Liminality and the book that saved me: The Ritual Process

In which I spit in my hand and learn about the world betwixt and between

This is my own entry for an occasional series, The Book That Saved You. Mine was an anthropology textbook that taught me how to live between the worlds.

The liminality of college karaoke. Me in about 1991 singing a Patsy Cline number.

Victor Turner’s The Ritual Process

The Ritual Process is an anthropological text about how rituals work, and what they mean. Here’s the publisher’s description:

“In The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure, Victor Turner examines rituals of the Ndembu in Zambia and develops his now-famous concept of ‘Communitas.’ …He extends Van Gennep's notion of the "liminal phase" of rites of passage…and applies it to gain understanding of a wide range of social phenomena.”

In short: Turner’s book is about what it’s like to go through a ritual—a transition that changes you—and how people feel about themselves and each other during and after.

Here’s why it matters to me.

At college, I spit in my hand

The professor in my first class in college, at 8 a.m. on a drizzly Monday morning, asked me to spit in my hand.

Let me explain.

This was Introduction to Cultural Anthropology at a liberal arts school in the early '90s, in Portland, Oregon. While such a request surprised me and seemed strange, I see now that it wasn't completely off-brand.

We were sitting in school desks arranged in a half-circle around the blackboard. The professor was tall and thin, wearing jeans and Birkenstocks, his face framed in shaggy brown hair and gold wireframe glasses. Without introduction, he asked us to take out a notebook and pen. Then he told us to spit in our hands. Nervous laughter. I hesitated—it had to be a joke, right? But as I looked around I saw students pursing their lips and dropping a small gob onto their palms. So I spit in my hand, too. Just a little.

I was studying at Lewis & Clark College in Oregon, a place where everyone wore Birkenstocks (except me), studied abroad, and called teachers by their first names. It was a beautiful campus—a place where you could pull on a sweater and meander along the mist-slicked cobblestone paths, past the dewy rhododendrons, coffee mug in hand.

"Hold it in your palm," he said. "Now write about it. What was it like to spit in your hand?"

What was he expecting? Was this a test? He gave us a few minutes.

"Now," he said, "suck it back up and write about that."

I could not bring myself to suck it up. Also, what the hell do you write about that? I suppose I wrote about the fact that I couldn’t do it. Maybe a few geniuses sucked it up and penned a masterpiece. But, come on. Spit is gross.

It turns out I wasn't the only one thinking gross. For the rest of the class we talked about why it felt gross. We explored Western linguistic connections between the word “germ” and associated words, drawing lines from one to another on the chalk board, diagramming a cultural web of cleanliness and filth. He sketched a related web of words and meaning from the point of view of another culture—a group on the Ivory Coast of Africa—with completely different associations. It blew my mind.

He had done fieldwork there, and he showed us our diagram didn’t line up with their thinking. What might be dirty in one culture was untroubling in another.

From the initial glob of spit in my hand to the spider web of meaning on the chalkboard, he gave me a visceral introduction to how little I knew about the world.

At 18, I had never considered such completely distinctive world views. From the initial sprinkles of spit in my hand to the branching webs of meaning on the chalkboard, he gave me a visceral introduction to how little I knew. I declared my major right away.

I dived into the reading list. I snuggled into an armchair by a fireplace in the manor house to read Margaret Mead’s Coming of Age in Samoa. My heart ached over the ethnography of a group of Bolivian tin miners, We Eat the Mines and the Mines Eat Us. Then came the book that changed my life: Victor Turner’s The Ritual Process.

Why liminality exploded my brain

Turner was an old-school anthropologist, having spent years with tribes in Eastern Africa. He studied rites of passage, such as coming-of-age rituals. Turner developed a theory about the universality of rituals, breaking down what happens to a group of people as they are transformed from one class, or one state of being, into another. He applied the theory not only to rites of passage, but also to other rituals, like weddings and religious ceremonies, even carnivals and theater.

It goes like this: first, people are separated from their regular place in life, whether it's their social group or status. Then, during the ritual, they're in a kind of nowhere land, a "betwixt and between" space Turner called liminal. No one is any better than anyone else in this place. You're fellow travelers. The regular rules don't apply.

