liminality
adding page because of Dave Gray‘s liminal thinking..
In anthropology, liminality (from the Latin word līmen, meaning “a threshold”) is the quality of ..
ambiguity or disorientation that occurs in the middle stage of rituals, when participants no longer hold their pre-ritual status but have not yet begun the transition to the status they will hold when the ritual is complete.
During a ritual’s liminal stage, participants “stand ..
at the threshold” between their previous way of structuring their identity, time, or community, and a new way, which the ritual establishes.
a nother way ness
The concept of liminality was first developed in the early 20th century by folklorist Arnold van Gennep and later taken up by Victor Turner. More recently, usage of the term has broadened to describe political and cultural change as well as rituals. During liminal periods of all kinds,
social hierarchies may be reversed or temporarily dissolved, continuity of tradition may become uncertain, and future outcomes once taken for granted may be thrown into doubt.
The dissolution of order during liminality creates a fluid, malleable situation that enables new institutions and customs to become established. The term has also passed into popular usage, where it is applied much more broadly, undermining its significance to some extent
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on Turner: He became aware that liminality “…served not only to identify the importance of in-between periods, but also to understand the human reactions to liminal experiences: the way liminality shaped personality, the sudden foregrounding of agency, and the sometimes dramatic tying together of thought and experience”.
The attributes of liminality or of liminal personae (“threshold people”) are necessarily ambiguous’. One’s sense of identity dissolves to some extent, bringing about disorientation, but also the possibility of new perspectives. Turner posits that, if liminality is regarded as a time and place of withdrawal from normal modes of social action, it potentially can be seen as a period of scrutiny for central values and axioms of the culture where it occurs. – one where normal limits to thought, self-understanding, and behavior are undone. In such situations,..
“the very structure of society [is] temporarily suspended”
and/or permanently.. suspended.. if we set to disengage from normative ness structures
‘According to Turner, all liminality must eventually dissolve, for it is a state of great intensity that cannot exist very long without some sort of structure to stabilize it…
mech simple enough.. to keep us free/liminal..
either the individual returns to the surrounding social structure…or else liminal communities develop their own internal social structure, a condition Turner calls “normative communitas”‘
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Turner’s approach to liminality has two major shortcomings. First, partly due to criticism, Turner was keen to 1\limit the meaning of the concept to the concrete settings of small-scale tribal societies, ..Second, again staying too close to his own experiences, Turner attributed a rather 2\univocally positive connotation to liminal situations, as ways of renewal. However, liminal situations can be, and in actual fact in modern era, rather quite different: periods of uncertainly, anguish, even existential fear: a facing of the abyss in void
imagining a world – ginormously small – where antifragility is the thing that keeps us sane.. swimming in uncertainty ness.. as the day..
realizing today.. we have tech to facil that (7 bill people following their whimsy.. rather than insisting upon some voluntary compliance ness for the sake of structure.. aka: the fear of structure less ness)
from chart: liminal moment – revolution
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When the spatial and temporal are both affected, the intensity of the liminal experience increases and so-called “pure liminality” is approached
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Philosopher Karl Jaspers made a significant contribution to this idea through his concept of the “axial age,” which was “an in-between period between two structured world-views and between two rounds of empire building; it was an age of creativity where ‘man asked radical questions’, and where the..
‘unquestioned grasp on life is loosened’”..t
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in those liminal periods that affect society as a whole, the future (what comes after the liminal period) is completely unknown, and there is no “ceremony master” who has gone through the process before and that can lead people out of it.
In such cases, liminal situations can become dangerous. They allow for the emergence of “self-proclaimed ceremony masters”, that assume leadership positions and attempt to “[perpetuate] liminality and by emptying the liminal moment of real creativity, [turn] it into a scene of mimetic rivalry”
unless we are ready/design for that ie: gershenfeld something else law..
life is ongoingly unknown.. until we embrace that.. we kill ourselves.. daily.. no?
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Of beings
Various minority groups can be considered liminal.
perhaps we all become minority.. no..? approach the limit of infinity .. of idiosyncratic jargon/thinking/being ness.. the dance..
perhaps public consensus always oppresses someone
In reality illegal immigrants (present but not “official”), and stateless people, for example, are regarded as liminal because they are “betwixt and between home and host, part of society, but sometimes never fully integrated”. Intersex or transgender people, bisexual people in most contemporary societies, people of mixed ethnicity, and those accused but not yet judged guilty or not guilty, are liminal. Teenagers, being neither children nor adults, are liminal people: indeed, “for young people, liminality of this kind has become a permanent phenomenon…Postmodern liminality”.
should it not be.. ie: once we define/label.. we deaden the being ness
The “trickster as the mythic projection of the magician – standing in the limen between the sacred realm and the profane” and related archetypes embody many such contradictions as do many popular culturecelebrities. The category could also hypothetically and in fiction include cyborgs,hybrids between two species, shapeshifters. One could also consider seals, crabs, shorebirds, frogs, bats, dolphins/whales and other “border animals” to be liminal: “the wild duck and swan are cases in point…intermediate creatures that combine underwater activity and the bird flight with an intermediate, terrestrial life”. It should come as no surprise that these liminal creatures figure prominently in mythology as ..
shapeshifters and spirit guides.
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sandymaxey (@sandymaxey) tweeted at 6:49 AM on Mon, Jan 29, 2018:
“Within the separateness of liminality, connectedness itself is remade.” https://t.co/DLsz47X7Js
(https://twitter.com/sandymaxey/status/957974002051493888?ref_src=twcamp%5Eshare%7Ctwsrc%5Eandroid%7Ctwgr%5Egmail%7Ctwcon%5E7090%7Ctwterm%5E0)She celebrates this threshold space as hallowed ground for dissolving and transcending the self, for rising above the flatland of individual identity and toward a more dimensional sense of belonging
The liminal is not opposite to, but the necessary companion of, identity and particularity — a person who steps outside her usual position falls away from any singular relationship to others and into oneness with the community as a whole. Within the separateness of liminality, connectedness itself is remade.
For most members of a community, the liminal is a point of transition, entered briefly, at a particular time, in passage toward something else; such persons are dipped into nonidentity and self-forgetfulness in order to change who they are. For some, though, the liminal becomes their only dwelling-place — becomes home. A writer must invent for himself how to live in this way.
Freedom from the opinion of others is useful for any who would live in the threshold, and perhaps especially for those who wish to practice art in public.
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be you. 