Anthropology Southern Africa

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Categorical difference versus continuum:

Rethinking Turner's liminal-liminoid distinction

Andrew D Spiegel

To cite this article: Andrew D Spiegel (2011) Categorical difference versus continuum:
Rethinking Turner's liminal-liminoid distinction, Anthropology Southern Africa, 34:1-2, 11-20,
DOI: 10.1080/23323256.2011.11500004

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/23323256.2011.11500004

Published online: 25 Sep 2015.

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 Anthropology Southern Africa, 20 I I , 34( I&2) II

Categorical difference versus continuum:

Rethinking Turner's liminal-liminoid
distinction 1

Andrew D Spiegel
Department of Social Anthropology, University of Cape Town
P.O. Rondebosch, 770 I Cape Town
mugsy.spiegel@uct.ac.za

Turner's distinction between liminal and liminoid is not commonly drawn upon, liminality being seen and applied to all 'betwixt
and between' social situations. Yet Turner's distinction, once appropriately revised, offers a more nuanced means to
understand such situations. The criteria Turner originally used to construct the distinction have, however, created a tendency
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towards its being used to perpetuate a crude and by now passe primitive-versus-civilised/modern distinction of societal types.
Starting with brief reference to South Africa's World Cup 2010 event and using various other illustrative examples, the article
outlines Turner's original conceptualisation of the liminal-liminoid distinction. It then proposes an alternative way of
understanding that distinction- seeing liminal and liminoid as opposite ends of a continuum stretching between two ideal type
social situations. It further argues that all real such social situations demonstrate aspects of both liminal and liminoid within
them, the extent of each being what differentiates them.

Keywords: Liminal; liminoid; continuum; social solidarity; transgression; disruption; reproduction.

Preamble Driven primarily by the ruling party's expressed intentions to

Hosting the FIFA World Cup made 20 I0 an especially excit-
ing year for South Africa, with the event being celebrated in
cities, towns and indeed villages across the land. Of particular
salience was the way the country's diverse people seemed to
come together in what might be described as a frenzy of
what Victor Turner ( 1969; 1974: 79) called spontaneous
communitas - or what Steven Robins (20 I0), writing for the
chattering classes in the popular press just as the spectacle
came to an end, referred to as "heady times as millions of
South Africans celebrate[d] ... [and] produced an extraordi-
nary sense of global citizenship and national pride and belong-
ing". It was as if the euphoria of the 1994 elections and the
inauguration of Nelson Mandela into the presidency were
being repeated. Not only did the World Cup event create an
intense sense of camaraderie amongst most of the country's
people; it also enabled them, in that same festive spirit, to
draw the then multitude of visitors to the country into their
embrace - an embrace that seemed for a seemingly timeless
moment to recognise and dignify the common humanity that
had been the ideal expressed by Mandela on his assumption
of office, and that undergirds the country's much celebrated
constitution.
Yet within days of the World Cup spectacle having ended,
that sense of timelessness had disappeared, to be replaced by
a deep disillusion that emerged in the country's media.
muzzle the post-apartheid free press, it was helped along by
reports, once again, of threats of xenophobic violence aimed
especially at citizens of, and refugees from other African
countries, and of repeated incidents of violent crime and of
continuing high crime rates. The disappointment was further
driven by a sense that the World Cup event, having provided
an experience of the kind of social environment to which the
country aspires, had failed to deliver on those expectations,
and that its organisers and the populace had abandoned the
country to its regular albeit uneasy existence. Indeed many
felt quite let down by it all, asking why, given that members of
the national community could so patently pull themselves
together for the big event, they could not maintain the same
spirit of cooperation with one another in the longer term
interests of the country as a whole and thus of their various
individual and partisan interests too. 2
Liminality and liminoidity as explanatory concepts
Application of Victor Turner's ideas about liminality - ideas
and their development by Turner that are the main focus of
this article- provide one potential answer to that question. It
is an answer that also requires seeing events such as the FIFA
World Cup as effectively kinds of (secular) ritual during which
everyday rules and behaviour patterns are suspended and
replaced by others, and during which social relationships and

