Construct · 2 fields · 4 citations

Where does liminality collide?

One name. Different field. Different construct. One map.

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liminality2 CONSTRUCTSLiminalityVAN GENNEP · THRESHOLDLiminalityGRABURN · TOURISM STUDIES

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1909Liminality1983Liminality
2026

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Anthropology

The ambiguous transitional phase between two social statuses

Arnold van Gennep, in his 1909 Les rites de passage (The Rites of Passage), named liminality as the middle stage of the three-part pattern he found across rites of passage: separation from an old status, a transitional or liminal phase, and reincorporation into a new status. The word comes from the Latin limen, meaning threshold, and it marks the interval when a person has left one social position but has not yet entered the next. Victor Turner developed the meaning in his 1967 essay collection The Forest of Symbols, describing those in the liminal phase as betwixt and between, stripped of their former rank and its rules, ambiguous and structurally invisible. As a landmark, liminality gives a single name to the in-between condition of any status transition, and researchers have carried it well beyond initiation ritual into studies of pilgrimage, theatre, migration, and organizational identity, where they apply it to periods when settled roles and categories are suspended.[1][2][3]

Unit
A phase within a rite of passage or transition: the ambiguous middle state between an old status and a new one
Recovery means
Not applicable
Measured by
Identified ethnographically by tracing the sequence of a rite of passage (separation, transition, reincorporation) and the marks of the transitional phase, such as ambiguity of status, symbolic invisibility, and the suspension of ordinary roles and rules

Tourism studies

travel as a ritual-like break from everyday life in which ordinary rules are loosened.

In tourism studies, liminality refers to travel as a ritual-like break from everyday life in which ordinary rules are loosened. This meaning comes from Graburn (1983) in Annals of Tourism Research.[4]

Unit
Recovery means
Measured by

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Nearby collisions

ritual5 fields · 7 citationsjingle · one word, four fieldsthreshold5 fields · 6 citationsjingle · one word, five constructspassage1 fields · 2 citationsanchor · a standalone construct

References

  1. van Gennep, A. (1960). The rites of passage (M. B. Vizedom & G. L. Caffee, Trans.). University of Chicago Press. (Original work published 1909)
  2. Turner, V. W. (1967). The forest of symbols: Aspects of Ndembu ritual. Cornell University Press.
  3. Beech, N. (2011). Liminality and the practices of identity reconstruction. Human Relations, 64(2), 285–302. https://doi.org/10.1177/0018726710371235
  4. Graburn, N. H. H. (1983). The anthropology of tourism. Annals of Tourism Research, 10(1), 9-33. https://doi.org/10.1016/0160-7383(83)90113-5

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