Liminal and Liminality

Glossary

Do you know what liminal really means?

Liminal and liminality sound like one of those academic buzzwords, but…

In anthropology, liminality is usually defined as the phase within a rite of passage. A rite of passage turns a novice into a respected member of the community and facilitates the acquisition of a new social role. Typical rites of passage include funerals and weddings. The liminal phase in the rite is this state of being in between two stages.

Victor Turner, an ethnographer who explored the cultures of many African societies, understood liminality as a space opposed to mundane social structures. Liminality presupposes equality for everyone, while social structure signifies hierarchy. In traditional communities, it often involves accepting hardship and aligning with the community's sacred, ancient values. Unlike modern societies, traditional ones institutionalized the states of liminality through rituals and rites that abolished or subverted social hierarchies, at least briefly.
In Turner's words:

“The pedagogics of liminality, therefore, represent a condemnation of two kinds of separation from the generic bond of communitas. The first kind is to act only in terms of the rights conferred on one by the incumbency of office in the social structure. The second is to follow one’s psychobiological urges at the expense of one’s fellows. A mystical character is assigned to the sentiment of humankindness in most types of liminality, and in most cultures this stage of transition is brought closely into touch with beliefs in the protective and punitive powers of divine or preternatural beings or powers.”

So what could liminality mean in modernized, secular societies?

Liminality could be understood as a point for rethinking and challenging the social hierarchy and the values that sustain it. By extension, the liminal is an imaginary or real space that allows one to rethink social realities without accepting their hierarchies by default, to think outside the box.

Importantly, liminal and liminality also have a temporal dimension. While social time is progressive and linear, always moving forward and often erasing historical experiences that do not fit the desired narrative of progress, liminal states embrace the coexistence of multiple pasts and presents simultaneously. Liminality thus honors the wisdom of ancestors as ancestors of humankind as a whole, not of a particular ethnicity or nation.

From an environmentalist or ecocritical perspective, exploring cultures that arise around liminal realms allows us to fundamentally question the idea that society’s current development is necessarily acceptable, let alone justifiable in terms of contributing to the social and political emancipation of humankind.

Liminality also presupposes the experience that Victor Turner termed, borrowing the term from his spouse and lifelong collaborator, Edith Turner, communitas. Communitas is simply the experience of collective joy that accepts differences without othering individuals or questioning the collective nature of that joy. In simpler terms, you don't need an identification to enjoy a collective happening.

While it is relatively easy to understand opposition to social hierarchies — in theory and in practice, for example, in contesting discrimination or inequality — it is much harder to imagine a society without a substantial differentiating  between “the neutral / the regular” and “the other”, although the otherness does not automatically mean oppressed. Exploring liminal (counter)cultures is a radical experiment in that regard.

Without such experiments, as possibilities for connecting with the layers of the past or imagining alternative futures, people could not escape the terror of their own mundanity in overcrowded and polluted settings.. 

Source: Victor Turner (1969). The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure. Chicago, Aldine Publisher

Author: Jelena Lalatović

Date: 23.2.2026