Religion (1985) 15, 2 05-217

LIMINALITY, KABBALAH, AND

THE MEDIA

Victor Turner

I was involved in a good many `liminal' situations during my visit to Israel in

1983 . So it would be useful to define what I mean by the term (see also V .
Turner6 pp . 94-96, 125 ; 1974 : 259 ; and ? pp . 25-27, 41-42, 46) . Limen is Latin
for `threshold' ; literally, a threshold divides two spaces . This may be a closed
from an open space, as the threshold of a house, the internal divisions of a
closed space, like the doors or partitions within a house . A threshold may also
divide two times, for example work time from leisure time, school time from
play time . But here we are already becoming metaphorical, regarding time as
if it were space . We will get more metaphorical yet, when we see how cultures
elaborate the metaphor of threshold, regarding it as the crossing point, both in
space and time, from one defined or labelled state of being or social status to
another . Such crossings or limina may be brief or elongated . Carrying a bride
through a doorway, ordering an army recruit to take two paces forward, may
take only a few seconds-though they symbolize vital sociocultural changes,
from unweddedness to weddedness, from civilian to military status-but they
are rich in meaning . Other cultural crossings may take much longer, both
chronologically and subjectively, and perhaps could be likened to `tunnels'
rather than `thresholds', cunicular rather than liminal . One example would be
the class of initiation rituals which move the initiands from culturally defined
childhood into adulthood, found in so many societies past and present . In
these, boys and girls are removed from the mundane sphere of dependence on
their mothers, submitted to an operation which leaves indelible marks on their
body, such as circumcision, scarification, cicatrization, tooth-removal or
filing, spirited away to a site set aside from everyday life in forest, cave, or moun-
tain, submitted to a variety of ordeals physical, psychological, given teaching by
elders on esoteric matters which are deemed pertinent to know, trained inten-
sively in skills appropriate to their age and gender, such as sexual expertise and
hunting, given moral instruction as to how to behave to kin, non-kin, and
strangers, and retained for periods from a few months to several years before
being returned, often through elaborate rites, to the quotidian world . In many

004P-721X/85/030205+ 13 $02 .00/0 ©1985 Academic Press Inc . (London) Ltd

20 6 Victor Turner

societies, funerary rites are equally prolonged and elaborated, where mythi-
cally described steps in the course of the journey of the dead person's spirit in
the hereafter are calibrated with the sequence of ritual events which also, step
by step, bring his or her successors and inheritors into new, viable relation-
ships with one another as the elements of the deceased's status and property
are inventoried and redistributed among the heirs .
The great French folklorist and ethnographer, Arnold van Gennep, was
the first to call attention in the early 20th century to the importance of the
space-time transitions, which he called `rites de passage', in the regular
working of sociocultural systems, mostly of the pre-industrial cyclical and
repetitive types . Although he wrote a good deal about the ritual ways in which
strangers were incorporated into `tribal' societies, and about rituals preparing
societal members for journeys into alien territories, in fact about limina
between the outside and the inside, his main concern was with passage rites
within relatively firmly bounded systems-from one room to another within a
house to refer back to my original illustration . These passage rites were
divided by van Gennep into two major types (to which I will add a third) : life-
crisis rituals based on cultural definitions of the human life-cycle . They
include : (a) rituals focused on pregnancy, notably first pregnancy ; (b) naming
rituals ; (c) pre-pubertal and pubertal initiations ; (d) betrothal and marital
rituals, often distributed over time and linked with pubertal rites ; (e) initiation
into prestige-bestowing adult associations, including secret societies,
sometimes having a number of increasingly esoteric grades ; (f) rituals eleva-
ting individuals to high office or royal, chiefly, or priestly rank ; (g) funerary
rituals, sometimes followed by rituals of second burial or bringing home the
ancestor .
Second, Seasonal or calendrical rituals : these tend to stress the whole com-
munity, whether it be a village, tribe, or nation, as it passes through the
agricultural or astronomical cycles, whether sowing, first fruits, and harvest
rituals, rituals performed at midwinter, midsummer, or other solstitial points
of change, rituals relating to the Venus or Jupiter cycles, or other junctures in
the cultural reckonings of recurrent time, such as the intercalary days between
solar and lunar calendars . Often, these seasonal rituals, whose successors in
the historical rituals are carnivals and other feasts, express reversals of
customary status, the poor or underclass categories dressing up or portraying
themselves as aristocrats or the wealthy, and developing liminal systems of
pseudohierarchy, and the normally dominant categories accepting their rit-
ually humble roles . These reversals occur not always or invariably, but often
enough to be crossculturally noticeable . Total, `law-like' generalizations
about human behaviour are liable to fail owing to our species-specific capacity
for innovation and creative adaptation . Nevertheless, one can say broadly that
in life-crisis rites, which normally bring about an elevation of status, there is,
 Liminality, Kabbalah, and the Media 207

