Victor Turner, Christian Women, & Emancipation in Ritual
In November 2017, I wrote an article for a feminist zine (FEM Magazine) as an undergraduate at UCLA. I reproduce the article below with minor cosmetic edits. I do not believe I would write a similiar piece today. In retrospect, my narration of Alexandrina da Costa’s experience in Portugal was too superficial to include as an example of Eucharistic anti-structure. Nevertheless, I hope the piece proves insightful for applying Turner’s frameworks for sociological, anthropological, and historical analysis.
Rituals are a common thread across culture, time, and space. Examples of rituals studied by ethnographers include everything from circumcision ceremonies in central Africa to Christmas holiday shopping in megamalls across the United States. There exists a rich trove of theoretical apparatuses from which we can mine to better understand the seemingly impenetrable worlds of other religious procedures that defy Euro-American norms of liberated femininity and female emancipation. This is never more true than it is in the realm of the anthropology of theology, religion, and religious ritual.
(Neo)liberal feminist discourse is often dismissive of non-Western religious and culture modes of difference. For example, Quebec is the most recent in a long line of places deciding to discriminate against Muslim women by preventing those wearing niqabs, burqas and hijabs from using public services. This legislation was ostensibly pushed under the banner of so-called “women’s liberation.”
What if there are better ways to talk about and imagine the performance of femaleness amidst the array of striking cultural and religious difference? What if the lens of thoroughly imperialist perspectives espousing visions of the nineteenth-century “Modernization hypothesis” serves to hinder rather than facilitate dialogue and authentic, local, and organic self-emancipation of women from cisheteropatriarchal norms embedded in religious procedures? What if, instead, we could utilize intellectual resources provided by symbolic and interpretive anthropology to reconfigure our assumptions about women performing their gender in religious ritual as a vehicle toward organic self-emancipation?
To begin this conversation, one can review the praxis of cultural anthropologists who seek to understand religious ritual in terms of its own practitioners. In 1908, Belgian ethnographer-folklorist Arnold van Gennep wrote a book called The Rites of Passage that would have a profound and lasting effect on anthropologist Victor Turner. In van Gennep’s book, one ventures into the world of Indigenous rites of passage – specifically those of the Zambian Ndembu. These rituals, for van Gennep, tended to have three phases: an initial, preliminary state, then a liminal stage (liminaire in French), and a final post-liminal stage (postliminaire in French).
Turner expanded upon van Gennep’s concept of liminality and observed that people in the midst of this ritual phase were “betwixt and between,” as he discussed in his landmark 1967 study, The Forest of Symbols: Aspects of Ndembu Ritual. These people in transition were neither part of the world to which they belonged prior to this liminal phase nor were they yet brought back into that same world. In 1969, Turner published a powerful piece of research entitled The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Stricture, wherein he discussed how the liminal phase was neither a dogmatic nor prescriptive arena of transition in which subjects were merely passive receivers. The liminal phase is a space where real and meaningful symbolic negotiation can take place between participants.
For “developed nations,” it is imprecise to refer to the general phenomenon of transition periods as liminal per se. One can instead refer to them as liminoid, as Turner encourages us to do. Liminoid spaces can be radical encounters of renegotiating, interrogating, and even combating power dynamics as understood and discursively reinforced in what we could call the pre-liminoid phase.
Take for example the archetypical American 4-year college experience, depicted with greater frequency in post-War media and especially in Bildungsromane, the “coming-of-age” genre. Before their college experience, the (typically male) subject is, for example, innocent. Whatever quality (or set of qualities) the subject has prior to the ritual-like experience of their undergraduate years, they will go through a set of experiences (sometimes trials and tribulations, often fraught with sexual tension) in the liminoid space of college, until they (are expected to) assimilate and reintegrate into the late modern neoliberal workforce.
The “anti-structural” dimension of symbolic combat is really a commitment to revise or overturn established practice in the world at large. Anti-structure, to put it simply, is a socio-cultural structure that deliberately subverts the hegemonic. To consciously perform protest in the liminoid phase is to first learn and become conversant in the culturally dominant discourse and subversively challenge its legitimacy using its own presuppositions and values. This is possible because of the instability and dynamism present in every conceptual schema: only a hermetically sealed narrative system is immune to this sort of liberating performance.
Turner’s model provides us with some tools to begin “reading procedures,” that is, ways of approaching and empathetically understanding women performing their womanhood in the midst of religious rituals and procedures. (Neo)liberal feminist models have delegitimized the religious experience of women in the West. For those who wish to see how women can perform their liberation in ritual, contemporary feminists should commit themselves to understating the contemporary tableaux of the Christian church, especially its cultural moment in America, as a liminoid space, and thus as an opportunity for profound change.
