【英文翻译版78】马修·恩格尔克：《象征之林》

英文文稿+中文翻译

Zachary Davis: When I was 16, I moved to Madrid, Spain to do a high school semester abroad. It was the first time I’d been in a different country than the United States, and I was amazed at all the ways Spaniards lived differently than me, like taking long naps in the middle of the day and then staying up till midnight eating and drinking in outdoor cafes! Or watching a man with a red cape theatrically kill an angry bull. Or eating a whole lot of jamón serrano. It was exciting to realize that so many things that seemed “natural” to me as an American were really just a different way of life.

扎卡里·戴维斯：16岁的时候，我搬到了西班牙马德里，在国外高中读了一个学期。这是我第一次来到一个不同于美国的国家。我惊讶地发现，西班牙人有着各种与我不同的生活方式，比如中午有长长的午休，在户外咖啡馆吃喝到半夜，观看一个披着红色斗篷的人戏剧性地杀死一头愤怒的公牛，或是吃很多塞拉诺火腿。许多在我这个美国人看来习以为常的事情其实是一种不同于其他地区人们的生活方式。意识到了这一点之后，我很兴奋。

Matthew Engelke: I think one of the central findings of anthropology and one of the big picture it takes is that we are, by and large, creatures of nurture rather than nature. So we are not hardwired to do X or Y. There is not a God gene. There is not, you know, an innate disposition to—you know, these kinds of things which fuel and underpin a lot of western social theory, but also contemporary social, scientific disciplines, and more kind of common understandings, you know, what we might call within anthropology, the folkways of the moderns.

马修·恩格尔克：我认为人类学的核心发现之一，也是最重要的收获之一，就是发现了人类大体上是一种后天形成、而不是自然而成的生物。没有人规定我们必须得做这个或那个，没有什么“上帝基因”这一说，也不存在什么天生的倾向。这些论调不仅促成并巩固了很多西方社会理论，还代表了当代人在社会学和科学领域的普遍认识——用人类学的术语来说，叫“当代民俗”。

Matthew Engelke: My name is Matthew Engelke. I'm a professor of religion at Columbia University where I teach courses in the anthropology of religion as well as on media, ritual, and the body.

马修·恩格尔克：我是马修·恩格尔克，是哥伦比亚大学的宗教学教授。我教授宗教人类学以及媒介、仪式和身体方面的课程。

Zachary Davis: In the mid-20th century, British anthropologists Victor and Edith Turner studied the Ndembu people of present day Zambia. They wrote about their findings in their 1967 book The Forest of Symbols. Through their study of this one African culture, they helped change the way anthropologists and other scholars understood humans everywhere.

扎卡里·戴维斯：20世纪中期，英国人类学家维克多·特纳和伊迪丝·特纳研究了生活在今天赞比亚地区的恩登布人。他们在1967年出版的《象征之林》一书中写下了他们的发现。他们对这一非洲文化的研究促使人类学家和其他学者改变了理解各地人类的方式。

Matthew Engelke: This is what anthropology at its best does. It challenges our own understandings of common sense and what we can take for granted in terms of everything from social relations to political organization to even the values that we hold.

马修·恩格尔克：这就是人类学的最佳作用。它挑战了我们自己对常识的理解，挑战了从社会关系到政治组织、再到价值观层面我们认为理所当然的东西。

Zachary Davis: Welcome to Writ Large, a podcast about how books change the world. I’m Zachary Davis. In each episode, I talk with one of the world’s leading scholars about one book that changed the course of history. For this episode, I sat down with Professor Matthew Engelke to discuss Victor and Edith Turner’s The Forest of Symbols.

扎卡里·戴维斯：欢迎收听：改变你和世界的100书，在这里我们为大家讲述改变世界的书籍。我是扎卡里·戴维斯。每一集，我都会和一位世界顶尖学者讨论一本影响历史进程的书。在本集，我和马修·恩格尔克教授一起讨论维克多·特纳和伊迪丝·特纳的《象征之林》。

Matthew Engelke: Anthropology as a modern academic discipline really got its roots in the 1850s and 60s. And of course, there are a number of important things that are happening at this period of time, primarily the western expansion of empires. It was in countries and nations such as France and England and also the United States in which anthropology first took shape. And it was primarily driven by the kinds of encounters that we were seeing during the colonial period with radically different cultures and ways of life.

马修·恩格尔克：人类学这门现代学科真正扎根于19世纪五、六十年代。当然，在这个时期还发生了许多重要的事情，主要的便是帝国向西扩张。人类学最初形成于法国、英国、美国这样的国家中，推动其形成的主要是殖民时期各种不同文化与生活方式的相遇。

Zachary Davis: At this time, France, England, and the United States had colonies around the world. Colonization was of course primarily about brutal resource extraction, but colonial powers were also very interested in studying the new cultures they were encountering.

扎卡里·戴维斯：当时，法国、英国和美国在世界各地都有殖民地。开拓殖民地当然主要是为了残忍地掠夺资源，但殖民者也很想研究他们遇到的新文化。

Matthew Engelke: So it was driven by the dual emphases of curiosity, but also colonial power.

马修·恩格尔克：它受到了好奇心和殖民力量的双重驱动。

Zachary Davis: In the mid-19th century, various anthropological institutions were established, such as the American Ethnological Society in New York and the Ethnological Society of London. Because anthropology was such a new field, early anthropologists drew heavily on already established fields such as anatomy, linguistics, and ethnology. And after Darwin published the Origin of Species, the theory of evolution began to take hold in various corners of the scientific community.

