Liminality

In anthropology, liminality () is the quality of ambiguity or disorientation that occurs in the middle stage of a rite of passage, when participants no longer hold their pre-ritual status but have not yet begun the transition to the status they will hold when the rite is complete. During a rite's liminal stage, participants "stand at the threshold" between their previous way of structuring their identity, time, or community, and a new way (which completing the rite establishes).

The concept of liminality was first developed in the early twentieth century by folklorist Arnold van Gennep and later taken up by Victor Turner. More recently, usage of the term has broadened to describe political and cultural change as well as rites. During liminal periods of all kinds, social hierarchies may be reversed or temporarily dissolved, continuity of tradition may become uncertain, and future outcomes once taken for granted may be thrown into doubt. The dissolution of order during liminality creates a fluid, malleable situation that enables new institutions and customs to become established. The term has also passed into popular usage and has been expanded to include liminoid experiences that are more relevant to post-industrial society.

Rites of passage

Arnold van Gennep

Van Gennep, who coined the term liminality, published in 1909 his ''Rites de Passage'', a work that explores and develops the concept of liminality in the context of rites in small-scale societies. Van Gennep began his book by identifying the various categories of rites. He distinguished between those that result in a change of status for an individual or social group, and those that signify transitions in the passage of time. In doing so, he placed a particular emphasis on rites of passage, and claimed that "such rituals marking, helping, or celebrating individual or collective passages through the cycle of life or of nature exist in every culture, and share a specific three-fold sequential structure".

This three-fold structure, as established by van Gennep, is made up of the following components:

* ''preliminal rites'' (or ''rites of separation''): This stage involves a metaphorical "death", as the initiate is forced to leave something behind by breaking with previous practices and routines.
* ''liminal rites'' (or ''transition rites''): Two characteristics are essential to these rites. First, the rite "must follow a strictly prescribed sequence, where everybody knows what to do and how". Second, everything must be done "under the authority of a master of ceremonies". The destructive nature of this rite allows for considerable changes to be made to the identity of the initiate. This middle stage (when the transition takes place) "implies an actual passing through the threshold that marks the boundary between two phases, and the term 'liminality' was introduced in order to characterize this passage."
* ''postliminal rites'' (or ''rites of incorporation''): During this stage, the initiate is re-incorporated into society with a new identity, as a "new" being.

Turner confirmed his nomenclature for "the three phases of passage from one culturally defined state or status to another...''preliminal'', ''liminal'', and ''postliminal''".

Beyond this structural template, Van Gennep also suggested four categories of rites that emerge as universal across cultures and societies. He suggested that there are four types of social rites of passage that are replicable and recognizable among many ethnographic populations. They include:

* Passage of people from one status to another, initiation ceremonies in which an outsider is brought into the group. This includes marriage and initiation ceremonies that move one from the status of an outsider to an insider.
* Passage from one place to another, such as moving houses, moving to a new city, etc.
* Passage from one situation to another: beginning university, starting a new job, and graduating high school or university.
* Passage of time such as New Year celebrations and birthdays.

Van Gennep considered rites of initiation to be the most typical rite. To gain a better understanding of "tripartite structure" of liminal situations, one can look at a specific rite of initiation: the initiation of youngsters into adulthood, which Turner considered the most typical rite. In such rites of passage, the experience is highly structured. The first phase (the rite of separation) requires the child to go through a separation from his family; this involves his/her "death" as a child, as childhood is effectively left behind. In the second stage, initiands (between childhood and adulthood) must pass a "test" to prove they are ready for adulthood. If they succeed, the third stage (incorporation) involves a celebration of the "new birth" of the adult and a welcoming of that being back into society.

By constructing this three-part sequence, van Gennep identified a pattern he believed was inherent in all ritual passages. By suggesting that such a sequence is universal (meaning that all societies use rites to demarcate transitions), van Gennep made an important claim (one that not many anthropologists make, as they generally tend to demonstrate cultural diversity while shying away from universality).

An anthropological rite, especially a rite of passage, involves some change to the participants, especially their social status.; and in 'the first phase (of separation) comprises symbolic behaviour signifying the detachment of the individual...from an earlier fixed point in the social structure. Their status thus becomes liminal. In such a liminal situation, "the initiands live outside their normal environment and are brought to question their self and the existing social order through a series of rituals that often involve acts of pain: the initiands come to feel nameless, spatio-temporally dislocated and socially unstructured". In this sense, liminal periods are "destructive" as well as "constructive", meaning that "the formative experiences during liminality will prepare the initiand (and his/her cohort) to occupy a new social role or status, made public during the reintegration rituals".

