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Human communities the world over and in the whole course of history perform at certain fixed moments in the year and periodically in the life of an individual, certain rituals. These rituals serve a purpose to both the collective and to the individual alike. They are in tribal societies, but also in post-tribal societies such as the Greek polis, an important means for mutual communication concerning the basic values of groups of people.

Because basic values are strongly anchored in the unconscious and emotional part of our psyche, these rituals frequently use non-verbal symbolism, that the participants, by means of symbolic behaviour and by using symbolic sacra, may ratify, by repeating and by exaggerating kinetically and vocally aroused feelings, to one another their beliefs in existential matters. Thus for example the use of the corn in the Eleusian mysteries of Demeter offered a symbol pointing to the notion of fertility (of the field as well as of animals and people).

A symbol is a significant element in the rite and is frequently non-verbal. Thus it is possible for objects to have symbolic meaning, but also for ritual acts, activities of groups, relations between participants, events, gestures, dances, melodies, spaces, sounds, colours etc. (1). But one can also make use of verbal symbolism, like it happens when the telling of a myth is coupled to the implementation of a rite (2). Thus the tale supports the rite in transmitting the basis values to all group members, in clarifying the cosmology of the group.

The following analysis of the anthropologists Van Gennep and Turner will give us a better understanding of the phenomenon of ritual.

2. Van Gennep's theoretical sketches

In 1908 the French anthropologist and ethnographer Arnold van Gennep published for the first time his ‘Rites de Passage’ (3). In his own country the book got little attention. It would take some sixty years to get its importance known to the world, by means of an English translation. This revaluation of Van Gennep is due especially to Victor Turner, who was inspired by the findings of Van Gennep to formulate his own theories about the functionality of rituals.

Van Gennep saw that most rituals were held in times of transition ('passage'), not only to celebrate the transition of an individual to a higher status, but also to mark out the transition of a whole group to a next phase. He realized that e.g. the transition of winter to spring or of summer to autumn was celebrated with a ritual, like the transition of peace to war. At each breaking point in the social order of a society a ritual served the purpose of alleviating the tensions that had arisen.

Although the term rite of transition ('rite de passage') therefore also applies to the calendrical rituals of groups, Van Gennep occupied himself foremost with the study of rituals of transition of individuals.

On certain moments in their lives individuals were confronted with a number of serious life crises, like puberty, marriage, retirement, death (4). These life crises were not only in tribal but also in post-tribal, even in post-industrial societies, celebrated with often elaborate rituals. Van Gennep distinguished three phases in such a 'rite de passage' (5):

1. Separation

The first phase at the beginning of a ritual is a phase of demarcation and separation of the ritual (holy) space and time from the space and time of everyday life. The rite stands aloof from time. The rite is timeless, 'time transcendent'. The religious dynamic of the ritual evokes a dimension of holiness to the happening. The values in the rite brought forward are seen to be eternal and invariable ( 'time transcendent’).

Inauguration rituals, like the puberty rites of boys and girls, use all kinds of symbolism like painting the boys or rubbing them with mud or faeces, to deny the initiandi all status distinction. The initiandi are reduced to a non-persona. Being the son of distinguished parents or a child of parents low on the social ladder is not significant in the ritual . Your name is taken away from you, sometimes even your gender, by investing you with the clothes of the other sex. You become a prima materies. You are merely human in its non-cultural, non social meaning.

Calendrical rites often enact spatial movement. A collective change of space like a procession symbolizes the change to a new situation or status.

2. Transition (limen)

This is the most important phase in the ritual. This phase marks out the threshold (limen) between the time preceding the ritual and the new time to come. This is frequently a period of complete cultural, social and cosmological chaos. The 'limen' phase is for the subject of this dissertation of the greatest importance. Later on we will study it more closely, reviewing its far-reaching implications .

