Liminality
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Liminality (from the Latin word līmen, meaning "a threshold") is the quality of the second stage of a ritual in the theories of Arnold van Gennep, Victor Turner, and others. In these theories, a ritual, especially a rite of passage, involves some change to the participants, especially their social status.
The liminal state is characterized by ambiguity, openness, and indeterminacy. One's sense of identity dissolves to some extent, bringing about disorientation. Liminality is a period of transition, during which your normal limits to thought, self-understanding, and behavior are relaxed, opening the way to something new.
People, places, or things may not complete a transition, or a transition between two states may not be fully possible. Those who remain in a state between two other states may become permanently liminal.
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[edit] Three stages
With examples from a college graduation ceremony.
- First or preliminary stage
This change is accomplished by separating the participants from their usual social setting. The students are first separated from the rest of their community, both by gathering together and by wearing distinctive clothing.
- The liminal stage
A period during which one is "betwixt and between", "neither here nor there". When the ceremony is in progress, the participants are no longer students but neither are they yet graduates. This is the distinctive character of liminality.
- The final or postliminal stage
A period during which one's new social status is confirmed, and reincorporation. Upon receiving his or her diploma, the student officially becomes a college graduate. The dean and professors shake the student's hand in congratulation, giving public recognition to the student's new status as a person with a college degree.
[edit] Communitas
During the liminal stage, normally accepted differences between the participants, such as social class, are often de-emphasized or ignored. A social structure of communitas forms: one based on common humanity and equality rather than recognized hierarchy. For example, during a pilgrimage, members of an upper class and members of a lower class might mix and talk as equals, when in normal life they would likely never talk at all or their conversation might be limited to giving orders.
[edit] Structure?
Anthropologists are currently in debate over whether the liminal stage of rituals has an absence of structure (anti-structure) or "hyper-structure", or whether both are possible. In anthropology, liminality can also represent an experience that places one in unfamiliar surrounds, not so much ambiguous as new (ambiguity is different from new in the aspect that a situation, or commonly, a plight, can make the definition of "ambiguous"/"ambiguity" have a multiply finite definition, albeit the unknown, the obscure, or the remotely familiar. Familiar in the sense that you visit a new neighborhood but not a new country).
[edit] Examples
[edit] Liminality in rituals
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 transitioned 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 or may not have set ritual observances. Even very sexually liberated cultures would make it extraordinarily taboo of an engaged spouse to have sex with another person during this time, versus the milder taboo of cheating on a lover.
When Western cultures use mistletoe, the plant is placed in a threshold (the "limen"), at the time of the winter solstice. The act that occurs under the mistletoe (the kiss) breaks the boundaries between two people. Because what happens under the mistletoe is occurring in ritual time/space, the people kissing are not breaking taboos imposed under normal circumstances by their marriages to (or relationships with) other people.
[edit] Liminality in time
Twilight serves as a liminal time, between day and night. The name 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. 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 astronomical 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.
Liminality can refer to the time between conception and birth in western cultures;[citation needed] some Eastern cultures counting the beginning of existence as the moment of conception.[citation needed]
[edit] Liminality in states of consciousness
Another example of liminality can occur when someone has just awoken from a dream and in a hypnagogic state of mind is unable to distinguish whether or not their dream really occurred. Drunkenness is a state in which the person is neither sick nor well.
[edit] Liminality of beings
In reality illegal immigrants (present but not "official"), stateless people, intersexual or transgender people, bisexual people in most contemporary societies, and those of mixed ethnicity or accused but not yet judged guilty or not guilty, are liminal. Teenagers, being neither children nor adults, are liminal people. The trickster and related archetypes embody many such contradictions as do many popular culture celebrities. The category could also hypothetically and in fiction include cyborgs, hybrids between two species, shapeshifters. One could also consider seals, crabs, shorebirds, frogs, bats, dolphins/whales and other "border animals" to be liminal. It should come as no surprise that these liminal creatures figure prominently in mythology as shapeshifters and spirit guides.
Wounds are liminal in that a wound is in constant flux, either getting better or getting worse. It is a site of healing or infection (or both, simultaneously). Menstruation is a condition in which (like a wound) the boundary between the inside of the body and the outside of the body is broken. Sex is a liminal act.
On an even more cosmic level, we have those judged both living and non-living, such as the human fetus in the abortion debate, those in a Persistent Vegetative State, undead characters and Schrödinger's cat. Plants such as seaweed (between sea and land) and mistletoe (between earth and sky) are not only liminal themselves, but are used in liminal rituals such as healing.
[edit] Liminality in places
These can range from borders, to no man's lands and disputed territories, to crossroads to perhaps airports or hotels, which people pass through but do not live in. In mythology and religion or esoteric lore this can include such realms as Purgatory or Da'at which as well as signifying liminality some theologians have denied actually existing, making them, in some cases, doubly liminal. "Between-ness" defines these spaces. For a hotel worker (an insider) or a person passing by with disinterest (a total outsider), the hotel would have a very different connotation. To a traveller staying there, the hotel would function as a liminal zone.
Examples in fiction include the Interzone, the Wood between the Worlds and, as mentioned, The Twilight Zone. In the series itself, fittingly, the Twilight Zone does not appear as an actual literal location, making it both a place and not a place at the same time, and therefore also doubly liminal.
Doors, windows, springs, caves, shores, rivers, volcanic calderas, fords, passes, crossroads, bridges, and marshes are all liminal. Oedipus (an adoptee and therefore liminal) met his father at the crossroads and killed him; the bluesman Robert Johnson met the devil at the crossroads, where he is said to have sold his soul. Major transformations occur at crossroads and other liminal places, at least partly because liminality -- being so unstable -- can pave the way for access to esoteric knowledge or understanding of both sides. Liminality is sacred, alluring, and dangerous.
[edit] Liminality in folklore
There are a number of stories in folklore of those what could only be killed in a liminal space: Lleu, could not be killed during the day or night, nor indoors or outdoors, neither riding nor walking, not clothed and not naked (and is attacked at dusk, whilst wrapped in a net with one foot on a cauldron and one on a goat). Likewise, in the Mahabharata, Indra promises to not slay Namuci and Vritra with anything wet nor dry, in the day nor in the night, but kills them at dusk with foam. [1]
[edit] Liminoid
Turner coined the term liminoid to refer to experiences that have characteristics of liminal experiences but are optional and don't involve a resolution of a personal crisis. A graduation ceremony might be regarded as liminal while a rock concert might be understood to be liminoid. The liminal is part of society, an aspect of social or religious ritual, while the liminoid is a break from society, part of play. Turner stated that liminal experiences are rare and diminished in industrial societies, and are replaced by liminoid experiences.
[edit] Related
.hack//Liminality is the title of the four OVAs from the .hack PS2 game series. One was included with each of the four games. Liminality in the series is defined as "The nature of boundaries", a definition used in the animation between the characters talking about the fictional popular online game 'The World' and the trouble that arises. They describe the nature of boundaries (liminality) as barriers of laws, physics, and omnipresent beings that prevent them from accomplishing their goal to save it.
Liminal Performance Group[2]: A Collaborative group of artist that produces work that is on the limen(s) of Dance, Theater, and Visual Art.
The Wake Student Magazine [3], a weekly magazine at the University of Minnesota, publishes a literary journal called "Liminal" [4]. The journal was created in 2005 and serves the University of Minnesota's creative community by publishing and sharing poetry, prose, and art. The journal strives to present a variety of works.
