From Ritual to Theatre: The Human Seriousness of Play

"Turner looks beyond his routinized discipline to an anthropology of experience... We must admire him for this." -- Times Literary Supplement

How is social action related to aesthetics? In what ways do the large and small crises that fill not only the nightly TV news but also our daily lives relate to the genre of theater? Victor Turner deals with these and other questions in a classic study that ranges from anthropology to acting, from everyday life to artistic genres.