liminality

Syllable breakdown

Dictionary meaning

the quality of being in a threshold state — from the Latin limen meaning threshold — a concept introduced by the anthropologist Arnold van Gennep in his 1909 analysis of rites of passage and developed by Victor Turner to describe the middle phase of ritual transitions in which participants have left their previous social state but have not yet arrived in their new one; in the liminal phase the initiate is ambiguous, stripped of previous identities and social markers, suspended between categories; Turner observed that liminality generates communitas — a powerful sense of social equality and solidarity among those undergoing the transition together — because normal social hierarchies are suspended; the concept has been extended beyond ritual contexts to describe any state of in-betweenness — historical periods of transition between social orders, architectural thresholds, adolescence, migration, and the experience of living between cultural identities; liminality is a central concept in cultural anthropology, performance studies, and postcolonial theory