Liminal Period
Betwixt and Between: The Liminal Period in Rites de Passage
The paper I’ll be discussing today is Betwixt and Between: The Liminal Period in Rites de Passage by Victor Turner. This paper analyses Arnold van Gennup’s Rites of passage with a particular focus on the liminal period and the symbolic themes that arise.
Rights of passage are ritualistic ceremonies that mark a change from one state of life to another. Turner defines a state as a fixed and stable condition that receives social recognition. So for example marriage or adulthood. He argues that when people change state they experience to some extent, Gennup’s three phases that describe the transitions that occur in all societies.
The three stages are separation, transition and reincorporation. They’re called a few different things but the inter-structural phase in the middle is usually referred to as the liminal phase. These phases can explain any sort of transition like puberty, marriage, and graduation. They can also be experienced by a group of people like a tribe going to war.
The first phase, separation, involves symbolic behavior where the novice or the person who is experiencing the change for the first time, is separated from the social structure. So in Simone’s lecture yesterday she used the example of a person who was receiving their PHD at a graduation ceremony. She physically separated the novice and acknowledged that she was different by giving her a cap and gown.
The next phase, the liminal is a kind of strange in between stage where the person’s state is ambiguous and their old status doesn’t exist. With the graduate example the graduate was referred to as a graduand as they are in the process of receiving their degree. They are in a transition from undergraduate to graduate and no longer a student as they are moving onto a new state.
The novice then moves on to the third and final stage where they incorporate a new status. So in yesterdays lecture when the graduand
The paper I’ll be discussing today is Betwixt and Between: The Liminal Period in Rites de Passage by Victor Turner. This paper analyses Arnold van Gennup’s Rites of passage with a particular focus on the liminal period and the symbolic themes that arise.
Rights of passage are ritualistic ceremonies that mark a change from one state of life to another. Turner defines a state as a fixed and stable condition that receives social recognition. So for example marriage or adulthood. He argues that when people change state they experience to some extent, Gennup’s three phases that describe the transitions that occur in all societies.
The three stages are separation, transition and reincorporation. They’re called a few different things but the inter-structural phase in the middle is usually referred to as the liminal phase. These phases can explain any sort of transition like puberty, marriage, and graduation. They can also be experienced by a group of people like a tribe going to war.
The first phase, separation, involves symbolic behavior where the novice or the person who is experiencing the change for the first time, is separated from the social structure. So in Simone’s lecture yesterday she used the example of a person who was receiving their PHD at a graduation ceremony. She physically separated the novice and acknowledged that she was different by giving her a cap and gown.
The next phase, the liminal is a kind of strange in between stage where the person’s state is ambiguous and their old status doesn’t exist. With the graduate example the graduate was referred to as a graduand as they are in the process of receiving their degree. They are in a transition from undergraduate to graduate and no longer a student as they are moving onto a new state.
The novice then moves on to the third and final stage where they incorporate a new status. So in yesterdays lecture when the graduand