ABSTRACT
The cultivation of anti-structure directly generates violence aimed at participants or at outsiders, and anti-structural violence risks spilling beyond its intended boundaries and may open the way toward open conflict and potential bloodshed. The management of social structure, in short, often involves religious practices that can generate violence, in structural, symbolic, and physical forms. The experience of communitas is one of “homogeneity and comradeship,” a period of “transition” set apart from the before and after states of differentiated and specified social rank and status. Turner, like Durkheim, saw periodic forays into anti-structure as a key to maintaining structured social frameworks; Turner went so far as to assert that communitas is a vital experience “without which there could be no society.” A different aspect of gendered social structure and liminality arises in the case of a broad category of women found in various forms in many societies.
