Communitas and Liminality
1. Communitas is a Latin noun referring either to an unstructured community in which people are equal, or to the very spirit of community.
2. The liminal state is characterized by ambiguity, openness, and indeterminacy. One's sense of identity dissolves to some extent, bringing about disorientation. Liminality is a period of transition where normal limits to thought, self-understanding, and behavior are relaxed - a situation which can lead to new perspectives.
3. The liminal state is characterized by ambiguity, openness, and indeterminacy. One's sense of identity dissolves to some extent, bringing about disorientation. Liminality is a period of transition where normal limits to thought, self-understanding, and behavior are relaxed - a situation which can lead to new perspectives.
4. These can range from borders, to no man's lands and disputed territories, to crossroads to perhaps airports or hotels, which people pass through but do not live in. In mythology and religion or esoteric lore this can include such realms as Purgatory or Da'at which as well as signifying liminality some theologians have denied actually existing, making them, in some cases, doubly liminal. "Between-ness" defines these spaces. For a hotel worker (an insider) or a person passing by with disinterest (a total outsider), the hotel would have a very different connotation. To a traveller staying there, the hotel would function as a liminal zone.
5. People, places, or things may not complete a transition, or a transition between two states may not be fully possible. Those who remain in a state between two other states may become permanently liminal.
6. Communitas is an intense community spirit, the feeling of great social equality, solidarity, and togetherness. Communitas is characteristic of people experiencing liminality together. This term is used to distinguish the modality of social relationship from an area of common living. There is more than one distinction between structure and communitas. The most familiar being the difference of secular and sacred. Every social position has something sacred about it. This sacred component is acquired during rites of passages, through the changing of positions. Part of this sacredness is achieved through the transient humility learned in these phases, this allows people to reach a higher position.
7. Communitas is an acute point of community. It takes community to the next level and allows the whole of the community to share a common experience, usually through a rite of passage. This brings everyone onto an equal level, even if you are higher in position, you have been lower and you know what that is.
Turner (1969, Pg.132) distinguishes between: • existential or spontaneous communitas, the transient personal experience of togetherness • normative communitas, communitas organized into a permanent social system • ideological communitas, which can be applied to many utopian social models
Communitas as a concept used by Victor Turner in his study of ritual has recently been criticised by anthropologists. See John Eade & Michael J. Sallnow's Contesting the Sacred (1991)
"Communitas" is also the title of a book by the twentieth-century American thinker and writer Paul Goodman and his brother, Percival Goodman, who is less well-known, but a thinker in his own right. Their book (published in 1947) examines three kinds of possible societies: a society centered around consumption, a society centered around artistic and creative pursuits, and a society which maximizes human liberty. The Goodmans emphasize freedom from both coercion by a government or church and from human necessities by providing these free of cost to all citizens who do a couple of years of conscripted labor as young adults.
Sources: Turner, Victor. "Rituals and Communitas." Creative Resistance. 26 Nov. 2005 http://citationmachine.net/. Eade & Sallnow, 'Contesting the Sacred' (1991)
Liminality
Liminality (from the Latin word līmen, meaning "a threshold"[1]) is the quality of the second stage of a ritual in the theories of Arnold van Gennep, Victor Turner, and others. In these theories, a ritual, especially a rite of passage, involves some change to the participants, especially their social status.[2] The liminal state is characterized by ambiguity, openness, and indeterminacy. One's sense of identity dissolves to some extent, bringing about disorientation. Liminality is a period of transition where normal limits to thought, self-understanding, and behavior are relaxed - a situation which can lead to new perspectives. People, places, or things may not complete a transition, or a transition between two states may not be fully possible. Those who remain in a state between two other states may become permanently liminal.
Three stages
With examples from a college graduation ceremony:
• First or preliminary stage
This change is accomplished by separating the participants from their usual social setting. The students are first separated from the rest of their community, both by gathering together and by wearing distinctive clothing.
• The liminal stage
A period during which one is "betwixt and between", "neither here nor there". When the ceremony is in progress, the participants are no longer students but neither are they yet graduates. This is the distinctive character of liminality.
• The final or postliminal stage
A period during which one's new social status is confirmed, and reincorporation occurs. Upon receiving his or her diploma, the student officially becomes a college graduate. The dean and professors shake the student's hand in congratulation, giving public recognition to the student's new status as a person with a college degree.