Victor Turner

Turner, who is considered to have "re-discovered the importance of liminality", first came across van Gennep's work in 1963. In 1967 he published his book ''The Forest of Symbols'', which included an essay entitled ''Betwixt and Between: The Liminal Period in Rites of Passage''. Within the works of Turner, liminality began to wander away from its narrow application to ritual passages in small-scale societies. In the various works he completed while conducting his fieldwork amongst the Ndembu in Zambia, he made numerous connections between tribal and non-tribal societies, "sensing that what he argued for the Ndembu had relevance far beyond the specific ethnographic context". He became aware that liminality "...served not only to identify the importance of in-between periods, but also to understand the human reactions to liminal experiences: the way liminality shaped personality, the sudden foregrounding of agency, and the sometimes dramatic tying together of thought and experience".

'The attributes of liminality or of liminal ''personae'' ("threshold people") are necessarily ambiguous'. One's sense of identity dissolves to some extent, bringing about disorientation, but also the possibility of new perspectives. Turner posits that, if liminality is regarded as a time and place of withdrawal from normal modes of social action, it potentially can be seen as a period of scrutiny for central values and axioms of the culture where it occurs.—one where normal limits to thought, self-understanding, and behavior are undone. In such situations, "the very structure of society stemporarily suspended"

'According to Turner, all liminality must eventually dissolve, for it is a state of great intensity that cannot exist very long without some sort of structure to stabilize it...either the individual returns to the surrounding social structure...or else liminal communities develop their own internal social structure, a condition Turner calls "normative communitas"'.

Turner also worked on the idea of communitas, the feeling of camaraderie associated among a group experiencing the same liminal experience or rite. Turner defined three distinct and not always sequential forms of communitas, which he describes as "that 'antistructural' state at stake in the liminal phase of ritual forms." The first, spontaneous communitas, is described as "a direct, immediate, and total confrontation of human identities" in which those involved share a feeling of synchronicity and a total immersion into one fluid event. The second form, ideological communitas, which aims at interrupting spontaneous communitas through some type of intervention which would result in the formation of a utopian society in which all actions would be carried out at the level of spontaneous communitas. The third, normative communitas, deals with a group of society attempting to grow relationships and support spontaneous communitas on a relatively permanent basis, subjecting it to laws of society and "denaturing the grace" of the accepted form of camaraderie.

The work of Victor Turner has vital significance in turning attention to this concept introduced by Arnold van Gennep. However, Turner's approach to liminality has two major shortcomings. First, Turner was keen to limit the meaning of the concept to the concrete settings of small-scale tribal societies, preferring the neologism "liminoid" coined by him to analyse certain features of the modern world. However, Agnes Horvath (2013) argues that the term can and should be applied to concrete historical events as offering a vital means for historical and sociological understanding. Second, Turner attributed a rather univocally positive connotation to liminal situations as ways of renewal when liminal situations can be periods of uncertainty, anguish, even existential fear: a facing of the abyss in void.

Liminality theory today

In contemporary anthologies such as ''Neither Here nor There: The Many Voices of Liminality,'' and ''The Liminal Loop: Astonishing Stories of Discovery and Hope'' topics such as poetic interpretations, Central American notions of the in-between, pilgrimage, spiritual transformation, crisis passages, war, natural disaster, cross-cultural adoption, climate change and spirituality, religious shifts, cyborgs, critical illness, prison, social collapse and reconstruction, gender, and communities in conflict, extreme adventure, initiation, process of transition, ritual, complex liminalities, spiritual practices, black experience, education abroad, genocide, therapeutic practices, ecological collapse, and the arts are explored by a variety of thinkers and practitioners in light of their liminal nature.

Types

Liminality has both spatial and temporal dimensions, and can be applied to a variety of subjects: individuals, larger groups (cohorts or villages), whole societies, and possibly even entire civilizations. The following chart summarizes the different dimensions and subjects of liminal experiences, and also provides the main characteristics and key examples of each category.

Another significant variable is "scale," or the "degree" to which an individual or group experiences liminality. In other words, "there are degrees of liminality, and…the degree depends on the extent to which the liminal experience can be weighed against persisting structures." When the spatial and temporal are both affected, the intensity of the liminal experience increases and so-called "pure liminality" is approached.

