Review of Victor Turner, The Forest of Symbols: Aspects of Ndembu Ritual

The ten essays that comprise this volume deal with the ritual symbols of the Ndembu people of Zambia, south-central Africa. All except one were previously published within the last ten years. Most of them excel in analytical rigor, detailed ethnographic description, and provide stimulating theoretical suggestions. Now that these essays have been assembled in a single volume, Victor Turner's approach emerges as a fruitful research method. It could well be one of the most significant contributions any anthropologist has made to folklore studies in the past decade.