I. I am grateful to Peter Versteeg whose presentation at a symposium on Turner's work at the University of Stellenbosch, October 2009,
alerted me to the issues that I attempt to develop here. Also see his article in this issue (Versteeg 20 I I). I am also grateful to Tarien
Roux for her help as a research assistant and to the two anonymous referees of this article and to Kees van der Waal whose comments
have helped me to hone the article. Any omissions or errors of interpretation are, of course, my own.
2. Nearly six months later, that insightful newspaper duo, Mokena Makaka and Rory Williams, expressed the disappointment thus in their
weekly 'Men About Town' column (Cape Times 3 January 20 I I): "At the final whistle of the World Cup, a sense of achievement was
instantly replaced with nostalgia. Cinderella's carriage was a pumpkin again, and we wished we were still at the ball ... but there is no
magic slipper".
 12
sensory experiences are significantly different from those
experienced outside of those special liminal periods. Yet, as
discussed below, Turner himself ( 1974) revised the concept
of the liminal by introducing another, the liminoid. Since for
Turner ( 1974) the liminal was intended to describe socially
and culturally 'betwixt and between' experiences and circum-
stances in what he called 'tribal and early agrarian societies'
( 1974: 84), he introduced the notion of the liminoid to
describe similar experiences and circumstances in modern
post-enlightenment societies where such experiences did
not, as he saw them, have the same society-wide salience
that the liminal had in pre-modern societies. Which raises the
questions: since the FIFA World Cup event is a wholly mod-
ern one 3 , and is staged, always, in a modern, some might say
hyper-modern social context, does that mean that it creates
circumstances of liminoidity (to apply a term coined by Vers-
teeg 20 I I) rather than liminality? And, if it does, is there any
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way that making that distinction can help us to understand
better the disappointment that followed the end of the
World Cup spectacle in South Africa?
In attempting to answer those questions and therefore to
interrogate Turner's liminal-liminoid distinction, this article
begins by asking whether and how Victor Turner's ( 1974)
enhancement of Van Gennep's notion of liminality might assist
in explaining processes such as those that were the World
Cup event in South Africa in 20 I 0, and to do so in a way that
might provide insight into the reasons for the sense of post-
event disappointment that followed. It then asks how and
whether our analytically applying those ideas might fit with
Turner's further development of the argument about the lim-
inal in his claim that there is a need to distinguish the liminal
from the liminoid ( 1974; 1982). To answer those questions,
however, we must go back some thirty-five or so years to the
time Turner was first developing that distinction - a review
process that, for me, has led to questions about the useful-
ness of the distinction in the form in which Turner presented
it, and to a suggestion as to how to refine the distinction to
make it more useful.
I was a senior undergraduate and subsequently a very jun-
ior postgraduate student in the University of Cape Town's
Anthropology Department at the time two of its members
were preparing and subsequently published a festschrift for
then recently retired Monica Wilson (West & Whisson 1975).
Amongst the contributions in the collection was one by
Turner who used the opportunity to discuss manifestations of
liminality through images of death and the dead during pil-
grimage, a process he compared in that respect with initiation
rites. His penultimate paragraph began with the sentence: "In
the interstitial, interfacial realm of liminality, both in initiation
rites and the pilgrimage process, the dead are conceived of as
transformative agencies and as mediating between various
domains normally classified as distinct" ( 1975: 126). The tau-
tology of that sentence's introductory phrase was such that
the phrase came to be bandied about in the Department with
a degree of amusement about how it reflected Turner's then
almost fetishised interest in the idea of liminality. Yet, other
3. The first official FIFA World Cup was held only in 1974, although there were international FIFA-sponsored tournaments from 1932
onwards. FIFA itself was founded in 1904.
4. It is noteworthy that Turner nonetheless went on to develop his ideas about play in From ritual to theatre: The human seriousness of play
( 1982). It is also there in his The anthropology of performance ( 1986).
Anthropology Southern Africa, 20 I I, 34( I &2)
than in a brief tentative and quite uninformative reference in
the festschrift text ( 1975: I 16), Turner made no mention of
the distinction between liminal and liminoid with which he
was clearly engaged at the time: a distinction with which he
appears to have first made major headway in his article 'Limi-
nal and Liminoid in Play, Flow and Ritual' (1974) and which
constituted a contribution to what appears, from one com-
mentator's perspective (Buettner-Janusch 1974), to have
been a quite unsuccessful symposium on the anthropological
study of human play. 4
Liminal versus liminoid: Turner's distinction
In that article, Turner ( 1974) rehearsed his indebtedness to
Arnold van Gennep ( 1960 [ 1909]) for the latter's use of the
term limen (threshold) to describe the state entered during
the middle (transition) phase of what he (Van Gennep) saw as
the tripartite structure of a rite of passage; and he explained
how Van Gennep had understood such a liminal phase to
include practices of symbolic reversals and inversions of a
kind commonly experienced during the kinds of life-crisis-
marking processes to which the phrase rite of passage came
to be applied almost exclusively and during which a suspen-
sion of chronological time was often experienced. However,
Turner also stressed a point he had made earlier (1967: 7-
15): that, for van Gennep, the idea of rites of passage applied
not only to "rituals accompanying the change in social status
of an individual or a cohort of individuals" (what one might
call life crisis markers), but applied also to "those [rituals]
associated with seasonal changes for an entire society" ( 1974:
56).
This point is salient, both for Turner's ( 1974) and for my
own present argument, since it points to the importance of
recognising the applicability of Van Gennep's limen idea to the
experience of society wide events that might include all of a
society's people - events such as carnivals, national festivals
or moments of memoriam such as, in the Netherlands, the
two minute long national stoppage and silence on Remem-
brance Day (Dodenherdenking; 20:00 on May 4, the eve of
Liberation Day), and activities such as marked the 20 I0
World Cup in South Africa. Such events, while only some-
times seasonal, do involve whole social cohorts, if not whole
societies, in periods when and in circumstances where regu-
lar activities are suspended; when, in a sense, people are liv-
ing 'out of time'; and when alternative modes of behaviour
and norms are envisioned - all characteristics of what, until
his development of the liminal-liminoid distinction, Turner
associated, without any differentiation, with the liminal.
It is this idea of the liminal that helps one make sense of
the disappointment felt in South African society as the World
Cup event came to an end and the country returned to its
more regular albeit unsettling ways. If one understands the
event as constituting a series of interrelated experiences 'out
of time', and indeed -as Turner has it for many such ritual
events - as a period and space when and in which a sense of
communitas is temporarily created, then its conclusion must
 Anthropology Southern Africa, 20 I I, 34( I&2)
necessarily have brought to an end much of the euphoria that
had occurred during the event and during which cherished
ideals seem to have been realised. Moreover, if one under-
stands the event as a one-off rather than as seasonal or life-
cyclical, one also then sees the limits of its potential as a
transformative moment through which those cherished ideals
might be imbedded in everyday social practice subsequent to
the event's conclusion.
But then what of the liminal-liminoid distinction? If we can
indeed explain that sense of post-World Cup disappointment
by seeing that wholly modern event, held in wholly modern
circumstances, as one that created a sense of liminality -
indeed of enabling a sense of communitas, 5 a phenomenon
that Turner associates with liminality - is there any value in
the liminoid idea, and if so in what respects?
A further point that Turner ( 1974) stressed, as he had
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done previously ( 1967; 1969), reflected his desire to steer
clear of studies of symbols from a structuralist point of view
and rather to see symbols as events that are part of social
processes and therefore as "shedding and gathering meaning
over time and altering form" ( 1974: 54); or - as he says in
what can only be a veiled critique of Levi-Strauss (cf. Deflem
1991) - "Binariness and arbitrariness go together, and both
are in the atemporal world of 'signifiers.' Such a treatment,
while often seductively elegant, a frisson for our cognitive fac-
ulties, removes the total set of symbols from the complex,
continuously changing social life ... " ( 1974: 55). As De Pina
Cabral ( 1997) has indicated, Turner was particularly con-
cerned to demonstrate the processual (Turner himself called
it the processional) character of ritual in particular and society
in general, and thereby distanced himself from the structural-
functionalism of his early career with Max Gluckman, and
from the structuralism of Levi-Strauss. By making points such
as in the above quote, Turner ( 1974) thus set the stage for
what one might anticipate would be a thoroughly processual
analysis: one that not only reflects on the salience of process
in social life but that also reflects concern to develop fluid and
malleable analytical tools that themselves disrupt any com-
mitment to structure alone and that might reflect the limen-
type character of innovative imaginings such as those
"whence novel configurations of ideas and relations may
arise" (Turner 1967: 97 quoted by De Pina Cabral 1997: 32).
It thus comes as something of a surprise to discover that
Turner's ( 1974; 1982) elaboration of a liminal-liminoid dis-
tinction failed to accommodate such analytically fluid notions.
Not only did he create the notion of the liminoid, but he con-
structed it as categorically different from the liminal and thus
fixed both into an apparent structural binary. Before I explain
how that appears to have come about, however, we need to
understand in greater detail what Turner's distinction repre-
sented and how he constructed two neatly separated con-
ceptual categories. Later I turn to how the distinction might
be retained, yet used in a manner that avoids the crude bina-
rism that is there in Turner's ( 1974) conceptualisation. I con-
clude with some ethnographic examples to illustrate how my
suggestions might usefully be applied.
5. Communitas is a central Turnerian concept, one that he set up in a binary with social structure. But, despite the notion being used
extensively in literature describing liminal states- much as I have used it here- it never gained the analytical purchase Turner had
hoped for it as one of "equal theoretical weight to the notion of social structure" (de Pin a Cabral 1997: 33).
13
Turner's criteria for distinguishing liminal from
liminoid
As indicated, for Turner (1974: 84-6) both the liminal and the
liminoid constituted periods of 'betwixt and between' human
social existence during which the norms of everyday life are
suspended and when alternatives that may be inversions are
practised. Indeed, his argument about liminality and liminoid-
ity is that both constitute spaces-apart and times-apart within
social existence, spaces/times within and during which alter-
natives to the norm are possible and indeed encouraged. Yet,
despite this relatively great extent of overlap, he distinguished
them categorically in terms of the following set of character-
istics:6
I. What occurs during the liminal, whilst apparently 'inver-
sive' and therefore potentially subversive of the extant
social structure, is actually super-functional for the mainte-
nance of that social structure. In that respect the liminal
remains a period and space of what Turner's mentor, Max
Gluckman, referred to as a ritual of rebellion. In contrast, a
liminoid period/space is one in which its topsy-turviness
represents substantive critiques out of which social struc-
tural transformation may well arise. In brief, the liminal
provides opportunity only for rebellion followed by a
return to the status quo ante, while the liminoid has the
potential to produce revolutionary change.
2. Liminal periods/spaces, and indeed their presence in social
cycles, are central to and maintained by the social struc-
ture in and of which they are moments of topsy-turviness
that are themselves often culturally designed to be such.
In contrast, liminoid periods/spaces arise idiosyncratically
and interstitially within society and its extant structures-
thus making the activities in those periods/spaces experi-
mental and potentially socially transformative.
3. Liminal periods/spaces occur cyclically and/or in connec-
tion with life-cycle processes and events; and what occurs
during liminal periods and in such spaces is of collective
concern to members of a socially solidary unit (a 'society').
In other words liminal periods/spaces mark "natural dis-
junctions in the flow of natural and social processes"
( 1974: 85), such breaks in flow being of concern to a soci-
ety as a socially solidary unit and to its maintenance too.
In contrast, liminoid periods/spaces occur erratically and
idiosyncratically around the interests of individuals, though
the impact of what occurs during them may influence
behaviour in a broader collectivity that might even include
a society in the sense of a socially solidary unit of the kind
that earlier sociology understood by that term.
4. The meanings of what occurs during/in the liminal are, at
least in the retro-perspective of those involved, shared by
those who constitute a socially solidary unit (society) and
may be used by them to reinforce its social solidarity.
In contrast, what occurs during/in the liminoid is idiosyn-
cratic and its symbols have individual meaning (or at most
related to a specific interest group); they are thus "closer
to the personal-psychological than to the 'objective-social'
 14 Anthropology Southern Africa, 20 I I, 34( I&2)

