their political differentiation separating to carve out realms for themselves. The wood for this fire must not be cut by an
into subchiefdoms imder Kanongesha; its periodic medication by Kafwana symbolized the ax but fovuid lying on the ground. This means that it is the product of the earth itself and
land — of which Kafwana was the original “owner” — and the total community hving on it. not an artifact. Once more we see the conjunction of ancestral Lundahood and chthonic
The daily invocations made to it by Kanongesha, at dawn and sunset, were for the fertility
powers.
and continued health and strength of the land, of its animal and vegetable resources, and of Next begins the rite of Kumukindyila, which means literally “to speak evil or insulting
the people — in short, for the commonweal and public good. But the lukanu had a negative words against him”; we might call this rite “The revihng of the chief-elect.” It begins when
aspect; it could be used by Kanongesha to curse. If he touched the earth with it and uttered Kafwana makes a cut on the underside of the chiefs left arm — on which the lukanu bracelet
a certain formula, it was beheved that the person or group cursed would become barren, will be drawn on the morrow — presses medicine into the incision, and presses a mat on the
their land infertile and their game invisible. In the lukanu, finally, Lunda and Mbwela were upper side of the arm. The chief and his wife are then forced rather roughly to sit on the
united in the joint concept of Ndembu land and folk. mat. The wife must not be pregnant, for the rites that follow are held to destroy fertility.
In the relationship between Limda and Mbwela, and between Kanongesha and Kafwana, Moreover, the chiefly couple must have refrained from sexual congress for several days
we find a distinction familiar in Africa between the pohtically or militarily strong and the before the rites.
subdued autochthonous people, who are nevertheless ritually potent. Iowan Lewis (1963) Kafwana now breaks into a homily, as follows:
has described such structural inferiors as having "the power or powers of the weak” (111).
One well-known example from the literature is to be found in Meyer Fortes’ account of the Be silent! You are a mean and selfish fool, one who is bad-tempered! You do not
Tallensi of northern Ghana, where the incoming Namoos brought chieftainship and a highly love your fellows, you are only angry with them! Meanness and theft are all you
developed ancestral cult to the autochthonous Tale, who, for their part, are thought to have have! Yet here we have called you and we say that you must succeed to the
important ritual powers in connection with the earth and its caverns. In the great Gohb chieftainship. Put away meanness, put aside anger, give up adulterous intercourse,
Festival, held annually, the union of chiefly and priestly powers is symbolized by the mystical give them up immediately! We have granted you chieftainship. You must eat with
marriage between the chief of Tongo, leader of the Namoos, and the great earth-priest, your fellow men, you must hve well with them. Do not prepare witchcraft
the Gohbdaana, of die Tale, portrayed respectively as “husband” and “wife.” Among medicines that you may devour your fellows in their huts — that is forbidden!
Ndembu, Kafwana is also considered, as we have seen, symbolically feminine in relation to We have desired you and you only for om- chief. Let your wife prepare food for the
Kanongesha. I could multiply examples of this type of dichotomy many times from African people who come here to the capital village. Do not be selfish, do not keep the
sources alone, and its range is world-wide. The point I would like to stress here is that there chieftainship to yourself! You must laugh with the people, you must abstain from
is a certain homology between the “weakness” and “passivity” of Uminahty in diachronic witchcraft, if perchance you have given it already! You must not be killing people!
transitions between states and statuses, and the “structural” or synchronic inferiority of You must not be ungenerous to people!
certain personae, groups, and social categories in political, legal, and economic systems. But you. Chief Kanongesha, Chifwanakenu [“son who resembles his father”] of
The liminal and the “inferior” conditions are often associated with ritual powers and with Mwantiyanvwa, you have danced for your chieftainship because your predecessor is
the total community seen as undifferentiated. dead [i.e. because you killed him]. But today you are born as a new chief. You must
To return to the installation rites of the Kanongesha of the Ndembu: The liminal com­ know the people, O Chifwanakenu. If you were mean, and used to eat your cassava
ponent of such rites begins with the construction of a small shelter of leaves about a mile mush alone, or your meat alone, today you are in the chieftainship. You must give
away from the capital village. This hut is known as kafu or kafwi, a term Ndembu derive up your selfish ways, you must welcome everyone, you are the chief! You must stop
from ku-Jwa, “to die,” for it is here that the chief-elect dies from his commoner state. being adulterous and quarrelsome. You must not bring partial judgments to bear
Imagery of death abounds in Ndembu liminality. For example, the secret and sacred site on any law case involving your people, especially where yom own children are
where novices are circumcised is known as ijwilu or chifwilu, a term also derived from involved, you must say: “If someone has slept with my wife, or wronged me, today
I must not judge his case unjustly. I must not keep resentment in my heart.”