扎卡里·戴维斯：19世纪中期，各种人类学机构相继成立，如纽约的美国民族学学会和伦敦民族学学会。人类学是一个全新的领域，早期的人类学家大量借鉴了已有的学科，如解剖学、语言学和民族学。在达尔文发表了《物种起源》之后，进化论开始在学界的各个角落占据主导地位。

Matthew Engelke: In those early days, there was a very strong also push for social evolutionism. So it was driven by the work of Darwin, which then comes into anthropology through such figures as Herbert Spencer and whether or not we could apply what Darwin was finding in the realm of biology to the realm of society.

马修·恩格尔克：人类学在早期也受到了社会进化论的有力推动。达尔文的理论推动了人类学的产生。后来，赫伯特·斯宾塞等人探讨了能否将达尔文在生物学上的发现应用于现实社会，使其理论进入到了人类学领域。

Zachary Davis: By the turn of the 20th century, anthropology was getting firmly established and legitimized in universities.

扎卡里·戴维斯：到了19-20世纪之交，人类学在大学里建立起来，取得了牢固且合法的位置。

Matthew Engelke: Institutions such as Oxford University and Columbia University, which became important early centers, first started hiring anthropologists. And the real crux of anthropology at that period of time was grappling with the diversity of cultures and how to understand the diversity of cultures against a backdrop assumption, often at the time that there was some kind of unity underlying these cultures. So the tension between universality and particularity—what makes us the same and what makes us different.

马修·恩格尔克：牛津大学、哥伦比亚大学等机构开始聘请人类学家，成为了早期重要的人类学中心。那时，人类学的核心议题是研究文化多样性，以及如何在某个背景假设下理解文化多样性。在当时，这些文化背后往往有着某种普遍性。所以人类学就研究起了普遍性与特殊性之间的矛盾——什么让人类相同，什么又让人类彼此不同。

Zachary Davis: Humans have always been aware that there are differences between peoples and cultures. But as anthropology developed as a discipline, western researchers began to look at different cultures with a growing recognition that their own ways of life weren’t necessarily the most correct or advanced, but instead just different.

扎卡里·戴维斯：人们一直发现，各民族和文化之间存在着差异。但随着人类学这门学科的发展，西方研究者开始审视不同的文化，越来越认识到他们自己的生活方式不一定是最正确或最先进的，仅仅是与其他不同的。

Matthew Engelke: I think what starts to become a distinctive aspect of the anthropological approach right around the turn of the 20th century is a recognition that the ways in which we think about the world, whoever we happen to be Victorian gentleman or, you know, officers of the Smithsonian Institution. The ways in which we think about the world and how the world is organized might not be the natural way, might not be the rightfully privileged way.

马修·恩格尔克：我认为19-20世纪之交，人类学方法的一个独特方面在于，它承认了不论我们是维多利亚时代的绅士，还是史密森尼学会的职员，我们对世界与世界组织方式的思考可能并不是自然形成的，也不是高人一等的。

Matthew Engelke: In other words, you start to see in the 1920s the development of what the anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski called “the native’s point of view”. That is to say, we need to take seriously the way in which other people understand the world, challenging our own common sense presuppositions.

马修·恩格尔克：换句话说，在20世纪20年代你会开始看到人类学家勃洛尼斯拉夫·马林诺夫斯基所说的“当地人观点”。这意味着我们要认真看待其他人理解世界的方式，打破我们自己常识性的预设。

Zachary Davis: Many of these early anthropologists saw value in studying other cultures because they revealed the beautiful variety of human life-ways. And over time, scholars of this new field worked to refine its research methods.

扎卡里·戴维斯：许多这些早期的人类学家看到了研究其他文化的价值，看到它揭示了人类生活方式的美丽多样性。渐渐地，这个新领域的学者们努力完善其研究方法。

Matthew Engelke: Figures like Franz Boas in the United States and Bronislaw Malinowski in the United Kingdom were two of the founding fathers. And you know, what's interesting about both Boas and Malinowsky is that they both insisted on what became the hallmark of the anthropological method, at least within the Anglophone world, which was in-depth field work with a particular group of people.

马修·恩格尔克：美国的弗朗茨·博厄斯和英国的勃洛尼斯拉夫·马林诺夫斯基是两位先驱。他俩有意思的地方在于，至少在英语世界里，都坚持把对特定人群进行深入的田野调查作为人类学方法的标志。

Zachary Davis: This anthropological method that Boas and Malinowsky helped establish quickly became standard, and was the approach Victor Turner would be trained in when he was getting his start in the field.

扎卡里·戴维斯：博厄斯和马林诺夫斯基推动建立的这种人类学方法很快成为了标准。这也是后来维克多·特纳在这个领域初入这个领域时学到的方法。

Matthew Engelke: He was born in Glasgow in 1920 and he grew up without his father around. His mother and father were estranged and he spent most of his time with his mother, who was an actress in the Scottish National Theatre.

马修·恩格尔克：1920年，特纳出生在格拉斯哥，从小父亲就不在他身边。他的父母关系疏离，大部分时间他都和母亲在一起。他的母亲是苏格兰国家剧院的演员。

Zachary Davis: Turner attended the University College London where he initially studied poetry and classics. But soon after he enrolled, World War II broke out.

扎卡里·戴维斯：特纳在伦敦大学学院上学，最初学习诗歌和古典文学。但入学后不久，第二次世界大战就爆发了。

Matthew Engelke: During the Second World War,Turner was a conscientious objector, which at the time carried a huge amount of stigma, because it was seen as a kind of a dereliction of duty to the nation. So he ended up serving in a bomb disposal unit in Oxfordshire during the Second World War. And it was there where he had had his university studies interrupted that he really started to discover his anthropological sensibility and his interest in other cultures.