first, a stripping of all previous status, a humiliation and equalization of those

going through passage, before the marks of superior status are assigned ; one
must be pressed down before being raised up . While in seasonal rituals, those
who are permanently defined as inferior, members of lower castes, outcasts,
or despised ethnicities, are culturally allowed for a few hours or days to `play'
at being members of groups or categories defined as being `higher', to play
with the symbols and trappings of power, while the normally powerful must
either endure the scorn of the `lower orders' or even flee the entire scene of
seasonal-ritual action . Ultimately, in both types, the political and economic
structures of the everyday, `secular' social system are re-asserted and, in a
way, regenerated, by these ritual reversals . Aroused sentiments of rebellion
against the social order are, as it were, divested, in symbolic action, of their
antinomian equality and transferred as a generalized quantum of affect to
symbols that represent the living continuity of the society now conceived as a
glowing ideal unity, standing above its concrete internal divisions, both
vertical and horizontal . But the liminal moment, nevertheless, exists when all
hangs in the balance, when change might be possible, the perilous moment
when social structure momentarily has to loose its grip, in order that change,
even within its systematic boundaries, has to be effected . For liminality is
essential to social transition, and it means crossing an abyss . There is here,
implicitly, a risk, a gamble . Hence, I think, the dense clustering of taboos and
prohibitions of various types around the liminal periods of sociocultural
transition, especially those ritualized in the life cycle . For it is this class of
ritual that possesses the most prolonged liminal period . Festivals and carni-
vals occurring as nodes in the agricultural year, changes from winter to
summer hunting, or shifts from wet season to dry season cattle herding in
transhuman pastoralism, are less liable to disturb the fundamental social
order, despite their often heady atmosphere of license, since their goals are
often pure enjoyment and good-natured self-expression, and their discharges
of inter-group or inter-category hostility either merely verbal or at most
stopping short of lethal violence . And they do not last very long-they explode
rather than burn slowly . Nevertheless, in periods of radical societal change, as
Natalie Davis, Le Roy Ladurie, and Robert Bazucha have shown for early
modern France, carnivals can become politicized . Political and religious
authorities come to fear their revolutionary potential and impose stringent
rules upon their performance, reducing their power to lampoon and criticize
ruling elites and classes .
A third kind of passage ritual consists of what I have called rituals of
affliction, which abound in sub-Saharan Africa . These are concerned with the
remedying of illness, misfortune, disaster, or catastrophe, both individual and
corporate . Here the limina, the passages are between sickness and health, life
and death, starvation and a full belly, barrenness and fertility, sometimes war
20 8 Victor Turner

and peace . Since afflictions are often conceived in pre-industrial societies as a

