Edith Turner

Edith Turner (June 17, 1921 – June 18, 2016) was an English-American anthropologist, poet, and post-secondary educator. In addition to collaborating with her husband, Victor Witter Turner, on a number of early socio-cultural research projects concerning healing, ritual, and communitas, she continued to develop these topics following his death in 1983, especially the concept of communitas. Edith Turner contributed to the study of humanistic anthropology and was a dedicated social activist her entire life.

Early life Edith Lucy Brocklesby Davis was born in Ely, England, on June 17, 1921, to Lucy Gertrude Davis (formerly Howard) and Reverend Dr. George Brocklesby Davis.

Academic life In 1984, Edith Turner was appointed as a lecturer in anthropology at the University of Virginia. To this day, she has some of the most widely spanning ethnographic fieldwork across the globe.

Her work includes "the Ndembu of Zambia (1951–1954), the Bagisu of Uganda (1966), pilgrimage sites in Mexico (1969, 1970), and pilgrimages in Ireland (1971, 1972). She also studied shrines in India and Sri Lanka (1979), Brazilian carnival and Afro-Brazilian cults (1979), Israeli rituals (1980), Japanese ritual and theater (1981), Yaqui ritual (1981, 1986), Israel pilgrimages (1983), African American healing churches (1985), Civil War reenactments (1986–87), Korean shamanism (1987), Inupiat festivals (1987–1988, 1989, 1990, 1991, 1992, 1993), suburban American rituals, ritual of the Saami of Kola Peninsula in Russia (1993), commemorations of the 150th anniversary of the Great Famine of Ireland (1995), and Christian groups in the United States (1996)".

Selected works with Victor W. Turner (co-author), Image and Pilgrimage in Christian Culture (1978), Columbia University Press 1995 paperback: Turner, Edith L. B. 1955. “The Money Economy Among the Mwinilunga Ndembu”. Rhodes-Livingston Journal 18:19–37. Turner, Edith L. B. 1987. The Spirit and the Drum: A Memoir of Africa. Tucson: University of Arizona Press. Turner, Edith L. B. 1990. “The Whale Decides: Eskimos’ and Ethnographer's Shared Consciousness on the Ice”. Etudes/Inuit/Studies ´ 14 (1–2): 39–54. Turner, Edith L. B., William Blodgett, Singelton Kahona, and Fideli Benwa. 1992. Experiencing Ritual: A New Interpretation of African Healing. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Turner, Edith L. B. 1992. “Poetics and Experience in Anthropological Writing”. In Anthropology and Literature, edited by Paul Benson, 27–47. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Turner, Edith L. B. 1993. “The Reality of Spirits: A Tabooed or Permitted Field of Study”. Anthropology of Consciousness 4 (1): 9–12. Turner, Edith L. B. 1996. The Hands Feel It: Healing and Spirit Presence among a Northern Alaskan People. DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press. Turner, Edith L. B. 1997. “There Are No Peripheries to Humanity: Northern Alaska Nuclear Dumping and the Inupiat’s Search for ˜ Redress”. Anthropology and Humanism 22 (1): 95–109. Turner, Edith L. B. 2000. “Theology and the Anthropological Study of Spirit Events in an Inupiat’s Village”. In Anthropology and Theology: Gods, Icons and God-Talk, edited by Walter Randolph Adams and Frank A. Salamone, 137–61. Lanham, MD: University Press of America. Turner, Edith L. B. 2003. “Fear of Religious Emotion Versus the Need for Research that Encompasses the Fullest Experience”. In Selected Readings in the Anthropology of Religion: Theoretical and Methodological Essays, edited by Stephen D. Glazier and Charles A. Flowerday, 109–18. Westport, CT: Praeger. Turner, Edith L. B. 2005. Among the Healers: Stories of Spiritual and Ritual Healing Around the World. New York: Praeger. Turner, Edith L. B. 2006. The Heart of Lightness: The Life of an Anthropologist. New York: Berghahn. Turner, Edith L. B. 2011. “Our Lady of Knock: Reflections of a Believing Anthropologist”. New Hibernia Review 15 (2): 121–25. Turner, Edith L. B. 2012. Communitas: The Anthropology of Collective Joy. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.