In large-scale societies

The concept of a liminal situation can also be applied to entire societies that are going through a crisis or a "collapse of order". Philosopher Karl Jaspers made a significant contribution to this idea through his concept of the "Axial Age", which was "an in-between period between two structured world-views and between two rounds of empire building; it was an age of creativity where "man asked radical questions", and where the "unquestioned grasp on life is loosened". It was essentially a time of uncertainty which, most importantly, involved entire civilizations. Seeing as liminal periods are both destructive and constructive, the ideas and practices that emerge from these liminal historical periods are of extreme importance, as they will "tend to take on the quality of structure". Events such as political or social revolutions (along with other periods of crisis) can thus be considered liminal, as they result in the complete collapse of order and can lead to significant social change.

Liminality in large-scale societies differs significantly from liminality found in ritual passages in small-scale societies. One primary characteristic of liminality (as defined van Gennep and Turner) is that there is a way in as well as a way out. In ritual passages, "members of the society are themselves aware of the liminal state: they know that they will leave it sooner or later, and have 'ceremony masters' to guide them through the rituals". However, in those liminal periods that affect society as a whole, the future (what comes after the liminal period) is completely unknown, and there is no "ceremony master" who has gone through the process before and that can lead people out of it. In such cases, liminal situations can become dangerous. They allow for the emergence of "self-proclaimed ceremony masters", that assume leadership positions and attempt to " erpetuateliminality and by emptying the liminal moment of real creativity, urnit into a scene of mimetic rivalry".

Depth psychology

Jungians have often seen the individuation process of self-realization as taking place within a liminal space. "Individuation begins with a withdrawal from normal modes of socialisation, epitomized by the breakdown of the persona...liminality". Thus "what Turner's concept of social liminality does for status in society, Jung ..does for the movement of the person through the life process of individuation". Individuation can be seen as a "movement through liminal space and time, from disorientation to integration ..What takes place in the dark phase of liminality is a process of breaking down ..in the interest of "making whole" one's meaning, purpose and sense of relatedness once more" As an archetypal figure, "the trickster is a symbol of the liminal state itself, and of its permanent accessibility as a source of recreative power".

Jungian-based analytical psychology is also deeply rooted in the ideas of liminality. The idea of a 'container' or 'vessel' as a key player in the ritual process of psychotherapy has been noted by many and Carl Jung's objective was to provide a space he called "a temenos, a magic circle, a vessel, in which the transformation inherent in the patient's condition would be allowed to take place."

But other depth psychologies speak of a similar process. Carl Rogers describes "the 'out-of-this-world' quality that many therapists have remarked upon, a sort of trance-like feeling in the relationship that client and therapist emerge from at the end of the hour, as if from a deep well or tunnel. The French talk of how the psychoanalytic setting 'opens/forges the "intermediate space," "excluded middle," or "between" that figures so importantly in Irigaray's writing". Marion Milner claimed that "a temporal spatial frame also marks off the special kind of reality of a psycho-analytic session...the different kind of reality that is within it".

Jungians however have perhaps been most explicit about the "need to accord space, time and place for liminal feeling"—as well about the associated dangers, "two mistakes: we provide no ritual space at all in our lives ..or we stay in it too long". Indeed, Jung's psychology has itself been described as "a form of 'permanent liminality' in which there is no need to return to social structure".

Examples of general usage

In rites

In the context of rites, liminality is being artificially produced, as opposed to those situations (such as natural disasters) in which it can occur spontaneously. In the simple example of a college graduation ceremony, the liminal phase can actually be extended to include the period of time between when the last assignment was finished (and graduation was assured) all the way through reception of the diploma. That no man's land represents the limbo associated with liminality. The stress of accomplishing tasks for college has been lifted, yet the individual has not moved on to a new stage in life (psychologically or physically). The result is a unique perspective on what has come before, and what may come next.

It can include the period between when a couple get engaged and their marriage or between death and burial, for which cultures may have set ritual observances. Even sexually liberal cultures may strongly disapprove of an engaged spouse having sex with another person during this time. When a marriage proposal is initiated there is a liminal stage between the question and the answer during which the social arrangements of both parties involved are subject to transformation and inversion; a sort of "life stage limbo" so to speak in that the affirmation or denial can result in multiple and diverse outcomes.