马修·恩格尔克：二战期间，特纳出于良心拒服兵役。这在当时是一个巨大的污点，人们觉得这是在拒绝履行对国家的义务。于是二战时，他最终来到了牛津郡的一个拆弹部队服役。在那儿，他中断了大学学业，却开始发现了自己的人类学天分和对其他文化的兴趣。

Zachary Davis: By chance, Turner met a group of like-minded people in his bomb disposal unit. They were very interested in various types of art and cultural expression, including Buddhism and French symbolist poetry. And their conversations sparked Turner’s interest in learning about other cultures and ways of life. After the war, he returned to University College and shifted his studies to anthropology. After graduating, he pursued a doctorate in anthropology at Manchester University.

扎卡里·戴维斯：偶然间，特纳在拆弹部队遇到了一群志同道合的人。他们对各类艺术和文化表现形式都非常感兴趣，包括佛教和法国象征主义诗歌。他们的谈话激发了特纳学习其他文化和生活方式的兴趣。二战后，他回到了伦敦大学学院，研究方向转向了人类学。毕业后，他在曼彻斯特大学攻读人类学博士。

Matthew Engelke: He received his anthropological training and education under the work of a South African at the University of Manchester named Max Gluckman. Now, Max Gluckman, who ruled at the University of Manchester from the 1950s onwards was this incredibly charismatic figure. And he drew a large number of students with whom he engaged in a series of, you know, very significant debates to forward the field of anthropology in the 1950s and 60s.

马修·恩格尔克：他在曼彻斯特大学一位名叫马克斯·格拉克曼的南非学者门下求学、接受学术训练。马克斯·格拉克曼从20世纪50年代起开始在曼彻斯特大学执教。他极具魅力，吸引了大量学生，与他们开展了一系列非常重要的辩论，在50、60年代推动了人类学的发展。

Matthew Engelke: And I think part of what gave Gluckman his edge is that he came from South Africa. He was a South African Jew. He was a Marxist. He was seen as someone who, you know, not coming from the elite center of English society, British society, but someone from the colonial periphery. And that, I think, gave him an incredibly valuable perspective. And it was a bit of grit in the oyster with respect to the ways in which they approached the anthropological project.

马修·恩格尔克：我认为格拉克曼在这个领域之所以有优势，部分原因是他来自南非。他是南非的犹太人，也是一个马克思主义者，不属于英国社会精英阶层的中心，而来自偏远的殖民地。我觉得这带给了他非常宝贵的视角。就他们做人类学研究的方式来说，这些经历就像是牡蛎中的沙砾一般。

Zachary Davis: Gluckman’s charisma captivated Turner and further solidified his interest in anthropology. And Gluckman’s many connections in central and southern Africa shaped the research that Turner would become famous for.

扎卡里·戴维斯：格拉克曼的魅力吸引了特纳，进一步巩固了他对人类学的兴趣。格拉克曼与非洲中部、南部的许多联系促成了特纳后来闻名遐迩的研究。

Matthew Engelke: The figures at the Manchester School, as it came to be known, were working in mostly colonial contexts in central and southern Africa, and they were deeply interested in the ways in which colonialism was affecting local communities and ways of life.

马修·恩格尔克：正如我们所知道的那样，曼彻斯特学派的人类学家主要在非洲中部、南部的殖民地区调研。他们很想知道殖民主义如何影响了当地居民和他们的生活方式。

Zachary Davis: Europeans began colonizing this part of Africa in the 17th century. England, the Netherlands, France, and Belgium established colonies in central and southern Africa to extract gold, diamonds, ivory, rubber, and other natural resources. The European influence drastically changed life for the local populations. And unlike some other anthropologists, students from the Manchester School didn’t turn their eyes away from these changes. In fact, many came to these regions specifically to study the impact Europeans were having on the local populations.

扎卡里·戴维斯：17世纪起，欧洲人开始在非洲这一带进行殖民活动。英国、荷兰、法国和比利时在非洲中部、南部建立了殖民地，开采黄金、钻石、象牙、橡胶和其他自然资源。欧洲的影响极大地改变了当地居民的生活。与其他一些人类学家不同的是，曼彻斯特学派的学生并没有对这些变化视而不见。事实上，许多学生来到这些地区，专门研究欧洲人对当地人的影响。

Matthew Engelke: There's a real tension, I think, within a lot of anthropological work between romantic and realistic views of society. A lot of anthropologists are very romantic. There's a certain kind of romanticism to the discipline of anthropology, which wants to emphasize, you know, “the valuable, seemingly timeless life ways of the other and the lessons that we can learn.”

马修·恩格尔克：我觉得在许多人类学研究工作中，对社会的浪漫看法和现实看法之间存在着一种非常紧张的关系。许多人类学家都非常浪漫。人类学这门学科有着某种浪漫主义的特质。它想强调“他者有价值的、似乎永恒的生活方式以及我们可以从中学到的东西”。

Zachary Davis: This anthropological approach had a particular vision of non-European cultures.

扎卡里·戴维斯：这种人类学方法对非欧洲文化有一种特别的看法。

Matthew Engelke: This idea of a pristine way of life, small scale society in which there's a kind of, you know, authentic existence and connection to the natural world, unadulterated by the trappings of modernity in which some kind of true expression of the human character can be lived out.