consequence of the transgression of moral norms and/or magical taboos
established by deities or ancestral spirits, who then punish the transgressors,
rituals of affliction tend to relate directly or indirectly to the current state of
inter-personal and inter-group conflicts in a demarcated field of on-going
social relations . In societies which do not sharply distinguish, as we do in the
Western tradition, between social, moral, and natural orders, and regard the
corporate group rather than the individual as the salient actor in social
interaction, illness and misfortune are often seen as the manifestation of social
conflict, open or secret . The gods or ancestors punish those who disrupt the
salient social bonds . That is why, in my African studies, I have found
divination into the hidden causes of misfortune and illness, and the rituals that
diviners prescribe to assuage ancestral wrath, usually involving episodes of
public confession of hidden grudges, to be indicators and inventories of the
contemporary state of adversary relations between groups and sub-groups,
even when life has hitherto appeared to have been going along relatively
placidly at the overt levels of kinshp, economic, and political action . One
might describe rituals of affliction as being highly `context sensitive', `context'
here being contemporary social-cultural context .
There are many other kinds of ritual too, and various authors have sought to
discriminate ritual from kindred modes of symbolic action, such as ceremony,
decorum, ritualization, etc ., but I am interested today in looking at liminality,
a space-time phenomenon not always found in every ritual, but suggestive for
the understanding of many social processes and states found outside of ritual
contexts . As is known, van Gennep divided rites of passage (and most rituals
have to some extent a passage quality) into three stages or phases, varying in
relative duration and intensity according to the nature of the passages as
defined first within a particular culture ; secondly cross-culturally, and thirdly
in relation to the scale and complexity of the societies considered . In Stage
One, rites of separation detach the ritual unit, single or corporate, from
mundane life ; in Stage Two, rites of margin or limen are performed in limbo
space and time for those undergoing transition, who are, so to speak, neither
here nor there but betwixt-and-between, in terms of traditional classification
and categories applying to mundane life before or after the rites, having lost
their previous status and cultural location and not yet having passed through
to their new place (or returned to their old place) in the sociocultural order . In
Stage Three, rites of re-aggregation, the ritual subjects are moved from
liminality back into quotidian reality and society by a series of symbolic
actions which endows them with the insignia and emblems of a new status .
Purification from the otherwise polluting sacredness and potency of liminality
is a common feature of these rituals of return and re-incorporation,
Now I am inclined to think that the entire ritual process described by van
 Liminality, Kabbalah, and the Media 209

Gennep can be seen as `liminal', not merely its middle phase alone . I am
indeed, not deeply committed to his division into three parts-though I do not
believe, as some say, that he borrowed his tripartite sequence from Hegel,
rather, he inferred it from his empirical study of thousands of rituals . I have
seen rituals that return the participants for a time to everyday life, then some
time later move them back into a liminal state, repeating this pattern for a
considerable time . And other rites have practically no `middle' phase or period
at all, merely consisting of ritual specialists chanting a formula in a house to
make it auspicious and then departing . Yet, as I said, all rituals are more or
less liminal, whatever their internal segmentation or lack thereof, in that they
are interposed between stretches of `ordinary' time, or occur either in places
`set apart' from ordinary activities or temporarily changed in nature to
accommodate ritual action .
However it is clear that in many protracted rituals, such as initiations, there
comes into being, whether naturally or by cultural edict, an inner space, a
period `in and out of time', to borrow T . S . Eliot's phrase, which might be
described as 'hyperliminal' . The term `inner space' recalls to me my recent
reading in Kabbalic literature-most recently two books by Mordechai
Rotenberg of Hebrew University (Damnation and Deviance, 1978 ; Dialogue
with Deviance, 1983) . 3 I refer specifically to R . Isaac Luria's notion of
Tsimtsum, `contraction', `concentration' . I will first give Gershom Scholem's
succinct account of Tsimtsum and then try to show how this might relate to the
notion of liminal space . Scholem points out that Luria opposed the pantheistic
interpretation of the Zohar put forward by earlier Kabbalists . He is concerned
with the first act of creation . `The existence of the universe is made possible by
a process of shrinkage in God' . Luria begins by putting a question which gives
the appearance of being naturalistic and, if you like, somewhat crude . How
can there be a world if God is everywhere? If God is `all in all', how can there be
things that are not God? How can God create the world out of nothing (creatio
ab nihilo), if there is no nothing? To anticipate no liminality in principio . This is
the question . According to Luria, God was compelled to make room for the
world by, as it were, abandoning a region within Himself, a kind of primordial
space from which he withdrew in order to return to it in the act of creation and
revelation . The first act of En-Sof, the Infinite Being, is therefore not a step
outside, but a step inside, a movement of recoil, of falling back upon oneself, of
withdrawing into oneself. Instead of emanation (in the neo-Platonic mode,
and in the view of earlier Kabbalists), we have the opposite, contraction (see
Scholem 4 pp . 260-261) . Now I am not going to follow Scholem into the
complexities of Lurianic Kabbala, nor Rotenberg into the implications of this
view for psychology, criminology, or sociology . Here I am merely contrasting
Luria with Durkheim, who equated God with society in an updated version of
pantheism, or rather, pansocietism, where the Durkheiman notion of the
2 10 Victor Turner