Communitas
During the liminal stage, normally accepted differences between the participants, such as social class, are often de-emphasized or ignored. A social structure of communitas forms: one based on common humanity and equality rather than recognized hierarchy. For example, during a pilgrimage, members of an upper class and members of a lower class might mix and talk as equals, when in normal life they would likely never talk at all or their conversation might be limited to giving orders.
Structure
Anthropologists are currently in debate over whether the liminal stage of rituals has an absence of structure (anti-structure) or "hyper-structure", or whether both are possible[citation needed]. In anthropology, liminality can also represent an experience that places one in unfamiliar surrounds, not so much ambiguous as new (ambiguity is different from new in the aspect that a situation, or commonly, a plight, can make the definition of "ambiguous"/"ambiguity" have a multiply finite definition, albeit the unknown, the obscure, or the remotely familiar. Familiar in the sense that you visit a new neighborhood but not a new country).
Examples:
Liminality in rituals
In the simple example of a college graduation ceremony, the liminal phase can actually be extended to include the period of time between when the last assignment was finished (and graduation was assured) all the way through reception of the diploma. That no man's land represents the limbo associated with liminality. The stress of accomplishing tasks for college has been lifted. Yet, the individual has not transitioned to a new stage in life (psychologically or physically). The result is a unique perspective on what has come before, and what may come next. It can include the period between when a couple get engaged and their marriage or between death and burial, for which cultures may or may not have set ritual observances. Even sexually liberated cultures would make it strongly taboo for an engaged spouse to have sex with another person during this time, versus the milder taboo of cheating on a lover.
When Western cultures use mistletoe, the plant is placed in a threshold (the "limen"), at the time of the winter solstice. The act that occurs under the mistletoe (the kiss) breaks the boundaries between two people. Because what happens under the mistletoe is occurring in ritual time/space, the people kissing are not breaking taboos imposed under normal circumstances by their marriages to (or relationships with) other people.
Liminality in time
Twilight serves as a liminal time, between day and night. The name of the television fiction series The Twilight Zone makes reference to this, describing it as "the middle ground between light and shadow, between science and superstition" in one variant of the original series' opening. The name is from an actual zone observable from space in the place where daylight or shadow advances or retreats about the Earth. Noon and, more often, midnight can be considered liminal, the first transitioning between morning and afternoon, the latter between days.
Within the years, liminal times include equinoxes when day and night have equal length, and solstices, when the increase of day or night shifts over to its decrease. Where the Quarter days are held to mark the change in seasons, they also are liminal times.
New Year's Day, whatever its connection or lack of one to the astronomical sky, is a liminal time. Customs such as fortune-telling take advantage of this liminal state. In a number of cultures, actions and events on the first day of the year can determine the year, leading to such beliefs as First-Foot. Many cultures regard it as a time especially prone to hauntings by ghosts -- liminal beings, neither alive nor dead.
Liminality in states of consciousness
Another example of liminality can occur when someone wakes from dream sleep and in a hypnagogic state of mind is unable to distinguish if a vaguely recalled dream actually occurred.
Liminality of beings
In reality illegal immigrants (present but not "official"), stateless people, intersexual or transgender people, bisexual people in most contemporary societies, and those of mixed ethnicity or accused but not yet judged guilty or not guilty, are liminal. Teenagers, being neither children nor adults, are liminal people. The trickster and related archetypes embody many such contradictions as do many popular culture celebrities. 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. It should come as no surprise that these liminal creatures figure prominently in mythology as shapeshifters and spirit guides.
Wounds are liminal in that a wound is in constant flux, either getting better or getting worse. It is a site of healing or infection (or both, simultaneously). Menstruation is a condition in which (like a wound) the boundary between the inside of the body and the outside of the body is broken. Sex is a liminal act.
On an even more cosmic level, we have those judged both living and non-living, such as the human fetus in the abortion debate, those in a Persistent Vegetative State, undead characters and Schrödinger's cat. Plants such as seaweed (between sea and land) and mistletoe (between earth and sky) are not only liminal themselves, but are used in liminal rituals such as healing.
