Victor Turner and Contemporary Cultural Performance

In the twenty years following Victor Turner s death, interventions on the interconnected performance modes of play, drama, and community (dimensions of which Turner deemed the limen), and experimental and analytical forays into the anthropologies of experience and consciousness, have complemented and extended Turnerian readings on the moments and sites of culture s becoming. Examining Turner s continued relevance in performance and popular culture, pilgrimage and communitas, as well as Edith Turner s role, the contributors reflect on the wide application of Victor Turner s thought to cultural performance in the early twenty-first century and explore how Turner s ideas have been re-engaged, renovated, and repurposed in studies of contemporary cultural performance.

Graham St John is a Research Associate at the Centre for Critical and Cultural Studies at the University of Queensland and recent Resident Scholar at the School for Advanced Research, Santa Fe, New Mexico. Graham has published widely in the fields of anthropology, cultural, youth, and religious studies. He edited Rave Culture and Religion (Routledge, 2004), and authored Global Trance Culture: Religion, Technology and Psytrance (Blackwell, forthcoming).