From Limen to Border: A Meditation on the Legacy of Victor Turner for American Cultural Studies

THE FOLLOWING ESSAY ATTEMPTS TO MARK AND ACCOUNT FOR WHAT seems to me a key transition-perhaps displacement is a better term-in recent cultural studies theorizing that has particular relevance for scholars in American studies. I refer specifically to the slippage, or even the virtual disappearance, of the work of symbolic anthropologist Victor Turner as a major methodological influence upon current American studies scholarship. In place of his models of rite of passage and processual analysis we have come to recognize the explanatory power of what might be called a borderlands position-a mode of understanding social and cultural processes and formations that, to judge from the theme of the 1994 meeting of the American Studies Association (Borders and Bonds: Society and Custom in a World of Regions), appears to have a shaping influence on current American studies scholarship. Although there are numerous literary figures and theorists identified with this critical perspective (Gloria Anzaldua and Cherie Moraga especially), in light of the recent shifts in anthropological theorizing I want to examine (perhaps best represented by the post-modem challenge to classic ethnography contained in the essay collection Writing Culture'), I will discuss the important work of Renato Rosaldo, especially his recent Culture and Truth, as exemplary of the challenges and transformations in cultural studies that currently influence scholars working in many areas associated with American culture studies. Specifically, in this brief reflection, I want to