The Seba library treats Structure And Anti Structure in 7 passages, across 4 authors (including Victor Turner, Victor Witter Turner, McGilchrist, Iain, Campbell, Joseph).
he called the co-occurrence of these motives 'structure' and 'anti-structure'; and a reentry into the everyday world. Of these three moves, the most important for Turner's critical and descriptive purposes was the mimetic phase
This passage provides the canonical definition of structure and anti-structure as co-occurring motives within the liminal, mimetic phase of ritual, where everyday norms are both elaborated and challenged.
, The Ritual Process Structure and Anti-Structure, 1966thesis
Ritual s Structure and Anti-Structure Victor Turner with a Foreword by Roger D. Abrahams
This is the title page of Turner's foundational text, establishing the work as the primary locus of the structure/anti-structure dyad in the scholarly literature.
, The Ritual Process Structure and Anti-Structure, 1966supporting
What is particularly striking about the Vice Lords and such other gangs as the Egyptian Cobras and the Imperial Chaplains is the complex and hierarchical nature of their organization.
Turner examines how liminal social groups — gangs — paradoxically reproduce elaborate hierarchical structures, illustrating the dialectical tension between structure and anti-structure in marginal communities.
, The Ritual Process Structure and Anti-Structure, 1966supporting
Complete order would prevent adaptive changes; unconstrained disorder would render self-organisation impossible. The so-called 'edge of chaos', where chaos and order are maximally present to one another, is the most fruitful condition of an open system
McGilchrist articulates a structural analogue to Turner's dyad, arguing that generative becoming requires the simultaneous presence of order and its disruption at the 'edge of chaos.'
, The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions and the Unmaking of the World, 2021supporting
Complete order would prevent adaptive changes; unconstrained disorder would render self-organisation impossible. The so-called 'edge of chaos', where chaos and order are maximally present to one another, is the most fruitful condition of an open system
A parallel passage to the above, reinforcing the theme that the interplay of order and disorder — analogous to structure and anti-structure — is the condition of creative emergence.
, The Matter with Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World, 2021supporting
the Age of the Holy Spirit, when the hierarchy of Rome would be dissolved and the whole world become, as it were, a monastery of souls in direct communion with God
Campbell traces a historical-religious vision of anti-structural dissolution — the prophesied abolition of hierarchical Church structure in favour of unmediated communal spirit — that resonates with Turner's conceptual dyad.
, Occidental Mythology: The Masks of God, Volume III, 1964aside
Mentorship becomes difficult to sustain; initiation is rejected. Anthropologists affected by those demons suggest that elders in primitive cultures always perform sadistic and humiliating acts on young men under cover of initiatory ritual.
Bly notes the collapse of initiatory ritual and its structural-anti-structural dialectic in modern Western culture, where the subversive potential of liminal experience is pathologized rather than honoured.
, Iron John: A Book About Men, 1990aside