See discussions, stats, and author profiles for this publication at: https://www.researchgate.

net/publication/304183790

Liminality

Article · December 2015

DOI: 10.1016/B978-0-08-097086-8.12102-6

CITATIONS READS

15 2,775

2 authors:

Hazel Andrews Les Roberts

Liverpool John Moores University University of Liverpool
75 PUBLICATIONS 590 CITATIONS 62 PUBLICATIONS 866 CITATIONS

SEE PROFILE SEE PROFILE

All content following this page was uploaded by Les Roberts on 28 June 2019.

The user has requested enhancement of the downloaded file.

Published in: NJ Smelser and PB Baltes (eds.), International Encyclopedia of the Social and Behavioral
Sciences. Oxford: Elsevier (2014)

LIMINALITY

Hazel Andrews and Les Roberts

Keywords: border, carnivalesque, danger, experience, in-between, interstitial, liminal,

liminoid, non-places, pilgrimage, ritual, threshold, tourism, transition, travel.

Abstract:

This article explores the concept of ‘liminality’, tracing its development from the work of the

French ethnologist Arnold van Gennep, to the pioneering theoretical anthropology of Victor

Turner, and goes on to consider ways that ideas of liminality have informed more recent

discussions and debates, particularly in relation to the anthropology of experience, tourism

and mobility, and place and space. Arguing that what is understood by ‘liminality’ today

encompasses a wide array of meanings and theoretical associations, the article examines

the extent to which the concept finds resonance with a rich and diverse field of social,

cultural and geographical enquiry.

Published in: NJ Smelser and PB Baltes (eds.), International Encyclopedia of the Social and Behavioral
Sciences. Oxford: Elsevier (2014)

The concept of ‘liminality’, much like the phenomena to which it is generally held to ascribe,

is itself passing through something of a transitional phase. From its origins in the work of the

French ethnologist Arnold van Gennep, through to the pioneering theoretical anthropology

of Victor Turner in the 1960s and 1970s, what is understood by the term liminality today

encompasses a wide array of meanings and theoretical associations that go far beyond

those more traditionally linked with anthropological discussions on ritual, performance,

pilgrimage and cross-societal ‘rites of passage’. As Meethan notes (2012: 69), the concept

can be found in studies on management, health, education, cyber space, governance,

sexuality and tourism, to name but few. One of the foremost points of critical intersection

that has propelled renewed interest in liminality and liminal phenomena in recent years is

the relationship between liminality, place and space. Indeed, those surveying the abundant

literature on borderzones, non places, interstitial spaces, edgelands, contact zones, spaces

of hybridity, third space, heterotopias, and so on, could be forgiven for thinking that

liminality is and ever has been intrinsically spatial in terms of the discursive landscapes

within which discussions on liminality are invariably situated.

While undoubtedly such trends can in part be attributed to the impact of a much

broader ‘spatial turn’ (Warf and Arias 2009) that has left its mark on social and cultural

theory in recent decades, it can also be taken as evidence of a concerted push to re-engage

with the concept of liminality in ways that acknowledge, but which at the same time are by

no means bound by the foundational work of figures such as van Gennep and Turner. As

Thomassen notes (2009), the concept has ‘travelled’ since it was first introduced in van

Gennep’s influential book Rites de passage. Accordingly, in the following we set out some of

the important theoretical background to liminality, acknowledging that van Gennep himself

has often remained a marginal figure in the intellectual history of a concept that was to
Published in: NJ Smelser and PB Baltes (eds.), International Encyclopedia of the Social and Behavioral
Sciences. Oxford: Elsevier (2014)

become so indelibly linked with the work of Turner. We then turn to some of the ways that

liminality can more productively be understood in relation to wider discursive fields to

which it is affiliated or into which it has encroached, particularly those that cluster under the

rubric of the anthropology of experience, tourism and mobility, emotions and the self, and

those linked to discussions of landscape, place and space. Given the more diffuse theoretical

terrain that has come to frame discussions of liminality and liminal phenomena, and the

attendant difficulties this can bring with it in terms of clearly delineating the meanings and

practices that potentially full under its banner, there is, as we have argued elsewhere

(Andrews and Roberts 2012), a need to rethink and ‘re-map’ liminality. As the cartographic

reference here alludes, this is a process which has most notably sought to explore the

constitutive spatialities of liminality, but also to examine the different ways, and the extent

to which, ‘in-between spaces’ can be said to represent one of the defining characteristics of

modern topographies of self and society.

Arnold Van Gennep

What we have come to understand as liminality in relation to social and cultural practices

stems in no small part from the work of Arnold van Gennep (1873-1957), whose Rites de

passage was published in 1909, but not translated into English until 1960. Measured against

the legacy of sociological and anthropological ‘founding fathers’ such as Emile Durkheim,

van Gennep’s body of work has remained on the periphery of theory and debate

(Thomassen 2009: 7). With an impressive 437 titles in his bibliography, van Gennep, who

mastered 18 different languages (ibid: 8), published on a wide range of topics but it is his

work on liminality that has by far proved the most influential.

