liminality
English
[edit]Etymology
[edit]Pronunciation
[edit]Noun
[edit]liminality (countable and uncountable, plural liminalities)
- The fact of being on the border of, or in between, two states.
- 2006, Matt Wray, Not Quite White, page 2:
- Slowly, the term reveals itself as an expression of fundamental tensions and deep structural antinomies: between the sacred and the profane, purity and impurity, morality and immorality, cleanliness and dirt. In conjoining such primal opposites into a single category, white trash names a kind of disturbing liminality: a monstrous, transgressive identity of mutually violating boundary terms, a dangerous threshold state of being neither one nor the other.
- (anthropology, philosophy, sociology, psychology) The state or quality of ambiguity which exists in the middle stage of certain events or rituals (such as a rite of passage or a society-wide revolution), during which the participating individual or group no longer holds its pre-ritual status but has not yet attained the status it will hold when the ritual has been completed.
- 1998, Joseph Frederick Bailey, Theorizing night vision: Novalis's "Hymnen an die Nacht.", page 209:
- The second way Novalis seeks to repotentize his thought is by striving to evoke feelings conducive to liminality.