sacred, in Scholem's terms, would seem to represent the concentration of

society (read `God' in Scholem) at a point (Scholem speaks of this point as
being in the Midrash the concentration of the Shekhinah, the Divine Presence,
in the holiest of Holies, at the place of the Cherubim) . Isaac Luria, to the
contrary, posited God's retreat away from a point, but nevertheless containing
the whole of creation . In the same way, or perhaps analogously, we might
think of society contracting itself away from the `ritual point' which van
Gennep called liminality . In other words society, to use Scholem's term, exiles
itself from its totality into the often `profound seclusion' of liminality . This
leaves room for a 'dialogic', a counterpoint of ideas, between the liminal and
the social structural (rather than a conversation or argument between persons,
as the term `dialogue' might suggest) . The liminal is, at least in principle, freed
from, emptied of, the social structural . And, just as the social structural may be
likened to the indicative mood of verbs in many language families, so may the
liminal space-time `point' be regarded as society's subjunctive mood, the
mood of may-be, might-be, as-if, possibility, hypothesis, speculation . Liminal
space is potentially, before refilling, a realm of meonic feeling .
The liminal, then, might possibly be construed as the product of contraction,
a space and time left empty, within which creative activities may or might
take place . For, as in Luria, the liminal space is not abandoned to chaos or
negativity-it is refilled, so to speak, from the essence of the social . Thus, in
many tribal initiations, the initiands are exposed to cosmogonic myths and
shown symbolic objects which illustrate the myths . What is dark, dangerous,
unpredictable, personified often by witches, demons, and ghosts (perhaps
these could be likened to the kelipot, the `shells' of Kabbalism), and portrayed
by masks and other disguises worn by elders, inhabiting the primary liminal
domain, can be exorcised or, alternatively, domesticated and remoulded to fit
into the cosmic designs . When the safeguards of quotidian social structure are
removed, the dark side, the `other side' of liminality is exposed, for society
and the selves that compose it have deep roots . It is interesting to consider how
crossculturally prevalent in liminality are symbols of dying, humbling, strip-
ping, invisibility, darkening, levelling, deconstruction, emptying-to be fol-
lowed by symbols of rebirth, reclothing, fertilizing, elevating, reconstruction,
light, and fire .
In many societies with subsistence economies on the precarious brink of
survival, liminality tends to become quite rigorously structured by such
cosmological myths and `showings' . But even here there is a strong component
of play, of the `ludic', as Huizinga puts it . Woodcarvers, songmakers, dancers,
other aestheticians of the liminal domain, are encouraged to innovate and
improvise within the limits of a tradition which has its own grammar and
symbolic vocabulary . Dreaming, trancing, the use of hallucinogens and sacred
fermented drinks by adepts and officiants may sometimes be the source of new
 Liminali(, Kabbalah, and the Media 211

ritual symbols, or may extend the meaning of old myths . Novices are given
riddles to solve, tasks to perform, that call on their ingenuity and elicit their
talents . In the social realm, a contrast arises between the unquestioning
obedience initiands must show to their instructors, and the close friendships
formed among the initiands themselves . In neither case do preritual rules of
kinship conduct apply . Social structure is simple and generic . Specific kinship
gives way to general obedience of juniors to seniors, and absolute equality
among initiands-though this may lead to the formation of lifelong friendships
between particular couples and groups, normative communitas providing, as
it were, a favourable ground for spontaneous or existential communitas .
Discipline and comradeship are two sides of the same coin, a coin minted in
liminality, a freely chosen contract, Rotenberg might say, generated in the
liminal situation of contraction .
So much for liminality, notably ritual liminality in pre-industrial societies,
where there is a high level of consensus as to values, norms, symbols, and the
cosmologies that sustain these and assign meaning to social action . But does
something similar to this culturally constructed or contractile liminal space-
time exist at all in Leviathan or Megalopolis, in large-scale, complex, indus-
trial societies, with a fine-cut division of labour, developed class-structure,
plural ethnicities, manifold voluntary associations, fast and elaborate means
of communication and transportation, linked to an international economy,
and monitored and reflected by multiple electronic media? Indeed, can one
speak of transitions, limina, at all, when everything appears to be in continu-
ous transition, in everlasting flux? Perhaps Rilke was right, in one of his Duino
Elegies, in finding some relief from the flux in the `Squares of Paris, where the
modiste, Madam La Mort, winds and binds the restless ways of the world' .
But he goes on at once to declare that she makes of them the fancy hats of
transient fashions, patterned eddies that swiftly lose their shape in what
another poet, W .H . Auden has called `the shifting tide . . . of History that
never stops or dies, and held one moment burns the hand' .
It seems that we have the opposite problem to the cyclical, repetitive
sociocultural systems mentioned earlier . (Though I am doubtful whether any
societies escape change ; I regard those famous `systems' as both native and
anthropologists' models . Nevertheless, Levi-Strauss is probably correct in
regarding `structure' as dominant over `history' in the `cool', 'neolithic'
societies he so obviously prefers . Transition in these is put in its place and
subordinated to continually replicated form .) In our society, we have the need
to generate limina that are the acme of stasis, of continuity, of seeming
timelessness in immersion in mythical time, illud tempus, in some cases . Hence
the current nostalgia for `roots', the re-creation, aided often by media, of
`ethnic' associations, the absorption in various forms of sport, each with its
rules and `fixtures', its leagues, where substantially the same teams play each
212 Victor Turner