typological pole" ( 1974: 86).7
For our present purposes, probably the most important and
indeed the first point of comparison that Turner ( 1974)
presents to distinguish the liminal from the liminoid is that:
5. Liminal periods/spaces occur predominantly in societies
held together, in Durkheim's ( 1933) terms, through struc-
tures of mechanical solidarity and, in Tennies's ( 1955
[ 1884]) terms, through Gemeinschaft. In other words, they
are found predominantly in pre-modern societies where
status determines the character of social relationships
(Maine 1873) and where social structure and collective
interests dominate and determine such structure.
In contrast, liminoid periods/spaces arise in societies struc-
tured around principles of organic solidarity (Durkheim) or
Gesel/schaft (Tennies); in other words, where social rela-
tionships are based on contract (Maine) and individual
interests are such that social structures are fluid and malle-
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the distinction in the late 1960s and early 1970s. That was a
time when, with many other anthropologists determined to
unshackle themselves from the structural-functionalism of
their teachers and, in some instances, their own early years
(d. Deflem 1991; De Pina Cabral 1997), he was stressing the
need to avoid structuralist analysis, to recognise social proc-
ess as determinative of cultural practice, and to seek analyti-
cal tools that themselves did not create images of tightly
constraining structure. It was also around that time that he
was joined in the Chicago Department of Anthropology by
Marshall Sahlins who, attempting to engage in a similar cri-
tique, had, some years earlier, developed his now famous
analysis of exchange as comprising not distinctive separable
forms but points along a continuum between ideal types
(Sahlins 1965). 8 I digress now to outline Sahlins's argument
because it provides a model for what one might do with
Turner's liminal-liminoid distinction in order to make it meet