Getz provides commentary on the liminal/liminoid zone when discussing the planned event experience. He refers to a liminal zone at an event as the creation of "time out of time: a special place". He notes that this liminal zone is both spatial and temporal and integral when planning a successful event (e.g. ceremony, concert, conference etc.).

In time

The temporal dimension of liminality can relate to moments (sudden events), periods (weeks, months, or possibly years), and epochs (decades, generations, maybe even centuries).

Examples

Twilight serves as a liminal time, between day and night—where one is "in the twilight zone, in a liminal nether region of the night". The title of the television fiction series ''The Twilight Zone'' makes reference to this, describing it as "the middle ground between light and shadow, between science and superstition" in one variant of the original series' opening. The name is from an actual zone observable from space in the place where daylight or shadow advances or retreats about the Earth. Noon and, more often, midnight can be considered liminal, the first transitioning between morning and afternoon, the latter between days.

Within the years, liminal times include equinoxes when day and night have equal length, and solstices, when the increase of day or night shifts over to its decrease. This "qualitative bounding of quantitatively unbounded phenomena" marks the cyclical changes of seasons throughout the year. Where the quarter days are held to mark the change in seasons, they also are liminal times. New Year's Day, whatever its connection or lack of one to the astrological sky, is a liminal time. Customs such as fortune-telling take advantage of this liminal state. In a number of cultures, actions and events on the first day of the year can determine the year, leading to such beliefs as first-foot. Many cultures regard it as a time especially prone to hauntings by ghosts— liminal beings, neither alive nor dead.

In religion

Judeo-Christian worship

Liminal existence can be located in a separated ''sacred space'', which occupies a ''sacred time''. Examples in the Bible include the dream of Jacob ( Genesis 28:12–19) where he encounters God between heaven and earth and the instance when Isaiah meets the Lord in the temple of holiness (Isaiah 6:1–6). In such a liminal space, the individual experiences the revelation of ''sacred knowledge'' where God imparts his knowledge on the person.

Worship can be understood in this context as the church community (or ''communitas'' or '' koinonia'') enter into liminal space corporately. Religious symbols and music may aid in this process described as a pilgrimage by way of prayer, song, or liturgical acts. The congregation is transformed in the liminal space and as they exit, are sent out back into the world to serve.

Judeo-Christian ministry

In ''Liminal Reality and Transformational Power,'' Dr. Timothy Carson, curator of the Liminality Project, co-founder of the Guild for Engaged Liminality with Lisa Withrow and Jonathan Best, and co-founder The Liminality Press with Lisa Withrow, explores the outer and inner aspects of liminality, addressing the history of the discipline with mythological and psychological underpinnings, and an application of the concepts to theology, Biblical hermeneutics, symbolism, and practical applications for those engaged in religious leadership.

In ''Crossing Thresholds: A Practical Theology of Liminality,''
Carson serves as co-author with Rosy Fairhurst, Nigel Rooms, and Lisa Withrow, as they define the aspects of liminality vis-à-vis its practical applications in religious life. The book includes a conceptual description of liminality as well as applications for hermeneutics, liturgy, ecclesiology, leadership, learning, faith formation, and pastoral care and crisis.

In ''Leaning into the Liminal: A Guide for Counselors and Companions,'' Carson utilizes a model informed by liminality – The Rites of Passage process – as a pan-theoretical resource for counselors, therapists, religious leaders, spiritual directors, and chaplains. It includes reflections on the role of the liminal guide, as well as contributions by seven other authors who address a variety of therapeutic models, healing the wounds of war, spiritual direction, and guiding through the end passages of life.

Of beings

Various minority groups can be considered liminal. In reality illegal immigrants (present but not "official"), and stateless people, for example, are regarded as liminal because they are "betwixt and between home and host, part of society, but sometimes never fully integrated". Bisexual, intersex, and transgender people in some contemporary societies, people of mixed ethnicity, and those accused but not yet judged guilty or not guilty can also be considered to be liminal. Teenagers, being neither children nor adults, are liminal people: indeed, "for young people, liminality of this kind has become a permanent phenomenon...Postmodern liminality".

The "trickster as the mythic projection of the magician—standing in the ''limen'' between the sacred realm and the profane" and related archetypes embody many such contradictions as do many popular culture celebrities. The category could also hypothetically and in fiction include cyborg

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