Summary
Liminality is the in-between state midway through a rite of passage, when someone has left one social position and not yet entered the next. The folklorist Arnold van Gennep named this threshold phase in 1909. The anthropologist Victor Turner, who had taken part in Ndembu initiation rites in Zambia, made it a general concept from 1964.
In a 1974 essay Turner coined ‘liminoid’ for what resembles it in industrial societies: theatre, sport, carnival, art. Ritual in the societies he called tribal is compulsory and collective; leisure is optional, often individual, often bought. “One works at the liminal, one plays with the liminoid.” Both, he thought, breed new models for living.
Rationale
Among contexts for experiencing different deep dispositions, Part 2 lists “lifestage rituals”. Turner’s contrast tests any we might support: a rite people choose, pay for and can skip is liminoid, whatever it’s called.