马修·恩格尔克：它觉得，这种原始的生活方式和小规模的社会是一种真正的生活方式，和自然界之间有着真正的联系。这种生活方式不受现代性的束缚，置身其中时可以展现出某种真正的人类性格。

Matthew Engelke: But of course, no life way is timeless. No life way is stuck or fixed. And, you know, in the 1950s, certainly it was impossible to travel to Central Africa and find some kind of, you know, pristine society which hadn't been touched by the forces or the influences of modernity.

马修·恩格尔克：当然，没有哪一种生活方式是永恒的，固定不变的。而且，在20世纪50年代，你当然不可能跑去中非旅行，找到某种没有被现代性的力量或影响所触及的原始社会。

Zachary Davis: This romantic view wasn’t only factually inaccurate, it was also based in fantasy.

扎卡里·戴维斯：这种浪漫的观点不仅与事实不符，也是仅仅基于幻想的。

Matthew Engelke: It's you projecting onto another group of people or some imagined group of people, your own fairy tales. I mean, that's one reading of the romantic strand of anthropology. And I think it's you know, it's a reading we need to grapple with.

马修·恩格尔克：你不过是把自己心目中的童话故事投射到另一群人或一些想象中的人身上。这是对人类学浪漫色彩的一种解读。但我觉得，这也是我们需要努力改变的一种解读。

Zachary Davis: Many of Gluckman’s students were interested in studying the developing urban centers in mining towns. These mines, established by European colonizers, brought together many people from different backgrounds and cultures. They were interested in studying how these people of varying backgrounds negotiated their differences while living close together in this new capitalist economy. But Turner’s interests lay outside the cities. He was drawn to more traditional, pastoral forms of life, and that shaped the subcultures he chose to study.

扎卡里·戴维斯：格拉克曼的许多学生都很乐于研究矿业城镇中正在发展的城镇中心。这些由欧洲殖民者建立的矿场将许多来自不同背景和文化的人聚集在一起。这些学生想要研究，当这些不同背景的人们在这个新的资本主义经济中紧密地生活在一起时，会如何协调彼此的差异。但特纳的兴趣在城市之外，他感兴趣的是更传统的田园生活方式，而这也影响了他选择哪个亚文化来研究。

Matthew Engelke: Turner actually spent most of his time in villages outside of this urban setting. But in a way, his focus in a more kind of romantic vein of anthropological imagining in some ways turned out to be more radical or maybe just as innovative in the fact that he focused very squarely on the centrality of ritual to social life. And for a lot of his contemporaries, certainly at Manchester, ritual, religious tradition, symbolism, these kinds of things were kind of icing on the cake or not the real stuff of society, because it wasn't politics. It wasn't economics.

马修·恩格尔克：特纳的大部分时间都花在了城市之外的村庄。但在某种程度上，他对人类学想象的浪漫关注在某种程度上更激进，或者说也很创新，因为他非常关注仪式在社会生活中的中心地位。而对于他的很多曼彻斯特大学的同时代人来说，仪式、宗教传统、象征主义这些东西只不过是锦上添花。它们与政治、经济无关，不是社会中真正重要的东西。

Matthew Engelke: And I think part of what Turner shows in this focus on ritual is just how central ritual is to the work of politics, to the work of economics, to the fabric of society. That ritual is not the dressing, is not the colorful extra element, but it is through ritual that we articulate our values and live those values out. And so this is a large part of what The Forest of Symbols is grappling with as a text.

马修·恩格尔克：我觉得从特纳对仪式的关注中，我们可以看到仪式政治、经济和社会结构是多么重要。仪式并不是装饰，也不是丰富多彩的额外元素。正是通过仪式，我们展现了我们的价值观，并将这些价值观付诸实践。这就是《象征之林》这本书所要阐述的主要问题。

Zachary Davis: So Victor Turner, I'd love to know the circumstance of how he arrived at the Ndembu people and what was his field work like?

扎卡里·戴维斯：我想知道，维克多·特纳是怎么到了恩登布人那里，又是怎么进行的田野调查。

Matthew Engelke: It was not unusual in the 1940s and 50s or really up through the 1940s and 50s for the field sites of anthropologists in training to be negotiated between, you know, the individual involved and the supervisor. So in this case, Max Gluckman, the professor at Manchester. And Gluckman, who had very, very strong connections in Northern Rhodesia and down through South Africa, in a sense, was able to kind of place his students with different communities or groups of people.

马修·恩格尔克：在20世纪四、五十年代，或者说直到那个时候，人类学家在学术训练中的田野调查地往往是由参训人员和导师一同决定的。而曼彻斯特大学教授马克斯·格拉克曼在北罗得西亚和南非都有很硬的关系，从某种意义上说，他能把他的学生安置在不同的社区或人群中。

Zachary Davis: Turner told Gluckman he was interested in studying ritual, and he arranged to do his field work in Northern Rhodesia, present-day Zambia. It was the early 1950s, and Turner was working on his PhD.

扎卡里·戴维斯：特纳告诉格拉克曼他想要研究仪式，打算在北罗得西亚、也就是今天的赞比亚做田野调查。那时是20世纪50年代初，特纳正在读博。

Matthew Engelke: One of the most important aspects, I think, of understanding his work, and it's relevant not only to how it was carried out, but to how it was produced, is that he went to the field with his family. And this was highly frowned upon by his professor. His professor did not want him to go with his wife and young children to the field because it was seen as, you know, a distraction. It was seen as not a place to bring the family. But he did. He insisted on it, as did his wife.

