ABSTRACT
A social anthropologist indebted to structuralism, Victor Turner pioneered the study of ritual as performance or theatre in the 1960s and 1970s following from Arnold van Gennep’s work on rites of passage. Turner’s Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure (1969) is still considered a seminal work in the fields of religious studies, anthropology, and even sociology. In 1966 Turner delivered the Lewis Henry Morgan Lectures at the University of Rochester, a significant portion of which became Ritual Process. In this performance, he laid out his thesis on ritual suggested by the title as a process, a thesis still invoked in emerging fields like ritual, theatre, and performance studies by figures such as Richard Schechner, Lawrence Sullivan, Ronald Grimes, and Catherine Bell.1 In this chapter I hope to thicken debates around the meaning and utility of ritual by suggesting that this meaning and utility fails to be consummated in ritual. By focusing on Turner’s description and analysis of Isoma in Ritual Process, I shall propose a theory of ritual as failure.