Liminality in places
These can range from borders, to no man's lands and disputed territories, to crossroads to perhaps airports or hotels, which people pass through but do not live in. In mythology and religion or esoteric lore this can include such realms as Purgatory or Da'at which as well as signifying liminality some theologians have denied actually existing, making them, in some cases, doubly liminal. "Between-ness" defines these spaces. For a hotel worker (an insider) or a person passing by with disinterest (a total outsider), the hotel would have a very different connotation. To a traveller staying there, the hotel would function as a liminal zone.
Examples in fiction include the Interzone, the Wood between the Worlds and, as mentioned, The Twilight Zone. In the series itself, fittingly, the Twilight Zone does not appear as an actual literal location, making it both a place and not a place at the same time, and therefore also doubly liminal.
Doors, windows, springs, caves, shores, rivers, volcanic calderas, fords, passes, crossroads, bridges, and marshes are all liminal. Oedipus (an adoptee and therefore liminal) met his father at the crossroads and killed him; the bluesman Robert Johnson met the devil at the crossroads, where he is said to have sold his soul. Major transformations occur at crossroads and other liminal places, at least partly because liminality -- being so unstable -- can pave the way for access to esoteric knowledge or understanding of both sides. Liminality is sacred, alluring, and dangerous.
Liminality in folklore
There are a number of stories in folklore of those who could only be killed in a liminal space: Lleu, could not be killed during the day or night, nor indoors or outdoors, nor riding or walking, nor clothed or naked (and is attacked at dusk, while wrapped in a net with one foot on a cauldron and one on a goat). Likewise, in the Mahabharata, Indra promises not to slay Namuci and Vritra with anything wet or dry, nor in the day or in the night, but instead kills them at dusk with foam. [3]
Liminality in ethnographic research
In ethnographic research, the researcher is often in a liminal state when he or she is both participating in the culture and observing the culture. The researcher must consider the self in relation to others and his or her positioning in the culture being studied.
In many cases, greater participation in the group being studied can lead to increased access of cultural information and greater in group understanding of experiences within the culture. However increased participation also blurrs the role of the researcher in data collection and analysis. Often a researcher that engages in fieldwork as a "participant" or "participant-observer" occupies a liminal state where he/she is a part of the culture, but also separated from the culture as a researcher. This liminal state of being betwixt and between is emotional and uncomfortable as the researcher uses self-reflexivity to interpret field observations and interviews.
Some scholars argue that ethnographers are present in their research, occupying a liminal state, regardless of their participant status. Justification for this position is that the researcher as a "human instrument" engages with his/her observations in the process of recording and analyzing the data. A researcher, often unconsciously, selects what to observe, how to record observations and how to interpret observations based on personal reference points and experiences. For example, even in selecting what observations are interesting to record, the researcher must interpret and value the data available. In order to explore the liminal state of the researcher in relation to the culture, self-reflexivity and awareness are important tools to reveal researcher bias and interpretation.
Liminoid
Turner coined the term liminoid to refer to experiences that have characteristics of liminal experiences but are optional and don't involve a resolution of a personal crisis. A graduation ceremony might be regarded as liminal while a rock concert might be understood to be liminoid. The liminal is part of society, an aspect of social or religious ritual, while the liminoid is a break from society, part of play. Turner stated that liminal experiences are rare and diminished in industrial societies, and are replaced by liminoid experiences.
Liminality in popular culture
The Twilight Zone as mentioned above.
Rant: An Oral Biography of Buster Casey, a novel by Chuck Palahniuk released on May 1, 2007, makes use of liminality in explaining time travel.
In the 2004 movie The Terminal, the main character (Viktor Navorski) is trapped in a liminal space; since he can neither legally return to his home country Krakozhia nor enter the United States, he must remain in the airport terminal indefinitely.
References 1. ^ "liminal", Oxford English Dictionary. Ed. J.A. Simpson and E.S.C. Weiner. 2nd ed. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989. OED Online Oxford University Press. Accessed June 23, 2007. 2. ^ Turner, Victor. 1967. “Betwixt and Between: The Liminal Period in Rites de Passage”, in The Forest of Symbols. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press 3. ^ "Vritra". Encyclopedia of Religion. (2006). Macmillan Reference USA/Gale Group. Retrieved on 2007-06-22.