Published in: NJ Smelser and PB Baltes (eds.), International Encyclopedia of the Social and Behavioral
Sciences. Oxford: Elsevier (2014)

Derived from the Latin word for ‘threshold’ (limen) – an etymological reminder of

the important spatial underpinnings to the concept – for van Gennep, ‘liminal’ is more

directly related to the symbolic processes and ritual conventions that structure and define

key moments of social transition, or ‘rites of passage’. His research examined the

relationship between liminal experiences and lasting effects of those experiences, arguing

that structure/order is derived from liminality – from the crucial middle or ‘in-between’

states that facilitate ritual passage from one social stage to another. For van Gennep,

liminality does not presuppose certainty or offer an explanatory causality with regard to

outcome, but rather a describes a world of contingency ‘where… “reality” itself, can be

carried in different directions’ (Thomassen 2009: 5). Liminality is thus a means to

conceptualize the moments between structure and agency: ‘in liminality, the very

distinction between structure and agency ceases to make meaning; and yet, in the hyper-

reality of agency in liminality, structuration takes place’ (ibid).

As elaborated by van Gennep, rites of passage form an explanatory codification or

analytical tool by which to understand all rites and distinguishes between different types,

ranging from change in status to those that mark the passage of time. Rites of passage

become a special category with three sub-categories: separation, transition (the liminal

phase), and reincorporation (the post-liminal stage). Basing his analysis on existing empirical

and ethnographic data, van Gennep observed a pattern in rituals that he argued is universal

and replicable across cultures and societies (ibid: 6). Celebrations or initiations are

important features of social rites of passage that are classified into four types of social

movement:
Published in: NJ Smelser and PB Baltes (eds.), International Encyclopedia of the Social and Behavioral
Sciences. Oxford: Elsevier (2014)

1. The passage of people from one status to another, e.g. marriage (moving from

fiancée to wife or husband), initiation ceremonies in which the outsider of a group

becomes an insider.

2. The passage from one place to another, e.g. moving home.

3. The passage from one situation to another, e.g. starting a new job, school, joining

university.

4. The passage of time – typically the passage of a whole social group moving from one

period to another, e.g. New Year, New Government or Ruling authority

(King/Queen/Emperor) (see Andrews and Leopold 2013: 36).

Van Gennep’s analysis identified certain characteristic patterns which occurred in the order

of the ceremonies:

 Separation/Preliminal – the physical detachment of the participant from normal life.

As Gunnell (2007) observes of Busar initiation traditions in Icelandic Gymnasia, new

pupils are only allowed to walk along marked pathways which separates them from

the spaces of movement used by the rest of the school’s students and teachers.

 Liminal/Transitional – the most important period according to Victor Turner in which

the participant is literally and symbolically marginalised. During this time the

participants in the ritual have a sense of Communitas. Communitas – a concept later

developed by Turner (1969) – is a feeling of camaraderie between those who are the

focus of the ritual. Gunnell's (2007) study again proves useful here as the new pupils

are argued to feel a sense of bonding with each other as they share the same ordeals

– wearing odd clothes and participating in rituals – before they become fully

accepted into the life of the school.

Published in: NJ Smelser and PB Baltes (eds.), International Encyclopedia of the Social and Behavioral
Sciences. Oxford: Elsevier (2014)

 Incorporation/Postliminal – the participant is reincorporated into society / returned to

society. In Gunnell's Icelandic example this occurs when, having completed their

challenges, the new pupils are finally accepted into the life which is celebrated with a

meal or dance (see Andrews and Leopold 2013: 36).

Melford Weiss’s 1967 article ‘Rebirth in the Airborne’ applies van Gennep’s tripartite model

of liminality to the training and initiation rituals involved in becoming an American

paratrooper. As part of their training trainees are separated from and discouraged from

association with those in the outside world. The liminal phase is typically accompanied by

the use of lucky charms and totems, and, in an inversion of normal social experience,

initiates are subjected to continuous periods of anxiety and stress which helps bind them

together as a group and helps inform feelings of communitas. Lastly, reincorporation, which

includes the playing of the national anthem and the reciting of scriptures, culminates in the

‘prop blast’, a ceremonial rebirth in which initiates re-enact their jump in front of the flight

sergeant, and the ritual drinking of ‘blast juice’, which is quaffed within the count of ‘1000,

2000, 3000’, the time between an actual jump from a plane and the opening of the

parachute. On successful completion the initiate is ritually joined with his fellow

paratroopers. Although paratrooper training is an essentially secular affair, ‘certain

superstitious practices which are interwoven show that, in the broadest sense, it is also a

religious rite’ (Weiss 1967: 24).

Building on ideas van Gennep outlined in Rites de passage, Turner argued that each

rite of passage has these elements (separation – transition – reincorporation) within it,

although some may be more developed than others depending on the purpose of the rite.

In a funeral, for example, rites of separate

Published in: NJ Smelser and PB Baltes (eds.), International Encyclopedia of the Social and Behavioral
Sciences. Oxford: Elsevier (2014)

on would be more pronounced than those typically associated with a wedding or graduation

ceremony.

Victor Turner

As previously noted, van Gennep's ideas were developed most notably by the British social

anthropologist Victor Turner, (1920-83). In particular Turner explored the concept of

liminality that van Gennep had developed in relation to both the 'middle' phases of all rites

and especially to rites of transition. Turner’s first published work drawing on van Gennep’s

theory was a paper on Ndembu circumcision ritual (1962). The Ndembu tribe of Zambia was

the main focus of Turner’s early work on ritual and the role of symbols in social processes,

which he went on to develop more fully in The Forest of Symbols, published in 1967. For

Turner, liminality is constituted in a condition or happenstance that has attributes of doubt

and lack of inevitability between what is known and has gone before and future outcomes.

