Religions Reviewed

Bynum cautions her readers that the whole of Turner’s writings do not set forth a coherent and uniform theory, so that her critique should not be seen as opposition to an essential position that is integral to his work.[1] And indeed, Turner’s own use of the term “structure” has been subject to ongoing and variable qualifications. In The Ritual Process, he sometimes uses and sometimes avoids the sense of the term as used in the work of Claude Lévi-Strauss.[2] In a later work, he stresses a notion of structure that he attributes to the epistemological writings of Wilhelm Dilthey.[3] This application of the term is focused on “structures of experience,” which Turner distinguishes from “the bloodless ‘cognitive structures,’ static and ‘synchronic,’ so beloved of the ‘thought-structuralists’ who have dominated French anthropology for so long.”[4] 

The nature of Bynum’s analysis in Holy Feast and Holy Fast is decidedly synchronic. She both compares and contrasts medieval sensibilities regarding food with those of the twentieth century, tending to emphasize the extent to which modern readers will find the medieval perspectives “alien.”[5] But her concern is not to demonstrate any causes or mechanisms by which the earlier state was transformed to the later one. Even within the relatively broad timeframe that she has chosen—three centuries or more during the later Middle Ages—she emphasizes a relatively uniform set of ideas governing consistent expressions of female religiosity.[6]  While she provides explicit disclaimers admitting the reality of historical change and difference, she seems only to demonstrate the process by which European religious culture, like the exceptional women whom she studies, does not change through reversal or disruption, but only intensifies its own given character.[7]

[1] Op. cit., pp. 30-31.

[2] Turner, The Ritual Process, pp. 20, 127, 131.

[3] Victor Turner, From Ritual to Theatre: The Human Seriousness of Play (New York: PAJ Publications, 1983), pp. 12-13.

[4] Op. cit., p. 13.

[5] Bynum, Holy Feast, p. 246.

[6] Op. cit., pp. 6-7.

[7] Bynum, Fragmentation, p. 49.