able, and indeed open to innovative interventions of the
kind that can be and are conceived during and in liminoid
periods/spaces.
In other words, as Deflem ( 1991: 15-16; original italics) puts
it, "liminal phenomena are predominantly restricted to 'prim-
itive' tribal societies [where] they are experienced collec-
tively ... Liminoid phenomena, on the other hand take place in
the complex industrial world; they are the product of individ-
ual or particular group efforts".
The last of the contrasts listed above offers a clear
pointer, I suggest, to the reasons that Turner constructed the
liminal-liminoid distinction as a binary. Despite what de Pina
Cabral ( 1997) sees in Turner's work as a shift away from see-
ing culture and society as necessarily bounded, it was his
apparent modernist commitment to a binary that assumes a
neat break between the pre-modern (read primitive) and the
modern, between what he called ( 1974:84) 'tribal and early
agrarian societies', on one hand, and societies structured
around the principles of the enlightenment, on the other, that
led him to create a picture of the liminal as contained within
the former and the liminoid as manifesting in the latter.
Moreover, there is danger for those picking up on the distinc-
tion to explain modern limen events and spaces as liminoid
and pre-modern ones as liminal. That is how Turner ( 1969)
himself applied the notions when he considered phenomena
such as the US-based hippie movement of the 1960s, and
how others, such as Mathiu Deflem ( 1991) and Peter Ver-
steeg (20 I I), have done so. It is precisely for that reason that
it is necessary, I believe, to rethink the distinction and to
move it away from that kind of binarism.
Ideal types on a continuum
It is important to remember here that Turner was developing
his own goal- of accommodating social process in social anal-
ysis, and indeed to provide tools that are themselves mallea-
ble enough to meet that goal.
The continuum of reciprocity as example
Sahlins's ( 1965) argument was that earlier substantivists' cate-
gorisation of three modes of exchange was misplaced. The
earlier work had seen (i) reciprocity as the economic driver
of social solidarity in very small-scale egalitarian and especially
face-to-face societies; (ii) redistribution as the economic
driver of social solidarity in larger-scale hierarchically organ-
ised societies albeit those where social relations were based
on status (rather than contract); and (iii) market exchange as
that same economic driver in even larger-scale societies
where contract underpinned social relations. Sahlins's
extremely elegant argument was that all were forms of reci-
procity which itself comprised (or functioned as) a wide range
of means for establishing and reinforcing social relations. At
the one end of what turns out to be a continuum between
Weberian ideal types lies reciprocity that is so deeply imbed-
ded in other social relations and the norms through which
they are maintained that Sahlins called it generalised reciproc-
ity: it is generalised into society.
Generalised reciprocity, as an ideal type, is such that flows
of value go in a single direction only, precisely because the
relationships between exchange partners are so socialised, so
imbedded in mutual trust, that there is no need for creation
of a balance sheet through which to assess the extent of
those flows in either direction. If reverse flows ever prove
necessary, they will occur without any claims having to be
made and purely because of the inextricably and mutually
supportive social relationships between those involved.
Moreover, such reverse flows can be, and ideally are, delayed