The particular importance of Turner’s work is its focus on the creative potential of ritual. In

so doing Turner put emphasis on the liminal phase connecting rites with notions of

performance and investigating rites as times of suspension during which the way forward is

characterised in terms of possibility and becoming. During the liminal phase of a ritual

initiates are in a 'betwixt and between' status, a threshold from which a new identity or

social status can emerge. They therefore have the possibility to change from their former,

pre-ritual status into something different when they are re-incorporated back into the

everyday social world.

Turner became aware of van Gennep’s work on ritual and liminality following the

publication of the English translation of Rites de passage in 1960. As one of the main

proponents of van Gennep’s theory Turner played a pivotal role in drawing it to wider
Published in: NJ Smelser and PB Baltes (eds.), International Encyclopedia of the Social and Behavioral
Sciences. Oxford: Elsevier (2014)

attention amongst anthropologists and others. Thomassen argues (2009: 14) that Turner

discovered the work experientially as the anthropologist was himself, at that time, betwixt

and between academic posts at Manchester and the United States. This important

transitional period would become manifest in the chapter ‘Betwixt and Between: the

Liminal period in rites of passage’, in Forest of Symbols (1967). As Thomassen (2009) notes

Turner argued against the Durkheimian view that rituals mirror the dominant social order.

Turner had already introduced the idea of 'social drama' in his work and found that van

Gennep's formulations on rites of passage sat well alongside the idea. Turner (1982: 27)

argued that during the liminal phase of rituals play is often involved: ‘Liminality may involve

a complex sequence of episodes in sacred space-time, and may also include subversive and

ludic (or playful) events… in liminality people “play” with the elements of the familiar and

defamiliarize them’. With this emphasis on playful action liminality becomes significant in

understanding individual and group responses to the ‘betwixt and between’ rather than

emphasising only its role as part of a sequence of events. For Turner, the liminal phase

presents the opportunity of being re-shaped or ‘fashioned anew’ (1969: 81) in which the

persons at the centre of the experience are prepared for and embody their new statuses. In

short, liminal experiences shape personality, focus mind and experience, and foreground

human agency (Thomassen 2009: 14). Drawing on the work of philosophers such as Dilthey,

the emphasis on experience and performance would become key elements in Turner’s

writings on liminality and liminal phenomena (see anthropology of experience below).

In The Ritual Process Turner argues that the period of liminality or liminal people

(that is people on the threshold of becoming different) ‘are necessarily ambiguous’ (1969:

81) defying classification in terms of the world of the everyday: ‘liminal entities are neither

here nor there; they are betwixt and between the positions assigned and arrayed by law,
Published in: NJ Smelser and PB Baltes (eds.), International Encyclopedia of the Social and Behavioral
Sciences. Oxford: Elsevier (2014)

custom, convention, and ceremonial’ (ibid). The ‘threshold’ people Turner describes have no

status often stripped of property or clothing which would mark their rank in the liminal

phase they are indistinguishable from others who are sharing that experience.

A particularly notable innovation in Turner’s theoretical updating of van Gennep’s

earlier ideas is the distinction he makes between liminal and ‘liminoid’. Turner (1982)

suggests that in modern consumerist societies in which work and play are more clearly

defined than in traditional societies the possibilities for liminal experiences to arise are

reduced, being supplanted mainly by liminoid moments found in artistic performances and

the practices of leisure consumption. The ritual and experiential liminal characteristics

ascribed to so-called traditional societies are transmuted into liminoid experiences through

play, creativity, drama and their associated art forms, such as theatre and literature.

Although perhaps based on too basic a distinction between traditional and non-traditional,

Turner’s concept of the liminoid allows for a more qualified or conditional sense of the

liminal insofar as it defines a transitional moment that is optional and which does not

involve a change of status or offer a resolution (Thomassen 2009: 15). The playfulness and

experiential qualities of liminoid phenomena can be transformative but they are not

transitional in the same way that a rite of passage represents a liminal state of ‘betwixt and

between’. In ‘From Ritual to Theatre: the Human Seriousness of Play’ (1982) Turner notes

that ‘oid’ derives from the Greek word eidos, meaning a form or shape. Liminoid thus takes

the form of or resembles but is not the same as the liminal. It represents ‘an independent

domain of creative activity’ (1982: 33). Thus Turner argued theoretical and experimental

science is liminoid as it is conducted in ‘neutral spaces’ or ‘privileged areas’ (laboratories or

studies) separate from society in general and issues of central political concern:

‘Universities, institutes, colleges, etc., are “liminoid” settings for all kinds of freewheeling,
Published in: NJ Smelser and PB Baltes (eds.), International Encyclopedia of the Social and Behavioral
Sciences. Oxford: Elsevier (2014)

experimental cognitive behavior as well as forms of symbolic action, resembling some found

in tribal society, like “rushing” and “pledging” ceremonies in American college fraternity and

society houses’ (1982: 33).

The distinction between pilgrimage and tourism as, respectively, forms of liminal and

liminoid ritual is one that has generated discussion in anthropological studies of tourism

(see below), where the distinction is at times difficult to draw. Graburn (1986), for example,

has argued that tourism is a form of pilgrimage in that the experience is that of a liminal rite

of passage. Pilgrimage, a focus of some of Turner’s later work with his wife Edith on

liminality and ritual (1978), entails an equalling out of participants: status hierarchies are

temporarily suspended and the pilgrims share a common experience of communitas,

building on ideas developed in Turner's (1969) earlier work. Similar arguments have been

made in respect of rave, dance and techno cultures and subcultures (see, for example,

Gerard 2004; St. John 2008), prompting debate as to whether these represent liminal or

liminoid experiences of transition and communitas.

