liminality

English

Etymology

liminal +‎ -ity

Pronunciation

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Noun

liminality (countable and uncountable, plural liminalities)

1. 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.

2. (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.