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After this harangue, any person who considers that he has been wronged by the chief-elect Other characteristics are submissiveness and silence. Not only the chief in the rites under
in the past is entitled to revile him and most fully express his resentment, going into as discussion, but also neophytes in many rites de passage have to submit to an authority
much detail as he desires. The chief-elect, diu-ing all this, has to sit silently with downcast that is nothing less than that of the total community. This community is the repository of
head, “the pattern of all patience” and humihty. Kafwana meanwhile splashes the chief with the whole gamut of the culture’s values, norms, attitudes, sentiments, and relationships. Its
medicine, at intervals striking his buttocks against him (kumubajisha) insultingly. Many representatives in the specific rites — and these may vary from ritual to ritual — represent the
informants have told me that “a chief is just like a slave (ndung’u) on the night before he generic authority of tradition. In tribal societies, too, speech is not merely communication
succeeds.” He is prevented from sleeping, partly as an ordeal, partly because it is said that but also power and wisdom. The wisdom (mana) that is imparted in sacred liminahty is not
if he dozes off he will have bad dreams about the shades of dead chiefs, “who will say that just an aggregation of words and sentences; it has ontological value, it refashions the very
he is wrong to succeed them, for has he not killed them?” Kafwana, his assistant, and other being of the neophyte. That is why, in the Chisungu rites of the Bemba, so well described by
important men, such as village headmen, man-handle the chief and his wife — who is Audrey Richards (1956), the secluded girl is said to be “grown into a woman” by the female
similarly reviled - and order them to fetch firewood and perform other menial tasks. The elders — and she is so grown by the verbal and nonverbal instruction she receives in precept
chief may not resent any of this or hold it against the perpetrators in times to come. and symbol, especially by the revelation to her of tribal sacra in the form of pottery images.
The neophyte in liminality must be a tabula rasa, a blank slate, on which is inscribed
the knowledge and wisdom of the group, in those respects that pertain to the new status.
The ordeals and humiliations, often of a grossly physiological character, to which neophytes
Attributes of liminal entities are submitted represent partly a destruction of the previous status and partly a tempering of
The phase of reaggregation in this case comprises the public installation of the Kanongesha their essence in order to prepare them to cope with their new responsibilities and restrain
with all pomp and ceremony. While this would be of the utmost interest in study of them in advance from abusing their new privileges. They have to be shown that in them­
Ndembu chieftainship, and to an important trend in study of Ndembu chieftainship, and selves they are clay or dust, mere matter, whose form is impressed upon them by society.
to an important trend in current British social anthropology, it does not concern us here. Another liminal theme exemplified in the Ndembu installation rites is sexual continence.
Our present focus is upon liminahty and the ritual powers of the weak. These are shown This is a pervasive theme of Ndembu ritual. Indeed, the resumption of sexual relations is
under two aspects. First, Kafwana and the other Ndembu commoners are revealed as usually a ceremonial mark of the return to society as a structure of statuses. While this is a
privileged to exert authority over the supreme authority figme of the tribe. In liminality, feature of certain types of religious behavior in almost all societies, in preindustrial society,
the imderling comes uppermost. Second, the supreme pohtical authority is portrayed “as a with its strong stress on kinship as the basis of many types of group affihation, sexual
slave,” recalling that aspect of the coronation of a pope in Western Christendom when he continence has additional religious force. For kinship, or relations shaped by the idiom of
is called upon to be the “servus servorum Dei.” Part of the rite has, of course, what Monica kinship, is one of the main factors in structural differentiation. The undifferentiated
Wilson (1957: 46—54) has called a “prophylactic function.” The chief has to exert self- character of liminahty is reflected by the discontinuance of sexual relations and the absence
control in the rites that he may be able to have self-mastery thereafter in face of the of marked sexual polarity.