An important but often overlooked characteristic of the liminal phase is its

association with danger. The attendant risk attached to the entering of a liminal phase or

liminal space is of losing a stable sense of self and identity, or of not being reincorporated

into the social world in ways that had been anticipated or desired. For those seeking drug-

induced and consciousness-altering experiences of communitas, for example, the

psychological and physical impacts may have permanent or long-term consequences that

take the experience outside of the temporary and otherwise contained environment of the

liminal phase. Death itself is also strongly associated with liminality (see Das 1977). Lastly,

the suspended nature of social life normally associated with the state of liminality can
Published in: NJ Smelser and PB Baltes (eds.), International Encyclopedia of the Social and Behavioral
Sciences. Oxford: Elsevier (2014)

become permanent in circumstances where it is institutionalised and incorporated into

dominant social and political structures of power (Thomassen 2009: 22).

Liminality, Place and Space

In his account of a walk along an ancient and notoriously hazardous tidal path situated off

the Essex coast, the writer Robert Macfarlane observes, ‘[w]e lack – we need – a term for

those places where one experiences a “transition” from a known landscape...[to]

somewhere we feel and think significantly differently. I have for some time been imagining

such transitions as “border crossings”. These borders do not correspond to national

boundaries, and papers and documents are unrequired at them. Their traverse is generally

unbiddable, and no reliable map exists of their routes and outlines’ (2012: 78).

Although he does not use the term, in this quotation Macfarlane succinctly outlines

some of the defining characteristics of a liminal landscape and experience. Liminality is of

inferential significance here insofar as it is ‘located’ both in terms of its geography and its

constitutive temporality. To experience the transition Macfarlane describes entails a process

of traversing space, whether real (the physical landscape as a site of wayfinding or

pilgrimage) and/or imagined (the social, symbolic and textual spaces of transition that invest

the landscape with meaning). It is also an experience that has duration: it unfolds over a

period of time. But crucially, like the landscape itself, the ‘routes and outlines’ that

otherwise order and rationalise time are – experientially at least – difficult to ‘map’ or

reliably navigate. The pilgrim or wayfarer enters ‘another place’, which, like artist Anthony

Gormley’s installation of the same name located on Crosby beach near Liverpool (Andrews

2012), is governed by the contingent workings of the natural elements. By the same token,

the quintessential liminality of the spatio-temporal moment is marked by the threat of

Published in: NJ Smelser and PB Baltes (eds.), International Encyclopedia of the Social and Behavioral
Sciences. Oxford: Elsevier (2014)

danger. In the case of the tidal mudflats that Macfarlane describes this, of course, has very

obvious connotations. But the extent to which borders and boundaries are elusive and

‘unbiddable’ may also invoke fears rooted in an incipient sense of existential or ontological

displacement. In the same way the initiate entering the liminal phase of a social ritual may

experience the undoing of a fixed or habituated sense of selfhood, the navigator of liminal

landscapes potentially ‘crosses over’ to states of being or consciousness that draw their

precarious affectivity from the uncertain and ‘unmappable’ geographies that are temporally

inhabited.

That these transitional spaces might represent ‘border crossings’ both highlights the

structural and experiential liminality of borderzones and hints at ways in which liminal

landscapes do not necessarily correlate with conventional territorial understandings of

borders such as those that relate to national boundaries. Borderzones, like all liminal

phenomena, are ambivalent in that they are at once spaces of mobility and immobility,

transition and stasis (Roberts 2002), hope and violence (Harvey 2000), place and non place

(Augé 1995), memory and oblivion (Augé 2004): spaces where the ‘play’ of horizons and

frontiers (Marin 1984) reflects the differential power relations that govern the increasingly

complex patterns of transnational mobility. As spaces of ‘radical openness’ (hooks 1990),

borderzones can engender what Gloria Anzaldúa has described as a ‘mestiza consciousness’,

a consciousness of the borderlands that is the ‘product of the transfer of the cultural and

spiritual values of one group to another’ (1987: 78). Equally they may take the form of

‘smooth spaces’ of flow, the domain of the deterritorialized ‘nomad’, the figurative (and

often romanticized) embodiment of postmodern homelessness who, at home everywhere

and nowhere, exists in a constant state of flux and becoming. For the nomad, the border

(geographical or metaphorical) represents an otherwise striated space of power that is

Published in: NJ Smelser and PB Baltes (eds.), International Encyclopedia of the Social and Behavioral
Sciences. Oxford: Elsevier (2014)

there to be crossed or ‘smoothed out’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1986; Braidotti 1994). The idea

that these and other liminal zones are anti-essentialist spaces where identities are

contingent, malleable and fluid, is one that also underpins Bhabha’s concept of ‘third space’,

conceived of as a cultural space where hybrid identities are negotiated and forged, often in

resistance to hegemonic power structures. For Bhabha, ‘[t]he non-synchronous temporality

of global and national cultures opens up a cultural space – a third space – where the

negotiation of incommensurable differences creates a tension peculiar to borderline

existences’ (1994: 218).

