Liminality

She addresses the incredibly messy, nonlinear reality of how our professional and personal identities evolve.

And to understand this, she draws heavily on the anthropological concept of liminality.

Liminality, yes.

It comes from the Latin word limin, meaning threshold.

The concept was originally developed by the anthropologist Arnold van Gennep in his study of rites of passage in various cultures.

Rites of passage.

A rite of passage always involves a separation from the old status, a transitional phase, and an incorporation into the new status.

Liminality is that middle phase.

[laughs]

Dude, Liminal is today's-

Well, well, I'm a fan

... is, today's word of the-

Liminal, that's like this category.

No, it, it's so, yeah.

Liminal, subliminal coming through and it's sort of cool.

It's so accurate.

There's a lot of reasons why I like it.

So going into this liminal time of the year, what does liminal even mean? Liminality is the state of being between one thing and another.

And I've always, I mean, I call myself a liminal witch because I feel like liminality has been such a huge theme in my entire life.

I feel like I live in a liminal space every day between going from my work in the office, just like this very traditional type of work.

So what you pointed to was what was the thing that shakes them out of that? What is the thing that says to them something different has occurred here? Get out of your head and into this experience.

And it was a moment of – I want to use the word liminality – Nice word.

Liminality.

Yeah.

The idea that a space was created where change could occur.

And Turner drew a really important line that I think we need to keep in mind for the rest of this conversation.

He distinguished between liminal and liminoid.

Liminal is obligatory, communal, and produces genuine social change.

Your community recognizes you as different afterward.

Liminoid is optional, often commercial, and produces the feeling of transformation without the status change.

You know what? I'm thinking about military boot camp, because that might be one of the only structurally complete rites of passage left in mainstream Western culture.

Separation, you leave home, they shave your head, they take your clothes.

Liminality, the shared ordeal, everyone suffering together.

The prefrontal cortex does its deepest work in the quiet of witnessing.

Liminality, the psychological state of being between two stable identities or ways of being, is consistently described in research as a period of increased silence seeking Anthropologist Victor Turner, who coined the term, described liminal states as characterized by withdrawal from ordinary social noise and immersion in a quieter engagement with existence.

Contemporary research on major life transitions finds that individuals who voluntarily seek silence during transitional periods report better adjustment outcomes than those who use social distraction.

The quiet between one chapter and the next is not lost time.

Let's see here.

Layers of Liminality, uh, which is, uh, weird things you can encounter in liminal spaces.

Um, let's see here.

Welcome to the endless, uh, threads of the skin in a procedurally driven liminal dungeon crawl compatible liminal horror.

What you're touching on here is the concept of liminality.

Wait.

Liminality is one of those academic words that gets thrown around a lot.

Break that down for us.

What actually makes a space liminal?