Liminality

Date: 29 January 2006 17:25:00

"The liminal state is characterized by ambiguity, openness, and indeterminacy. One's sense of identity dissolves to some extent, bringing about disorientation. Liminality is a period of transition, during which your normal limits to thought, self-understanding, and behavior are relaxed, opening the way to something new."

- Wikipedia (so it must be true)

I learned about liminality and its phases from the work of Victor Turner, which I read during my theology degree. It is as close as I have come to studying anthropology, and it's fab.

A huge amount has been written using Turner's ideas. Arnold van Gennep is another one. I can't think who else. The idea is of a phase of CHANGE, that horrible, bitter, skincrawling word that drags us out of bed every morning, forces us through puberty and wants us always to grow up. It's about RITES OF PASSAGE which mark our moving from one phase of life to another, and it's about RITUALS and why they're so necessary for that change to happen healthily and effectively. Liminal phases don't just happen to individuals, they happen to communities too.

What has not been written about nearly so much (at least as far as I can see) is how it feels to watch someone go through a liminal process, and be trapped outside it. Someone I care about a lot is going through a liminal phase right now. It is a frightening experience and I want badly to make it all okay. I can't, though. Few have struck in me such a sense of distanced respect: I must at all costs resist the urge to tell her what she should do. I can answer her questions but I can't try to sort things out for her.

Is this a common experience? It's pretty new to me. I'm having serious trouble keeping my mouth shut.

In On Seeing and Noticing Alain de Botton discusses "The Pleasures of Sadness". As a visual aid he points us to the work of Edward Hopper, an early C20th artist who focused on liminality, on places where people are in transition.

[caption id="attachment_580" align="aligncenter" width="300" caption="Edward Hopper, Automat, 1927"][/caption]

Hopper is the father of a whole school of art which finds as its subject matter 'liminal' spaces, buildings that lie outside homes and offices, places of transit... we may, in contact with it, feel as if we have been carried back to some important place in ourselves, a place of stillness and sadness, of seriousness and authenticity: it can help us to remember ourselves. How is it possible to forget 'oneself'? At stake is not a literal forgetting of practical data, rather a forgetting of those parts of ourselves with which a practical sense of integrity and well-being appears to be bound up. Within our own minds we are made aware of ideas and moods distinct enough to feel like different personalities - an inner fluidity which can lead us to declare, without any allusion to the supernatural, that we are not feeling as if we are ourselves."

Alain de Botton, On Seeing and Noticing

I wonder what he means by "without any allusion to the supernatural"? I never said a word.

I am in a liminal place too, I think. I am changing into something quite different from what I was a year ago, even five years ago. Part of this change was from young man to husband. Then there was young man to father. It is only now that I have come to grips with these two (and it took me the best part of five years) that I find myself confronted with the last and most intimidating: young man to man. I'm thirty years old, but it's only now that I really find myself talking and thinking and acting like it seems to me a grown man ought to act. Perhaps it is only since I acquired the wife and child that I have seemed man enough for society to grant me that role.

Or maybe I waited for society's approval before I felt I could behave like a man. Liminality is a social concept, after all. I wonder how many of today's young men are in the same position. Devoid of anything but the ugliest role models, their manhood terrifies society, which holds them at arm's length. Only ever told that they are wrong to be who they are, how are they to cross the vast liminal desert that stretches between them and the husband, the father, the man they want to be? The smarter of us might slowly spy out suitable role models and learn from them as we go. Even then it's a long walk, without signposts: do we actually offer young men any rituals to lead them into manhood? Many societies do, but off the top of my head the only really major life-change rituals I ever experienced were a water baptism, a marriage ceremony and a graduation. These all seem quite incidental, though, because none of them made me feel I was a man. It was more like each incidentally edged me closer to that place.

My friend has also spoken about this sensation of finally becoming her real self. She feels only now that she is the "right age". Before, she was surrounded by people who simply weren't like her, but a born societal chameleon, she fitted right in with them. She describes this as lonely, and I'm not surprised. Liminality is a place where we often feel weirdly isolated. The piece I have written below, ghosts 1 (friends-only I'm afraid!), about the empty house of a bereaved person, is really about a home that is no longer a home, but has acquired the unforgiving, loveless cold of liminality. I recall miserably the empty streets and parks of a friendless childhood, and realise only now that I was living in a liminal space. In fact, I grew up there! If it is this isolation, this sense of "not feeling right" that indicates liminality, I wonder if Automat, above, would remain a liminal space if the woman had companions. I don't think it would. I think that would transform it into something more like home, like reintegration.

This is the hardest part. We cannot choose to take anyone with us on our rite of passage. We may have companions, but we don't really get to choose them, and they're only with us if we are to go through the process as a community. Then, as everyone's identity dissolves, bonds may be formed between the group that will last for a long, long time. This is what happens when army units find themselves bonded for life, unable to share their experiences with anyone outside the unit. I think it is the sensation of "wrongness" that makes liminality so unbearable at times. It's a very scary place to be. Liminal means dangerous. Crossroads, Trubshaw notes, were considered downright magical at one time. Everything in us shudders at the prospect of liminality, because it hurts so much to be on our own. But whatever the threshold my friend is crossing, whatever the changes that are stirring beneath the dry ground, I think it's going to be alright. I don't know what's going to happen at all, but I think she is becoming something new. I think she will be deeply, radiantly happy on the other side of it. I think she is becoming Something Wonderful.

ERRATUM

I've made a change to the text of Liminality, above. I was wrong to say that one had to enter a liminal state alone. There are of course some rites of passage - the aboriginal walkabout, for example - where the process must be undertaken alone. Equally, however, there are many situations in which groups find themselves in liminal processes together, and bond unshakeably for having gone through the process with one another. This is because during the liminal process one's identity dissolves. All in that group become equals for the duration of the liminal experience. An interesting example might be a movie like The Poseidon Adventure wherein, if I recall correctly, various very different people from very different walks of life are forced together into a liminal survival situation, all of their identities transformed along the way. They become a communitas.

Interesting links on liminal states and anthropology

Dictionary of Anthropology
- at Anthrobase.com
The Rites of Passage of the Baka Pygmies
- example of an initiation ritual
The Nordic Anthropological Film Association's Archive
- searchable, streamable, full-length anthropological documentaries! Kick ass!
Gethsemane as Liminal Space

It may be that I'm taking this too seriously.