Das Ritual

Victor Turner does not interpret rituals as expressions of mythologies, but analyzes them in their immediate meaning for the members of a culture. Instead of limiting himself to researching "primitive" rituals, this book provides a set of tools for analyzing the rituals of "complex" industrial societies. On the basis of two rituals of a Central African tribal society he develops his categories of the threshold state (liminality) and the social community (communitas), which became essential for anthropology as well as for general social theory.