It is worth recalling that anthropologists of very different theoretical stripes agree that symbols mark the threshold of culture. For example, an arch-materialist like Leslie White writes, “The symbol is the universe of humanity” (1949:22). Yet relatively few anthropologists were concerned with how symbols mean.
Sapir, for example, distinguished between primary symbols, which directly mimic an object—the picture of a dog that means “dog”— and secondary symbols, in which “a connection is no longer directly traceable between words, or combinations of words, and what they refer to,” as in the sentence, “The red, white, and blue stands for freedom” (1929:211).
Turner’s contribution—and an example of his sophisticated common sense—was to consider symbols within specific fields of social action. In analyzing Ndembu ritual, Turner wrote, I found I could not analyze ritual symbols without studying them in a time series in relation to other “events,” for symbols are essentially involved in social processes. I came to see performances of ritual as distinct phases in social processes whereby groups become adjusted to internal changes and adapted to their external environment. From this standpoint the ritual symbol becomes a factor in social action, a positive force in an activity field. The symbol becomes associated with human interests, purposes, ends, and means, whether these are explicitly formulated or have to be inferred from the observed behavior. The structure and properties of a symbol become those of a dynamic entity, at least within its appropriate context of action. (1967:20)
Thus, the symbol of the American flag takes on different meanings if it is flapping on a flag post in a schoolyard, hanging in the back of a Chevrolet van, or draped across the casket of a slain soldier. The image is the same, but the meanings associated with it are different in kind and intensity.
Turner considers cultural symbols, including ritual symbols, “as originating in and sustaining processes involving temporal changes in social relations, and not as timeless entities” (1974:55). Symbols have some basic properties in common.
They are powerful condensations of meaning: “Many things and actions are represented in a single formation” (Turner 1967:28). For example, Turner analyzes the meanings associated with the chishing’a, a Ndembu hunting shrine consisting of only a forked stick placed in the ground, a piece of earth from
a termite hill trimmed into a rectangle and placed at the base of the branch, and a braid of grass. The associated meanings include social relationships between hunters and nonhunters, the hunter’s immediate family and matrikin, toughness of mind and body, piety toward the hunter’s ancestors, fertility, skill in the use of weapons, and fairness in the distribution of meat— some fifteen different meanings directly associated with this shrine. “This is but a single example of the mighty synthesizing and focusing capacity of ritual symbolism,” Turner observes: “It might almost be said that the greater the symbol, the simpler its form” (1967:298). A moment’s reflection on the evocative nature of the Christian cross—simply two perpendicular pieces of wood of unequal length—suggests the truth of Turner’s observation. Therefore, symbols are “‘multivocal,’ susceptible of many meanings” (Turner 1974:55), though their meanings tend to cluster around two extremes of a continuum; at one end, there is often a cluster of meanings around physiological and natural phenomena, and at the other, another cluster of meanings about social relationships. For example, the red in the American flag is sometimes explained as representing the blood of those who have died in defense of freedom, the stripes as the original thirteen colonies, and the entire symbol as evoking values of patriotism and respect.
But the important point is that symbols, condensed and multivocal, may speak to different people in different ways; the construction and reconstruction of meaning occurs with specific, dynamic contexts of social process. This has profound theoretical implications. If, as so many anthropologists have argued,
symbols are the key to cultural life, and if, as Turner suggests, symbols are dynamic social creations—with the potential for contradictory, but coexisting, interpretations—then how can a cultural trait or a social structure be abstracted from its dynamic context? Why should one believe that cultural patterns serve to
create social stability (Radcliffe-Brown) or meet discernible human needs (Malinowski) when the very nature of cultural life is fluid, contradictory, and dynamic as opposed to stable, congruent, and static?
Turner’s insights into symbols touch a central nerve in twentieth-century anthropological thought. Culture exists as experience; it only occurs insofar as it is practiced. This leads to an anthropology of performance and a concern with praxis (literally, “action” or “practice,” as in the performance of an art or skill), rather than an anthropology of social structure. Turner pursued this approach in a variety of investigations, but one particularly intriguing investigation focused on pilgrimages.