topics: |  religion | ritual | social |

An insightful analysis

One of the most incisive analyses of the process by which communal convention enforces itsself on individuals. Rituals, as hallmarks of this convention, are the most revealing for this process.

Consequently, the analysis addresses one of the major aspects of how societies evolve conventions that attempt a balance between the process of individual desires and societal harmony.

This is a classic work, but it was new to me. Despite the weight of reputation it has acquired in subsequent decades, the writing is easy and effective, and the analysis moves fluidly and cogently.

This is the work that introduces ideas that have opened up new vistas of exploration in the social scinces - the ideas that transition stages - major stages that involve ritual - are often accompanied by symbolic markers that enable society to achieve a kind of equality or balance. The two concepts involved in this process are termed:

	* Liminality : from L. limen threshold, [cognate: subliminal]
		The situation when one is in transition.  Here one has no
		status, no marks of identity, and lives in an ambiguous mode,
		subject to the dictate the community as a whole.   wiki: Liminality

	* Communitas : in Latin, an egalitarian community, e.g.  groups
		of mendicant mystics, or utopians, or socialists.  But these
		are almost never stay that way.  Turner uses the term to
		refer to the transient sense of equality seen during
		festivals (e.g. Holi), or during some limination rituals
		where social strata are overturned.  wiki: communitas

What was revolutionary about communitas was that it opposed the dominant
view in sociology, which till then had looked at societies primarily in
terms of hierarchies or structure. it argued that in certain situations,
especially those involving major transitions, the normal stratified nature
of society can be up-ended, and a more egalitarian form - or even the
opposite form - may prevail for a short period.

Further it is argued (chapter 4), that attempts to maintain such an
egalitarian system usually do not work, and the system would relapse into one
of hierarchies.  Chapter 5 talks of several groups who have egalitarian or
anti-structure tendencies (gangs, hell's angels), and also of individuals who
attempted egalitarian lives (Gandhi, Tolstoy). 

Ndembu rituals

A detailed analysis of rituals from the Ndembu tribe - a Bantu group from Zambia, among 
whom Victor and Edith Turner spent over two years - constitute the main
"data" based on which the arguments are presented.

One of the major rituals of the Ndembu is the coming of age for boys,
during which they undergo circumcision.   Though they may come from
different status households, they are all equal during this liminal period. 

 
Ndembu boys go through an initiates, daubed in white clay.  In the liminal stage
they are all nearly naked, and marked so as to be as nearly the
same as the other initiands.   The ritual is over, they will now
return to the village.
	source: from Forest of Symbols by Victor Turner, 
	from http://plato.acadiau.ca/courses/soci/chegwidden/rop/Ndembu/Ndemboys.html

The Ndembu ritual of inducting the chief

Particularly poignant is the description of the rites by which the supreme
chief of the entire tribe - a large group of villages - is selected.  The
liminal stage is the night before his elevation, when he sits with a wife,
near naked, and is subjected to all kinds of physical and verbal abuse.  He
has to do menial biddings (like fetching firewood) and has to sit silently
with bowed head while

	any person who considers that he has been wronged by the chief-elect
	in the past is entitled to revile him and most fully express his
	resentment, going into as much detail as he desires. 

Later also, the chief is not allowed to let what is said or done in this
liminal phase affect his actions.

[Reading this part reminded me of the fresher's night that signalled the end
of ragging at Kharagpur - one could then do whatever one felt to one's
seniors who had been giving it to them all these weeks...  Perhaps this was a
liminal adjustment that had emerged to provide a semblance of balance in an
otherwise extremely unbalanced situation. ]

Thus, the liminal is the stage when one's status is ambiguous - neither
here nor there - in fact, a lowly, in-between state, where everyone in the
community, from high to low, is equal.   

This is the sense of communitas. 

I am grateful to A.K. Ramanujan's Speaking of Siva, 
(where he mentions Turner in the context of the term "anti-structure"),  -
for pointing me to this fascinating work. 

Based on the Lewis Henry Morgan lectures, Univ. Rochester 1966.  Published
1969. 