Although concepts such as ‘third space’, ‘nomad’, and la mestiza are predicated on a

radically de-essentialised space of liminal encounter, arguably they are only able to sustain

their deterritorialising logic through a concomitant essentialisation of space. As Smith and

Katz have commented, ‘an absolutist spatial ontology… provides the missing foundation for

everything else in flux’ (1993: 79). By reducing the complexities and dynamics of social space

(Lefebvre 1991) to a largely rhetorical space of flow, hybridity and becoming the extent to

which identities are caught within – and often at the mercy of – material and economic

geographies of transnational liminality can be overlooked. An instructive and tragic case in

point is that of the 23 Chinese migrant workers who drowned while picking cockles in the

vast expanse of sandflats and mudflats at Morecambe Bay in 2004. Located on the north

west coast of England in Lancashire, Morecambe Bay is notorious for its fast moving tides

and treacherous quicksand, as well as its lucrative cockle beds. Despite the dangers posed

by this stretch of coastline the Bay has long attracted itinerant workers, many of whom, as

with the Chinese cockle pickers, remain at the mercy of exploitative and illegal gangmasters.

While the Morecambe Bay incident brought to light the appalling conditions faced by these

migrant workers, it also forced an awareness of the extent to which such groups are an
Published in: NJ Smelser and PB Baltes (eds.), International Encyclopedia of the Social and Behavioral
Sciences. Oxford: Elsevier (2014)

invisible but immutable presence, occupying a ghostly liminal zone on the social and

geographic margins of the nation; caught in the interstices of transnational space.

Situated ‘betwixt and between’ land and sea Morecambe Bay Sands represents an

ambiguous, and thus potentially dangerous zone on account of its unbiddable and

‘unmappable’ physical terrain. But, as the 2004 incident made clear, such landscapes are

also liminal to the extent that they are heterotopias, or spaces of otherness, ‘juxtaposing in

a single real place several spaces, several sites that are in themselves incompatible’

(Foucault 1986: 25; Hetherington 1997). As a space of transnational migrant labour and

increasingly globalised social, cultural and economic relations, coastal resorts such as

Morecambe Bay expose the underlying tensions and social divisions between

representations that play on the ludic, touristic heritage of these resorts and those which

address the marginality and exclusion that characterises the other set of mobilities and

meanings evoked by these spaces. In this instance, the precarious and unnavigable natural

landscape of Morecambe Sands becomes a metonym for the increasingly de-stabilising

landscapes of global capitalism. Compare this example with the hybrid spaces depicted in

the film Bhaji on the Beach (dir: Gurinder Chadha, 1993), in which a group of British-Asian

women go on a day trip to Blackpool, also on the Lancashire coast. The sense of shared

communitas and identity that the beachscape connotes in the latter stands in stark contrast

to the fear, exploitation and uncertainty experienced by those occupying very different

spaces of marginality and transnational liminality in twenty-first century Britain.

Liminality and Psychotherapy

When planning his walk across Maplin Sands on the Thames Estuary (see above), Robert

Macfarlane initially and very sensibly sought the services of a guide who had the detailed
Published in: NJ Smelser and PB Baltes (eds.), International Encyclopedia of the Social and Behavioral
Sciences. Oxford: Elsevier (2014)

local knowledge necessary to navigate the route safely. Wayfarers crossing the sand-flats of

Morecambe Bay are also encouraged to only undertake the walk with the accompaniment

of a guide. An official guide, known as the Sandpilot of Morecambe Bay, regularly leads

parties on the six mile trek across the sands. As we have elsewhere noted (Andrews and

Roberts 2012: 8), the role of the guide highlights another common attribute of liminal

landscapes in that initiates are required to place their trust in the knowledge of a ‘ritual

elder’ or ‘master of ceremonies’ so as to ensure safe navigation and transit. Analogies here

can be drawn with the relationship between psychotherapist and patient, the former often

held to be providing a form of ‘ritual leadership’ (Moore 1991: 25). In From Ritual to

Theatre, Turner casts the experimental theatre director Jerzy Grotowski in the role of ritual

guide-cum-psychotherapist: ‘Let us create a liminal space-time “pod” or pilgrimage centre,

[Grotowski] seems to be saying, where human beings may be disciplined and discipline

themselves to strip off the false personae stifling the individual within’ (1982: 120). It is

important to note, however, that the ritual leader is not the master or controller of

transformative space. Such space ‘cannot be commanded – it can only be invoked’ (Moore

1991: 27). As such, liminality ‘is always within a context of containment in which the

boundaries are not tended by the ego of the individual involved’ (ibid: 29), but nor, by the

same token, are they overly determined by the intervention of the leader or guide.

Navigating the psycho-liminal landscapes of the patient, the therapist, like the Sand

Pilot, is responsible for ensuring the careful stewardship of the boundary beyond which safe

and secure transformation cannot be assured. Stressing the importance of the boundary in

an article examining the psychoanalyst as ritual elder, Moore argues that:

Published in: NJ Smelser and PB Baltes (eds.), International Encyclopedia of the Social and Behavioral
Sciences. Oxford: Elsevier (2014)

when sensing the need for a liminal space, [individuals] will seek out boundary and

containment wherever they can. If knowledgeable ritual elders are not present to

invoke liminal space and lead them through it, then they gravitate to the liminoid and

try to find containment or generate it on their own. The attraction of geographical

boundaries such as seashores to those in transition states is a striking example of this

intuitive quest for the boundary. Finding a natural boundary is, of course, relatively

simple. Locating an appropriate transformative container, however, is much more

difficult. (1991: 28)