6. While Turner makes the distinctions in terms of liminal versus liminoid phenomena, I have rephrased some of those as characteristics
of liminal versus liminoid periods/spaces and the occurrences during and in those. Deflem ( 1991: I 5-16) provides a similar summary
to mine, though he retains Turner's reference to phenomena rather than periods/spaces, and he also retains Turner's ( 1974) ordering
of the differentiating characteristics.
7. Turner's use here of the phrase 'typological pole' is interesting in that it seems to presage thinking towards how, as I suggest in this
article, Turner's distinction between liminal and liminoid needs to be developed.
8. It remains a mystery, to me at least, why Sahlins entitled this work 'On the sociology of primitive exchange' (italics added) since his doing
that leaves him open to a critique similar to that which I am presently levelling at Turner. Moreover, Sahlins's continuum of reciprocity
seems to be applicable across a primitive-modern conceptual divide and indeed to imply the fallacy of that conceptual divide. A full
discussion of that point would be inappropriate here.
 Anthropology Southern Africa, 20 I I , 34( I &2)
in perpetuity. Clearly this represents an ideal that is never
actualised in practice, although some real exchange relation-
ships come close to such an ideal.
At the other end of the continuum is what Sahlins called
negative reciprocity, by which he meant exchanges in which
value flows again go in a single direction only, and where the
relationship between those who receive value and those
from whom it derives is again intense. But in this case it is a
wholly antagonistic relationship. Here the transfer of value is
one that the givers do not sanction and which the receivers
engage in by stealth or through the illegitimate exercise of
power over the givers. In this instance, even if the giver
draws up a balance sheet, in the sense of specifying what has
been taken (and therefore should be returned - preferably
immediately), the relationship is such that they cannot effect
such reciprocation either immediately, in the long term or
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indeed ever. Again, there is a delay in reciprocal transfer that
goes into perpetuity, but for reasons of intensely negative
rather than supportive social relations. The examples that
come closest to this kind of reciprocity are theft, embezzle-
ment and coercive appropriation, although in practice, as we
know, there is always a possibility of reverse appropriations
and/or compensation through war or conflict, or through
some kind of superior institutional intervention.
Midpoint on the continuum Sahlins placed what he called
balanced reciprocity: where ideally transfers of value are
immediately reciprocated and in equal value, where balance
sheets are drawn up by both parties and acted upon immedi-
ately, and where the relationship between exchange partners
is shallow and without any need for trust beyond the moment
of exchange itself. For Sahlins, this is the ideal type repre-
sented by the principle of market exchange where exchange
partners give and receive what each regards as being of equal
value to what they respectively receive and give in a particu-
lar transaction, and where they do so without any delay
whatsoever. But again this is an ideal type since in practice no
such moment of exchange is ever instantaneous and so there
is always some measure of trust (or mistrust) involved and
therefore always some kind of albeit shallow relationship
between partners.
Thus, for Sahlins, market exchange could be seen as a
form of reciprocity lying midway between the ends of a con-
tinuum of reciprocity that stretched from generalised (the
earlier substantivists' 'reciprocity') to negative (a form of
exchange not identified earlier as such). Moreover, the earlier
concept of redistribution, Sahlins argued, is constituted by a
multiplicity of reciprocal relationships that in ideal-type terms
lie at the generalised end of the continuum. That is because
they are reciprocal relationships between members of a hier-
archical solidary unit and the legitimated leaders of that unit,
relationships in which principles of authority, trust and mutual
support that stretch into perpetuity ideally underpin transfers
of value between them.
9. Deflem ( 1991: 17) argues that, "Turner seems to have underestimated his distinction between the liminal and the liminoid, as well as
the differences between tribal and modern societies". And he goes on to suggest that, had Turner pursued that distinction more vig-
orously, he would also have developed an argument that religious ritual is to be found only in the former kind of society, whilst much
of what passes for ritual in the latter is actually secular non-religious ritual or- to rehearse Gluckman and Gluckman's ( 1977) distinction
-ceremony. It is precisely that kind of simplistic dichotomisation that this article aims to refute.
IS
Applying the continuum of ideal types idea to the liminal-
liminoid distinction
The above is of value in a discussion of Turner's ( 1974) limi-
nal-liminoid distinction because it shows us a path towards
using it to meet his own goal of using analytical perspectives
that can accommodate social process. That is necessary
because Turner failed to meet that goal when he constructed
the distinction as categorical. The argument developed below
is that, to meet that goal, Turner needed to construct the dis-
tinction by conceptualising the liminal and the liminoid as
opposing poles on a continuum between two ideal types.
As outlined earlier, Turner identified five different sets of
characteristics through which to distinguish the liminal and
the liminoid from one another. Also indicated is that he did so
in order to argue that they each constituted a distinctive ana-
lytical category. Let us now look at those again and consider
whether seeing the two as poles on (ends of) a continuum
might not be more useful.
All of the first four contrasts listed earlier suggest the kind
of dichotomy between so-called pre-modern and modern
societies that is understood to reflect their respective bases
for social solidarity. That dichotomy is explicated in point (v)
above which, as I indicated earlier, was the first that Turner
( 1974) listed and that I suspect drove his whole exercise. Yet,
as Deflem ( 1991) suggests, even as Turner was developing
the distinction he was underplaying it in terms of its repre-
senting a categorical dichotomy - note his use of the phrase
'typological pole' (Turner 1974: 86). This suggests that he
was, possibly still somewhat inchoately, recognising its limita-
tions if seen only in neat categorical terms. 9
As two distinctive kinds of society, and from the perspec-
tive Turner then applied and that Deflem ( 1991) has since
wanted emphasised, the pre-modern (or what Turner called
the tribal) and the modern are understood to be based on
two distinctive solidary mechanisms: the pre-modern ostensi-
bly being based on ascription and the modern on achieve-
ment, the former reflecting entrenched and inflexible group
identities, the latter reflecting deep commitment to individu-
alism.
Yet, as Mary Douglas ( 1978) has argued, and as any exam-
ple one might consider ethnographically would indicate, one
finds aspects of both in all social contexts, whether they are
constructed as pre-modern (tribal) or as modern (or indeed
as post-modern, however, precisely, that might be distin-
guished from late modern if in practice it is useful to do so).
For that reason, and because by now the fallacy that is such a
distinction has been demonstrated to reflect a modernist dis-
dain for anything assumed to be unlike the modern, it is best
to exclude that one of Turner's ( 1974) distinguishing criteria
and therefore to discard Deflem's ( 1991) proposition that the
distinction might be used even more vigorously than Turner
himself used it.