Excerpts

1 Planes of Classification

% Johann Jakob Bachofen, in letter to Lewis Henry Morgan (1960): 

	German scholars propose to make antiquity intelligible by measuring
	it according to popular ideas of the present day. They only see
	themselves in the creation of the past. To penetrate to the structure
	of a mind different from our own, is hardy work" [quoted p. 2]

to this remark, Evans-Pritchard (1985) commented: 

	it is indeed hardy work, especially when we are dealing with such
	difficult subjects as primitive magic and religion, in which it is
	all too easy, when translating the conceptions of the simpler peoples
	into our own, to transplant our thought into theirs.

I would like to add as a proviso here that in matters of religion, as of art,
there are no "simpler" peoples, only some peoples with simpler technologies
than our own. Man's "imaginative" and "emotional" life is always and
everywhere rich and complex.

Nor is it entirely accurate to speak of the " structure of a mind different
from our own." It is not a matter of different cognitive structures, but of
an identical cognitive structure articulating wide diversities of cultural
experience.

Monica Wilson who has conducted field research into the religion of the
Nyakyusa people of Tanzania, says (1954):

	Rituals reveal values at their deepest level ... men express in
	ritual what moves them most, and since the form of expression
	is conventionalized and obligatory, it is the values of the_group
	that are revealed.  I see in the study of rituals the key to an
	understanding of the essential constitution of human societies. 

moves camp (from the Chief's) to a cluster of common villages.

	There, in time, my family came to be accepted as more or less a part
	of the local community, and, with eyes just opened to the importance
	of ritual in the lives of the Ndembu, my wife and I began to perceive
	many aspects of Ndembu culture that had previously been invisible to
	us because of our theoretical blinkers. 
	
	As Nadel has said, facts change with theories and new facts make new
	theories.

Ndembe ritual Isoma

[procreational ritual performed by women to appease ancestral shades ...]

a woman who is either quarrelsome herself or a member of a group riven with
quarrels, and who has simultaneously "forgotten her [deceased mother or
mother's mother or some other senior deceased matrilineal kinswoman's] shade
in her liver [or, as we would say, ' heart' ] , "is in peril of having
her procreative power (lusemu) "tied up" (ku-kasila) by the offended
shade. 12

The Ndembu, who practice matrilineal descent combined with virilocal
marriage, live in small, mobile villages. The effect of this arrangementis
that women, through whom children derive their primary
lineage and residential affiliation, spend much of their reproductive
cycle in the villages of their husbands and not of their matrilineal kin.

My figures on Ndembu divorce indicate that the tribal ratios are the highest
among all the matrilineal societies in Central Africa for which reliable
quantitative data exist—and all have high divorce rates. Since women return
to their matrikin on divorce—and a fortiori to their children resident among
those kin — in a very real sense village continuity, through women, depends
upon marital discontinuity. 12

[the ritual involves making a tunnel, sacrificing a red cock, and the couple
staying in a separate hut until a hen lays its first egg. ]

2 Paradoxes of Twinship in Ndembu Ritual

[though fertility is highly valued, twins can be problematic:  

	a high cultural premium is placed on fertility (lusemu); yet an
	exuberance of fertility [may] result in physiological and economic
	distress. 

	In a society without cattle or the notion that sheep and goats can be
	milked for human consumption, it is difficult for a mother to supply
	twins with adequate nourishment by lactation. Often their survival
	may depend upon the chance that another woman has recently lost a
	child, has milk available, and is willing to nurse one of the twins.
	[also difficult for parents alone to provide sustenance to two] 45

[This results in the twinship ritual, where the couple goes around seeking
everyone's help and blessings to prevent twinship in future. ]

after the twin ceremony, children are marked with circles around their
eyes: white (twin) and red (non-twin).

3 Liminality and Communitas

Limination

All rites of passage or "transition" are marked by three phases: 
  - separation, symbolic behavior signifying the detachment of the
		individual or group either from an earlier fixed point in the
		social structure, from a set of cultural conditions (a
		"state"), or from both.   
  - margin (or L. limen, signifying "threshold").  In this phase, the
		nature of the ritual subject (the "passenger") are ambiguous
		- neither here nor there;  passes through a cultural realm
		that has few or none of the attributes of the past or coming
		state.
  - aggregation or re-incorporation into the state.  95

Liminal entities, such as neophytes in initiation or puberty rites, may be
disguised as monsters, wear only a strip of clothing, or even go naked, to
demonstrate that as liminal beings they have no status, property, insignia,
[no marks] that may distinguish them from their fellow neophytes or
initiands.

