There are moments in life when we are no longer what we were, but we are not yet what we will become. It is in these suspended, uncertain and sometimes disorienting spaces that the liminality: one passage condition which, from an anthropological concept, has now become a key to understanding the sense of confusion widespread in contemporary societiesespecially among the new generations.
What is liminality: the anthropological meaning
The term “liminality” comes from Latin limenor “threshold”. It was introduced and coined by the anthropologist Arnold Van Gennep in the distance 1909in the work Rites of passagewhere he described the rituals that accompany changes in social status, the most common of which are: birth, puberty, marriage and death. Van Gennep identified three phases in which the individual experienced liminality, or the transition to a new identity: the separationThe margin (or liminal phase in which we turn to change) and the reinstatement in society with the new “form”.
Subsequently, Victor Turner he deepened and took up the concept again, defining the liminal phase as a state “betwixt and between” (translated into Italian as “in the balance” or “halfway”): an ambiguous condition in which ordinary social structures are suspended and the individual does not fully belong to either the previous or future position.
In many traditional societies, this suspension was regulated by collective rituals that provided meaning, direction and symbolic containment.
From modernity to liquidity
In contemporary societies, however, i rites of passage have become weakened or fragmented. THE’entry into adulthoodfor example, is no longer marked by a symbolically shared event, but by a series of often long and discontinuous transitions: end of studies, independent living, emotional stability.
The sociologist Zygumnt Bauman, in this sense, he describes our era as “liquid modernity“, characterized by precariousness, mobility and instability of identities. In this context, liminality is no longer a short and ritualized phase, but tends to become a chronic condition. Having said this, Bauman wants to tell us that theuncertainty does not simply precede change, but becomes its norm: the boundaries between one phase of life and another are postponed or dissolve, generating a condition of continuous social indeterminacy.
In this sense, numerous contemporary demographic studies actually show a progressive postponement of the stages traditionally associated with adulthood. According to the data Eurostat 2024the average age at which young Europeans leave their parents’ home today exceeds 27 years oldwith tips beyond i 30 in some Southern European countries. At the same time, they appear to increase theaverage age of first child and the duration of training courses.
Jeffrey Arnett, social scholar, defined this phase emerging adulthooda new socio-psychological category that would extend approximately between the ages of 18 and 29, characterized by identity exploration, instability and a sense of possibility but also uncertainty. In anthropological terms, we could interpret it as one prolonged liminality: a threshold (or margin, as Van Gennep said) that extends over time, without a clear moment of reintegration.
Rethink loss in a positive light
It has been as fully analyzed as the liminal phase entail one temporary loss of references: the categories that defined our role as student, child, partner or worker become unstable and transitory, change or fall. In the absence of collective rituals that offer meaning to these transformations, the individual can experiment anxiety, sense of inadequacy, perception of being behind peers or even of personal failure. What in other eras was recognized as a shared passage today tends to be internalized as a private difficulty.
However, liminality is not just vulnerability. As Turner observed, it is also one space of potential creative transformation. In fact, it is precisely in the suspension of social structures and roles that they open up possibility of redefining identity, experimentation and social innovation. The threshold, in other words, is not just a void, it is an open space, full of possibilities.
The critical issue of contemporaneity is therefore not the existence of the threshold, but its growth individualization. When the passage is experienced in lonelinesswithout collective narratives that legitimize it, it risks being perceived as a deviation from the norm rather than a shared condition. This is why it becomes crucial to recover one more social and community dimension of the liminal experience. Sharing uncertainty, through peer networks, educational spaces and communities, including digital ones, means giving change a relational framework that makes it less threatening and more intelligible.
Recognize the liminality as analytical categoryin this sense, means subtracting the loss from individual guilt and placing it in one shared social framework.
Sources
Van Gennep A. (1909). “Les rites de passage”
Bauman Z. (2000). “Liquid Modernity”
Bauman Z. (2005). “Liquid Life”
Arnett J.J. (2000). “Emerging adulthood: A theory of development from the late teens through the twenties”
Stenner P. (2017). “Liminality and experience”
