Ritual experience and communitas: A critical study of Victor Turner's ritual theory from a perspective of consciousness theory

Though scholars have employed Victor Turner's ritual theory as a useful interpretative tool, they have not always evaluated its adequacy. This dissertation is a critical study of Turner's ritual theory from the perspective of a theory of consciousness originally developed by Ken Wilber. One of the issues that needs to be clarified in Turner's theory is his use of the term, "anti-structure." Though Turner defined anti-structure as liminality and communitas, it is communitas that Turner used as the equivalent to anti-structure. Communitas as the essential mode of human sociality does not emerge in every liminal phase. Instead, this dissertation insists that communitas occurs only in the liminality which meets the necessary conditions for communitas. In addition, even the effect of communitas is subjected to the social context in which the ritual process takes place.;From the perspective of the two mode theory of consciousness, communitas as a momentary phenomenon emerges at the transitional moment of structural change of the self-system in liminality. The transitional moment is when the existing self-systems of participants have begun to dissolve, but new self-systems have not fully emerged. As soon as the new self-systems of participants are structured, the immediate, direct relationships among them turn into the norm-governed structural relationship once again.;When examined from the perspective of the two mode theory of consciousness, existential communitas is not oft-repeatable experience in the ritual process and in our everyday social lives. This implies that Turner's theory of ritual as anti-structure and interpretation of the social process as alternating between structure and anti-structure is inadequate. As an alternative to Turner's theory of ritual, this dissertation argues that the social life of human beings is a process in structure and that rituals play three roles in the process of social life in structure: first, rituals are major means through which people make transitions from structure to structure; second, rituals provide liminal structure in everyday social norms are temporarily suspended; third, some religious rituals are rites of passage which enable their practitioners to live the process of life in structure in their wholeness wholly attending.