The condition of the patient and her husband in Isoma had some of these
attributes— passivity, humility, near-nakedness—in a symbolic milieu that
represented both a grave and a womb.  96

Communitas

The normal model of society as a structured, differentiated, and often
hierarchical system of politico-legaleconomic positions with many types of
evaluation, separating men in terms of "more" or "less."

[A different] model emerges recognizably in the liminal period, is of society
as an unstructured or rudimentarily structured and relatively
undifferentiated "communitas" of equal individuals who submit together to the
general authority of the ritual elders. 96

I prefer the Latin term "communitas" to "community," to distinguish this
modality of social relationship from an " area of common living." 

The distinction between structure and communitas is not simply the familiar
one between "secular" and "sacred," or that, for example, between politics
and religion. ... this "sacred " component is acquired by the incumbents of
positions during the rites de passage, through which they changed
positions.  Something of the sacredness of that transient humility and
modelessness goes over, and tempers the pride of the incumbent of a higher
position or office. 

This is not simply, as Fortes (1962) has cogently argued, a matter of giving
a general stamp of legitimacy to a society's structural positions.  It is
rather a matter of giving recognition to an essential and generic human bond,
without which there could be no society. Liminality implies that the high
could not be high unless the low existed, and he who is high must experience
what it is like to be low.

Ritual of induction as highest-chief

The liminal component of this rite begins with the construction of a small
shelter of leaves about a mile away from the capital village.
It's called kafu or kafwi, a term Ndembu
derive from ku-fwa, "to die," for it is here that the chief-elect dies
from his commoner state. 

Turner pays a lot of attention to this kind of possibly spurious
etymologizing - explaining  

	The meaning of a given symbol is often, though by no means
	invariably, derived by Ndembu from the name assigned to it, the sense
	of which is traced from some primary word, or etymon, often a
	verb. Scholars have shown that in other Bantu societies this is often
	a process of fictitious etymologizing, dependent on similarity of
	sound rather than upon derivation from a common source. Nevertheless,
	for the people themselves it constitutes part of the "explanation" of
	a ritual symbol; and we are here trying to discover " the Ndembu
	inside view," how the Ndembu themselves felt and thought about their
	own ritual.  p.11

The chief-elect, clad in nothing but a ragged waist-cloth, and
a ritual wife enter the kafu
shelter just after sundown.  The couple are led there as
though they were infirm.  There they sit crouched in a posture of
shame (nsonyi) or modesty, while they are washed with medicines
mixed with water brought from the [ritual] river site...  

Reviling of the Chief-Elect

Next begins the rite of Kumukindyila, which means literally "to
speak evil or insulting words against him"; we might call this rite
"The Reviling of the Chief-Elect."   It begins when Kafwana makes
a cut on the underside of the chief's left arm. The chief
and his wife are then forced rather roughly to sit on the mat. The
wife must not be pregnant, for the rites that follow are held to destroy
fertility. Moreover, the chiefly couple must have refrained from sexual
congress for several days before the rites.

Kafwana now breaks into a homily, as follows:

    Be silent! You are a mean and selfish fool, one who is bad-tempered! You
    do not love your fellows, you are only angry with them! Meanness and
    theft are all you have! Yet here we have called you and we say that you
    must succeed to the chieftainship. Put away meanness, put aside anger,
    give up adulterous intercourse, give them up immediately! We have granted
    you chieftainship. You must eat with your fellow men, you must live well
    with them. [...] 
    You must not bring partial judgments to bear on any law case involving
    your people, especially where your own children are 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. p.101

After this harangue, any person who considers that he has been wronged by the
chief-elect in the past is entitled to revile him and most fully express his
resentment, going into as much detail as he desires. The chief-elect, during
all this, has to sit silently with downcast head... 

Kafwana at intervals strikes his buttocks against him (kumubayisha)
insultingly.

Many informants have told me that " a chief is just like a slave (ndung'u) on
the night before he succeeds." He is prevented from sleeping, partly as an
ordeal, partly because it is said that if he dozes off he will have bad
dreams about the shades of dead chiefs... 

The authority of the community as a whole

In this process the chief in these rites, but also neophytes in many rites de
passage have to submit to an authority that is nothing less than that of the
total community.