马修·恩格尔克：我觉得要想了解他的工作，我们就有必要了解其中一个重要的事情。这个事情不仅关乎于他如何开展工作，还关乎于他如何呈现工作结果。他的家人和他一起去做了田野调查。他的教授非常不赞成他这么做，觉得带妻子和年幼的孩子一起去田野会让他分心。田野不是什么适合带家人去的地方。但特纳还是这么做了。他和妻子都坚持这么做。

Zachary Davis: His supervisor allowed it—on one condition.

扎卡里·戴维斯：导师允许了，但提了一个条件。

Matthew Engelke: His supervisor made a stipulation, the kind of stipulation that, you know, today would strike us as completely outrageous. But his supervisor is said to have agreed only by saying, OK, well, you can go to the field with Eddie as long as she doesn't get pregnant in the field. So this kind of very, you know, patriarchal, authoritative structure of the academy and certain understandings of gender sensibilities, really dominated the big picture.

马修·恩格尔克：导师提了个要求，这个要求在今天看来会觉得很没道理。据说，他的导师说，只要你的妻子伊迪丝不在田野调查期间怀孕，就能跟你一起去。从这儿你可以感受到，父权式权威结构和对性别的敏感充斥着整个学术界。

Zachary Davis: Victor Turner’s wife Edith did more than just care for the kids. She became a central part of the research team on this project and helped her husband write The Forest of Symbols. Victor, Edith, and their two young children lived with the Ndembu people for over two years.

扎卡里·戴维斯：维克多·特纳的妻子伊迪丝不仅仅照顾着孩子们，她还成为这个项目研究团队的核心成员，帮助丈夫撰写了《象征之林》。维克多、伊迪丝和他们的两个孩子与恩登布人一起生活了两年多。

Matthew Engelke: These are people in what is today Zambia and parts of the Democratic Republic of Congo and even slightly into Angola, who at the time in the 1950s lived in highly fluid villages. So they were matrilineal, but virilocal. So they traced their genealogies through the line of the mother. But women lived with their husbands’ kinfolk.

马修·恩格尔克：恩登布人生活在今天的赞比亚和刚果民主共和国的部分地区，有的甚至来到了今天安哥拉的部分区域。20世纪50年代，他们生活在高度流动的村庄中。他们有母系传统，但以男性为中心构建家庭。他们通过母亲那边的血缘来追溯自己的家谱，但女性和丈夫的亲属生活在一起。

Matthew Engelke: So their allegiances are to a group of people with whom they do not necessarily live, because they are connected through the mother's line. And this is especially the case with the woman in question, the wife in question, because she doesn't feel an affinity or connection to her in-laws, if you will. And one of the things that stuck out for the Turners in their fieldwork was just how much this led to fission and fractures within social life.

马修·恩格尔克：他们拥护的是一群不一定和他们生活在一起的人，因为他们彼此间通过母亲的血缘联系在一起。这一点在他们分析的一位女性身上表现得尤为明显。这位妻子并不觉得自己与姻亲有什么亲近感或联系。在特纳夫妇的田野调查中，有一件事让他们印象深刻，那就是这种情况在很大程度上导致了社会生活的割裂。

Matthew Engelke: Contrary to the image of, you know, the romantic anthropological sense that, oh, I want to go study this group of people who live in a kind of timeless tradition where things never change and there's wonderful stability.

马修·恩格尔克：这与人们的印象完全不同。对人类学有着浪漫想象的人会说，我要去研究这群人，他们生活在一种永恒的传统中，情况永远不会变，极其稳定。

Matthew Engelke: In Ndembu social life there's a constant state of change. It was a constant flux. And it wasn't all, you know, kind of peace, love and happiness. There were tensions within the organization of social structure which were negotiated through and made sense of through Ndembu ritual life.

马修·恩格尔克：然而恩登布人的社会生活却处在不断的变化之中，总有各种改变。而且这些变化并不完全是和平、友爱、幸福的。社会结构的组织中存在着紧张关系，这些紧张关系在恩登布人的仪式生活中被协调并合理化。

Zachry Davis: This is what Turner was interested in—how the Ndembu community worked out these tensions through rites of passage.

扎卡里·戴维斯：这正是特纳感兴趣的地方——恩登布人如何借助“通过仪式”来解决这些紧张的关系。

Matthew Engelke: A rite of passage is a ritual which marks the transition from one state of being to another. So a rite of passage is something like a marriage or a funeral. Funerals are incredibly important rites of passage because they mark for us, whoever we are, the proper transition to death, and in many cases—not all, but in many cases the afterlife. So a rite of passage has to be held in order for this transformation to take place.

马修·恩格尔克：“通过仪式”是一种标志着一个人从一种状态过渡到另一种状态的仪式，有点像婚礼或葬礼。葬礼是一种非常重要的通过仪式，因为它标志着无论我们是谁，我们都步入死亡。在很多、但不是所有情况下，葬礼还标志着我们步入到来世。要想让这种过渡发生，就必须举行通过仪式。

Matthew Engelke: The Forest of Symbols, which was published in 1967, is a collection of essays detailing both specific Ndembu rituals and more general theories of how we should understand ritual symbolism and ritual processes such as rites of passage.

马修·恩格尔克：1967年出版的《象征之林》是一本论文集，里面详细介绍了恩登布人的具体仪式以及一些更普遍的理论，这些理论探讨了我们应当如何理解通过仪式等仪式的象征意义和举办过程。

Zachary Davis: Many of Turner’s essays in The Forest of Symbols focus on specific Ndembu rites of passage.

