Liminality

The word 'liminal' comes from the Latin 'limen,' meaning threshold—that physical strip of wood or stone you step over when entering a doorway. Ancient Romans considered thresholds sacred spaces where household gods resided, requiring specific rituals when crossing. This etymology reminds us that liminality began as a concrete, embodied experience before philosophers abstracted it into a concept about psychological and social transition.

Anthropologist Victor Turner discovered liminality while studying Ndembu rites of passage in 1960s Zambia, where boys undergoing initiation were temporarily stripped of all social status—neither children nor adults. He observed they existed in what he called 'anti-structure,' a zone where normal rules dissolve and profound transformation becomes possible. Turner realized this wasn't just about tribal rituals; it was a fundamental human mechanism for change that shows up everywhere from college freshman year to career transitions to spiritual awakenings.

Liminality's greatest gift might be its generative ambiguity—when you're between identities, you're temporarily free from the rules governing both. Studies of immigrants, job-changers, and gender-transitioning individuals reveal that liminal periods, while uncomfortable, consistently spark creativity and new perspective precisely because familiar cognitive patterns are disrupted. The discomfort isn't a bug; it's the feature that cracks open new possibilities for thinking and being.

Modern life has created permanent liminal spaces that Turner never imagined: airport terminals, hotel lobbies, waiting rooms, and even social media platforms where we curate identities that aren't quite 'real' or 'fake.' Anthropologist Marc Augé calls these 'non-places'—transient zones where we're temporarily freed from social expectations but also unmoored from meaningful connection. Notice how differently you behave in an airport versus your home; that's liminality shaping your psychology in real-time.

Traditional societies used formal rituals to contain and conclude liminal periods—weddings, graduations, funerals—giving them clear endpoints. Modern culture has largely abandoned these structures, leaving people stuck in extended liminality: the perpetual 'emerging adulthood' stretching into the 30s, relationships that never quite commit, careers without clear advancement. The philosophical insight here is profound: without deliberate closure rituals, we risk inhabiting threshold states indefinitely, never fully arriving anywhere.

COVID-19 thrust billions into simultaneous liminality—not sick but not safe, not quite working from 'home' or 'office,' watching old social structures dissolve without knowing what would replace them. Philosophers noted this was perhaps humanity's first shared threshold experience at planetary scale, complete with all the classic features Turner identified: suspended status, communitas (sudden solidarity with strangers), and the unsettling feeling that the 'before times' might never return. Some argue we're still liminal, collectively struggling to complete the transition into whatever comes next.