The concepts of liminal and liminoid, and particularly the work of Turner, have been

influential in the development of Jungian-based psychoanalysis in which the therapeutic

contract between therapist and client is conceived of as a ritual process. The edited

collection ‘Liminality and Transitional Phenomena’ (Schwartz-Salant and Stein 1991) brings

together work by scholars of psychology and religion alongside that of psychotherapists and

counsellors who all approach the theory and practice of Jungian psychotherapy by engaging

closely with ideas of liminality. The importance of the ‘container’ or ‘vessel’ as part of the

psychotherapeutic ritual process is one that several contributors draw attention to. Hopcke,

for example, notes that the concept of liminality is ‘felicitously consonant’ with Carl Jung’s

own approach to analysis, which was to provide a space, ‘a temenos, a magic circle, a vessel,

in which the transformation inherent in the patient’s condition would be allowed to take

place’ (1991: 117). For Hopcke, liminality is the very essence of effective analytic work, the

aim of which is transformation and change.

Liminality and Tourism

Published in: NJ Smelser and PB Baltes (eds.), International Encyclopedia of the Social and Behavioral
Sciences. Oxford: Elsevier (2014)

The concept of liminality has found its way into more areas of academic enquiry through its

use in tourism. In the first place the idea that tourism marks some form of hiatus in the

(yearly) life was expounded in the early days of the anthropological study of tourism in

Nelson Graburn’s text Tourism as a Sacred Journey (1989 [1976]). In this work Graburn

follows van Gennep's formulation of rites de passage to understand the touristic experience

as a leaving of the normative world, to enter a liminal phase of separation in which the

holiday experience allows for the individual to feel as if they have been renewed in some

way before their return home upon which they are re-incorporated back into the everyday,

heavily routinized world they left behind. As part of the liminality of the vacation the

holidaymakers may feel some sense of communitas with their fellow travellers in which they

share the trials and tribulations of being in an unfamiliar environment.

The ritualistic and episodic role of tourism as a period which permits different

attitudes and behaviours to emerge from that found in the home world was used as a basis

to understand the apparently ludic behaviour of tourists in relation to their sexual conduct

aboard charter tourism yachts in the Caribbean. In his study, James W. Lett Jr. (1983) argues

that tourists to the British Virgin Islands treat the place as a playground which allows them

to indulge in a form of ‘playground culture’ (1983: 55). The emphasis on play marks the

experience as liminoid rather than liminal and draws attention to the distinctions

highlighted by Turner (1982) – see above.

Another major contributor to the linking of the concept of liminality to tourism can

be found in the work of Rob Shields (1991). In Places on the Margin Shields notes that

following the patronage of the Prince Regent, the southern English sea-side town of

Brighton developed from a fishing village into a seaside resort where dominant discourses

could be subverted. For example, Brighton became connected with the ‘dirty weekend’,
Published in: NJ Smelser and PB Baltes (eds.), International Encyclopedia of the Social and Behavioral
Sciences. Oxford: Elsevier (2014)

often represented in the form of the ‘dirty postcard’. What this referred to in practice was

the conduct of illicit sexual relationships. Such was the reputation of Brighton that it was

often used to ‘stage’ adulterous encounters to further divorce proceedings. Shields argues

that the beach took on a carnivalesque role which allowed the transgression of propriety

and societal norms and that this helped to mark it as liminal zone. In her study of charter

tourists to Magaluf and Palmanova on the Mediterranean island of Mallorca, Andrews

(2011) applies the concept of liminality not only to the beach but to the resorts as a whole,

in which the practice of the holiday is marked out as different from the ‘everyday’ in the

actions of the tourists and those mediating their experiences. This can be illustrated by the

purchase of clothes specially for the occasion and the amplification of difference (and

attendant dangers) promoted by the tour operators.

The degree to which holiday taking can be seen as markedly different from the

everyday or out of the ordinary has been criticised (see, for example, Veijola and Jokinen

1994). Andrews (2009) suggests that it is more of a disruption to habitus rather than a

complete change per se, arguing that that this line of thought can be developed further by

thinking more carefully about the concept of experience and in particular the nuances of

what it might mean and how it can be used.

Liminality and Anthropology of Experience

In their edited collection The Anthropology of Experience, Victor Turner and Edward Bruner

(1983) discuss the nature of experience within a dramaturlurgical context of performance

and narrative. In their volume the meaning of experience, as Geertz suggests, remains ‘the

elusive master concept of this collection, one that none of the authors seems altogether

happy with and none feels able to really do without’ (1986: 374). In the English speaking
Published in: NJ Smelser and PB Baltes (eds.), International Encyclopedia of the Social and Behavioral
Sciences. Oxford: Elsevier (2014)

world, one of the problems encountered when trying to define or discuss experience is the

limitations of having only one word of use in the English language, unlike in German, for

instance, where there are two: Erfahrung and Erlebnis. Erfahrung refers to the idea of

encounters and Erlebnis to the world of senses and emotions, intuition and movement. The

Erlebnis is not fixed, rather it is a process in which there are a number of possibilities that

arise within or through a particular situation; it is the world of the subjective or of being

affected by something (see Andrews 2009). Drawing on the work of the German philosopher

Wilhelm Dilthey (1833-1911) Turner argues that the liminal phase allows for ’unique

structures of experience ( Dilthey’s Erlebnis )’ (1983: 41). Thus liminality provides the

Erlebnis form of experience, which is a world of possibilities and becomings: ‘Liminality can

perhaps be described as a fructile chaos, a storehouse of possibilities, not a random

assemblage but a striving after new forms and structures, a gestation process, a fetation of

modes appropriate to postliminal existence’ (ibid: 42). Turner compares this to ‘ordinary’

life which is lived in the indicative mood and argues that liminality, in its abilities to offer

possibilities, operates in the subjective. It is these ideas of the exploratory nature and

potential of becoming in liminaltiy that link it to the idea of social drama developed most

notably by the philosopher John Dewey (1859-1952).

