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liminality
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liminality

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alt=9–10-year-old boys of the Yao tribe in Malawi participating in circumcision and initiation rites.|thumb|Initiation ritual of boys in Malawi. The ritual marks the passage from child to adult male, a liminal stage in the context of their lives.

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37 sections
Contents
  • Rites of passage
  • Arnold van Gennep
  • Victor Turner
  • Liminality theory today
  • Types
  • In large-scale societies
  • Depth psychology
  • Examples of general usage
  • Liminal festivals
  • Liminal spaces in ritual and pilgrimage
  • Liminality in migration and borderlands
  • Digital/virtual liminality
  • In rites
  • In time
  • Examples
  • In religion
  • Judeo-Christian worship
  • Judeo-Christian ministry
  • Of beings
  • In places
  • In folklore
  • In ethnographic research
  • In higher education
  • In popular culture
  • Novels and short stories
  • Plays
  • Films and TV shows
  • Photography and Internet culture
  • Music and other media
  • Liminoid experiences
  • Examples of liminoid experiences
  • Sports
  • Commercial flight
  • See also
  • Citations
  • General sources
  • External links

alt=9–10-year-old boys of the Yao tribe in Malawi participating in circumcision and initiation rites.|thumb|Initiation ritual of boys in Malawi. The ritual marks the passage from child to adult male, a liminal stage in the context of their lives.

In anthropology, liminality () is the quality of ambiguity or disorientation that occurs in the middle stage of a rite of passage, when participants no longer hold their pre-ritual status but have not yet begun the transition to the status they will hold when the rite is complete. During a rite's liminal stage, participants "stand at the threshold" between their previous way of structuring their identity, time, or community, and a new way (which completing the rite establishes).

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