Liminal Perspective

A liminal perspective toward analysis studies the in-between space in relationships, social roles, and contexts in times or at places of transition and change. Victor Turner furthered the idea of liminality as manifested through ritual as social actors move through [Page 485]ambiguity and transition. To Turner, the liminal phase was the stage of a transitional ritual in which a person is between social states (which Turner referred to in the title of one of his key articles, “Betwixt and Between”). Turner found that people sharing liminal spaces were in an antistructure state of communities in which they were relatively equal to and bonded with each other, while othered and marginalized by the rest of society. Turner specifically studied the role of rituals in these liminal spaces.

As a type of cultural analysis, studies of liminality look at social spaces in which change takes place, the boundaries between and around these spaces, and the borderlands surrounding these spaces. Researchers studying liminality would look at the way communication, ritual, and processes mark social spaces and move people between and through them.

The liminal perspective has been used in research concerning chronic illness and disability, ethnicity and immigration, group oppression, and bisexuality, among others. For example, Jean Jackson's 1991 research studied the liminal space of chronic pain as a borderland between the mind and the body, while Joanne Warner and colleague Jonathan Gabe's 2004 study examined the gap between mental health service providers and the otherness of the people with whom they work. Donna Goodwin and colleagues looked at the language (metaphors) used to indicate and describe the position of social liminality occupied by persons with a disability. Anette Forss and colleagues' 2004 study examined the liminal space of uncertainty among women who had received abnormal Pap smear test results.

Ben Rampton's 1999 study of multiracial youth, Samuel Marc Davidson's 2006 study of bisexual Latino men, and Paul Tabar's 2005 study of a Lebanese folkloric dance performed by immigrants from Lebanon living in Australia all used the lens of liminality to explore the discourse involved in forming, transforming, and articulating new identities.

The study of liminal spaces is important because it is at places and moments of change and transformation that one can see most clearly the processes of domination and resistance, of inclusion and exclusion, and of marginalization and socialization. It is in society's borderlands that one is challenged to recognize the other and the self and to see oneself in another.