3. Incorporation

By means of symbolic behaviour the last phase of the ritual is enacted. The neophytes, the initiandi, are prepared for their new status in society outside the ritual. This entails for the participants of ‘life-crisis rituals’ a step higher on the social ladder. Boys in rituals of puberty in tribal societies are allowed at this stage to mix with the adult men and receive the distinctions and the privileges the adults have. This phase of status elevation is generally accompanied by symbolic behaviour like colouring the boys in the colours of the men and/or handing out to them the instruments of masculinity (e.g. arrow and bow). Participants in calendrical rituals are prepared at this stage to the changes of cultural and ecological activities to come in the new season. The mutual relation of all participants in the ritual is as far as possible cleansed of all pre-ritual tension. The ritual makes a fresh start to begin the new season.

According to Victor Turner (6) the so-called ‘life-crisis rituals’, like the ones discussed in the preceding, are generally ‘rituals of status elevation’. The initiate or the group of initiates is promoted one step higher on the social ladder. The second type of rituals, the so-called cyclic and calendrical rituals, Turner calls ‘rituals of status-reversal’

For a clear understanding of the functionality of a ‘ritual of status-reversal’ it is important to study the second phase of Van Gennep's three step analysis more closely.

Using the word ‘limen’, which Van Gennep coined to characterise this phase, Turner describes this phase of the ritual as having a liminal quality. With the term liminality Turner wants to highlight the unique character of this phase in the ritual. Liminality he sees as the time and place at which a society withdraws from its normal mode of social and cultural behaviour (7), to reach, in a period isolated in time and place, a deeper evaluation of the central values and axioms of that particular culture.

In the first and third phase of the ritual the cosmology of the group (i.e. the community's outlook in all of its categories concerning social, cultural, political, religious, ethical etc. questions), as it remains invariable and axiomatic in the course of time, is generally ratified. But in the second phase, in the liminality of the ritual, there is also room for the critical. Liminality inverts the reality external to the ritual situation in order to produce alternatives for the world of everyday. This frequently gives an impression of chaos for the participants in the ritual. Acts are possible or sometimes even ordained which are prohibited in normal day to day living.

Thus the initiandi in puberty rituals in certain Australian, Melanesian or African communities are free to rob and plunder, because: ‘the novices are outside society, and society has no power over them, especially since they are actually (in term of indigenous beliefs) sacred and holy, and therefore untouchable and dangerous, just as gods would be’ (8). In the liminal phase the participants stand aloof from the legal and social constraints which control behaviour in daily circumstances.

To understand the freedom of the liminal situation we must be well aware of the fact that tribal societies, and also societies like the Greek polis of the 5 century BC, have a strongly closed character. The cosmology of the group is solidly anchored in the past. One cherishes the transmitted beliefs of the ancestors. The cultural system has frequently introduced a strong order in the social structure, wherein each one plays his allotted role. In other cosmological categories there is order as well: there is the separation of culture and nature (tribal societies also are aware of this duality, as Levi-Strauss has convincingly shown), the tripartition of animal-man-god etc.

But order is restriction too. Unconsciously the fear remains that by warding off a number of cosmological aspects, the group is forced to exclude certain dynamics from their cosmological scheme which may as well be productive and beneficial. This has to do with the ambiguous character of those dynamics. To give an example: most tribal and post-tribal societies want to exclude physical violence from their cosmological order. Violence undermines the social structure and disrupts the order necessary, if a society is to function properly. When fellow-citizens threaten each other, even molest or try to kill each other, the whole society runs the risk of falling asunder. Because most tribal societies function legally with the lex talionis, violence must always be retaliated. This can lead to endless vendetta’s, somtimes lasting for generations. Therefore violence must always be kept within bounds. This applies however only in peace time and only to citizens of a certain community in their mutual social relations.