The ordeals and humiliations, often of a grossly physiological character, to
which neophytes are submitted represent partly a destruction of the previous
status and partly a tempering of their essence in order to prepare them to
cope with their new responsibilities and restrain them in advance from
abusing their new privileges.

They have to be shown that in themselves they are clay or dust, mere matter,
whose form is impressed upon them by society.

[At the end of this, the chief is installed with all pomp and rites.] 

Some of the oppositions between liminal and normal states: 

	Transition / state
	Homogeneity / heterogeneity
	Communitas / structure
	Equality / inequality
	Anonymity / systems of nomenclature
	Nakedness or uniform clothing / distinctions of clothing
	Sexual continence / sexuality
	Minimization of sex distinctions / maximization of sex distinctions
	Unselfishness / selfishness
	Total obedience / obedience only to superior rank

[To this list from the original text, we may add what is hinted here and
clarified in later texts analyzing these notions : 

	Ambiguity / Clarity
	Disorientation / Familiar Orientation
]

4: Communitas: Model and Process

Cites sources from Gonzalo's vision of an egalitarian commonwealth in
Shakespeare's Tempest, attempts to achieve such ideal societies -
e.g. the the beats and the hippies.  

	The kind of communitas desired by tribesmen in their rites and by
	hippies in their "happenings" is not the pleasurable and effortless
	comradeship that can arise between friends, coworkers, or
	professional colleagues any day. What they seek is a transformative
	experience that goes to the root of each person's being and finds in
	that root something profoundly communal and shared.

[also analyzes early Franciscan practice under St. Francis, and compares
this with the Sahajiya movement after Chaitanya.] 

St. Francis - imagistic thought?

	Francis is like many other founders of communitas-type groups — "his
	thought was always immediate, personal and concrete.  Ideas appeared
	to him as images. A sequence of thought for him ... consists of
	leaping from one picture to the next....

	The luxury of the brothers' table is demonstrated by Francis
	disguised as a poor stranger. The wickedness of touching money is
	conveyed by an acted parable imposed on an offender by Francis as a
	penance"

	This concrete, personal, imagist mode of thinking is highly
	characteristic of those in love with existential communitas, with the
	direct relation between man and man, and man and nature. Abstractions
	appear as hostile to live contact. William Blake, for example, a
	great literary exponent of communitas in his Prophetic Books, wrote
	that "he would do good to others must do it in Minute Particulars;
	General Good is the plea of the Hypocrite and Scoundrel."  142

[Enjoinment to poverty is true of almost all mystics.  Some,like
rAmAkriShNa, react physically when touching a coin. 

Concrete images - as also man-woman relations - are characteristic of much
mystic writing - e.g. the bAuls or the sufis, whose writings are often very
concrete, and even physical in their thinking. ]

Again, like other seers of communitas ancient and modern Francis made several
crucial decisions on the basis of dream symbolism.  For example, before he
decided to resign t h e official leadership of the Order in 1220, he "dreamt
of a little black hen, which, try as she might, was too small to cover all
her brood with her wings." A little later, his deficiencies as a legislator
were revealed to him in another dream, in which he " tried vainly to feed his
starving brothers with crumbs of bread that slipped through his fingers"
(p. 34).


[Over time] the heartfelt simplicity of Francis's formulations on property
gave way to more legalistic definitions. Francis gave only two laconic
instructions, with reference to the ownership of their settlements :

first Rule of 1221 : only: "Let the brothers be careful, wherever they maybe,
	in hermitages or in other settlements, not to appropriate a
	settlement to themselves..." 
revised Rule of 1223: "Let the brothers appropriate nothing to themselves,
	neither a house nor a settlement nor anything."

This seems quite unequivocal, but any developing structure
generates problems of organization and values that provoke redefinition of
central concepts. 

This often seems like temporizing and hypocrisy, or loss of
faith, but it is really no more than a reasoned response to an alteration in
the scale and complexity of social relations, and with these, a change in the
location of the group in the social field it occupies, with concomitant
changes in its major goals and means of attaining them.

Spirituals versus Conventuals

From the first the Franciscan Order burgeoned, and within a few decades from
the death of its founder, we find the brethren in many parts of Italy,
Sicily, France, Spain and even undertaking missionary journeys to Armenia and
Palestine. 