other year after year . It may be objected that many in our society occupy their
leisure by travelling, as tourists or pilgrims . But such travels are often highly
scheduled and orderly ; and many pilgrimages are a search for roots .
Yet the appearance of flux in modernity is misleading . Many of us have
highly stable status roles in massive bureaucratic and professional structures,
often on a national or even international scale . Many of us clock in and clock
out of factories . Others are tightly bound to the wheel of the market and Stock
Exchange . We are held in the grip of les vines tentaculaires . But only the
observant in churches, sects, cults, and religious movements have well articu-
lated ritual liminality . And these groups, too, become bureaucratized, and to a
greater or lesser extent secularized ; or else defiantly and rigidly desecularized .
So I repeat : where is liminality today in relation to our mainline politico-
economic structures? Wherever it is, it is more likely to be found in the times
allocated to leisure than in those dedicated to work in our industrialized
societies . We must examine what people do in the times before and after work,
at the weekends, on public holidays, on vacation . Some provision may be
made in the work process for moments of release from task-structured be-
haviours : lunch breaks, tea breaks, and so forth . But the work ethic even
penetrates the three-martini lunch, during which, sometimes, deals may be
clinched and bargains struck . It is hard to call these intervals genuinely
`liminal' .
In my essay `Liminal to Liminoid' 7 I list some of the genres of art and
performance which may be the true inheritors of tribal liminality . `True', in
the sense that these genres of cultural performance, diverse and multiple as
they are, perform something of the same meaning-conferring, and often
reflexive role for a complex industrial society that a single system of ritual does
for a pre-industrial society . I coined the term `liminoid' . I know that this term
is gratingly neologistic, but it does suggest that there are performative modes
or genres that are akin to and possibly derive from tribal and feudal rituals
(regarding a whole ritual as `liminal' in relation to everyday life) . These differ
from the earlier liminality as being more the creation of individual than of
collective or `folk' inspiration, and often being critical in character, rather than
furthering the purposes of the existing social order, although that order has
been by no means backward in exploiting liminoid means for its own ends . I
will finish this introduction by quoting certain passages from the essay
mentioned above which distinguishes between liminal and liminoid phen-
omena in an analytical frame which draws on the insights of the great classical
social thinkers, and is frankly in the tradition of cultural evolutionism . I have
also borrowed a term or two from Georges Gurvitch 1 though I am by no means
in agreement with much of his general theoretical position .
In tribal societies, liminality is often functional, in the sense of being a
special duty or performance required in the course of work or activity ; its very
 Liminality, Kabbalah, and the Media 213