"We are presented, in such rites, with a 'moment in and out of time,'" Turner writes. Then, there’s the feeling that develops among these fellow travelers. It’s called communitas, meaning that fleeting but intense bond you feel with people who are in exactly the same boat before everything is about to change. Turner was talking about young boys from East Africa's Ndembu tribe who spent a month together in an initiation camp waiting to be circumcised. You might have experienced this yourself—but maybe not in an initiation camp.

These two concepts—liminality and communitas—consumed me.

First, liminality. I felt the word in my cells. I nearly had it tattooed on my arm. In college, it was literal. I had left home and friends to live temporarily in a place until I graduated. It was emotional, too. I lived in that shimmering place between being on my way to becoming something but not quite arriving. The problem was that I felt everyone else around me was well on their way, but I was stuck. Here’s how I framed it: I was in a liminal space. Becoming something was always possible; I just wasn’t working hard enough for it. You see, I couldn't tolerate the idea of failure. But I couldn’t quite bring myself to buckle down for that A+. What if I couldn’t do it? Better to stay in the twilight of possibility. No one had yet whispered that grownup secret in my ear that hard work is the reward, that you're never a failure if you try. So I half-assed it.

I couldn't tolerate the idea of failure. Better to stay in the twilight of possibility.

How did this happen? When I got to college, my head smacked against a hard truth: I was not special. My enchanted life in high school? The praise and success? Gone. I was—gasp—normal. Hundreds of students who were better read, smarter, more self-confident, and more interesting surrounded me. Whereas in high school I was cast in every play I tried out for, it took two years of auditioning before I finally got a part in a play in college. I know, big deal, right? But it rocked my 19-year-old world.

On paper, I was moving through Turner's ritual process, acquiring the knowledge I needed to emerge from that tribal initiation hut. But in reality, I was still huddled inside, uncertain of what to do or who to be.

Each year, I slipped a little deeper into self-doubt. I was losing my ability to bounce back from small failures. I was moving too slowly through Turner's ritual process. Sure, I was collecting the credits I needed to graduate, I moved off campus, I learned how to pay bills, and had relationships. But everyone seemed to be completing the ritual faster—getting into grad school, going off on prestigious fellowships—and I was still huddled inside the tribal initiation hut, uncertain of what to do or who to be.

Remember, if you don't try, you can't fail. Better to stay in the twilight of possibility. Better not to work too hard and be able to say to yourself later, well, “I still have it in me to do spectacularly.”

“…that [college] bonding can be ecstatic. You may all come out the other side of the experience different, changed, but while you're in it together, you experience this heightened sense of community.”

What about communitas, that other word that changed me? Well, college wasn't all bad. I learned that when you're all in the initiation hut, in a liminal space together, it's like surviving choppy seas in a rickety boat. You cling together, bond in ways you never thought possible, as Turner described it. Think of liminal as the moment and communitas as the feeling that emerges in that moment. I think of a trip overseas to Ecuador with a group of fellow students. In a foreign country we needed each other. The strangeness of it bound us together. That bonding can be ecstatic. You may all come out the other side of the experience different, but while you're in it together, you experience this intense sense of community. For years, I chased that feeling, like a drug.

There is magic betwixt and between, when you are in transition, and a group of people in the same boat can save each other in unexpected ways.

The language I needed for transition

Turner’s book gave me language for what I felt, and have felt sometimes since then: that I was betwixt and between the worlds, in a liminal space, waiting for the next stage of my life. Today, the word liminality helps me weather transition, knowing I will be different on the other side of the experience, whenever I get there. It has given me comfort within the discomfort of change, the hope that in transition, there is growth. That’s especially helpful right now as I look for work after a lay-off.

The book also gave me language for the kind of intense connection I needed so desperately as a young adult: communitas. Today, I have found that community—not necessarily communitas—is just as satisfying, if not better. It persists if you nurture it. It feeds my soul now, from my neighbors to my dearest, oldest friends.

I still keep The Ritual Process on a shelf near my desk to remind me that there is magic betwixt and between, when you are in transition, and that a group of people in the same boat can save each other in unexpected ways.