The ritual process

Victor Turner, an anthropologist, draws on his fieldwork among the Ndembu people of Zambia to study their rituals. Out of this material he works out the idea of communitas, which he describes as a direct bond between people that exists outside any fixed social order.

The book began as a series of lectures delivered and published in 1969. Turner uses the study of ritual actions and symbols as a way into the workings of social structure and social processes. He builds on Arnold van Gennep's account of the liminal stage within rites of passage, widening it so that it can explain many other kinds of social life.

Rituals were once regarded as remnants that merely upheld social conservatism. Turner shows them instead as settings where social change can take shape and then become part of ordinary practice. In the revised edition, Roger Abrahams's foreword explains how Turner's grounded field evidence made an unfamiliar African belief system intelligible to Western readers, and how the work combined Continental theory with ethnographic reporting.