One of the earliest studies to develop this orientation was Victor Turner’s Schism and Continuity in an African Society (1957). Although in the line of Max Gluckman’s Manchester School of anthropological theory, this work has several aspects that are unique. Instead of exam- ining the whole group of the Ndembu of northern Rhodesia, Turner fo- cuses on individuals as they pass through a series of crises (in Turner’s terminology, social dramas). Each of these dramas is analyzed as the culmination of a long period of building tensions in which new power alignments and shifts of allegiance have been taking place.
For Turner, “the widest community of Ndembu is . . . a community of suffering”; and indeed his central antagonist, Sandombu, is a true tragic hero. In the first of a complex series of social dramas involving this man, who has ambitions to be headman of Mukanza village, San- dombu twice insults the village headman, Kahali, as a challenge to his authority. This results in a fierce dispute between them, each threatening the other with sorcery. Sandombu leaves for another village where a notorious sorcerer is supposed to live. A short time later, the insulted headman falls sick and dies. Sandombu is allowed to return to Mukanza, but there is sufficient suspicion to prevent him from replacing the head- man, and a man from another lineage is chosen.
This train of events is deceptively simple. Sandombu’s insult to Kahali was a breach of one of the deepest principles of Ndembu social orga- nization—the authority of the elder generation over the younger. Fur- thermore, Sandombu was Kahali’s sister’s son, and succession from older to younger within the same lineage was looked on with disfavor. There were other reasons to put a check on Sandombu’s ambitions. He was sterile and his sister was barren. This, in itself a sign of sorcery, had important implications; because the Ndembu are matrilineal and a leader must draw his strength from his kinsmen through the female line, the
POLITICAL ANTHROPOLOGY 98
sister’s lack of children would narrow Sandombu’s basis of support. Also, his indiscriminate generosity—a function of his ambition—had brought in strangers who were threatening to the conservative villagers. Finally, rivals for headmanship had an obvious vested interest in accusing Sandombu of sorcery. The result was that the village’s three most pow- erful lineages united in opposition to Sandombu.
For Turner, the norms and structures that had so interested the gen- eration of the 1940s have become the social field, the background before which the real action takes place. Lineage systems, marriage rules, val- ues, and behavioral norms are not unalterable realities, but rather are social idealizations subject to constant manipulation. For example, the norm regarding succession within the lineage was applied to Sandombu but not to Kosanda, who later succeeded his mother’s brother as head- man. Accusations of sorcery were used to justify the public consensus that Sandombu should not be headman; they were only secondarily the basis for such consensus. Thus norms and rules were not abjectly fol- lowed but were emphasized or de-emphasized according to a complex set of criteria.
Such an approach rests on certain underlying assumptions about the nature of society. Society is viewed as a field of forces in dynamic ten- sion in which centrifugal and centripetal tendencies constantly pull against each other. When the tension between fission and cohesiveness becomes acute, a crisis develops, climaxing in the re-establishment of a temporary and unstable equilibrium. There is seldom a complete reso- lution of tensions; rather, the result is a readjustment of forces that lends more strength to one side and depletes the strength of the other. Along with Marc Swartz and Arthur Tuden (1966), Turner has elaborated this process into a diachronic model of political phase development in which a period of mobilization of political capital is followed by an encounter or showdown. The latter involves some sort of breach of the peace in which one party in the conflict attempts to openly challenge the other. This leads to a crisis—“a momentous juncture or turning point in the relations between components of a political field”—which in turn brings about counteracting tendencies as the social group marshals peacemaking forces to avoid complete cleavage of the two sides. Deployment of ad- justive or redressive mechanisms may involve informal arbitration, legal machinery, or public ritual. Finally, there will be a restoration of the peace as the two parties either readjust to a new set of asymmetric power relations or schism entirely.
Although Turner’s book was transitional and still grounded in the structural-functionalism of the 1940s (his stated goal was “to isolate the
cardinal factors underlying Ndembu residential structure”), many of the ideas that would later coalesce as action theory were already evident. In Sandombu, Political Man is seen as a real-life individual, manipulating cultural rules, making choices, and developing strategies—in short, mak- ing goal-oriented decisions.
A major reason for focusing on individuals rather than on groups is that in the individual a number of different systems meet. A group may act out a single role at a particular time, but the individual always em- bodies conflicting roles, at once father and son, leader and follower, warrior and peacemaker. The individual thus expresses the contradictions that may be invisible in studies of groups.