temptations of power. But the role of the hvunbled chief is only an extreme example of a It is instructive to analyze the homiletic of Kafwana, in seeking to grasp the meamng of
recurrent theme of liminal siutations. This theme is the stripping off of preliminal and liminality. The reader will remember that he chided the chief-elect for his selfishness,
posthminal attributes. meanness, theft, anger, witchcraft, and greed. All these vices represent the desire to possess
Let us look at the main ingredient of the Kumukindjila rites. The chief and his wife are for oneself what ought to be sheired for the common good. An incumbent of high status is
dressed identically in a ragged waist-cloth and share the same name — mwadyi. This term is peculiarly tempted to use the authority vested in him by society to satisfy these private and
also apphed to boys imdergoing initiation and to a man’s first wife in chronological order privative wishes. But he should regard his privileges as gifts of the whole commumty, which
of marriage. It is an index of the anonymous state of “initiand.” These attributes of sexless­ in the final issue has an overright over all his actions. Structure and the high offices provided
ness and anonymity are highly characteristic of liminahty. In many kinds of initiation where by structure are thus seen as instrumentalities of the common weal, not as a means of
the neophytes are of both sexes, males and females are dressed alike and referred to by the personal aggrandizement. The chief must not “keep his chieftainship to himself.” He “must
same term. This is true, for example, of many baptismal ceremonies in Christian or syncretic laugh with the people,” and laughter (ku-seha) is for the Ndembu a “white” quahty, and
sects in Africa: for example, those of the hwiti cult in the Gabon (James Fernandez; personal enters into tbe definition of “whiteness” or “white things.” Whiteness represents the seam­
commumcation). It is also true of initiation into the Ndembu funerary association of less web of connection that ideally ought to include both the hving and the dead. It is right
Chiwila. Symbohcally, all attributes that distinguish categories and groups in the structured relation between people, merely as human beings, and its fruits are health, strength, and all
social order are here in abeyance; the neophytes are merely entities in transition, as yet good things. “White” laughter, for example, which is visibly manifested in the flashing of
without place or position. teeth, represents fellowship and good company. It is the reverse of pride (winyi), and the

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secret envies, lusts, and grudges that result behaviorally in witchcraft (wuloji), theft REFERENCES
(wukombi), adultery (kushimhana), meanness (cAi/lva), and homicide (wubanji). Even when a
man has become a chief, he must still be a member of the whole community of persons Fortes, Meyer (1962) “Ritual and office,” in Max Gluckman (ed.), Essays on the Ritual of Social Relations.
(antu), and show this by ‘laughing with them,” respecting their rights, “welcoming every­ Manchester: Manchester University Press.
Lewis, Iowan M. (1963) “Duahsm in SomaU notions of power,” Journal of the Royal Anthropological
one,” and sharing food with them. The chastening function of liminality is not confined
to this type of initiation but forms a component of many other types in many cultures. A Institute, vol. 93, part I.
Richards, Audrey I. (1956) Chisungu, London: Faber and Faber.
well-known example is the medieval knight’s vigil, during the night before he receives the
Turner, Victor (1967) The Forest cf Symbols, Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
accolade, when he has to pledge himself to serve the weak and the distressed and to Van Gennep, Arnold (1909) The Rites of Passage (trans. Monika B. Vizedom and Gabrielle L. Caffee),
meditate on his own imworthiness. His subsequent power is thought partially to spring from
London; Routledge and Kegan Paul.
this profoimd immersion in hrunility. Wilson, Monica (1957) Rituals of Kinship among the Nyakyusa, London: Oxford University Press.
The pedagogics of liminality, therefore, represent a condemnation of two kinds of"
separation from the generic bond of communitas. The first kind is to act only in terms of the
rights conferred on one by the incumbency of office in the social structure. The second is to READER CROSS-REFERENCES
follow one’s psychobiological urges at the expense of one’s fellows. A mystical character is
assigned to the sentiment of humankindness in most types of liminality, and in most cultures
Schechner — close collaborator
this stage of transition is brought closely in touch with beliefs in the protective and punitive McKenzie - on hminahty as a defining concept for performance studies
powers of divine or preterhuman beings or powers. For example, when the Ndembu Geertz, C. Bell, Fabian, Conquergood - imphcations of Turner’s ritual theory for anthropological and
chief-elect emerges from seclusion, one of his subchiefs — who plays a priestly role at the ethnographic practice
installation rites — makes a ritual fence around the new chief s dwelling, and prays as follows Mason, Faber, Santino, Ancelet - descriptions of specific rituals
to the shades of former chiefs, before the people who have assembled to witness the Turner and Turner - with wife and collaborator Edie Turner, on the value of reenacting ritual for
installation: instructional purposes

Listen, all you people. Kanongesha has come to be born into the chieftainship
today. This white clay [mpemba], with which the chief, the ancestral shrines, and the
officiant will be anointed, is for you, all the Kanongeshas of old gathered together
here. [Here the ancient chiefs are mentioned by name.] And, therefore, all you who
have died, look upon your friend who has succeeded [to the chiefly stool], that
he may be strong. He must continue to pray well to you. He must look after the
children, he must care for all the people, both men, and women, that they may be
strong and that he himself should be hale. Here is your white clay. I have enthroned
you, O chief. You, O People, must give forth soimds of praise. The chieftainship
has appeared.

The powers that shape the neophytes in liminality for the incximbency of new status are felt,
in rites all over the world, to be more than himian powers, though they are invoked and
channeled by the representatives of the community.

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