Conversely in war physical violence is encouraged. In preparation to war citizens must be trained in violence. In times of war violence is beneficial to the community and frequently the only means of surviving. But in some cases these two forms of violence, disruptive and beneficial violence, are difficult to sort out. A citizen may in social dispute harbour the same feelings of hatred in respect to his fellow tribe-member, as he feels in respect to a public enemy. To him the two forms of violence are not clearly separated. The ambiguity of violence lies in the fact that they are both specimens of the same ground feeling. In some cases is not at all clear why violence must be kept outside the cosmological order. In other cases it may call for an incorporation.

Other forms of ‘power’ tend to be ambiguous also. Supernatural powers such as the occultism of seers and wizards and other kinds of para psychological phenomena frequently have a 'black' and a 'white' version. Here too the community sees itself confronted with the question: where is the dividing line in our cosmological order? Who can tell whether some ‘black’ magic practices do not turn out to be beneficial in some (exceptional) cases? Is our judgement able to see the difference?

Everything a tribal society places outside its cosmological order is at the same time a defilement of that order. It is a potential holy and constructive element within that order as well (9). For the dangerous seems to be in contact with latent powers.

Oudemans and Lardinois put it as follows: “Because cosmological order is a struggle against the power of ambiguity and paradox on the one hand and needs that power to sustain itself on the other hand, the relation between power and cosmology is one of insoluble conflict” (10). Closer research into the liminal phase of rituals however shows that rituals try to solve this conflict, by allowing the forbidden, what lies outside of order, to arise in the particular time and place of the ritual. Thus to arouse the potential salutariness of such prohibited powers and to use their dynamics in everyday life, outside the ritual.

The Lele people in central-Africa use a vast amount of hygienics in everyday life. Some animals are absolutely tabood in their diet.  However what is normally prohibited, is in some rituals prescribed. Douglas (11) speaks of ‘composting’: what is normally disapproved, is during the rite 'composted' to renew the life force.

René Girard (12) thought that rituals tried to contact power to exercise control over it and to 'canalize' it. This certainly is the function of rituals. Rituals frequently act as a tension valve in society. By means of ritual behaviour disruptive forces are transformed into healing powers, like in the sacrifice of the scapegoat (pharmakos): a king, a criminal or, in some of the later developments of the ritual, a sacrificial animal, is charged with taking up the collective sins of the community. In a symbolic manner he becomes a living representative of the collective feeling of sinfulness. He is as it were a materialisation of that feeling. This makes it possible to kill him or dispel him beyond the country's borders. Thus his expulsion or death serves as a release of sin for the whole community (13). The ‘power’ of the scapegoat is ambiguous. On the one hand he is as a representative of collective sins an evil power, a defiler. For this reason he needs to be expelled or killed. On the other hand his expulsion serves as a catharsis for the whole community (14) and therefore he is to be regarded a healing force (15). The disruptive power of the scapegoat turns out to be ambigusous: it may as well be a healing force.

For Girard this ‘canalising’ of power is the main function of ritual. Closer research into the liminal phase of rituals (not only sacrificial rituals) however shows that besides ‘canalising’ there is also a free use of powers prohibited outside the ritual, not only to channel these powers, but also to benefit the community from new beneficial dynamics.

A community must order itself to function. But this order is a restriction too. In the ritual the participants are freed from this restriction, in order for all human capacities to be fully exploited. New forms of thinking, new feelings, new manners of expression, new creativity, which cannot be operative in daily life due to the all oppressing order, are now possible to rise to the fore in this the liminale phase of the ritual (16).

The system of values forming the basis of a group's socio-cultural behaviour must, in order to have some operative validity, give an impression of permanence and intransience. In tribal societies (and also in the Greek polis of the 5^th century) the tradition is very important. One ascribes the laws and moral institutions to the ancestors, who are held in high esteem. One is not alllowed to deviate from their laws and institutions, because they have shown their usefulness in the course of history. The cosmological order therefore has the inclination to be invariable, conservative, because it wants to preserve what's good. It is a ‘world of being’ or pretends to be so.

