Spirits Are Real: Vic Turner Betwixt and Between

I dreamed of attending a lecture by Victor Turner, a great cultural anthropologist who became famous for his studies of liminality, the "betwixt and between" state in the life of an individual or a culture when established norms are left behind and profound transformation may follow, with the challenge of reintegration looming beyond that. Vic has been dead in the world for many years but I found him to be very much alive in a betwixt and between state somewhere else.  

I loved the simplicity with which he addressed his audience. He told us, "I dedicated my life to explaining different peoples to each other." In my dream Vic Turner knows he's dead, in the sense that he's not on earth, in the Africa he loved, or in America, or Sri Lanka, or Manchester. He has had plenty of time to reflect on that life, though time works differently here.

I read in his wife Edie's memoir, Heart of Lightness (Berghahn Books, 2005) that he died relatively young in 1983. She describes the depth of their engagement with the Ndembu people of northern Zimbabwe. She gives a whizbang portrait of his personality: Vic was "a flat-out character; in a sense, he was out of control, his consciousness had escaped from him, it was flying ahead of him, like the arutam-souls of Jivaro Indians flying out ahead of their bodies over the battlefield."

Naturally he broke with the dialectcal materialism of his early Marxism and then with the British anthro penchant for reducing spirits to by-products of social structures. I did not have the pleasure of meeting Vic Turner before he passed on. I am glad to see that in his Bardo of Betwixt and Between, this passionate Scots scholar of liminality is still thinking about what his discipline needs to be - an anthropology of experience that requires the observer to become a participant and practitioner of the ways of another culture.

For more than two decades, his widow Edie upheld that cause like the milk tree the Ndembu call their flag, declaiming - after she watched a dramatic shamanic extraction - that "spirits are real".

In her memoir, Edie recalls how the Manchester set of Africanists agreed to uphold what later became for Star Trek the Prime Directive: leave the cultures you visit untouched. 

The Blob and Tooth Extraction

She went back to Kajima in Ndembu country a couple of years after Vic’s death. For many hours, she helped gather the tree parts and supplies required for an extraction healing. When the healer completed her operation, Edie saw a huge grey blob emerge from the patient’s back. Later she was shown a bloodied molar. She was told that the patient had been possessed by a spirit of the dead that was now trapped in the tooth. . 

The Ndembu call this type of operation a Tooth extraction and a bloody tooth is usually produced as evidence of success. The tooth is stuffed in the hole of a piece of antelope meat shaped like a donut and confined in a jar with cassava meal and blood. Edie did not doubt the blob was real (though she hints that the tooth may be just for show) and this this was true shamanic extraction. She made this the theme of a celebrated article affirming that spirits are real. * Truly, an anthropologist who stepped out from under the mosquito net. 

* E.B. Turner, "The Reality of Spirits: A Tabooed or Permitted Field of Study?" first published in Anthropology of Consciousness March 1993.

Illustration: "Under the Milk Tree" RM + AI