sects, clubs, fraternities, Masonic orders and secret societies. And by the publication
of From Ritual To Theatre his scope of interest had widened so far as to include
‘theatre, ballet, opera, film, the novel, printed poetry, the art exhibition, classical
music, rock music, carnivals, processions, folk drama, major sports events and
dozens more’ (V Turner 1982:85, 86).
Notwithstanding his perpetual distinction between the liminal and liminoid,^1
Victor Turner believed that such activities and groups have discovered ‘the cultural
debris of some forgotten liminal ritual’ (1979a:58) and somehow managed to
excavate a connection to a numinosity thought lost to large-scale, complex societies.
Following his introduction to Richard Schechner in 1977 and a subsequent two-
week workshop in experimental theatre, Turner discovered something of that
elusive liminal energy and a sort of ‘retribalization’ among a spontaneous
communitas of anthropology and drama students while ‘re-enacting’ a series of
Ndembu rituals. Perhaps encountering his own transformative threshold where, like
the essence of liminality itself, he was betwixt and between the anthropologist’s
analytic endeavour to understand ritual and the dramatist’s performative experience
of ritualizing, Turner’s accounts (1979b) of the workshop are suggestive of those
anti-structural moments he characterizes as particular to ritual. Much of his final
writing, some of it collected and edited after his death by his wife, Edith, took this
to heart in declaring that ‘[t]he theatre and other performance arenas have taken
over the liminal space that belonged to ritual’ (E.Turner 1986:10).
Writing ritual-nessThe idea that performances of underground dance music are a contemporary
manifestation of some ancient form of ritual is well established among participants
of so-called rave and club cultures. From ‘techno-shamanism’, through ‘neo-
tribalism’ to ‘trance dancing’, the language of ravers and clubbers is replete with
references to a subculturally excavated sense of primitive numinosity. In the
introduction to This Is Not a Rave, an insider’s guide to Toronto’s rave scene replete
with first-person accounts, author Tara McCall expresses her own spiritual
experience of the events:
Something magical happens to me during those twilight hours on Sunday
morning. It is on the Sabbath that I always find my god. I am as nomadic as
the others wandering from warehouse to warehouse to have my soul
awakened. The music thunders through my flesh, the notes swim within my
veins. DJs spin their scriptures with eloquence, zest and assurance. The bass
rattles my lungs and beats in unison with my heart. If I close my eyes I can
watch my flesh melt away and my soul rise between the spaces of sound.
(McCall 2001: n.p.)McCall’s testimonial is but one example of how both ravers and clubbers often
invoke, acknowledge and even promote the potentially transcendent experiences
SELECTING RITUAL 167