Considering then Turner's remaining four criteria enables
one to conceptualise ideal type liminal occurrences as those
 16
collectively driven by members of a society in order to repro-
duce that society's extant structures and to reinforce its
social solidarities through temporarily inverting those very
structures through practices that include extremes of sensory
experience absent from the mundane of everyday life. Simi-
larly, one could characterise ideal-type liminoid occurrences
as driven by individuals or social interest groups, and as con-
stituting processes that not only invert but - again through
including unusually intense sensory experience - also instru-
mentally and critically subvert extant structures, that disrupt
society and social solidarity and that, in doing so, are constitu-
tive of social transformation.
In brief, then, the ideal-type liminal pole is characterised
by society-wide collectively driven and sensorily intense
inversions that are such only as to reproduce extant struc-
tures and to reinforce societal solidarity. The opposite ideal-
type liminoid pole is characterised by equally sensorily intense
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inversions, but are such as to disrupt and indeed upend old
social solidarities and to enable the constitution of new social
structures. Yet elements of both manifest, to a greater or
lesser extent, in all limen experiences and circumstances,
whether those are the initiation lodges or health-seeking ritu-
als of the mid-twentieth century Ndembu of Zambia, or the
sensorily exciting 1960s hippie movement, both of which
Turner ( 1967; 1969) considered, or indeed the present day
serendipitously ecstatic rituals of experimental science or
those where revolutionary ideas about political-economic
structures are developed. And that is the case for any other
such limen space/period one might care to consider.
Moreover, the midpoint on such a continuum is again a
never realised ideal type: one through which an event might
arise wholly spontaneously with neither collective nor individ-
ual drivers, and where social solidarity is neither maintained
nor built anew through social structural transformation. Such
ideal-type disruptions would therefore be symbolically vacu-
ous in their having no meaning for those involved, no social or
societal function and no sensory experience of the kinds of
ecstasy that Sponheuer (2009) has described as being the goal
of eurythmy performances that achieve kairos moments.
They would constitute examples of anarchic chaos in its crud-
est sense which may be vandalism. 10
Crucial to any modern significant paradigm-shifting
moment is surely a need to upend, to be engaged in an excit-
ing, sometimes ecstasy inducing inversion and subversion of
existing ideas and theories: in that respect it is indeed limi-
noid. Yet, even as that occurs, it is limited by a set of con-
straining factors that enable the new ideas and theories thus
developed to reach a public that might consume them, fac-
tors that limit their distribution and that all too often repro-
duce the very structures that those new ideas might
eventually succeed in replacing. Moreover, and more to the
point here, is that commonly the spaces/times which consti-
tute those moments are themselves institutionally recog-
nised, even culturally designed, as knowledge producing
contexts; and that their performance as such simply repro-
duces or maintains an extant structure of which they are part.
I0. By anarchic chaos I mean what is popularly understood to be anarchy or even vandalism, not the anarchic structures that Graeber
(2004) discusses. My thanks to Patti Henderson in discussion with whom I recognised the importance of the sensory experiential as-
pects of limen events, especially those at either end of the continuum I have here proposed.
Anthropology Southern Africa, 20 I I, 34( I &2)
In that respect they are liminal.
In addition, even if those moments do not manifest in
cycles, they are nonetheless almost always part of a broader
structure, even when it is individuals who seemingly idiosyn-
cratically but nonetheless serendipitously initiate them and
drive their development. They are not outside of nor simply
subverting structure; nor do they simply reproduce it. They
do both in greater or lesser degree. Moreover, the very
processes of producing new knowledge, if done in association
with others, may have the effect of creating both solidarities
between those involved and a sense of regularisation or disci-
pline - so pushing them towards the liminal pole and away
from the liminoid one. Similarly, even when that knowledge
production occurs through individual effort -which is almost
never the case, intellectual collegiality being what it is - once
its product is adopted by others, solidarities develop between
those others who commonly then become acolytes and share
and exchange ideas about the new knowledge they have
taken on board, thereby creating social solidarities and creat-
ing structures that regularise and maintain them. Indeed, that
is precisely the process through which intellectual disciplines
are created, maintained and reproduced - specifically as 'dis-
ciplines' that then constrain the extent to which the perspec-
tives their proponents claim as those of the discipline can
themselves be altered, and that accept others into the fold, as
it were, of the solidary group that has formed around those
disciplinary principles. It is also, as Mosse (2005) has shown,
the kind of process through which those super-modern phe-
nomena called development and policy production/imple-
mentation have come to hold so many in their thrall.
True, these are all processes of solidarity creation, at least
at their start, rather than those of its maintenance. But surely
those same kinds of processes must have occurred in the his-
tory of each and every supposed pre-modern society. None
has ever been god-given, despite ideological claims some-
times that they are. Similarly, if one carefully unpacks the
processes that were part of his ethnographic examples from
so-called pre-modern people about which Turner wrote at
first hand, one will, as Mary Douglas ( 1978) implicitly sug-
gested, find elements of what he understands as characteris-
tics of the liminoid within them.
Testing the continuum principle
I conclude with some brief illustrative examples that I have
chosen and ordered to demonstrate both that all limen
events have elements of both liminal and liminoid characteris-
tics, and how the extent of each is historically and socially
contextually determined. I begin with the example with
which this article began and move from that through to ever
smaller contemporary limen events.
The 2010 FIFA World Cup: A society wide norm-
changing event? 11
As indicated, the 20 I 0 FIFA World Cup spectacle in South
Africa was a large-scale collectively driven and modern event,
held in a modern context and with no local cyclical signifi-
 Anthropology Southern Africa, 20 I I, 34( I &2)
cance 12 but nonetheless producing a sense of national soli-
darity in the process of its being played out. For South Africa
as a nation-state, staging the 20 I 0 World Cup provided an
opportunity for the country's inhabitants to invert their eve-
ryday into a series of exuberant performative displays, vibrant
colours and musical sound - practices that built a sense of
social solidarity that many understood should constitute the
'real' post-apartheid South African experience and through
which they could experience the kind of national camaraderie
to which all aspire as an everyday norm. If we were to see
this as only a liminoid event - effectively an idiosyncratically
modern experimental one-off event but one with the poten-
tial, almost immediately, to change everyday behaviour pat-
terns - we would fall into precisely the trap that so many
South Africans did: of assuming that the manifestations during
that ecstatic period and space of camaraderie, solidarity and