扎卡里·戴维斯：特纳在《象征之林》中写下的许多论文都聚焦于某场恩登布人的通过仪式。

Matthew Engelke: One of these is on the girls puberty ritual, which in the local language is called Konga. And what Turner does in this essay is delve into a very, very detailed analysis of all of the symbolic elements of the ritual symbolism, the central symbol in the particular ritual here is what's called the symbolism of the milk tree. So the milk tree is an indigenous tree, which is called the “milk tree”, because it emits a white sap, which is reminiscent of breast milk.

马修·恩格尔克：其中一篇论文探讨了女孩的青春期仪式，这种仪式在当地语言中被称为“Konga”。特纳在这篇论文中对仪式的所有象征性元素进行了非常详细的分析。这场仪式的核心象征元素是乳树。乳树是当地的一种树，之所以叫这个名字，是因为树里会流出白色的汁液，让人联想到母乳。

Matthew Engelke: So this is important to the Ndembu because they are matrilineal. That is to say, again, they trace genealogy through the mother. So it is breast milk, which becomes the kind of master symbol of belonging and connection for a particular family. I think one of the things that really stands out about the ways in which Victor Turner addresses ritual symbolism is the depth to which he deconstructs the meaning and the significance of something seemingly as simple as the sap from a tree. And through his analysis of this milky white substance, he tells us about the ways in which the Ndembu understand matrilineal relations, about the differences between men and women, about the tensions between mothers and daughters, and about the ways in which the unity of the Ndembu people is both brought together through that symbol, but also challenged by that symbol.

马修·恩格尔克：这对恩德姆布人来说很重要，因为他们是母系社会，也就是说，他们通过母亲来追溯家谱。于是，母乳成为了一个家庭归属与联系的主要象征。我觉得，维克多·特纳处理仪式象征主义的独到之处在于，他深度解构了树汁等看似简单的东西的含义和意义。通过对这种乳白色物质的分析，他告诉了我们恩登布人如何理解母系关系、男人和女人之间的差异、母亲和女儿之间的紧张关系，而这种象征又如何既让恩登布人团结起来，又破坏了他们的团结。

Zachary Davis: One of Turner’s big insights is that symbols often bring together seemingly contradictory elements.

扎卡里·戴维斯：特纳的一个重要见解是，符号常常将看似矛盾的元素结合在一起。

Matthew Engelke: And let's think about this with respect to, let's say, the American flag, which is a symbol of unity. But the elements of that symbol also emphasize distinctiveness and difference. You have 13 stripes for the 13 original colonies and you have 50 stars, one for each of the existing states. And so within something like the flag of the United States, you can make an argument, “Look, we're all one people.” And yet at the same time, point to it and say, “No, we're not all one people, we're 50 people. And, oh, we need to understand ourselves against why are these 13. Why are they privilege? Oh, because they're the original states.”

马修·恩格尔克：我们来思考一下这个问题。比如，美国国旗是团结的象征，但这个符号中的元素也强调了独特性和差异性。国旗上的十三条条文象征着最初的十三块殖民地，五十颗星象征着如今的五十个州。所以面对美国国旗，你可以说：“看，我们都是一个国家的人。”但同时，你也可以指着它说：“不，我们不是，我们是五十个不同地方的人。还有，为什么要单独拎出来这十三个呢？它们有什么了不起的？哦，原来它们是最初的十三个州。”

Matthew Engelke: So there are all sorts of ways in which ritual symbols or, you know, central social symbols contain these multilayered or as he would put a kind of polysemic elements. We cannot ever reduce the significance or the meaning of a symbol to one thing. And this is one of the most, I think, important aspects of his work.

马修·恩格尔克：所以，仪式符号或核心的社会符号可以以各种各样的方式包含这些多层次的——或者用特纳的话来说，“多义性”的元素。我们不能把某个符号的涵义简化为某个单一的意思。我觉得这是特纳这本书最重要的方面之一。

Zachary Davis: What are the Turners’ arguments about the social role of ritual?

扎卡里·戴维斯：特纳夫妇如何看待仪式的社会作用？

Matthew Engelke: Turner, in The Forest of Symbols makes a few very important points about ritual and ritual symbols. Maybe one of the most important is that ritual symbols produce action. Ritual symbols motivate us to do things in the world. Ritual symbols also reflect our values and help us understand what it is we hold valuable, right?

马修·恩格尔克：针对仪式和仪式符号，特纳在《象征之林》中提出了几个非常重要的观点。也许其中最重要的一点是，仪式符号推动行为，我们在这个世界上做事情。仪式符号也反映了我们的价值观，帮助我们理解什么是自己认为有价值的东西。

Matthew Engelke: I think one of the central pillars of what he is arguing is that we can look at rituals as a kind of microcosm, a symbolic microcosm of a larger social order. And so we can read rituals as a manual or a map of who we are or what we are as a society.

马修·恩格尔克：我觉得，他观点的核心支柱之一是，我们可以把仪式看成一种微型世界、一种有着复杂社会秩序的象征性的微型世界。这么看，我们可以把仪式看作阐释我们是谁、我们这个社会是什么样的手册或地图。

Zachary Davis: And these findings about ritual and symbolism among the Ndembu are relevant beyond Ndembu culture.

扎卡里·戴维斯：这些关于恩登布人的仪式和象征主义的发现，也适用于恩登布文化以外的其他东西。

Matthew Engelke: Probably the most significant essay in The Forest of Symbols is an essay on the concept of liminality, which Turner describes as “the state of being betwixt and between.” Liminality is often a central part of ritual action, and it is the moment of a ritual process in which the actors are no longer constrained by the structures or expectations of society.