There has always been a liberating potential in the praxis of the Christian church at large. The trajectory of the New Testament, from the words of Jesus Christ to the commentary of Paul, has a universalistic dimension and appeal; this is best embodied in the actual rituals of the church itself, which reflect the multiform narratives of freedom that have been made available in Christ as a representative of the liberating mission of the God of the Hebrew Bible.
While churches exist in a particular cultural moment that is itself a liminoid space, perhaps one can observe a greater degree of complexity caught up under the space of transition. In the ritualistic space of transition is another transition space—one that is very hard to articulate or analyze on its own terms.
Present day debates about the “legitimacy” of women priests, ministers, and pastors have brought much attention to this issue. Context-dependent, historicist, and confessionally bounded interpretations of scripture considered sacred by Christians are often the first point of contention in debates and arguments about the role of women in theologically conservative churches. If women themselves in theologically conservative churches do not believe nominal appointments (i.e., priest means male) that encase ritual performance are particularly relevant to a liberating symbolic negotiation, their own stories configure a conceptual schema of antagonizing power dynamics. Further, this would happen without making theologically conservative churches less conservative. This liberating performance can be most powerfully seen in the praxis of the Eucharist, otherwise known as communion or the Lord’s Table.
In communion, all participants are recognized as especially called into a body of communal belonging. Their being as people with dignity and worth is reaffirmed as the consumption of the flesh of Jesus Christ (in some circles literally so, and in others spiritually so, and in still others only symbolically) knits all together in Union with themselves. In Christ, one sees the unifying moment of purpose in the event of the Eucharist. The very being of the participant is affirmed when the collectivity affirms its mutual self-commitment.
The testimony of 20th century Catholic Portuguese woman Alexandrina da Costa is an instructive paradigm for the liberating potential of the Eucharist. In 1918, she jumped out of her window after seeing three men break into her home in an attempt to rape her. This left her completely paralyzed. Bedridden, she offered Eucharistic prayers such as this:
“My good Jesus, you are a prisoner and I am a prisoner. We are both prisoners. You are a prisoner for my welfare and happiness and I am a prisoner of your hands. You are a King and Lord of all and I am a worm of the earth. I have abandoned you, thinking only of this world which is the destruction of souls. But now, repenting with all my heart, I desire only that which you desire, and to suffer with resignation. O my Jesus, I adore thee everywhere thou dwellest in the Blessed Sacrament. Where thou art despised, I stand by thee. I love thee for those who do not love. I make amends for those who offend thee. Come into my heart.”
Here we see the radical liberating potential of the Eucharistic moment: an example of how a Christian ritual is a space of symbolic negotiation. Da Costa tells of her imprisonment along with Christ, and instructively, finds hope in her near complete paralysis, “suffering with resignation.” This resignation is not a fatalistic acceptance of misery, but a hopeful invocation of mercy and forgiveness. The Eucharist served as a site of healing for da Costa; it was a firm rejection of the intentions of her would-be assaulters. She “make[s] amends for those who offend [Christ].” She narrates her own liberation precisely by invoking forgiveness for the people who have also been victimized by their patriarchal culture, being trained to view women as objects of consumption. This invocation is the symbolic combat against the patriarchal order which legitimates, condones, and promotes the physical and sexual assault of women. The ontological unity of all human beings as a fundamental axiom must be affirmed by both minister and parishioner. Without this axiom being realized by both, the opportunity for anti-structure in the event of the Eucharist is not actualized.
We have seen how Turner’s reading of van Gennep offers us new ways to read how women perform their own womanhood as agents and individuals rejecting the narrative of patriarchy in otherwise impossible and despairing situations. The Eucharist, as an example of a liminoid space and phase, can interrogate wider cultural narratives and assumptions about the importance and “role” of women. It offers an alternative script from which all participants can reorient and relearn their dignity and worth as human beings, alongside the index of the liberating moment of the Christ-event. Da Costa’s example offers us a somber glimpse into the authentic, organic, and self-emancipatory praxis of the ritual space of the Eucharist. In this space, da Costa, almost completely paralyzed, is able to reject culturally dominant narratives of male superiority in this particular liminoid space. Da Costa’s experience works within the discourse of Christian ritual to reclaim the dignity that her assailants attempted to take away from her.
Da Costa, and many women today, may and have used the ritual space of the Eucharist to deny the legitimacy of cultural norms to begin the symbolic combat of anti-structure. The Eucharist itself is one of many church rituals that can be read as a liminal space. Women are not passive victims of misogyny and oppression in theologically conservative churches. In many cases, they are active agents revising, interrogating, questioning, and reinterpreting prejudicial and discriminatory practices to remind others of injustice and inequality. Religious rituals, procedures, and rites, therefore, allow women to transcend the global structures of patriarchy that bind them in their performance and appropriation of the same rituals.
