In Between States

One of my all time favorite anthropological concepts is that of liminality.  It is the space, generally created by ritual, where one is "betwixt and between" states, usually in a rite of passage.  Victor Turner popularized this concept, although he owes a great debt to Van Gennep for the structure of ritual.  Classically, a person involved in a ritual as the focus goes through three stages - separation from normal life, liminality, reincorporation into society.  The ritual signifies the person's change in status, from child to adult, single to married, alive to dead.  In a world that is obsessed with digital states, where a person is either one thing or another, it is refreshing to think of the process of becoming.  A cusp, a doorway, a penumbra.

There are other types of rituals, such as rites of intensification, where liminality also plays a role, although participants are not shifting from one state to another permanently.  During a liminal phase, communitas takes place, where participants' social status is leveled and normal rules are suspended.  Power can be inverted, placing significance on the words of fools.  My participation in Vodou ceremonies have been marked by the sense of communitas and liminality.  These were some of my formative experiences as an anthropologist, so it's no surprise I look for the liminal in everything I do.

Just this week, I've traveled to both Ohio and New Mexico.  Two entirely different professional experiences and the contrast in weather was startling.  Since there are no direct flights from Texas to either of the places I went, I have spent a lot of time in airports this week.  I was struck that travel becomes its own ritual.  People are literally betwixt and between.  However, there was very little joy in the process.  People looked grumpy and exhausted.  There was some loosening of strictures, as people casually struck up conversations as opposed to the general reservations American have about interacting with strangers.  But there was no sense of "we're all in this together."  It was as if something was being done unto them and they had no choice but to endure.

Now, one could argue that this is just the nature of American culture - that there is no space for mass liminality.  However, I am from New Orleans and I beg to differ.  Mardi Gras lends itself to the obvious argument about public ritual, but I was more often struck by the way people in the city responded to the threat of a hurricane.  I left NOLA prior to Katrina, so I can't speak to how that devastation affected how people currently prepare for a storm, but when I was growing up, it was as if the more dire the forecast, the friendlier people became.  All of a sudden neighbors who never spoke helped one another board up windows and people took care of one another in shelters.  The sense of communitas made living through the threat of devastation bearable.  So I know that mass liminality, a collective holding of breath, is possible.

By the time I was flying back to Texas for the second time in four days, I was tired and a bit harried, but it seemed to me that people were missing out on the magic of the experience of being in between.  For those few hours, we were all the same, subject to the same vagaries of the all-powerful airport gods, weather and labor organizing and standby flights.  Communitas is often marked by a lack of social power on the part of participants; status, ascribed and achieved, no longer counts.  I feel like travelers miss the fact that the lack of secular power can be counterbalanced by ritual power.  Betwixt and between, we have access to spiritual insights and, in some cases, supernatural powers.  If nothing else, being able to suspend quotidian life offers perspective on our daily expectations for ourselves and others.

I will be traveling again soon and rather than being impatient to just get there, already, I intend to think deeply on what it means to be liminal, in between states, neither here nor there.