The social world however is a ‘world in becoming’ (17), a variable world with all its tensions and changing social relations. So in the course of time the cultural system of values may cease to correspond well with the changing social world. This may be due to all kinds of economic, political, religious or sometimes even ecological developments. In tribal societies this new discrepancy between the cultural system and the social world first reveals itself in the liminal phase of ritual. New developments are here for the first time identified. The liminal phase offers an excellent occasion for reflection and evaluation about the world in which the group lives. However, these new developments may be distressing for the many, because one is obliged to exchange the certainty of the old with the uncertainty of the new. Fermentation and criticism, the ambiguity and the presentation of alternative cultural systems, which are so characteristic of liminality, put the world upside down.

Turner defining liminality: “Liminality may be for many the acme of insecurity, the breakthrough of chaos into cosmos, of disorder into order (....). Liminality may be the scene of disease, death, suicide, the breakdown without compensatory replacement of normative, well-defined social ties and association. It may be anomie, alienation, fear (.....). In tribal, etc. society it may be the interstitial domain of domestic witchcraft, the hostile dead and the vengeful spirits or strangers (18).

“Liminality is pure potency, where anything can happen (...). Where the elements, the basic building blocks of culture (...) are released from their customary configurations and recombined in often bizarre and terrifying imagery. (...) Yet this potential boundlessness is in practise limited (....) by the participant’s knowledge that this is an unique situation” (19).

4. The topsy-turvy world: the game of inversions.

In the preceding we saw that the second class of rituals studied by Turner, the so-called cyclic and calendrical rituals, is characterised by a phenomenon which Turner calls ‘status reversal’. To acquire a proper understanding of this phenomenon first the term ‘structure’ needs to be discussed, as defined by Turner. With structure he means something different from the way the French anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss defines structure. In the theory of Levi-Strauss the term structure concerns logical categories,  lying deeply anchored at the basis of all verbal and non-verbal actions. His research deals with the structure of the human spirit in its conscious and its unconscious layers.

With Turner structure means social structure, meaning the whole complex of social relations according to which a community orders itself. Every one occupies a certain place within that structure, standing high, low or in the middle. His or her position defines the function of and the appreciation for each person within that society.

Social structure is a hierarchy comparable to a ladder which to climb or to descend. Structure is dynamic, the different segments being potentially variable. Structure is highly differentiated. Structure is of vital importance for a community. Without the structuring of people playing a social role in hierarchically built up stratifications, the functioning of a group is not conceivable. One needs leaders as well as inferiors.

Although a society cannot function without structure, she may also become, due to this very structure, the victim of tensions. Everyone wants to climb the social ladder, but not everyone can stand on top. Descending the ladder will certainly lead to frustrations. Even when one has resigned to being lowly structured, envy may eventually arrise and fuel all sorts of tensions. People of the same social position tend to group themselves. The individual tensions of the members of such a group may adopt a collective form at group meetings. Such collective tension may direct itself at a group of another social position. This may result in such fierce contra version that a society deteriorates into crisis (20). The power of structure is therefore ambiguous: she may produce order, but can lead to disintegration also.

To purify the community of the tensions arisen due to structure, rituals are performed. In the liminal phase of the ritual (the place for alternatives to present themselves) a situation is created which is the reversal of the situation external to the ritual. Turner calls this situation ‘anti-structure’ (‘anti’ meaning here 'in opposition to'). Structure is put upside down, reversed or sometimes denied. What is highly structured outside ritual, is placed low within the liminality of ritual et vice versa. A ‘ritual of status reversal’ is characterised by all kinds of inversions: the lowest reach the top in the ritual. The rich and famous become poor and humbly. The poor become rich. The mighty become weak. The weak become strong.

Not only the ones lowly structured deem these inversions to be beneficial. Also the highly structured desire a release of tension (21). They wish for once to have normal human relationships with their inferiors, without being looked up against. The high positions which they hold give rise to all sorts of tensions, because of the large responsibilities they have to carry. A temporary escape from their responsibility regenerates their powers and is welcomed as beneficial.