Major difficulty faced re: the manipulation of resources that threw into
sharp relief the question of the nature of property. This latter question
became almost an obsession with the order during the century following
Francis's death, and resulted in its division into two major branches —one
might even call them camps or factions: the Conventuals, who in practice
relaxed the rigor of Francis's ideal, and the Spirituals, who, with their
doctrine usus pauper, practiced, if anything, a more severe observance than
their founder.

Benefactors from the outside world, who were attracted by the austerity of
Franciscan poverty, played their part in weakening it by donations often
difficult to refuse.

[Eventually the Franciscan movement divided into two branches - the
Conventuals, who relaxed the rigour of Francis's ideal, and the spirituals,
who, with their doctrine of usus pauper, practiced if anything, an even more
severe observance than their founder.

-usus pauper_: use of goods is restricted to the bare minimum sufficient to
sustain life; indeed, some Spirituals perished from their own austerities.

The conventuals gained more influence with the papacy and persecuted and
even imprisoned  some spirituals.   the latter kept alive the example of St
Francis -included men such as John of Parma, Angelo da Clareno, Olivi, and
Ubertino. 151

however, many spirituals obtained the support of prominent people such as the
monarchs James II of Aragon and Frederick II of Sicily as well as several
queens. p. 150]

Dominum and Usus

notion of property was formally separated into two aspects  
	- dominium (or proprietas): rights over property
	- usus: actual manipulation and consumption of property. 

Pope Gregory IX:  Franciscans should retain usus but denounce dominum
of every kind. 

     during papal investigation of the affairs of the order in 1309, 83 years
     after the death of the founder — "use" [had] became "abuse."  Ubertino,
     the spokesman of the Spirituals, brought forward much documentary
     evidence concerning the practice of cultivation for profit, the use of
     granaries and cellars for wine, the reception of bequests of horses and
     arms.
     [coins in a box would be carried by a servant, but the keys would be
     with the brother.]

Persecution of the Spirituals : Burnt at the stake

in the end Pope John XXII, backed by the power of the inquisition, issued a
series of bulls in the 1320s, that resulted in the ultimate extirpation of
the Spirituals from the order. 

[In 1317, John XXII formally condemned the group of them known as the
Fraticelli ('little brethren') - extreme proponents of the poverty views of
Francis, regarding the wealth of the Church as scandalous.   

Excommunicated and imprisoned Fra Angelo, ignoring the arguments of his
able defence in ""Epistola Excusatoria".   But Angelo escaped and his
followers eventually denied that Joh XXII was the real pope - they were tried
by the inquisition in 1334.  

In 1323, he issued the short bull Quum inter nonnullos,[10] which declared
"erroneous and heretical" the doctrine that Christ and his apostles had no
possessions whatever. 

1389: Michele Berti was burned at the stake in Florence.  

1428: John of Capistrano and James of the March burned thirty-six Fraticelli
establishments or dispersed the members and a number were burned at the stake
at Florence and Fabriano, at the latter place in the presence of the pope.
]

Thus in the end, the communitas became one of hierarchy and structure. 

Other communitas formed in crisis - e.g. end of the world groups. 

Sahajiya cult in Bengal

[This section is largely informed by Dimock's The place of the hidden moon: 
erotic mysticism in the Vaisnava-sahajiyā cult, 1966/1991]

Caitanya's devotion, like Francis's, was fostered by images and
identifications, in his case with Krishna and his associates. 

The highly erotic tenor of the Bhagavata and derivative texts and devotions
apparently presented similar problems to later Vaisnavite theologians as
have confronted Jewish and Christian exegetes of the Song of Songs of
Solomon. 

But the ritual solution of the Sahajiyas, (a Tantric offshoot of)
Caitanya's movement, was rather different from that of such Christian
mystics as St. John of the Cross and St. Teresa of Avila, who regarded the
erotic language of Solomon's Canticles as purely metaphorical. 

The central ritual of the Sahajiyas was an elaborate and protracted series
of liturgical actions, interspersed with the repetitive recitation of
mantras which culminated in the act of sexual intercourse between fully
initiated devotees of the cult, a man and a woman, who simulated in their
behavior the love-making of Krishna and Radha. This was no mere act of
sensual indulgence, for it had to be preceded by all kinds of ascetical
practices, meditations, and teachings by accredited gurus. It was
essentially religious in nature, treating the act of sex as a kind of
sacrament, "an outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual grace."

