ABSTRACT
We have seen how stable and unstable behavior are part of the traditional repertoire of physical science, but what is novel is the concept of something—liminality—in between chaotic behavior and harmony, which also contains regularities of its own but which, like chaos, defies prediction. The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) (1989) defines liminality (from the Latin word līmen, meaning “a threshold”) as a psychological, neurological, or metaphysical subjective conscious state of being on the “threshold” of or between two different existential planes. The OED notes that “liminal” first appeared in publication in the field of psychology in 1884, but the idea was introduced to the field of anthropology in 1909 by Arnold Van Gennep (1960) in his seminal work Les rites de passage. Van Gennep described rites of passage such as coming-of-age rituals and marriage as having the following three-part structure: (a) separation; (b) liminal period; and (c) reassimilation. The initiate (that is, the person undergoing the ritual) is first stripped of the social status that he or she possesses before the ritual, then inducted into the liminal period of transition, and finally given his or her new status and reassimilated into society.
