Liminality

Liminality; a term used across multiple disciplines including anthropology, sociology, literature, and translation studies, to describe the state of ambiguity, uncertainty, and in-betweenness experienced by individuals, groups, or societies during transitions from one condition or social position to another.^【1】

The concept originates from the work of French ethnographer Arnold van Gennep, Rites de Passage, and was expanded by British cultural anthropologist Victor Turner; it represents an unstable and transient phase in which legal, traditional, or normative social structures are suspended, the individual has left behind their former identity but has not yet been accepted into their new one.^【2】,^【3】

^{Eşiksellik Sürecinde Birey (Yapay Zeka İle Oluşturulmuştur)}

Arnold van Gennep categorized transition processes in social and cultural transformations into three main stages:

1. Separation (preliminal),

2. Liminality (liminal),

3. Reintegration (postliminal).

In the first stage, the individual experiences a symbolic break from their existing social structure; in the third stage, they are reintegrated into society with their new status.^【4】 The period between these two fixed points, liminality, is a zone of complete uncertainty.^【5】

Victor Turner conceptualized liminality as a state of “betwixt and between,” where individuals exist outside legal or cultural categories. According to Turner, liminal beings (liminal personae) possess characteristics such as ambiguity, invisibility, and statuslessness. This liminal condition grants individuals the potential to challenge existing social dogmas and norms precisely because they do not fully belong to any specific social position.^【6】,^【7】

The concept serves as an important analytical tool in fictional texts, examining both characters’ identity crises and the social upheavals of transformation. In Thomas Hardy’s novel Jude the Obscure, the character Jude Fawley remains trapped in perpetual liminality throughout his life, unable to fully belong to any class, economic group, or intellectual community due to his incomplete rites of passage, a condition that ultimately leads to his tragic end.^【8】

In translation studies, liminality describes the translator’s position as a third space situated between source and target cultures. Within the framework of Thomas O. Beebee’s concept of “transmesis,” developed to represent the translator’s role in fiction, liminality becomes a symbol of linguistic and cultural hybridity.

For instance, the character Neveser in Selim İleri’s novel Kafes embodies a perfect liminal figure, caught between her sexual identity and her role as a translator—often seen as secondary to authorship—during the transition from the Ottoman Empire to the Republic. She metaphorically reflects the alienation of the modern Turkish intellectual caught between imperial heritage and Western ideals.^【9】

In contemporary science fiction literature, liminality is also examined through a posthumanist lens to transcend the rigid categories constructed by humanism. In Octavia E. Butler’s Xenogenesis trilogy, humanity’s genetic exchange with the alien Oankali species after a nuclear catastrophe dismantles conventional definitions of the human and initiates a liminal transformation.^【10】

^{Bireyin Benlik ve Toplumsal Normlar Arasındaki Sıkışmışlığı (Yapay Zeka ile Oluşturulmuştur)}

In this process, traditional boundaries between human and nonhuman entities become blurred, paralleling Rosi Braidotti’s concept of “not-Oneness” and Stacy Alaimo’s “trans-corporeality.”^【11】,^【12】 The liminal uncertainty experienced by characters destabilizes hierarchical distinctions of race, gender, and species, creating space for hybrid identities and generating sustainable future alternatives beyond biological determinism.^【13】

With its spatial and temporal dimensions, liminality also finds application in the sociopolitical analysis of contemporary international migration and refugee crises. Borders and borderlands (borderlands) become structural liminal spaces, zones of instability left outside dominant ideologies.^【14】

In Zinnie Harris’s play How to Hold Your Breath, Europeans reduced to refugee status by economic collapse, attempting to reach Africa by sea, represent a macro-level crisis of liminality, where social order is suspended.^【15】 Migrants and refugees, stripped of legal and social status during this transitional phase, remain in a permanent state of limbo as individuals who are “legally present but rendered stateless”; this demonstrates that liminality does not always lead to constructive normalization but can instead result in tragic identity erosion through institutional crises and political instrumentalization.^【16】,^【17】