Overview

The concept of Liminality (from Latin limen, meaning “threshold”) was introduced by Arnold van Gennep in 1909 and expanded by Victor Turner in the 1960s. It refers to the “betwixt and between” state. It is the moment when you step out of your front door but haven’t entered the street yet. In anthropology, it describes the middle phase of rituals (like initiation), where the rules of normal life are suspended.

Core Idea

The core idea is transformation. To change from one thing to another (e.g., boy to man, single to married), you must pass through a zone of nothingness. In this zone, you are stripped of your identity. You are nameless, sexless, and status-less. This chaos is necessary to be reborn into a new structure.

Formal Definition

Van Gennep defined three stages of a rite of passage:

  1. Separation: Leaving the old status.
  2. Liminality (Transition): The threshold phase.
  3. Incorporation: Re-entering society with a new status.

Intuition

Think of an airport. Once you pass security, you are in a liminal space. You are not in your home country (legally), but you aren’t in your destination yet. You are in a “non-place” where normal time feels suspended. Or think of a college graduation. You have finished classes (separation), but you haven’t started your job. You are in that weird, anxious, exciting summer where you are neither a student nor a worker. That is liminality.

Examples

  • Initiation Rites: In many cultures, adolescents are taken to the forest, painted white (symbolizing death/invisibility), and forced to undergo trials. In this phase, they are “liminal entities”—monsters or spirits, not humans.
  • Boot Camp: A recruit is stripped of their civilian clothes, hair, and name. They are broken down (liminality) so they can be rebuilt as a soldier.
  • Disaster Zones: After a hurricane, the normal social order collapses. Strangers help strangers; rich and poor wait in the same line for water. This is a liminal moment where structure dissolves.

Common Misconceptions

  • It’s just “change”: It is a specific type of change characterized by ambiguity and the suspension of norms.
  • It’s always bad: While anxiety-inducing, liminality is also the source of creativity. Because the rules are gone, anything is possible. It is a “realm of pure possibility.”
  • Communitas: Victor Turner’s term for the intense feeling of social equality and solidarity that emerges among people in a liminal state (e.g., the bond between soldiers in boot camp or protesters in a movement).
  • Liminal Spaces: A popular internet aesthetic featuring empty corridors, malls at night, or foggy fields—places that feel eerie because they are “transitional” spaces without people.
  • Structure vs. Anti-Structure: Society oscillates between Structure (hierarchy, rules) and Anti-Structure (liminality, equality). Both are needed.

Applications

  • Organizational Change: When a company merges or restructures, employees enter a liminal state of uncertainty. Managing this “neutral zone” is key to leadership.
  • Storytelling: The “Belly of the Whale” in the Hero’s Journey is a liminal space where the hero dies and is reborn.
  • Migration: Refugees often live in a state of permanent liminality—stateless, waiting, neither here nor there.

Criticism / Limitations

  • Idealization: Turner sometimes idealized “communitas” as a utopia, ignoring that power dynamics often persist even in rituals.
  • Permanent Liminality: In the modern world (precarious gig economy, endless adolescence), liminality is no longer a temporary phase but a permanent condition, which causes anxiety rather than transformation.

Further Reading

  • Turner, Victor. The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure. 1969.
  • Van Gennep, Arnold. The Rites of Passage. 1909.
  • Thomassen, Bjørn. Liminality and the Modern: Living Through the In-Between. 2014.