ABSTRACT
In his essay “The Liminal Period in Rites of Passage,” Victor Turner (1987) describes a phenomenon common to initiation ceremonies. Initiation rites often require that the familiar world that has housed and sustained the initiate be disassembled into its component parts. Each part of the familiar world becomes represented in a mask painted in unfamiliar colors. The features of the mask are usually distended and disproportionate, often monstrously depicted. The reason for this monstrous depiction is that the familiar feature of the world has been severed from its place. It no longer fits where one would normally expect it to fit and therefore loses all sense of “proportion.” It stands out; it is out of place. The initiate is thrown into a position of “ambiguity and paradox, a confusion of all customary categories” (p. 7), because the initiate, too, is out of place and loses a sense of proportion. The initiate no longer feels at home and no longer has the reliable, familiar guideposts to keep things in perspective: “What is the point of this exaggeration amounting sometimes to caricature? It seems that to enlarge or diminish or discolour in this way is a primordial mode of abstraction. The outstanding exaggerated feature is made into an object of reflection” (p. 13). In this way, “much of the grotesqueness and monstrosity … may be seen to be aimed not so much at ter-
rorizing or bemusing the neophytes … as at making them vividly and rapidly aware of what may be called the ‘factors’ of their culture” (p. 14).
