Liminality

Antistructure and Communitas

Turner applied the notion of liminality to a wide range of situations. During episodes of liminality, norms of one's previous status get suspended, while those of the future status do not yet pertain. A person may withdraw voluntarily from a previous structure, or its temporary loss may be triggered by mishap. In either case, one can revel briefly in “antistructure” before a new condition of permanence supervenes. During a natural disaster or a breakdown of transportation, for example, or indeed during any other collective interruption of routine, people experience temporary liberation from certain social norms. To heighten the attraction, journeys shared with random strangers, particularly pilgrimages, generate communitas. For a brief interval, shared liminality can create, not least among those obsessed by rules, a kind of fleeting euphoria. If, however, the normlessness of antistructure lasts more than a few hours or a few days, it becomes irksome and eventually intolerable. To cite a gruesome example, the disappearance without trace of a loved one, even of a pet, triggers endless liminality. Intrinsic to enjoying liminality is an expectation of closure, and the sooner the better.

Need for Closure

As Turner suggested, the cultural revolution of the later 1960s in Western Europe and North America can be viewed as an experiment in liminality. Recurring episodes of communitas among young people during those years eventually went sour because no one knew how to bring antistructure to a close. The experiment in antistructure lasted too long and fostered a longing for structure, almost any structure. What began in communitas ended in recrimination because advocates of institutional change did not know how to bring the ferment to a halt. The risk of suffering trauma from prolonged liminality runs high. That is one reason why the concept has acquired new intensity during an era of anxiety such as the one the United States entered following the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center in New York City and the Pentagon in Washington, D.C., on September 11, 2001. For some weeks after the events, there was a widely shared experience of liminality together with a tremulous sense of communitas, but later almost everyone craved nothing but closure.

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