Does liminality, as Victor Turner himself used the term, apply only to small-scale tribal ritual settings, with his own neologism "liminoid" reserved for comparable features of the modern world, or can the term liminality itself be extended to concrete historical and institutional transitions, as Ag
Turner developed liminality from Arnold van Gennep's earlier rites-of-passage model through his Ndembu fieldwork, but he restricted the term itself to small-scale tribal ritual, coining "liminoid" for the modern world rather than extending "liminality" to cover it. Agnes Horvath (2013) countered this restriction directly, arguing that liminality itself, not only Turner's liminoid, can and should be applied to concrete historical events as a means of historical and sociological understanding. The dispute is not merely terminological: whether "liminality" or "liminoid" is the right word for a modern transition carries real weight for how far Turner's ritual-derived theory can travel outside the ethnographic settings that produced it.
What would resolve this A cross-disciplinary consensus, or at least a widely adopted convention, on whether Turner's own scope restriction reflects something essential to the concept (a genuine structural difference between ritual in small-scale societies and transitions in complex ones) or only a caution particular to his own Ndembu-derived evidence base.
Anthropological and historical theory, specifically ritual studies and the sociology of transitionWikipedia: Liminality