reversals and inversions tend to compensate for rigidities or unfairness of

normative structure . But in industrial society, the rite de passage form, built
into the calendar and/or modelled on organic processes of maturation and
decay, no longer suffices for total societies . Leisure provides the opportunity
for a multiplicity of optional, liminoid genres of literature, drama, and sport,
which are not conceived of as 'antistructure' to normative structure where
`antistructure is an auxillary function of the larger structure' (Sutton-Smith,
1972 : 17) . Rather they are to be seen as Sutton-Smith envisages `play', as
`experimentation with variable repertoires', consistent with the manifold
variation made possible by developed technology and an advanced stage of the
division of labour (p . 18) . The liminoid genres, to adapt Sutton-Smith (he was
referring to 'antistructure', a term he borrowed from me, but claimed that I
used it in a system-maintenance sense only), `not only make tolerable the
system as it exists, they keep its members in a more flexible state with respect
to that system, and, therefore, with respect to possible change . Each system
[Sutton-Smith goes on] has structural and antistructural adaptive functions .
The normative structure represents the working equilibrium, the antistruc-
ture represents the latent system of potential alternatives from which novelty
will arise when contingencies in the normative system require it . We might
more correctly call this second system the protostructural system because it is
the precursor of innovative forms . It is the source of new culture' (pp . 18-19) .
In the so-called `high culture' of complex societies, the liminoid is not only
removed from a rite de passage context, it is also `individualized' . The solitary
artist creates the liminoid phenomena, the collectivity experiences collective
liminal symbols . This does not mean that the maker of liminoid symbols,
ideas, images, does so ex nihilo ; it only means that he is privileged to make free
with his social heritage in a way impossible to members of cultures in which
the liminal is to a large extent the sacrosanct .
When we compare liminal with liminoid processes and phenomena, then,
we find crucial differences as well as similarities . Let me try to set some of these
out . In a crude, preliminary way they provide some delimitation of the field of
comparative symbology .
l . Liminal phenomena tend to predominate in tribal and early agrarian
societies possessing what Durkheim has called `mechanical solidarity', and
dominated by what Henry Maine has called `status' . Liminoid phenomena
flourish in societies with `organic solidarity', bonded reciprocally by 'contrac-
tual' relations and generated by and following the industrial revolution,
though they perhaps begin to appear on the scene in city-states on their way to
becoming empires (of the Graeco-Roman type) and in feudal societies (in-
cluding not only the European sub-types, found between the 10th and 14th
centuries in France, England, Flanders and Germany, but also in far less
`pluralistic' Japanese, Chinese, and Russian types of feudalism or
214 Victor Turner

quasi-feudalism) . But they first begin clearly to develop in Western Europe in

nascent capitalist societies, with the beginnings of industrialization and
mechanization, the transformation of labour into a commodity, and the
appearance of real social classes . The heyday of this type of nascent industrial
society was in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries-climaxing in the `Age
of Enlightenment', though it had begun to appear in Western Europe in the
second half of the 16th century, particularly in England, where, a little later,
Francis Bacon published his Novum Organum in 1620, a work which definitely
linked scientific with technical knowledge . Liminoid phenomena continued to
characterize the democratic-liberal societies which dominated Europe and
America in the 19th and early 20th centuries, societies with universal suffrage,
the predominance of legislative over executive power, parliamentarianism, a
plurality of political parties, freedom of workers and employers to organize,
freedom of joint-stock companies, trusts, and cartels to organize, and the
separation of church and state . Liminoid phenomena are still highly visible in
the post-World War II managerial societies of organized capitalism of the
modern USA, West Germany, France, Britain, Italy, Japan and other count-
ries of the Western bloc . Here the economy is no longer left even ostensibly to
`free competition' but is planned both by the state itself-usually in the
interests of the reigning industrial and financial upper-middle classes-and by
private trusts and cartels (national and international), often with the support
of the state, which puts its considerable bureaucratic administrative machin-
ery in their service . Nor are liminoid phenomena absent from the systems of
centralized state collectivism exemplified by Russia and China, following their
revolutions, and by the `people's democracies' of Eastern Europe (with the
exception of Yugoslavia, which has been moving in the direction of decentra-
lized collectivism) . Here the new culture tries to synthesize, as far as possible,
humanism and technology-not the easiest of tasks-substituting for natural
rhythms the logic of technological processes, while attempting to divest these
of their socially exploitative character and proposing them to be generated and
sustained by the `popular genius' . This, however, with collectivism, tends to
reduce the potentially limitless freedom of liminoid genres to the production of
forms congenial to the goal of integrating humanism (in the sense of a modern,
nontheistic, rationalistic viewpoint that hold that man is capable of self-
fulfillment, ethical conduct, etc ., without recourse to supernaturalism) and
technology .
2 . Liminal phenomena tend to be collective, concerned with calendrical,
biological, social-structural rhythms or with crises in social processes whether
these result from internal adjustments or external adaptations or remedial
measures . Thus they appear at what may be called `natural breaks', natural
disjunctions in the flow of natural and social processes . They are therefore
enforced by sociocultural `necessity', but they contain in nuce `freedom' and
 Liminality, Kabbalah, and the Media 215