sensory humaneness constituted a revolutionary moment
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after which such characteristics would persist, precisely
because those are the country's explicit constitutional ideals.
And we would therefore be unable to explain the disappoint-
ment that followed. Yet equally we cannot see it as just a lim-
inal event where things were upended exclusively for ritual
catharsis, only thereafter for everything to return to the old
ways. Indeed, the very fact that, as in 1994, there was adem-
onstration of the possibility of national camaraderie, that - as
Sloan (20 I0) has described - enabled some young South Afri-
cans to discover the ease with which they could cross what
had, until then appeared to them to be impermeable social-
cultural barriers, provided a picture of what is possible, and
therefore enabled some to strive to achieve it in their post-
World Cup everyday lives. For that reason we need to look
for aspects of both the liminoid and the liminal in the event
and therefore to place it along the continuum between those
two poles.
Consider now two other relatively large-scale and defi-
nitely public cyclical South African events, both of which also
generate a sense of social solidarity, albeit not a society-wide
one as did the World Cup spectacle. They are the annual
Mother City Queer Project (MCQP) and Cape Minstrels Car-
nival Parade.
The Mother City Queer Project: A regional cyclical event
becoming a ritual of rebellion
The MCQP event has been held annually in early summer in
Cape Town since 1994. It attracts tens of thousands of partic-
ipants from many different parts of the country and the world
to participate in a costume-party type carnival celebrating gay
rights, but by no means restricted to gay participants. If any
event on the South African calendar explicitly aimed, particu-
larly at its founding, to upend convention and everyday
behavioural norms through sensorial vibrancies of colour,
smell and sound that manifest in a multiplicity of risque cos-
tumes and multiple dance spaces, it is the MCQP. Indeed,
I I. One anonymous reviewer of this article has suggested that the early 20 I I performances and sensory practices of people in Egypt's
Tahrir Square provide an excellent example of the extreme societally transformative power of the topsy-turviness of limen experienc-
es. I have not, however, attempted to develop the example here, primarily for my lack of adequate data to be able to scrutinise the
events closely enough, and because the events occurred only after the main body of the present article was written.
12. The World Cup does, of course, work to a constructed four-year global cycle, just like the Olympic Games, whose decision to exclude
football in the 1930s was effectively the impetus for a football-only version of that four-yearly spectacle.
17
having established itself as a premier event of its kind, it has
come to signify a major departure from the South African
past where gays had no rights whatsoever and most certainly
would never have publicly displayed their sexual orientations
in the ways that the MCQP has since made possible, both
during the event itself and in Cape Town more generally
throughout the year. Yet, despite its new theme each year
and its consequent new sets of in-your-face costumes, the
MCQP has become a cyclically performed event; and it has
increasingly become culturally constructed around a set of
clearly defined principles and practices within which, despite
the sensory excitement and innovation that occurs, it has
come to symbolise and maintain a growing solidary sense for
those who constitute themselves as the gay community. It is
thus now an event that, for the most part, provides an oppor-
tunity for a very short term remission from the everyday
without, for the most part, changing the norms of that every-
day; and, despite its topsy-turviness and displays of unusual
sights, sounds and smells, it is effectively a space/time of ritual
rebellion.
Is this a space/time of liminality or liminoidity? Or, is that a
misplaced question - one that is better answered by closely
examining the activities that have actually occurred during
each annual event? Doing that would enable analysts to place
each occurrence somewhere along a liminal-liminoid contin-
uum, thereby to assess the extent to which, over the seven-
teen years of its celebration, the MCQP as an institution has
become ever less a space to challenge and to introduce revi-
sions of everyday societal norms. It would also reveal
whether, having initially strengthened a sense of social soli-
darity in a section of the population and even, possibly, cre-
ated a new wider societal tolerance towards diversity of
sexual orientation, the MCQP now simply reinforces those
now institutionalised society-wide phenomena.
The Cape Minstrels Carnival Parade: An established
regional and cyclical ritual of rebellion
The annual Cape Minstrels (Kaapse Klopse) Carnival Parade is
another quite large-scale modern event, one that, while
always having occurred in, indeed been, a limen space/period,
is today probably situated far more towards the liminal than
the liminoid end of the continuum than is the MCQP. In part
that is because the Cape Minstrels Carnival Parade has its ori-
gins in a slave off-day· on 2 January each year when slaves
were permitted to relax on Cape Town's beaches and in city
squares, and to sing and dance in ways that reportedly paro-
died their masters' indulgent behaviours: "It was a way to
escape the horrible world of slavery and to give an outlet for
their frustration" (Mellet 2008). 13 These activities became
more formally carnivalised in the mid-I BOOs with the influ-
ence of American minstrels who passed through the city on
visiting ships, and whose black-face costumes and musical
modes were adopted and adapted by local recently manumit-
 18
ted slaves and other Coloured working class city residents
and became the basis for the performed transgressions of
members of marching troupes through the city streets in "an
expression of asserting the Coloured working people's 'Free-
dom of the City"' (ibid.). Such claims and assertions reflect
the carnival's function as a means to create and maintain
social solidarity for a section of the city's population even as
the parades themselves, filled as they are with colourful cos-
tumes, raucous music and animatedly taunting dance that
combine to parody everyday oppressive convention, provide
a ritualised moment of catharsis whereafter the dominant
structures of oppression once again prevail. Moreover, in the
post-apartheid period, and like the MCQP, the Cape Min-
strels Carnival Parade helps to construct a wider social soli-
darity around the principle of tolerance. But in this instance it
is a tolerance associated with so-called multi-culturalism
which, as Terence Turner ( 1993) has so clearly demonstrated
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is all too often a means of hiding persistent class-based
oppression. As indicated, early 21st century organisers of the
Cape minstrels carnival assert the parade's significance for
claiming working people's 'Freedom of the City' through per-
forming transgressive acts that, for those involved, challenge
the status quo precisely because participants experience their
actions as living out such a challenge (Wentzel 20 I I: 24). 14
Yet despite those senses of experiential challenge through
participants proffering an embodied critique of the status
quo, they provide little more than opportunity for building a
relative tenuous social solidarity - as is revealed annually by
repeated contestations over control of the parade, contesta-
tions that simply reinforce the subordinate position of its
organisers in city affairs. As Wentzel (20 I I) has pointed out,
that subordinate position was exacerbated by the city admin-
istration's organisation of an alternative 'Cape Carnival', cre-
