Liminality

The Experience of Liminality

In traditional societies, initiation rites exemplify ceremonies of liminality. But many cultures make similar provisions for other critical transition periods, such as entering marriage, assuming leadership, taking religious vows, apprenticing in a profession. Even in their modern embodiments, a number of distinctive features are apparent. Such passages are usually undertaken in secret or ritually segregated settings, entail taxing ordeals, and are supervised by expert guides. During this time, the usual social markers of distinction are erased —a “leveling” process that, along with the experience of shared suffering, encourages intense and enduring bonds of solidarity among initiates. But no matter how rigorous the ordeal or sublime the camaraderie experienced en route, the expectation is that the initiate will return to ordinary life and take on new responsibilities.

In a more extended sense, the distinctive blend of peril and privilege that liminality offers may apply to people who voluntarily remove themselves from the sway of convention for a time. Pilgrimages, religious revivals, secular festivals, even wilderness treks and corporate retreats: Participants in all of these briefly suspend responsibility and court uncertainty; all do so with the expectation of a return to normality. Crises, too, may usher in liminal periods. Consider the suspension of routine that follows natural disasters (epidemics, floods), civil disturbances (wars or revolutions), or private misfortunes (a death in the family). Finally, sociologists remind us that the experience of illness may be exploited (consciously or not) for its liberating potential in relieving the afflicted person from the demands of ordinary life.

All such states share a few core elements: suspension [Page 355]of the rule of the commonplace; mixing with unfamiliar others in strange settings and often mobile circumstances; and a heightened sense of uncertainty, of things being unfinished. It is this last property of indeterminacy—the fact that the process sometimes takes place without experienced guides in poorly marked and badly mapped territory—that makes liminality relevant to students of homelessness.

On occasion liminality stalls, the return fails to take place as projected, and the transitional period becomes extended. Should this persist, the built-in expectation of a return (on the part of both voyager and awaiting community) can weaken, eventually giving way to a routinization of the displacement itself. A kind of forgetfulness sets in: The tug of broken ties and foregone appointments weakens and the becalmed voyager finds a substitute normalcy beckoning. This was precisely the concern of critics who warned of the “demoralizing” effects of municipal lodging houses on the newly unemployed of the Progressive Era and, later, of researchers who charted the hazards of “shelterization” in the congregate relief warehouses of the Great Depression. In each case, the worry was that what had begun as a moratorium on business as usual had been transformed into a way of life in its own right. Nor were these unprecedented concerns.

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