the potentiality for the formation of new ideas, symbols, models, beliefs .
Liminoid phenomena may be collective (and when they are so, are often directly
derived from liminal antecedents) but are more characteristically individual
products though they often have collective or `mass' effects . They are not
cyclical, but continuously generated, though in the times and places apart
from work settings assigned to `leisure' activities .
3 . Liminal phenomena are centrally integrated into the total social process,
forming with all its other aspects a complete whole, and representing its
necessary negativity and subjunctivity . Liminoid phenomena develop apart
from the central economic and political processes, along the margins, in the
interfaces and interstices of central and servicing institutions-they are plural,
fragmentary and experimental in character .
4 . Liminal phenomena tend to confront investigators rather after the manner
of Durkheim's `collective representations', symbols having a common intell-
ectual and emotional meaning for all the members of the group . They reflect,
on probing, the history of the group, that is, its collective experience, over time .
They differ from preliminal or postliminal collective representations in that
they are often reversals, inversions, disguises, negations, antitheses of quoti-
dian, `positive' or `profane' collective representations . But they share their
mass, collective character . Liminoid phenomena tend to be more idiosyncratic,
quirky, to be generated by specific named individuals and in particular groups
`schools', `circles' and 'coteries'-they have to compete with one another for
general recognition and are thought of at first as ludic offerings placed for sale
on the `free' market-this is at least true of liminoid phenomena in nascent
capitalistic and democratic-liberal societies . Their symbols are closer to the
personal-psychological than to the `objective-social' typological pole .
5 . Liminal phenomena tend to be ultimately eufunctional, even when seem-
ingly 'inversive' for the working of the social structure-ways of making it
work without too much friction . Liminoid phenomena, on the other hand, are
often parts of social critiques or even revolutionary manifestos-books, plays,
paintings, films, etc ., exposing the injustices, inefficiencies, and immoralities
of the mainstream economic and political structures and organizations .
In complex, modern societies both types coexist in a sort of cultural
pluralism. But the liminal-found in the activities of churches, sects and
movements, in initiation rights of clubs, fraternities, masonic orders, and other
secret societies, etc .,-is no longer world wide . Nor are the liminoid pheno-
mena which tend to be the leisure genres of art, sport, pastimes, games, etc .,
practised by and for particular groups, categories, segments, and sectors of
large-scale industrial societies of all types . But for most people the liminoid is
stil felt to be freer than the liminal, a matter of choice, not obligation . The
liminoid is more like a commodity-indeed, often is a commodity, which one
selects and pays for-than the liminal, which elicits loyalty and is bound up
21 6 Victor Turner

with one's membership or desired membership in some highly corporate

groups . One works at the liminal, one plays with the liminoid . There may be
much moral pressure to go to church or synagogue, whereas one queues up at
the box office to see a play by Beckett, a show of Mort Sahl's, a Superbowl
game, a symphony concert, or an art exhibition . And if one plays golf, goes
yachting, or climbs mountains, one often needs to buy expensive equipment or
pay for club membership . Of course, there are also all kinds of `free' liminoid
entertainments and performances-Mardi Gras, charivari, home entertain-
ments of various kinds-but these already have something of the stamp of the
liminal upon them, quite often they are the cultural debris of some forgotten
liminal ritual . There are permanent 'liminoid' settings and spaces, too-bars,
pubs, some cafes, social clubs, etc . But when clubs become exclusivist, they
tend to generate rites of passage, with the liminal a condition of entrance into
the liminoid realm .
I am frankly in the exploratory stage just now . (For instance, I am currently
beginning, stimulated by Elihu Katz's work, 2 to look at media events as
'liminoid' phenomena .) I hope to make more precise these crude, almost
medieval maps I have been unrolling of the obscure liminal and liminoid
regions which lie around our comfortable village of the sociologically known,
proven, tried and tested . Both `liminal' and `liminoid' mean studying symbols
in social action, in praxis, not entirely at a safe remove from the full human
condition . It means studying all domains of expressive culture, not the high
culture alone nor the popular culture alone, the literate or the non-literate, the
Great or the Little Tradition, the urban or the rural . Comparative symbology
must learn how to `embrace multitudes' and generate sound intellectual
progeny from that embrace . It must study total social phenomena .

