On liminality

In 1909 a French ethnographer named Arnold van Gennep described the ritual or rite as a set of symbolic activities that has 3 steps or states: preliminary, liminal, and postliminary (also referred to as separation, liminality, and regression).

The first and the last stage are easy to understand. Separation is the act of removing the individual's social status and introducing it to a space and time of a certain "special" form. This can be from wearing a ceremonial dress, getting dressed for work, to speaking another language. Basically anything that separates the individual from the context of the one that is going to come out.

While regression is the moment in which the individual is already accepted back into the context, but with different rules, responsibilities, or thoughts. Ex: A child who finishes the rite of his first communion has accepted a new set of norms and responsibilities within that context.

Liminality, on the other hand, is a bit more complex to describe; and in general it is a very curious notion. A Scottish guy named Victor Turner took the concepts of the rite states that were thought of by van Gennep and dedicated his life studying them. He defines liminality as an intermediate or ambiguous period of time/space (although at certain points in his discourse he also describes people as "liminal"). According to Turner, liminality is a process of integration and discarding of all our concepts and creates the possibility of an alteration of the being and its knowledge in a moment where there is no identity. Think of it as opening the door of a house and standing just below the frame; It is not inside or outside the house, right? That is the liminality.

Personally, I like to define liminality as a non-existence. The spaces or moments of life where time seems to have another texture or a different flavor. As if it really did not make sense at all, but it's still there. Liminality is characterized by making our context feel completely strange and little known. As an altered reality. Something that can not be identified.

The elevators alone when you go to visit someone you like.

That moment in the early morning when you wake up without reason, and everyone is asleep and you can walk around the house like a ghost.

The roads on the way to an unknown place.

A truck stop in the mountain where you have a hot chocolate.

School during the holidays with empty classrooms.

The moment before a first kiss.

A minimarket of some gas station at 3 in the morning.

Life is full of moments or liminal spaces. That NON-existence, it makes our hair stand up a little, a little nervous, a little anxious. The liminality places us in a known situation but it takes away all the context, and we seem like fish out of water. Drowned, nervous. Without knowing where to hit. In a limbo. (In case you had not noticed, that's where the word "limbo" comes from)

In this generation of #Millenials most of our colleagues or friends have an aura of urgency. As if the time they have to be successful will end faster than normal. And then ... they are not wrong.

We live in a constant state of Liminality. Of NON-existence. Of constant doubt and absolute terror. I think that is the quality that defines us as Millennials, with one foot in adulthood, and the other still in adolescence, and the generation before us has not yet accepted us.

We have not complied with the "fire ritual" necessary to be accepted as adults. The self-titled "adults" have us dancing on hot coals and each time they continue to increase in the heat.

We have been forged from the fire. Without identity. We grew up with the pressure of having to save a planet that our parents and grandparents are killing. We study at a time when the rate of illiteracy is more than 60% lower than 50 years ago, and yet they say "lazy" when we complain about having to study for an exam. We work freelance if we cannot find a permanent job when our parents worked in the same company or in the public sector all their lives without so much as a college degree. We saw our parents retire at 60 knowing that we probably will not get to do that. And still, we are not "adults" at all.

But as we are forged from the fire, we have learned to adapt to the pressures that come with being of our generation at this moment in history. We fight for ourselves and our future; but more than anything, to be able to say that we could do it. We are capable, and we have enough guevos to be able to tell the "real adults" to rot, because we are happier in our NON-existence. In fact we enjoy it; we enjoy not having a fixed space in our context; We enjoy the elevators alone; the quiet moments at midnight; the hallways between the party and the bathroom; the streets of our neighborhood at 4 in the morning when we arrived from dancing out all night; the boarding lounge of an airport.

We enjoy liminality because we ourselves are liminal; constantly between one stage and another. Between adolescents and adults. Between happy and miserable. Between giving everything and giving nothing. Between entering a bar and leaving it. And we will continue to enjoy these NON-existences until we finally feel things around us make sense; we will continue to enjoy until we finally have an identity.

According to Víctor Turner, at the end of the rite, in the regression stage, an irreversible transformation takes place where we overcome the limits of our intellectual concepts to arrive at a different and more evolved discourse. The individual is reintegrated into the context but with a high social status and an established identity.

I don't know about you, but I feel like that fire is burning a little less than yesterday.