“
Liminality” is a concept that has interested anthropologists and students of pilgrimage for the past two decades. In Latin, a
limen is a threshold, which is an in-between place – not inside, not outside the house.
So, “liminality” is a kind of “threshold-ness” a being in-between – just like a pilgrim on a journey, not at home, but not yet at a destination, either. (The term was first used by the anthropologist
Arnold van Gennep, who used it to described the intermediate phase in a ritual initiation, where the person undergoing a rite of passage has left her old identity, but hasn’t yet taken on a new one. ) I once heard Jás Elsner (
Pilgrimage Past and Present: Sacred Travel and Sacred Space in the World Religions, 1995) say that the entire experience of a modern international flight is liminal. You enter a strange space; your old identity is left behind (you have to carry papers even to prove who you are); you fly over a space often claimed by no one; and when you arrive at the new destination, you have to go through the ritual of disembarking, showing your passport, and, at that point, become a “new” person.
The time in-between the start and the finish of your journey, or pilgrimage, is a “liminal state”.
Airports themselves often feel “noplace” (at least inside of them). In the air, as a traveler, you’re also “noplace” and “nowhere” at once. I think this might be especially true in those short hallways between the plane and the customs and passport control, before you’ve actually “entered” the new country. You’ve not really set foot on the state territory, actually ... but you are someplace, as well. You can see it, and touch it, and slip on it if you get tangled up in your luggage. Makes you wonder how “real” modern nation-state borders really are—and who decides where they are, when they begin and end, and why.
Anthropologists of pilgrimage, especially Victor and Edith Turner (
Image and Pilgrimage in Christian Culture, 1978), also like to talk about the
communitas of pilgrimage—another Latin word that means here a sense of shared community, and especially the shared community of the band of travelers: a new identity of being pilgrims together.
Felix Fabri spent almost three months in a “liminal state” on his way to Jerusalem. Felix enjoyed a sense of communitas with the other pilgrims on his ship, but communitas also had its limits for him, too. On his way to Jerusalem in 1480 (his first trip), he tells us that the French pilgrims and the German pilgrims did not leave off their old identities for one new happy pilgrim band, at all:
“...we unanimously decided that no more games of cards or dice should be played on board of the [pilgrim] galley, that no quarrels, oaths, or blasphemies should be allowed, and that the clerks and priests should add litanies to their usual daily prayers. Indeed, before this decree was made, much disorder took place in these matters, for men were gambling morning, noon, and night, especially the Bishop of Orleans with his suite; and withal they swore most dreadfully, and quarreled daily, for the French and we Germans were always at blows....For the French are proud and passionate men; and therefore, I believe that it was an act of divine providence that they were separated from us, and our galley cleared of them; for we should scarcely have reached Jerusalem in their company without bloodshed and the murder of some of us.”
No games, dice, or swearing on the first leg of the flight. Everyone’s been pretty well behaved...so far!
