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Abstract

At the time of writing, it is April 2020 and large parts of the world are in various stages of Corona-lockdown. Both the severity of the penetration of the virus itself as well as the severity of the measures to combat it varies across the globe, but increasingly everywhere lives are turned upside down. Normality is suspended and it is frequently pronounced that the world will not look the same on the other side of this crisis. While we are launching a new volume, the current situation also gives renewed actuality to some of our previous publications. Not least, one of our 2016 issues is worth revisiting: Rupture and Exile: Permanent Liminality in Spaces for Movement and Abandonment, edited by Harmony Siganporia and Frank G. Karioris (Volume 8, issue 1). This thematic section is centred on liminality, a concept with which every sociocultural anthropologist and many other social and cultural theorists are well acquainted. Liminality is a concept that is most usually attributed to Arnold van Gennep (1873-1957) and his Les Rites de Passage (1909), but it is also tightly associated with Victor Turner and his The Forest of Symbols (1967) or (perhaps especially) The Ritual Process (1969). While Turner departed from a discussion of liminality as primarily an attribute of rites of passage, he also expanded the concept to include "a greater variety of ambiguous situations, epochs, and spaces that might be read as liminal" (Siganporia & Karioris 2016). Van Gennep had a three-stage model of rites of passage: separation, margin/ liminality and reintegration. It is in this middle stage we find liminality. Liminality is from Latin limen meaning threshold. It is the boundary between the outside and the inside, between two entities that are separated from one another. A rite of passage is a transition from something old to something new, and liminality is the state of neither nor in between the old and the new. In the case of initiation rites-neither child nor adult. Liminality is marked by ambiguity, uncertainty