Courtney Pauls- Liminality

Victor Turner describes liminality as “the state and process of mid-transition in a rite of passage...liminars are stripped of status and authority, removed from a social structure maintained and sanctioned by power and force, and leveled to a homogeneous state.” Another way to think of liminality is a threshold state. When you are standing in a threshold of a door, you are neither in the room or out. By standing in the threshold, you are in between two places. A graduation ceremony is a good example of a liminal state because the graduates are not still in school, but they are not in the real world quite yet. At that moment, the graduates are in between two places. In a liminal state, communitas can occur.