ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on liminality, as both phase and state. In complex large-scale societies, liminality itself, as a result of the advancing division of labor, has often become a religious or quasi-religious state, and, has tended to reenter structure and acquire a full complement of structural roles and positions. To summarize findings so far on rituals of status reversal: the masking of the weak in aggressive strength and the concomitant masking of the strong in humility and passivity are devices that cleanse society of its structurally engendered "sins" and what hippies might call "hang-ups." A common variant of the type of ritual is when inferiors affect the rank and style of superiors, sometimes even to the extent of arraying themselves in a hierarchy mimicking the secular hierarchy of their so-called betters. Life-crisis rites and rituals of induction into office are almost always rites of status elevation; calendrical rites and rites of group crisis may sometimes be rites of status reversal.
