Ritual and the Space In Between

Arnold van Gennep grouped these ceremonies, held at birth, puberty, marriage and death, into one category and gave them a three part shape: separation, transition and incorporation. It is one of the few categories in anthropology documented in nearly every culture studied.

This French ethnographer coined the phrase rites of passage in his 1909 book and named the ambiguous middle stage liminality. He worked mostly outside the university system and is also credited as the founder of folklore studies in France.

The threshold stage of a rite of passage, when a person has left one status behind and has not yet reached the next. Anthropologists describe it simply as betwixt and between.

Turner took van Gennep's middle stage and built a career on it, spending long stretches among the Ndembu of Zambia to study how liminality dissolves ordinary social structure. He later stretched the idea toward modern secular life, an extension other scholars still argue overreaches the original concept.

The word itself entered English through Captain Cook's 1777 visit to Tonga, where he was told a thing was taboo and recorded the word as covering almost anything forbidden. Every culture on this trail draws some version of that line, around food, the dead, sex or violence.

A totem marks a family, clan or lineage the way a taboo marks a forbidden act, through a shared symbol rather than a shared boundary. Durkheim read it as the root of collective worship, and Levi-Strauss later argued it was not one unified institution at all, just an ordinary habit of human classification.

A father takes to his bed, fasts, or in one Papua New Guinea account builds a hut outside the village and mimics labor pains until the child is born. Levi-Strauss read the practice as a ritual that welds a father into a family he cannot otherwise physically join.

Honoring the dead here is not just memory. It rests on a belief that the dead keep some hold on the fortunes of the living, so the relationship with them has to be maintained, not merely recalled.

The shaman crosses the same threshold a rite of passage marks, entering a trance through drumming, ritual performance or hallucinogens to reach a spirit world on the community's behalf, most often to heal, divine or guide.

When misfortune has no other explanation, some communities find it in a person instead, most often a woman, child or someone already at the margins. It is the boundary this trail keeps meeting, between a community and whoever gets placed outside it and blamed.