The link between Turner's ideas of liminality and Erlebnis had been explored in an

earlier text From Ritual to Theatre, published in 1982. In this Turner argues that an

anthropology of performance is an integral part of the anthropology of experience and that

performance is found in many different types of cultural expression: ritual, carnival and

theatre to name but a few. Such performances are themselves processes and it is in this

process that ‘what is normally sealed up, inaccessible to everyday observation and

reasoning, in the depth of sociocultural life, is drawn forth’ (1982: 13). The link to the idea of
Published in: NJ Smelser and PB Baltes (eds.), International Encyclopedia of the Social and Behavioral
Sciences. Oxford: Elsevier (2014)

social drama and liminality being in the subjunctive is again clear: that such experiences

allow for the emergence of a number of possibilities. This is echoed in the work of Michael

Jackson in his work on existential anthropology, where experience is entwined with notions

of ‘being’. As Jackson observes ‘[b]eing is (...) in continual flux, waxing and waning according

to a person's situation’ (2005: x).

Conclusion

The concept of liminality is, as we have seen, closely bound up with experience and the

processes of change, transformation and transition that individuals undergo as part of that

experience. Tropes and practices of play, performance, flow, becoming, potential, gestation,

passage, movement: these are all in some way constitutive elements that variously inform

the essential ‘in-between-ness’ of liminal experiences and states. Socially, psychologically,

and ontologically this in-between-ness entails a process of letting go of stable topographies

of selfhood; of ‘striving after new forms and structures’ as Turner puts it. As a ‘fructile

chaos’ liminality can also, therefore, be characterised in terms of danger (Thomassen 2012)

and of the anxieties and emotional turbulence that accompanies the passage through

liminal states or spaces. Increasingly, however, the concept has taken on a far looser set of

meanings that has at times reduced what might be understood as ‘liminal’ to a rather vague

sense of being ‘on the edge’ or ‘in-between’ in ways that have become decoupled from the

concept’s attendant (and requisite) social underpinnings. Paying closer critical attention to

the spatialities of liminal phenomena, an issue we addressed in our book Liminal

Landscapes: Travel, Experience and Spaces In-between (Andrews and Roberts 2012), is one

of the ways that liminality can be re-grounded in the foundational work of van Gennep,

Turner and others, whilst at the same time acknowledging the extent to which the concept
Published in: NJ Smelser and PB Baltes (eds.), International Encyclopedia of the Social and Behavioral
Sciences. Oxford: Elsevier (2014)

has ‘travelled’ and aligned itself with a far broader field of social, cultural and geographical

enquiry.

References

Andrews, H., 2009. Tourism as a ‘Moment of Being’. Suomen Antropologi: Journal of the

Finnish Anthropological Society. 34 (2),5-21.

Andrews, H., 2011. The British on Holiday Charter Tourism, Identity and Consumption.

Bristol, Channel View.

Andrews, H., 2012. Another Place or Just Another Space? Liminality and Crosby Beach, in:

Andrews, H., and Roberts, L. (Eds.), Liminal Landscapes: Travel, Experience and Spaces In-

between. London, Routledge, pp. 152-166.

Andrews, H. and Leopold, T., 2013. Events and the Social Sciences. London, Routledge.

Andrews, H. and Roberts, L., 2012. Introduction: Re-mapping Liminality, in: Andrews, H., and

Roberts, L. (Eds.), Liminal Landscapes: Travel, Experience and Spaces In-between. London,

Routledge, pp. 1-17.

Anzaldúa, G., 1987. Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza. San Francisco, Aunt Lute

Books.
Published in: NJ Smelser and PB Baltes (eds.), International Encyclopedia of the Social and Behavioral
Sciences. Oxford: Elsevier (2014)

Augé, M., 1995. Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity. London,

Verso.

Augé, M., 2004. Oblivion. Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press.

Bhabha, H., 1994. The Location of Culture. London, Routledge.

Braidotti, R., 1994. Nomadic Subjects: Embodiment and Sexual Difference in Contemporary

Feminist Theory. New York: Columbia University Press.

Das, V., 1977. Structure and Cognition: Aspects of Hindu Caste and Ritual. Delhi, Oxford

University Press.

Deleuze, G. and Guattari F., 1986. Nomadology: The War Machine. New York, Semiotext(e).

Foucault, M., 1986. Of Other Spaces. Diacritics 16 (1),22-27.

Geertz, C., 1986. Making Experience, Authoring Selves, in: Turner, V.W. and Bruner, E.M.

(Eds.), The Anthropology of Experience. Chicago, University of Illinois Press, pp. 373-380.

Gerard, M., 2004. Selecting Ritual: DJs, Dancers and Liminality in Underground Dance Music,

in: St. John, G. (Ed.), Rave Culture and Religion. London, Routledge, pp. 167-184.
Published in: NJ Smelser and PB Baltes (eds.), International Encyclopedia of the Social and Behavioral
Sciences. Oxford: Elsevier (2014)

Graburn, N.H.H. 1989. Tourism: the Sacred Journey, in: Smith, V. (Ed.), Hosts and Guests:

The Anthropology of Tourism, second ed. Oxford, Blackwell, pp. 17-32.