[here Turner omits to mention the long history of Tantra, which has had a
long tradition of sexual processes.  The history and practices of Tantra and
its relation with the Sahajiyas is dealt with at length in Dimock] 

What is sociologically interesting about this ritual is that, just like the
gopis, the female partners of the male Sahajiya initiates had to be married
to other men (see also De, 1961, pp. 204-205). This was not regarded as
adultery...

Non-marital love as communitas

My own view is that what is now being considered, in both sixteenth-century
Bengal and twelfth-century Europe, as a love that is both divine and faintly
illicit—as contrasted with licit, marital love—is a symbol of
communitas. Communitas is the link between the gopis, the blue god between
each milkmaid. Communitas is also the friar's relationship to My Lady
Poverty. In terms of the symbolic opposition between romantic love and
marriage, marriage is homologous with property, just as love in separation is
homologous with poverty. Marriage, therefore, represents structure in this
theological- erotic language. The notion of personal possession or ownership
is also antithetical to the kind of communitas-love epitomized by the
relationship between Krishna and the gopis.

Sahajiya doctrine differed fromVaisnava orthodoxy in that the latter
prescribed sacramental union between spouses, whereas the followers of
Caitanya, as we have seen, prescribed ritual intercourse between a devotee
and the wife of another. Caitanya himself had such a ritual mate, " t h e
daughter of Sathi, whose mind and body were devoted to Caitanya." It is
interesting to note that the ritual partners of the Gosvamins, the original
companions of Caitanya and the expositors of Sahajiya theology, were "women
of... casteless groups, washerwomen or women of other low castes" (ig66a,
p. 127). Indeed, the gopis themselves were cowherdesses, and hence not of the
highest caste. This communitas quality of failing to recognize hierarchical
structural distinctions is in fact quite typical of Sahajiya, and of
Vaisnavism as a whole.

Devotionalists and Conservatives

Caitanya's disciples were six Gosvamins -theologians and philosophers, who
set up an as'rama (a school of religious instruction) for Vaisnavas where the
formal doctrine of their sect could be elegantly forged.  They held dialogues
with certain Sufis, a group of Muslim mystics and poets who had strong
affinities with the Sahajiyas themselves. These six scholars wrote in
Sanskrit and "played the major role in the codification of the doctrine and
ritual of the sect" (1966b, p. 45).

But once more a devotional movement was doomed to founder on the rock of
doctrinal formulation. After Caitanya's death, his followers in Bengal split
into two branches. One branch followed the lead of Caitanya's friend and
intimate companion, Nityananda, known as the "casteless Avadhuta" (the
Avadhutas were ascetics); the other followed Advaita-acarya, an early and
leading devotee of Caitanya, a Brahman of Santapur.

Nityananda was a spiritual avadhUta and mixed with the Shudras, and brought
in thousands of buddhist monks and nuns into the Vaishnava fold.  

For Caitanya and the Nityananda branch of his followers, bhakti emancipated
them from laws and conventions: "they danced ecstatically and sang;
they were as if mad".  160

Eroticism and Religion

The founders, Francis and Caitanya, were poets of religion; they
lived out the colorful religious imagery that filled their meditations.

In the case of the Vaisnava-Sahajiyas, it was the group of Gosvamins
who assumed the task of defining the central concepts of the sect.
Whereas the Franciscans had located their Archimedean point in
the notion of poverty, and then gone on to discriminate between
dominium and usus with regard to property, and had finally been led
into factionalism around the doctrine of usus pauper, the Sahajiyas
had centered their controversies on another aspect of possession, in
this case sexual possession—though, as we have seen, for them sexual
union took on a sacramental character.

The Vaisnavas' sacred books, the Bkagavata and the Gila Govinda,
are full of the imagery of passion; they tell of the love of the gopis for
Krishna.

The first exegetical attempt by a Gosvamin, Jiva by name, was to deny that
such union with parakIyA (not svIya, not own) women could be meant
literally.  The gopis were really divine forms - shaktis - and therefore, for
Krishna, svakIya, really his own.  162

Rupa gosvamin : accepts the parakIyA role of the gopis, but argues that
such ordinary human ethical yardsticks could hardly be applied to the divine
persona. (such arguments have been used to explain strange aspects of
Jehovah, such as his command to Abraham to sacrifice Isaac.  