ated as an out-of-time (mid-year) precursor to Cape Town's
20 I0 FIFA World Cup events. Moreover, that same process
further undermined the Cape Minstrels Carnival Parade
organisers' ability to use their annual parade substantively to
invert the city's everyday and thereby to challenge the domi-
nance of bureaucratic organisation that city administrators
attempt each year to impose on the event.
I now briefly consider two smaller-scale contemporary
limen events that are not performed in public yet are collec-
tively driven and also help construct a sense of social solidar-
ity amongst those involved, but without really challenging the
status quo in any substantive sense. My goal in doing so is to
show the kinds of solidarity building that occurs around
almost all socially constructed limen events.
Escaping post-apartheid: White South Africans on a
solidarity reinforcing holiday
The first example derives from the holiday-making practices
of a small cohort of white South African tourists visiting a
Mozambican beach resort (Voss De Lima 2003). Building on
13. 'Our songs come from our forefathers and their fathers before. They were oppressed when they came. They came here as slaves you
know and they were always the oppressed and so the only way they could express themselves was putting it in words, singing, dancing,
making music and being jolly. So that the next one would think we are happy. In the meantime we are expressing our feelings about
certain things' (Rebirth Africa nd .)
14. My argument here is contra Wentzel (20 I I) who draws on Bakhtin's ( 1984) consideration of Carnival to suggest that transgressive
performances during the Cape Minstrels Carnival Parade provide evidence of substantive capacity to transgress dominant social-polit-
ical structures.
Anthropology Southern Africa, 20 I I, 34( I&2)
an anthropology of tourism literature that has used Turner's
ideas about liminality to describe and explain the character of
tourist experiences (eg. Graburn 1978; Lett 1983), Voss De
Lima has shown how a group of conservative white South
Africans travelled from their Limpopo province homes to a
small beach resort, there to encapsulate themselves in a limi-
nal space/time whilst on an annual beach-resort holiday. She
shows further that the sense of liminality that these holiday-
makers experienced was one that they explicitly sought, pre-
cisely in order, at least for a short while, to re-create for
themselves a sense of their old apartheid era distinctiveness
and through that - and through the communitas they con-
structed amongst themselves whilst there - to reproduce a
sense of social solidarity in the face of what they experienced
as post-apartheid hostility towards them as members of a
defined social category back home.
Comparing their behaviour with the often described nor-
mative deviance of tourists which they regard as holiday free-
dom, Voss De Lima (2003:59) explained that those particular
holiday makers also sought freedom, but not a freedom
to engage in behaviour that would be seen as
deviant in their country. Rather, it was a freedom
from what they perceived to be threats that the
social change in their country had introduced. Their
holiday thus provided them with a liminal period
that allowed them to live their days without feeling
as if they were being watched or had to look over
their shoulders all the time. It was a period giving
the parent generation stress-free time with their
children and friends, keeping the children nearby
and safe, and one during which to reinforce what
they regarded as the core values of their
community, as a structure that was already present
before their arrival but that was reinforced during
their stay.
Escaping alienation: Black South Africans and the
solidarities of Independent Churches
Another non-public but contemporary limen type event that,
like those described above, helps to construct social solidari-
ties amongst its participants can be seen in the practices of
African Independent (especially Zionist) Churches in South-
ern Africa. All too often, the extended church-service long
encapsulation that is a feature of these organisations have
been written about as if they simply offer moments of tempo-
rary relief, for workers during periods of off-work time, from
the degradations of contemporary (including apartheid) life
(eg. Kiernan 1990). Yet those same spaces/times have been
shown also to generate significant social solidarities that ena-
ble members to develop ideas for revisions of modes of
sociality beyond the confines of the enclosed church services
in which they occur and that they then take into the world
outside the church and its congregants. In other words, one
 Anthropology Southern Africa, 20 I I , 34( I &2)
finds in them both liminal and liminoid characteristics.
Towards a conclusion
Similarly, and despite their commonly being initiated by indi-
viduals and practised by very small cohorts of people, we
need to recognise in the limen-type practices of contempo-
rary 'alternative spirituality' that are of interest to Versteeg
(20 I I) their capacity to mobilise social solidarities. In other
words, such practices help to create new sets of closely inter-
twined people in what they themselves may regard as a far
too disparate and large-scale world to be managed without
their being associated with some kind of smaller socially soli-
dary unit. In doing so, we thus need to recognise that those
practices too have the function of social solidarity building
and maintenance, and thus reflect aspects of liminality as well
as characteristics of liminoidity.
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As Devisch ( 1996) has so clearly demonstrated for the
modernising post-colonial city of Kinshasa, the sense of
anomie that people experience there has led them to con-
struct, through their healing churches, what he calls a process
of villagisation in the city, one through which people form
smaller units of social solidarity than can be created by a fal-
tering post-colonial state for its whole citizenry. The question
is whether what Devisch has described is exclusive to such
explicitly post-colonial contexts, or whether similar proc-
esses are at work in the anomie and anonymous contexts of
the global world, particularly one where the earlier certain-
ties of a market economy have been undermined and
stressed almost to breaking point.
We cannot ignore the social solidarity building function of
those practices if we arrive at an affirmative answer to the
question: do the groupings that form around developed
world practitioners of alternative spirituality constitute a kind
of parallel to the urban villages that Devisch describes? Such
an answer also means that we have to recognise the liminal
alongside the liminoid characteristics of such persons' alterna-
tive spiritual quests. In other words, if it is to be used as all,
Turner's ( 1974) simple dichotomous distinction that created
two distinctive analytical categories must be replaced, at the
very least, by an understanding of the liminal and the liminoid
as opposite ends of a continuum. Moreover, as indicated ear-
lier, and given the central importance of the social solidarity
building and maintenance function of limen experience, it
would make sense to suggest that the way to assess where on
that continuum any particular limen event might fall is to con-
sider the extent of its solidarity building and maintenance
function, and with that the size, relative to that of a social
whole of which those involved are part, of the solidary unit
constructed and reproduced. That would enable us to use
the liminal-liminoid distinction in a way that avoids a primi-
tive-modern binary that was Turner's ( 1974) impetus for cre-
ating a categorical distinction, and still to recognise the
significance of solidarity building for a whole society versus
that for a small unit within such a society.
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