Discuss Turner’s thesis on the social significance of pilgrimages.

Turner’s Thesis: Victor W. Turner holds that pilgrimage has the classic three-stage form of a rite of passage: 

(i) Separation, 

(ii) The liminal stage i.e. the journey itself, the sojourn at the shrine, and the contact with the sacred, and 

(iii) Reaggregation i.e. the home-coming

In this context, Turner asks us to consider two modalities of social experience as under : 

(i) Of structure, and (ii) Of commmunitas.

(i) Structure: In structure people are (a) differentiated by social role and (b) position and linked in an often hierarchical political system. 

(ii) Communitas: On the other hand, communitas presents itself in an undifferentiated community of equals who may recognize each other in an immediate and total way. Communitas “is almost everywhere held to be sacred or ‘holy’. The reason may be that it transgresses or dissolves the norms that govern structured and institutionalized relationships and is accompanied by experiences of unprecendented potency”. Communitas emerges where social structure is not and reaffirms the bonds of essential unity upon which the social order ultimately rests. 

The intervening period and flow of activities between departure from home for the pilgrimage centre and return therefrom to the familiar world is marked out by “liminality, the optimal setting of communitas relations, and communitas, a spontaneously generated relationship between levelled and equal, total and individuated human beings”

Liminality and communitas constitute anti-structure. Anti-structure is the source and origin of the all structures and their critique. It gives suggestion to new possibilities. In the pilgrimage situation the ethos of communitas becomes visible in the social bond which develops among pilgrims and which welds them into a group. Relations among members of the group of pilgrims cut across the social divisions. Pilgrims are relieved for a time from the nets of social structure wherefrom they journey to the pilgrimage centre. It allows temporary release. Therefore, pilgrimage is designated as a form of anti-structure compared to the highly ordered and structured sedentary life of the place of residence. 

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