Liminality

Liminality is a term associated with rites of passage through which a person's identity and status is transformed at different times in his or her life. First systematically studied by the anthropologist Arnold Van Gennep in the book Rites of Passage (1960), rites of passage were noted to have a three-stage structure. The first stage, separation, saw the person about to undergo the transforming rite have all previous markers of his or her identity removed. In the second stage, liminal, that person, removed from his or her community, would undergo some form of ritual ordeal or initiation ceremony before in the third phase, reaggregation, being returned to his or her community with a new identity. Such rites are often associated with the passage between key life stages including transition from childhood to adulthood or marriage or with the rites associated with the death of a person and his or her burial.

As well as being associated with different times in a person's life, these rites often have their own social spaces—the liminal phase, in particular, is often associated with a particular space of initiation removed from the everyday spaces of the community associated with the rite. It was also often noted that in the liminal phase, many social norms and conventions are temporarily overturned in sanctioned but otherwise transgressive forms of behavior as part of the rite. Those undergoing initiation in this phase will also typically experience a strong sense of communion and intense emotional experience associated with such things as pain and hallucinogens, as well as the intense emotional experience of being through the performance of the rite.

Such rites have long been of interest for anthropologists and one in particular, Victor Turner, wrote a series of works in the 1960s and 1970s on rites in both small-scale societies as well as Western society. While much of the early writing on rites of passage, including Turner's own, understood these rituals as a functional requirement for how life-course identities were constituted within a society and how such ritual helped to affirm existing social structures, this began to change when he attempted to apply these concepts to understand aspects of Western consumer societies. Of particular note is that Turner sought to understand the 1960s counterculture in the United States using elements from this analysis of rites of passage. Turner argued that social structures often produced moments of anti-structure, which are liminal in character. This involves the creation of free spaces where social norms can be transgressed and oppositional or alternative identities established. Festivals such as those at Woodstock, Stonehenge, or Glastonbury, as well as bohemian neighborhoods, such as Greenwich Village in New York, Haight Ashbury in San Francisco, or the Left Bank in Paris, can all be seen as liminal spaces where subcultures or neo-tribes were able to establish new identities and lifestyle practices that challenged the social conventions of their day. In this analysis, Turner went on to try and free ideas of liminality from the earlier functionalist context of being seen as a necessary process associated with social reproduction to a space of freedom and play where novel forms of community might be established. He introduced the term liminoid in contrast to liminal to understand such spaces and their practices freed from the structuring principles of a rite of passage.

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