In the Bhdgavata itself, someone asks how Krishna,
described as the "upholder of piety," could have indulged in love
play with the wives of others, and receives the reply: "For those
who are free of egoism there is no personal advantage here by means
of proper behavior, nor any disadvantage by means of the opposite."

Dimock notes, "svakiya leads to kAma, to desire
for the satisfaction of the self; only parakiya results in the prema, the
intense desire for the satisfaction of the beloved, which is t he
characteristic, to be emulated by the bhakta [the devotee], of the
love of the gopis. It is because the love of the gopis is a parakiya love
that it is so intense. 

After a long preliminary training in ascesis, the Sahajiyas depart from
Vaisnava orthodoxy by entering on the stage of the sexual ritual of
vidhi-bhakti.

fate of Vaishnavism

Advaita's group became absorbed in the caste system, and Nityananda's group,
exclusivist and full of missionary fervor, encountered persecution and
gradually lost heart.

Historically, the tide of Sahajiyaism seems slowly to have ebbed in the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, though Vaisnavism is still an active
force, e.g. among the sect of musicians known as Bauls, who play a "primitive
but haunting one-stringed instrument, called ek-tara," and sing "songs as
gentle and as stirring as the wind which is their home," claim to be
"maddened by the sound of Krishna's flute, and, like a Gopi, caring nothing
for home or for the respect of the world, they follow it".

Quotes this Dimock translation of a Lalan song: 

	Hindu, Muslim—there is no difference,
	Nor are there differences in caste.
	Kabir the bhakta was by caste a JolA,
	but drunk with prema-bhakti 
	he seized the Black Jewel's feet
	One moon is lantern to this world,
	and from one seed is the whole creation sprung
				(1966a, p. 264).

Turner's parenthetical comment after reflects a poor understanding of Kabir -
after "prema-bhakti", he explicates: 
	[true love, best expressed, as we have seen, by extramarital love]
 

5 Humility and Hierarchy

Hells angels

They call themselves the one-percenters, "the one percent that don't fit and
don't care".  They refer to members of the "straight" world as "citizens,"
which implies that they themselves are not.

Initiation rites: 

Angel recruits bring clean new Levis and jackets to the rite, only to steep
them in dung, urine, and oil. Their dirty and ragged condition, "ripened" to
the point of disintegration, is a sign of status that reverses the "neat and
clean" standard of "citizens" trapped in status and structure.

[discusses the festival of Holi as a status reversal, with a long extract
from the lively description by McKim Marriott based on a village near
Mathura: 

	I began to see the pandemonium of Holi falling int an extraordinarily
	regular social ordering. But this was an order precisely inverse to
	the social and ritual principles of routine life. Each riotous act at
	Holi implied some opposite, positive rule or fact of everyday social
	organization in the village.

	Who were those smiling men whose shins were being most mercilessly
	beaten by the women? They were the wealthier Brahman and Jat farmers
	of the village, and the boldest beaters in this veiled battalion were
	often in fact the wives of the farmers' low-caste field-laborers,
	artisans, or menials — the concubines and kitchen help of the
	victims.  

	Who was it who had his head fondly anointed, not only with handfuls
	of the sublime red powders, but also with a gallon of diesel oil? It
	was the village landlord, the anointer was his cousin and archrival,
	the police headman of Kishan Garhi.

	Who was it who was made to dance in the streets, fluting like Lord
	Krishna, with a garland of old shoes around his neck? It was I, the
	visiting anthropologist, who had asked far too many questions, and
	had always to receive respectful answers.

Contents

1 Planes of Classification in a Ritual of Life and Death
2 Paradoxes of Twinship in Ndembu Ritual 			       44
3 Liminality and Communitas 					       94
4 Communitas: Model and Process 				       131
5 Humility and Hierarchy: The Liminality of
  	   Status Elevation and Reversal			       166
  Bibliography 							       204

Victor Turner bio

Victor Turner (1920-1983) was a research officer at the Rhodes-Livingstone
Institute in Zambia, where he began what was to be a lifelong study of Ndembu
village life, ritual, and symbolism. He taught at the University of
Manchester from 1955 to 1963, when he moved to the United States. Turner
served as professor of anthropology at Cornell University, 1964-1968. From
1968 to 1977, he was professor of anthropology and social thought at the
University of Chicago, and then until the time of his death he was William
R. Kenan Professor of Anthropology and Religion at the University of
Virginia.