Turner and Theatre

Turner’s main argument in his “Symbols in Ndembu Culture” is that people are frequently unaware of the symbolic meanings behind both their everyday actions and their ritual actions.  This is one of the major tenets of symbolic anthropology, but Turner also argues that only the etic perspective can naturally pick up on and interpret these meanings.  In his lines of evidence, he presents a detailed description of the “milk tree” ritual and observes materials, movement, spatial relations, and events.

Turner is obviously very influenced by Durkheim and Gluckman, though his research and interest seem to be much narrower.  Turner is, of course, one of the founders of symbolic anthropology, and throughout his piece he searches for inherent and associated meaning in action.

The strength of his argument lies in his example.  It is solid and easy to follow.  He also recognizes some of his own bias in his writing and interpretation, which I find most interesting as it seems to be the beginning of postmodernist thoughts.

He accepts that all he can do is interpret symbols based on emic account and his own etic perspective.  He recognizes that even this is not enough to full encompass the emic perspective and thus cannot be the absolute truth.  He recognizes that objectivity is a challenge.  However, he continues to argue that symbolic interpretation is at the individual level and is thus different for everyone.  His own educated interpretation is therefore true, if only to him.  He says that even the existing circumstances outside of a ritual can change the meaning of any symbol for only that period of time for a specific person.  A symbol reflects an individual’s values and sentiments at the time it is presented.  There is no constancy to the interpretation of a symbol, as interpretation changes as a person’s mind does, and a person’s mind changes with his experiences with and without the symbol.

He does also suggest that sometimes a man is unaware of the origin of his action, which I must question.  This idea almost suggests that a person sometimes performs things completely blindly.  However, should not a person always have some sort of motivation for an action?  Perhaps my theatre training is taking over and affecting my ability to accept this point (which is my own bias), but every action begins with a thought.  Every action has an origin.  No action can be performed with total blindness, as even ritual actions will have some motivation behind it.  A man will create it for himself if he has to.