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“THE ENDLESS CONVERSATION” Fieldwork, Writing, and the Marriage of Victor and Edith Turner MATTHEW ENGELKE In 1975, Edith Turner described herself in a biographical note to the feminist literary magazine Primavera as “an (unofficial) anthropological fieldworker” who had done “quite a lot of research in Africa” (1975c:91). She had been working with her husband, the well-known anthropologist Victor Turner, for over thirty years. Together, they translated the French symbolist poets, conducted fieldwork among the Ndembu of Zambia, and on pilgrimage in Europe and Latin America, wrote, taught, and raised a family. And so Turner’s self-description might seem an understatement. She is today a well-known proponent of humanistic anthropology and has been an influential contributor to the anthropology of religion. But Turner described herself with hesitation because she was not an anthropologist in the strict sense of the term. Edith Turner was an anthropologist ’s spouse—a significant other. This is something else altogether. There is one moment in particular that captures the complexity of Edie’s role as Victor Turner’s significant other. Soon after that issue of Primavera came out in the winter of 1975, the Turners moved with their two youngest children to an apartment in Princeton, New Jersey at the Institute for Advanced Study, where Victor Turner took up a year-long fellowship. It was a “busy time” (ETI). The Turners had many visitors, and according to those around, Victor Turner was the center of attention for the fellows (DSI). James Fernandez, who was teaching nearby at Princeton University and saw the Turners on a regular baMatthew Engelke is a lecturer in the Department of Anthropology at the London School of Economics. In addition to his work on the Turners, he has conducted field research in Zimbabwe on apostolic churches and on human rights. 6 sis, said, “Vic was the bon vivant” (JFI) of the cohort that year. David Sapir, also in residence at the Institute in 1975–76, said Vic provided “the conviviality” (DSI). As always, Vic and Edie tried to fold this conviviality into the work of intellectual production. Normally this strategy worked; the Turners never preferred Apollonian sobriety to Dionysian abandon. But something that year was different for Edie. For Edie, Princeton was too social; the work she had done in Primavera just prior to the move had rekindled a fire to write on her own, in what she would later call a “woman-centered” approach to anthropology (1987). At the Institute she pulled out an old manuscript called “Kajima” she had first drafted in 1954, after she and Vic had returned to England from their fieldwork with the Ndembu. Edie now worked on the manuscript in their Institute apartment. There was no office for her, so she set up space in the closet of the master bedroom . It was a walk-in closet with a window (neither she nor Vic had large wardrobes and there was room to fit a small desk). It was “a room of my own,” she said, with purposeful allusion to Virginia Woolf. It was in the closet that she reworked “Kajima” along the lines of the piece from Primavera as “the anthropologist ’s wife,” and as someone interested in “the richness of the women’s culture” (ETI). In addition to the “Kajima” project, Edie worked with Vic. The purpose of his tenure in Princeton was to finish the manuscript for Image and Pilgrimage in Christian Culture, the research for which they had carried out in the late 1960s and early 1970s during Vic’s sabbaticals and summer vacations at the University of Chicago. Edie would sometimes work on Image in her closet-office, but usually they worked on it together, as they always had. It was a process she loved—indeed thrived on. As Sapir described it, “they would sit in [Vic’s] office ; Edie was at the typewriter and they would face each other and do all this consultation” (DSI). They finished the manuscript, and Edie published “Kajima ” on her own, as The Spirit and the Drum (see Engelke 2001). But Vic and Edie’s consultation, as Sapir calls it, became more complicated from that point on. She felt the pull of “Kajima,” of her own work. As an historical figure, “the spouse” sheds interesting light on the history of anthropology with regard to at least two issues: fieldwork and writing. Both are central to understanding the Turners’ relationship in the context of professional anthropology. Probably nothing generates more ambivalence in anthropology...

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