CONCLUSION
There seems to be today what one might call a growing `need' for liminoid
spaces and times . This may be partly satisfied by the renewal and regeneration
of former liminoid channels, events, and genres, such as pilgrimage and other
forms of motivated travel, and by the reconstruction of ethnicities, by various
restorations of the past, mythical or historical . Museums seem to be becoming
active centres for a kind of intercultural dialogue, through juxtaposing key
symbols from different cultural traditions which summarize various aspects of
the common human condition, and often incorporate live performance into
their calendars by artists and actors drawn from these traditions . The youth of
Western societies turn to aspects of Eastern religion as a liminoid antidote to
their natal structure . Others are `born again' from earlier stages of their own
religious traditions . Folk religion or the `Little Tradition' skillfully exploits the
mass media, to provide a populist liminoid counterstroke to the complexities of
the Great Tradition . In the States we think of Jerry Fallwell and other
 Liminality, Kabbalah, and the Media 21 7

`electronic preachers', usually extremely right wing in their politics .

The electronic media, particularly television, have added a new liminoid
direction in our age . That is why the work of such researchers as Elihu Katz
(1982) and his colleagues is of the utmost contemporary importance . Here we
have a new, unprecedented, sociocultural reconstruction of `reality' in terms of
the `media event', and, of course, `reality' is often a liminoid fabrication, a
selection of images and spectacles in accordance with covert criteria . Perhaps
the distinction made by Jerzy Grotowski between active and passive culture is
relevant here . Active culture is cultivated by a writer when writing a book, a
director and actors when preparing performances, even an initiand perform-
ing a liminoid ritual . Passive culture is a relationship to what is a product of
active culture, that is to say, reading, watching a play performed, film, TV,
listening to music, watching sport . It is in active culture that one comes to be
oneself, to be with someone, to be in relationship, I-and-Thou, as Buber wrote,
and Stanislawski saw as the true goal of the actor-where acting is being, not
just pretending . The media tend to promote and amplify passive culture .
What this implies for the conferment of meaning, and as a mode of social
control, and what are its further implications provide matter for further
investigations .

REFERENCES
1 Gurvitch, G . 1941 . Mass, Community, and Communion journal of Philo-sophy,
August .
2 Katz, E . 1982 . Electronic Ceremonies, Television Performs a Royal Wedding in
M . Blonsky, ed . Semiotics is a Cross-Roads . Baltimore : John Hopkins University
Press .
3 Rotenberg, M . 1978 . Damnation and Deviance . New York : Free Press . 1983 . Diaue
with Deviance, Philadelphia ; ISHI .
4 Scholem, G . 1941 . Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism . New York : Schoken .
5 Sutton-Smith, B . 1972 . Games or Order and Disorder. Paper presented to
Symposium on `Forms of Symbolic Inversion', American Anthropological Associ-
ation, Toronto .
6 Turner, V . 1969 . The Ritual Process . Chicago : Aldine . 1974 . Dramas, Fields, and
Metaphors. Ithaca, New York : Cornell University Press .
7 Turner, V . 1982 . From Ritual to Theatre . New York : Performing Arts Journal
Publications .

VICTOR TURNER (1920-1983), B .A. (University of London), Ph .D . (University of

Manchester) was born in Scotland . After fieldwork in Zambia, he taught at the
Universities of Manchester, Cornell, Chicago and Charlottesville, Virginia . An
obituary notice in the Times, 2 January, stated : `In a series of monographs he explored
in more detail than anyone had before the nature of religion in an African society . Later
he extended his range to religion in general' . His books include Schism and Continuity in
an African Society (1987), Ndembu Divinity (1961), The Ritual Process (1969), Drama,
Fields and Metaphors (1974) .