Liminality Research Paper

1. ‘Liminality’ And African Ritual

Like other anthropologists associated with the Rhodes-Livingstone Institute in the 1950s, Turner read and found relevant to his fieldwork Henry Junod’s use of van Gennep’s interpretative apparatus for understanding Thonga ritual in The Life of a South African Tribe (Junod 1927). During their layover in Cape Town, before returning to Manchester, England, Turner’s wife and academic partner, Edie, attended Monica Wilson’s seminar on van Gennep and rites de passage.

Turner’s first published use of van Gennep’s theory came in 1960 in a conference paper on Ndembu circumcision ritual (Turner 1962). This was one of four essays analyzing rites of passage published by mentor Max Gluckman in Essays on the Ritual of Social Relations. Gluckman’s own essay ‘Les rites de passage,’ lays out van Gennep’s theory regarding transitions, and his three-part model of such rituals. Like van Gennep, Turner was especially interested in the threshold or ‘liminal’ phase with its dance of old and new and promise of regeneration, and with the classificatory ambiguity embodied in, for example, being no longer a boy but not yet a man.

In 1964, Turner reformulated and developed van Gennep’s concept and introduced the term ‘liminality’ in ‘Betwixt and Between: The Liminal Period in rites de passage,’ a paper presented at the American Ethnological Society meetings, and published that same year in the AES Proceedings. This model of ‘processual analysis’ was reprinted as the key Chapter 4 in The Forest of Symbols: Aspects of Ndembu Ritual (Turner 1967), and ‘liminality,’ as not only a phase or space in a rite of passage, but as the condition or state of being ‘betwixt and between,’ soon became commonplace in ritual studies. ‘Liminality’ also began to extend its reach throughout academic disciplines, referring to places, persons, and processes far afield from tribal ritual.

2. The Ritual Process

The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-structure (Turner 1969) was based on the Lewis Henry Morgan Lectures that Turner delivered at the University of Rochester in 1966. As he wrote in 1977 in the foreword to the paperback edition of this book, ‘it was in the course of these lectures that I crossed the threshold between the study of ritual in an African tribal context and the analysis of processual symbols in cross-cultural and transtemporal terms.’ In the ‘incursive nomadism’ of his own work, Turner was to use ‘liminal’ to describe everything from millenarian movements and pilgrimage processes in industrial society, to cross-cultural play phenomena, to cultural performances and the written genres of literate cultures, and finally to experimental postmodern theater and to the functioning of the human brain. Cultures and societies, he argued, were processes not systems, and all sociocultural processes were, of necessity, characterized by a dialog between structure and antistructure, which was used synonymously both with ‘liminal’ or ‘liminality’ and with ‘communitas.’

3. ‘Liminal’ To ‘Liminoid’

By the early 1970s, the adjective ‘liminal’ had been coupled with so many diverse phenomena, and Turner had been so criticized by his anthropological colleagues, that he felt compelled to introduce the term ‘liminoid’ to refer to the secular leisure genres and optional play forms of complex industrial society, reserving ‘liminal’ for sacred, prescribed, ritualized transitions between states in small-scale, stable societies (Turner 1974b). In answer to criticism that he had overgeneralized and overextended the concept of ‘liminality,’ he now insisted that ‘liminoid’ genres are similar to but not identical with the ritually ‘liminal.’ The distinction never really caught on—in part because people found the word ‘gratingly neologistic’; in part because Turner himself had already coupled ‘liminal’ with many phenomena other than tribal ritual; but in largest part because the characteristics, if not the consequences, of the situation being described, whether a Ndembu circumcision ritual, a carnival in Rio, a Pueblo clown performance, or a Dostoevski novel, are much the same.

Turner discovered, as he wrote in 1974, that the concept of liminality, of social antistructure was ‘the theoretical operator’ necessary to processualism, to a view of society as dynamic and dramatic (Turner 1974a); to getting beyond what he regarded as ‘the dualistic rigor mortis of the system of binary oppositions’ (1974b), and to a ‘comparative symbology’ method. And, like the interstitial ritual situation that ‘liminality’ described, the concept offered him ‘the possibility of standing aside and formulating alternatives’ and ‘the freedom to meditate and speculate’ (1974a).

4. Liminality And Communitas

In The Ritual Process, Turner (1969) also argued that the phenomenon of ‘communitas’ epitomized antistructure and that this relation of full, unmediated communication was one of the fundamental aspects of ‘liminality.’ These transient, undifferentiated states of relatedness are ‘seedbed[s] of cultural creativity,’ both the source of structures and at the same time their critique (Turner 1974b). As he repeatedly argued (1969), ‘no society can function without a dialectic between structure and ‘‘communitas.’’’ In response to criticisms that his formulations and applications of this concept were, like ‘liminality,’ too general and universal, Turner (1974a) was to distinguish among ‘spontaneous,’ ‘ideological,’ and ‘normative’ ‘communitas.’

