Victor Turner was born in Scotland and educated in England. He began his career as a research officer with the Rhodes-Livingstone Institute in northern Rhodesia. Best known for his ethnographic studies of ritual and social process among the Ndembu, Turner also produced significant theoretical insights about rites of passage, the psychology of healing, conflict management, the importance of drama and play, and the theory of symbolic interpretation. He spent much of his career at universities in the United States and was among the leading figures in the turn to symbolic interpretation that marked American anthropology during the 1960s and 1970s.
A. Mangai is the pseudonym of Dr. V. Padma, who teaches English at Stella Maris College, Chennai. She has been actively engaged in theatre for close to three decades. She writes bilingually in Tami
Abhirami Girija Sriram, who lives in Chennai, is an editor and translator. Having worked in publishing for over a decade, she is particularly interested in literature in translation from Tamil and
Benjamin Zachariah is a Research Fellow at the Karl Jaspers Centre for Advanced Transcultural Studies, Heidelberg University. He is the author of Developing India: An Intellectual and Social Histor