马修·恩格尔克：《象征之林》中最重要的论文可能是一篇关于“阈限”的论文。特纳将“阈限”描述为“介于两者之间的状态”。阈限往往是仪式行动的核心部分，是仪式过程中行动者不再受社会结构或期望约束的时刻。

Zachary Davis: One example is a student’s passage from high school to college.

扎卡里·戴维斯：一个例子是学生从高中到大学的过程。

Matthew Engelke: The summer between high school and college can be understood as a liminal period. And this is something that the Turners and those who have been inspired by the Turners have elaborated upon at great length. So what makes you liminal? Well, you are a high school graduate, but you are not yet a college student.

马修·恩格尔克：高中和大学之间的夏天可以被看作一个阈限期。这就是特纳夫妇和他们的受他们启发的后继者花大量篇幅阐述的东西。什么让你具有阈限性？答案是：你高中毕业了，但还不是大学生。

Matthew Engelke: So what are you supposed to do? Well, you're supposed to enjoy a certain amount, I mean, at least in one of the prototypes, you enjoy a certain amount of freedom from the strictures of expectation. You're no longer a student. You're no longer a child, but you're not yet an adult. So you are, as Turner put it, betwixt and between.

马修·恩格尔克：那么你应该做什么？至少在最初的一个情况下，你会享有一定程度的自由，不再受各种期待的束缚。你不再是学生或小孩，但还没成为一个成年人。就像特纳说的，你介于二者之间。

Matthew Engelke: OK, so what he showed in his work on liminality is how these liminal moments are central to our self-recognition of the structures under which we normally live. The function, if you will, of liminality, is on one account very conservative. That is to say, you sometimes give people freedom to go wild, in the process of doing so, what you're really trying to do is help them to appreciate the norms of everyday life. So you have to leave something temporarily in order to understand the significance of the structures under which you normally operate.

马修·恩格尔克：所以他在关于阈限的论文中展示了，这些阈限时刻如何对我们认识自己日常生活的结构至关重要。阈限的功能可以说在某种程度上非常传统。也就是说，有时候你会给人们疯一把的自由，但这么做的时候，你其实真正想做的事帮助他们去欣赏日常生活的规范。你必须暂时离开一些东西，才能理解你日常操作的结构有何意义。

Zachary Davis: Like when I go camping and I really miss my bed.

扎卡里·戴维斯：比如，我去露营的时候，真的很想念我的床。

Matthew Engelke: Exactly, right, yes. So, I mean, you know, it might seem a stretch to try to link this to, you know, a ritual that takes place in central Africa in the 1950s. But I think one of the real kind of genius elements of Turner's work is the ability to show that the lessons of liminality apply.

马修·恩格尔克：没错。我的意思是，尽管把这个和20世纪50年代非洲中部的仪式联系起来，可能显得有些牵强，但我觉得特纳的作品中真正的天才之处恰恰在于，能向我们展现阈限的原理适用于他处。

Matthew Engelke: Now let's think about this in relation, if I may, just for a second, to something that literally the entire world is undergoing at the moment, and that is the covid pandemic. We are living now in a liminal moment. We—and by “we” I mean the world—the world is living in a liminal moment. What does that mean? The normal rules have been suspended. The norm, the structures of everyday life have been suspended. We are liminal. We are betwixt and between.

马修·恩格尔克：现在，让我们来思考一下这个问题和当下的关系。当下新冠疫情在全世界蔓延，我们正处在一个阈限时刻。这里的“我们”是指全世界——全世界都处在一个阈限时刻。这意味着什么？意味着往常的规范已经暂停了，日常规范与结构已经中止。我们变得有阈限性，处于两端之间。

Matthew Engelke: And the question is, well, when we come out on the other end, what are the lessons we are going to have learned through this process of reflection? And Turner referred to the liminal period as a stage of reflection. What are the lessons we are going to have learned about? What it is we want to regain and what it is we want to reconstitute, to reorganize in a new way?

马修·恩格尔克：问题是，当我们从另一端出来时，我们会在反思的过程中学到什么教训？特纳将阈限期称为反思的阶段。我们会学到什么教训？我们想要以新的方式恢复、重建什么？

Zachary Davis: In their later work, the Turners focused on liminality in the social movements of their time.

扎卡里·戴维斯：在后来的研究中，特纳夫妇聚焦于他们那个时代社会运动中的阈限。

Matthew Engelke: Both Victor and Edith Turner tried to show the ways in which, for example, most proximate to their own lives, the kind of countercultural movements of the 1960s, fueled the potentials for social change around civil rights, around our understandings of gender and equality, around the nature of all sorts of social hierarchies.

马修·恩格尔克：维克多·特纳和伊迪丝·特纳都试图展现那些与自己生活最接近的活动，如20世纪60年代的反文化运动如何激发了民权、性别观念、平等观念、社会等级制度性质等方面社会变革的潜力。

Matthew Engelke: They referred to this as a kind of liminality, as a kind of what Turner called in his essay on liminality, “a fruitful darkness”. Liminality is a fruitful darkness. I just love that phrase and the ways in which it allows us to reflect upon how structures hem us in and how we break free of those structures in certain moments and are given the opportunity in some cases to reinforce them.

马修·恩格尔克：他们称之为一种阈限，一种特纳在其关于阈限的文章中所说的“富有成果的黑暗”。阈限是一种富有成果的黑暗。我很喜欢这个说法，它让我们反思结构如何束缚我们、我们如何在某些时刻挣脱这些结构，以及在某些情况下我们如何获得了巩固它们的机会。

Matthew Engelke: You say, you don't want to give up your bed. You want to go camping every once in a while, but it helps you appreciate your nice fluffy pillow back home. So, you know, that's a use of liminality. That's an outworking of liminal experiences in which it allows us to appreciate what we have. But the Turners became increasingly interested in even the revolutionary potentials of liminality.

