Victor Turner

"Meaning is not in symbols but in their use within communities."

"Every society ritualizes its deepest concerns and highest values."

"Transitional periods are dangerous and creative simultaneously."

"The fool's role in ritual is to speak truths power cannot silence."

"Metaphor is how we make sense of the unmakeable sense of."

"Collective effervescence is the glue that holds society together."

"Initiation is the bridge between childhood and adulthood, ignorance and knowledge."

"In the liminal state, all previous distinctions lose their force."

"Ritual time is qualitatively different from clock time."

"The anthropologist becomes a mirror in which the culture sees itself reflected."

"Communitas emerges spontaneously when people are stripped of status."

"Society requires periodic breaks in order to regenerate itself."

"The sacred order is always threatening to collapse into chaos."

"Performance creates reality as much as it represents it."

"We are creatures who make meaning through ritual action."

"The margins are where alternative possibilities take shape."

"Understanding other cultures is understanding the multiplicity within ourselves."

"Ritual is not something we do; it is something that does us."

"The betwixt is where we negotiate who we are and who we might become."

"Every culture must resolve the tension between order and freedom."

"Symbols work precisely because they are inexhaustible in meaning."

"The liminal person is both polluted and holy, dangerous and sacred."

"Anthropological fieldwork is a rite of passage for the researcher."

"Society is a drama in which we are simultaneously authors and actors."

"The spontaneous communitas cannot be planned or manufactured."

"Ritual reveals the invisible structures that organize social life."

"We understand ourselves through the stories we tell about ourselves."

"The sacred is that which commands our respect and demands our obedience."

"In ritual, past and present collapse into a single transformative moment."

"The anthropologist is always an outsider trying to become an insider."