Liminality

[8] This three-fold structure, as established by van Gennep, is made up of the following components:[10] Turner confirmed his nomenclature for "the three phases of passage from one culturally defined state or status to another...preliminal, liminal, and postliminal".

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.

First, Turner was keen to limit the meaning of the concept to the concrete settings of small-scale tribal societies, preferring the neologism "liminoid" coined by him to analyse certain features of the modern world.

Liminality has both spatial and temporal dimensions, and can be applied to a variety of subjects: individuals, larger groups (cohorts or villages), whole societies, and possibly even entire civilizations.

[6] The following chart summarizes the different dimensions and subjects of liminal experiences, and also provides the main characteristics and key examples of each category.

The idea of a 'container' or 'vessel' as a key player in the ritual process of psychotherapy has been noted by many and Carl Jung's objective was to provide a space he called "a temenos, a magic circle, a vessel, in which the transformation inherent in the patient's condition would be allowed to take place.

[34] The temporal dimension of liminality can relate to moments (sudden events), periods (weeks, months, or possibly years), and epochs (decades, generations, maybe even centuries).

The book includes a conceptual description of liminality as well as applications for hermeneutics, liturgy, ecclesiology, leadership, learning, faith formation, and pastoral care and crisis.

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".

[44] The "trickster as the mythic projection of the magician—standing in the limen between the sacred realm and the profane"[45] and related archetypes embody many such contradictions as do many popular culture celebrities.

[49] More conventionally, springs, caves, shores, rivers, volcanic calderas—"a huge crater of an extinct volcano...[as] another symbol of transcendence"[50]—fords, passes, crossroads, bridges, and marshes are all liminal: "'edges', borders or faultlines between the legitimate and the illegitimate".

Likewise, in Hindu text Bhagavata Purana, Vishnu appears in a half-man half-lion form named Narasimha to destroy the demon Hiranyakashipu who has obtained the power never to be killed in day nor night, in the ground nor in the air, with weapon nor by bare hands, in a building nor outside it, by man nor beast.

This can be reinforced by the split of town and gown, where local communities and the student body maintain different traditions and codes of behaviour.

[68] Jane's existence emerges as paradoxical as she transcends commonly accepted beliefs about what it means to be a woman, orphan, child, victim, criminal, and pilgrim,[69] and she creates her own narrative as she is torn from her past and denied a certain future.

[69] Karen Brooks states that Australian grunge lit books, such as Clare Mendes' Drift Street, Edward Berridge's The Lives of the Saints, and Andrew McGahan's Praise "...explor[e] the psychosocial and psychosexual limitations of young sub/urban characters in relation to the imaginary and socially constructed boundaries defining...self and other" and "opening up" new "liminal [boundary] spaces" where the concept of an abject human body can be explored.

[70] Brooks states that Berridge's short stories provide "...a variety of violent, disaffected and often abject young people", characters who "...blur and often overturn" the boundaries between suburban and urban space.

The stories, such as "In-Between", "Cogito, Ergo Sum", "The Trap", "Monkey Bath", "DreamCatcher", "Escape to Nowhere", "A Letter to My-Self", "No Man's Land", "Whither Am I?

Primer (2004), is a US science fiction film by Shane Carruth where the main characters set up their time travelling machine in a storage facility to ensure it will not be accidentally disturbed.

The hallways of the storage facility are eerily unchanging and impersonal, in a sense depicted as outside of time, and could be considered a liminal space.

In the late 2010s, a trend of images depicting so-called "liminal spaces" surged in online art and photography communities, with the intent to convey "a sense of nostalgia, lostness, and uncertainty".

[73] The subjects of these photos may not necessarily fit within the usual definition of spatial liminality (such as that of hallways, waiting areas or rest stops) but are instead defined by a forlorn atmosphere and sentiments of abandonment, decay and quietness.

Additionally, it has been suggested that the liminal space phenomenon could represent a broader feeling of disorientation in modern society, explaining the usage of places that are common in childhood memories (such as playgrounds or schools) as reflective about the passage of time and the collective experience of growing older.

[75] The creepypasta showed an image of a hallway with yellow carpets and wallpaper, with a caption purporting that by "noclipping out of bounds in real life", one may enter the Backrooms, an empty wasteland of corridors with nothing but "the stink of old moist carpet, the madness of mono-yellow, the endless background noise of fluorescent lights at maximum hum-buzz, and approximately six hundred million square miles of randomly segmented empty rooms to be trapped in".

Coil mention liminality throughout their works, most explicitly with the title of their song "Batwings (A Limnal Hymn)" (sic) from their album Musick to Play in the Dark Vol.

In the lyrics of French rock band Little Nemo's song "A Day Out of Time", the idea of liminality is indirectly explored by describing a transitional moment before the returning of "the common worries".

[2] In these modern societies, rites are diminished and "forged the concept of 'liminoid' rituals for analogous but secular phenomena" such as attending rock concerts and other[84] liminoid experiences.

[2] Examples of this include Cherokee and Mayan riddles, trickster tales, sacred ball games, and joking relationships which serve holy purposes of work in liminal situations while retaining the element of playfulness.

[2] Ritual and myth were, in the past, exclusively connected to collective work that served holy and often symbolic purposes; liminal rites were held in the form of coming-of-age ceremonies, celebrations of seasons, and more.

One scholar, Alexandra Murphy, has argued that airplane travel is inherently liminoid—suspended in the sky, neither here nor there and crossing thresholds of time and space, it is difficult to make sense of the experience of flying.

[85] Murphy posits that flights shift our existence into a limbo space in which movement becomes an accepted set of cultural performances aimed at convincing us that air travel is a reflection of reality rather than a separation from it.