5. Liminality And Reflexivity

Like ‘communitas,’ the idea of ‘reflexivity’ is implicit in his earliest formulations of liminality. In ‘Betwixt and Between’ (1967) Turner suggests that ‘liminality may be partly described as a state of reflection.’ Drawing upon William James’s ‘law of dissociation,’ he argues that Ndembu figures such as the man-lion monsters who appear to neophytes ‘break the cake of custom and enfranchise speculation.’ Subsequently, he was to argue that major ‘liminal’ and ‘liminoid’ situations are ‘occasions on which a society takes cognizance of itself,’ of ‘plural reflexivity’ (1974a), and that ‘social drama is the major form of plural reflexivity in human social action’ (in MacAloon 1984).

Turner’s genius was to recognize not only that conflict and ambiguity provoke thought, but further that only when there is a breach in social relations, a discontinuity in customary process, a gap or aporia in discourse, or the deliberate paradox and disordering of liminal symbols, do we truly reflect upon the order of things. The betwixt and betweenness that he described as ‘liminality’ is a paradoxical and universal human experience. Like all paradoxes—whether in life, literature, or religion, and whether rhetorical, logical, or epistemological—the paradoxes of the ‘liminal’ situation embody and engender ‘reflexivity.’

Turner also had a genius for generating variations on a theme, and for organizing colleagues around these topics. Between 1977 and 1984, he engendered and participated in two interdisciplinary symposia and one Wenner-Gren international conference focused on ‘reflexivity.’ All were published as books or special issues of journals: Babcock (1980), Ruby (1982), and MacAloon (1984). In the last years of his life, Turner became increasingly interested in a ‘multiplicity of desacralized performative genres’ that ‘have assumed the task of plural reflexivity’ (Turner 1985), in ‘the ways in which both ‘‘liminal’’ and ‘‘liminoid’’ phenomena constitute metalanguages (including nonverbal ones), devised for talking about the various languages of everyday’ (Turner 1992).

6. A Critical Commonplace

As a consequence of the formulations that Turner made in lectures and publications between 1962 and 1982, ‘liminality’ has become virtually a household word, not only in anthropology and the social sciences generally, but in literary and religious studies as well. Like ‘irony’ in the New Literary Criticism of several decades ago, ‘androgyny’ in early feminist theory, or ‘deconstruction’ in post-structuralist theory, Turner’s formulation of ‘liminality’ gave 1970s scholars across the disciplines a model of and a word for talking about central incertitudes—the ambiguity, paradox, and disorder as well as the order of the human condition.

With the more recent interdisciplinary developments of cultural studies, postcolonial theory, resistance studies, and queer theory, and the increasingly positive valuation of the interstitial, the hybrid, the mestizaje in the last two decades of the twentieth century, ‘liminality’ has become even more popular and visible. In addition to the critical terms already mentioned, ‘liminality’ is also the paradigm for the recognition and valuing of borderlands and borderland epistemology, contact zones, heteropias, undecidability, instability, indeterminacy, disorder, gynesis, impurity, dialogism, heteroglossia, the carnivalesque, the pharmakon, transgender, and third sexes and genders, etc. Largely because of Turner’s championing of the via negati a, such ambiguous states and spaces are now regarded as fundamental, necessary, and desirable rather than problematic.

Few concepts in the social sciences produce their own journal. In 2000, LIMEN: A Journal for the Theory and Practice of Liminal Phenomena was founded in the politically liminal space of Croatia. ‘Liminal’ is no longer a marked adjective. In scholarly publications, it is commonly used without quotation marks and without references. ‘Liminality’ is a crossover term not only among disciplines, but between academic and popular discourse. Novels, movies, actors, musicians all talk about ‘that space in between,’ for which ‘liminal’ has become the adjective of choice.

Bibliography:

1. Babcock B A 1980 Signs about signs: The semiotics of self-reference. Semiotica 30: 1–2
2. Junod H A [1912/13] 1962 The Life of a South African Tribe. University Books, New Hyde Park, NY
3. MacAloon J J (ed.) 1984 Rite, Drama, Festival, Spectacle: Rehearsals Toward a Theory of Cultural Performance. ISHI Press, Philadelphia, PA
4. Ruby J (ed.) 1982 A Crack in the Mirror: Reflexive Perspectives in Anthropology. University of Pennsylvania Press, Philadelphia, PA
5. 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 University Press, Manchester, UK
6. Turner V W 1967 The Forest of Symbols: Aspects of Ndembu Ritual. Cornell University Press, Ithaca, NY
7. Turner V W 1969 The Ritual Process: Structure and AntiStructure. Aldine, Chicago
8. Turner V W 1974a Dramas. Fields, and Metaphors: Symbolic Action in Human Society. Cornell University Press, Ithaca, NY
9. Turner V W 1974b Liminal to liminoid in play, flow, and ritual: An essay in comparative symbology. Rice University Studies 60(3): 53–92
10. Turner V W 1977 The Ritual Process: Structure and Antistructure. Cornell University Press, Ithaca, NY
11. Turner V W 1985 Process, system, and symbol: A new anthropological synthesis. In: Turner V W On the Edge of the Bush: Anthropology as Experience, Turner E (ed.) University of Arizona Press, Tucson, AZ
12. Turner V W 1992 Variations on a theme of liminality. In: Turner V W (ed.) Blazing the Trail: Way Marks in the Exploration of Symbols. University of Arizona Press, Tucson, AZ
13. Van Gennep A [1909] 1960 The Rites of Passage. Routledge and Kegan Paul, London