Gunnell, T., 2007. Busar: Initiation Traditions in Icelandic Gymansia, in: Midholm, L. and

Nordstöm, A. (Eds.), The Ritual Year and Ritual Diversity, Proceedings from the International

Conference of the SIEF Working Group on the Ritual Year, Gothenburg, Sweden, 7-11 June

2006, pp. 287-297.

Harvey, D., 2000. Spaces of Hope. Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press.

Hetherington, K., 1997. The Badlands of Modernity: Heterotopia and Social Ordering.

London, Routledge.

hooks, b., 1990. Yearning: Race, Gender and Cultural Politics. Boston, MA, South End Press.

Hopcke, R.H., 1991. On the Threshold of Change: Symbolization and Transitional Space, in:

Schwartz-Salant, N. and Stein, M. (Eds.), Liminality and Transitional Phenomena. Wilmette,

Illinois, Chiron, pp. 115-132.

Jackson, M., 2005. Existential Anthropology: Events, Exigencies and Effects. Oxford,

Berghahn.

Lefebvre, H., 1991. The Production of Space. Oxford, Blackwell.

Published in: NJ Smelser and PB Baltes (eds.), International Encyclopedia of the Social and Behavioral
Sciences. Oxford: Elsevier (2014)

Lett Jr., J.W. 1983., Ludic and Liminoid Aspects of Charter Yacht Tourism in the Caribbean.
Annals of Tourism Research. 10, 35-56.

Macfarlane, R., 2012. The Old Ways: a Journey on Foot. London, Hamish Hamilton.

Marin, L., 1984. Utopics: The Semiological Play of Textual Spaces. Atlantic Highlands, NJ,

Humanities Press International.

Meethan, K., 2012. Walking the Edges: Towards a Visual Ethnography of Beachscapes, in:

Andrews, H., and Roberts, L. (Eds.), Liminal Landscapes: Travel, Experience and Spaces In-

between. London, Routledge, pp. 69-86.

Moore, R.L., 1991. Ritual, Sacred Space, and Healing: the Psychoanalyst as Ritual Elder, in:

Schwartz-Salant, N. and Stein, M. (Eds.), Liminality and Transitional Phenomena. Wilmette,

Illinois, Chiron, pp. 13-32.

Roberts, L., 2002. ‘Welcome to Dreamland’: From Place to Non-place and Back Again in

Pawel Pawlikowski’s Last Resort. New Cinemas: Journal of Contemporary Film 1 (2),78-90.

Schwartz-Salant, N. and Stein, M. (Eds.), Liminality and Transitional Phenomena. Wilmette,

Illinois, Chiron.

Shields, R., 1991. Places on the Margin: Alternative Geographies of Modernity. London,

Routledge.
Published in: NJ Smelser and PB Baltes (eds.), International Encyclopedia of the Social and Behavioral
Sciences. Oxford: Elsevier (2014)

Smith, N. and Katz, C., 1993. Grounding Metaphor: Towards a Spatialised Politics, in: Keith,

M. and Pile, S. (Eds.), Place and the Politics of Identity. London, Routledge.

St. John, G., 2008. Trance Tribes and Dance Vibes: Victor Turner and Electronic Dance Music

Culture, in: St. John, G. (Ed.), Victor Turner and Contemporary Cultural Performance. New

York: Berghahn, pp. 149-173.

Thomassen, B., 2009. The Uses and Meanings of Liminality. International Political

Anthropology 2 (1),5-27.

Thomassen, B., 2012. Revisiting Liminality: the Danger of Empty Spaces, in: Andrews, H., and

Roberts, L. (Eds.), Liminal Landscapes: Travel, Experience and Spaces In-between. London,

Routledge, pp. 21-35.

Turner, V.W., 1962. Three symbols of passage in Ndembu circumcision ritual: An

interpretation, in: Gluckman, M (Ed.), Essays on the Ritual of Social Relations. Manchester,

Manchester University Press.

Turner, V.W., 1967. The Forest of Symbols, Aspects of Ndembu Ritual. New York, Cornell

University Press.

Turner, V.W., 1969. The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure. New York: Cornell

University Press.
 Published in: NJ Smelser and PB Baltes (eds.), International Encyclopedia of the Social and Behavioral
Sciences. Oxford: Elsevier (2014)

Turner, V.W., 1982. From Ritual to Theatre: the Human Seriousness of Play. New York: PAJ

Publications.

Turner, V.W., 1987. The Anthropology of Performance, New York: PAJ Publications.

Turner, V.W. and Bruner, E. (Eds.), 1986. The Anthropology of Experience. Chicago,

University of Illinois Press.

Turner, V., and Turner, E., 1978. Image and Pilgrimage in Christian Culture: Anthropological

Perspectives. New York, Columbia University Press.

van Gennep, A., 1960. The Rites of Passage. Chicago, Chicago University Press.

Veijola, S. and Jokinen, E., 1994. The Body in Tourism. Theory, Culture and Society 11 (3),25-
151.

Warf, B. and Arias, S. (Eds.), 2009. The Spatial Turn: interdisciplinary perspectives. Abingdon,

Routledge.

Weiss, W.S., 1967. Rebirth in the Airborne. Trans-action 4 (6),23-6.

View publication stats