马修·恩格尔克：你说，你不想离开你的床。你想偶尔去露营，不过露营会让你回家之后欣赏起你那漂亮的绒毛枕头。这就是对阈限的运用，是对阈限体验的一种发挥，让我们能够欣赏我们所拥有的东西。特纳夫妇对阈限的革命性潜力越来越感兴趣。

Zachary Davis: How would you describe the longer term influence of the Turners’ work and maybe of cultural anthropology as a whole? How does the world look different because of their work?

扎卡里·戴维斯：您觉得特纳的研究以及整个文化人类学有哪些长期的影响？他们的研究让世界有了哪些不同？

Matthew Engelke: The Forest of Symbols became very influential, not only in anthropology, but in history, In literary criticism, in religious studies and in performance studies. These were all fields in which the work of Victor Turner. The work of Victor and Edith Turner really shaped debate about the centrality of ritual, the ways in which we understand change in relation to continuity and the importance of performance, because rituals are performances.

马修·恩格尔克：《象征之林》不仅在人类学中变得非常有影响力，在历史、文学批评、宗教研究和表演研究中也是如此。这些都是维克多·特纳的研究所涉及的领域。维克多·特纳和伊迪丝·特纳的研究真正地影响了关于仪式中心地位的辩论，影响了我们如何理解连续性的变化和表演的重要性，因为仪式就是一种表演。

Matthew Engelke: So you start to see in the 70s and 80s a huge upswell of work thinking about the performativity of life, not only in ritual context, but in day to day context. So these ideas of ritual performance becoming crucial tools with which to understand everyday social interactions, that we are always performing in certain roles. And it is the work of Turner, the work of the Turners together, which I think really helped us appreciate these kinds of approaches to the analysis of social life.

马修·恩格尔克：所以你会看到，在七、八十年代出现了一股研究浪潮，去思考仪式生活乃至日常生活中的表演性。这些关于仪式表演的思想成为了理解日常社会互动的重要工具——在日常互动中，我们总是在表演某种角色。我觉得特纳夫妇的研究确实有助于我们去欣赏这些分析社会生活的方法。

Zachary Davis: Through The Forest of Symbols, Victor and Edith Turner helped dethrone Western society as “the universal, most sophisticated way to live.” By stepping away from Western life and into Ndembu culture, they were able to see that what is actually universal is the complexity of life and human expression. Every culture is different, but they all negotiate these complexities through traditions and rituals.

扎卡里·戴维斯：借助《象征之林》，维克多·特纳和伊迪丝·特纳帮助推翻了西方社会生活方式的地位，使之不再是“普遍的、最复杂的生活方式”。离开西方生活、接触恩登布文化的经历让他们能够看到，实际上真正普遍的是生活和人类表达的复杂性。每一种文化都是不同的，但他们都通过传统和仪式来协调这些复杂问题。

Matthew Engelke: A lot of anthropology has traditionally and even still today focused on, let's call it other places. And again, wherever you are, there are always other places. And there are traditions of anthropology that have grown up not only in the United States, not only in, say, North America or Europe, but indeed in South Africa and Brazil and India and China. All of these places have very strong traditions of anthropology. And there are these kinds of drives to understand difference, to understand the other, which really underpins the general approach of anthropology.

马修·恩格尔克：很多人类学在传统上乃至在今天仍然着眼于我们所说的“异域”。无论你在哪儿，总有地方对你来说是异域。人类学传统不仅存在于美国、北美和欧洲，也存在于南非、巴西、印度和中国。所有这些地方都有非常强大的人类学传统。他们有这种驱动力来理解差异、理解他人，而这确实是人类学一般方法的基础。

Matthew Engelke: The Forest of Symbols is, to my mind, one of the most powerful and important expressions of what anthropology can bring to an understanding of ourselves. It is a book that allows us to delve deep into these seemingly inconsequential and insignificant aspects of something as seemingly obscure as a ritual symbol. And in the process, it shows us actually how that ritual symbol reflects and articulates the values or positions that we hold dear or are supposed to hold dear.

马修·恩格尔克：我觉得，对于“人类学能如何影响我们对自身的理解”这个问题来说，《象征之林》是最有力、最重要的回答。这本书让我们能够深入研究仪式符号这些看似不起眼、不重要的东西。在这个过程中，它实际上向我们展示了，某个仪式符号如何反映、展现着我们所珍视或应该珍视的价值或立场。

Matthew Engelke: The Forest of Symbols is a book that really allows us to understand how the seemingly insignificant details, the seemingly simply colorful details of life are much more than window dressing, are much more than the frills. And really, as Turner would put it, produce action, really matter to the constitution of who we are.

马修·恩格尔克：《象征之林》这本书让我们真正了解到，生活中那些看似无关紧要的细节、看似色彩斑斓的细节如何起到了不至于装点门面、修饰外表的作用。正如特纳所说，它们真的会推动行为，对我们的身份构成也非常重要。

Zachary Davis: Writ Large is a production of Ximalaya. Writ Large is produced by Jack Pombriant, Liza French, and me, Zachary Davis. Script editing is by Galen Beebe. We get help from Feiran Du, Ariel Liu and Monica Zhang. Our theme song is by Ian Coss. Don’t miss an episode. Subscribe today in the Ximalaya app. Thanks for listening. See you next time.

扎卡里·戴维斯：本节目由喜马拉雅独家制作播出。感谢您的收听，我们下期再见！