“Liminality is the condition of the threshold — Latin limen meant a threshold, a doorway, the sill between one space and another, and liminality is the state of being between, neither fully one thing nor another.”
Latin limen (threshold, doorway, entrance) gave English both eliminate (to push out across the threshold) and sublime (raised above the threshold). The threshold was a significant object in Roman domestic religion: the Lares and Penates, household gods, were especially associated with the threshold and hearth. To cross a threshold was to enter a protected space; the sill was the boundary between outside and inside, between the profane and the sacred.
Arnold van Gennep, a French folklorist, published The Rites of Passage in 1909 and introduced the concept of liminality to anthropology. He analyzed rituals of transition — initiation, marriage, death, the installation of chiefs — and found a three-part structure: separation from the old state, the liminal period (the threshold time when the person is between states), and reincorporation into a new status. The liminal period was dangerous and powerful: the person was neither what they had been nor what they would become.
Victor Turner, the British-American anthropologist, developed the concept extensively in the 1960s and 1970s. In The Ritual Process (1969) he described liminality as characterized by communitas — a direct, unmediated bond between people stripped of their normal social roles. In the liminal state, hierarchy dissolves, structures loosen, transformation becomes possible. This was why initiation rites deliberately created disorientation and hardship: the breakdown of the old self was the precondition for the new self.
The concept has moved far beyond anthropology. Adolescence, immigration, grief, career change, illness, lockdown — all are liminal states in Turner's sense: periods of in-between-ness where the old identity has dissolved and the new one has not yet formed. Liminal spaces — abandoned malls, empty airports at 3 AM, hospital waiting rooms — have become an internet aesthetic, described as places where the normal rules of inhabited space are suspended.
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The 'liminal spaces' internet aesthetic — photographs of empty malls, half-lit corridors, deserted playgrounds — captures something real about psychological experience. These are places designed for activity and presence but photographed in their absence. They are threshold places caught at the wrong moment: neither full nor empty, neither abandoned nor inhabited.
This is what liminality feels like from inside. The adolescent is between childhood and adulthood. The immigrant is between countries. The grieving person is between the world-with and the world-without. The uncertainty is not a problem to be solved. It is the condition of transformation. Turner was right: the breakthrough cannot happen without the breakdown. The new self can only form in the threshold space.
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