As an example of such a ‘ritual of status reversal’ one may mention the Saturnalia of the Romans: a ritual banquet where the masters had to serve their slaves. The inversion consisted of the masters becoming slaves and the slaves masters.

This type of ‘ritual of status reversal’ is frequently held on fixed times in the year (calendrical rituals), at the ending of the old and at the beginning of the new year. The new year is begun with cleansing the community of the tensions acquired in the previous year.

The game of inversions not only entails an inversion of status. Within liminality more things are put upside down. Thus an inversion of gender role is possible also: women play the role of men, men become women. This may imply an inversion of attributes: male insignia and distinctives may become female et vice-versa.

It is worth noticing that inversions therefore not only apply to rituals of status reversal. They may also be played at ‘rituals of status elevation’. We saw in paragraph 2 of this chapter that puberty rituals frequently show gender inversions.

More inversions are conceivable: the fixed meaning of words may be inverted, inversions of ethical notions may take place: what is usually good, becomes bad in the ritual et vice versa. Inversions of the duality of man and animal are possible: people may be transformed into animals or an animal may start to speak all of a sudden. The duality of life and death may be transcended: the deads may become alive and the living may appear dead.

Inversions are strongly linked to liminality and serve to solve tensions in the community, but also to evoke potential positive powers. Not only the highly structured may positively contribute to the community; the lowly structured may be of significance also. Within structure this significance is often clouded, because the lowly structured generally do not have freedom to speak, or do not have the possibility to make a contribution to society. Within anti-structure there is such a possibility and such a freedom.

5. Shared humanity

In recent years Turner devoted his time to a further study of liminality and anti-structure. He even started to investigate other types of societies than the tribal and agrarian communities where he started his research.

His investigations showed that when inversions and other ritual means provoked anti-structure, the participants in the rite began to share feelings of solidarity and unity, sometimes even reaching mystical levels. When everyone was stripped of his or her status (like in puberty rituals), or when the participants took up other social roles (like in rituals of status reversal), a feeling of shared humanity arose. One saw one's self as only human. The others were only human too, no better, no worse, anonymous, equal, without status, naked. Turner called this situation and this feeling communitas.

Just like structure is necessary to a community, communitas is essential too. At times a community must express unity, though she cannot function without structured diversity also. Structure and communitas depend on each other. They stand in a dialectical relation to one another. There is no structure without communitas: “Structural action swiftly becomes arid and mechanical, if those involved in it are not periodically immersed in the regenerative abyss or communitas” (22). But there is no communitas without structure also: “Communitas is made obvious or accessible (...) only through its juxtaposition to or hybridization with aspects of social structure” (23)

Communitas has a strong religious impact: “It is almost everywhere held to be sacred or ‘holy’, possibly because it transgresses or dissolves the norms that govern structured and institutionalized relationships and is accompanied by experiences of unprecedented potency” (24). Communitas is holy, because it is the implementation of everyone's dreams. Communitas is the idealized picture of how a society should function (25).

Structure produces feelings of sin only to be purified by communitas: “Communitas (....) can, through brief revelation, ‘burn out’ or ‘wash away’ (...) the accumulated sins and sunderings of structure” (26).

Still we must admit that the communitas experience is generally human and in so far such widely divergent phenomena like the Hell’s Angels and the Order of the Franciscans are comparable, because the same ground feeling underlies their ideas and actions. However, this has nothing to do with liminal ritual communitas. This we must keep in mind when defining the term communitas.

According to Turner there are three forms of communitas:

1 Spontaneous communitas

When people meet, all of a sudden a feeling of solidarity may arise in the group. One gets the impression that all men are equal, though serving different social roles. Turner calls this kind of spontaneous communitas ‘a directly, immediate and total confrontation of human identities’ (27). The feeling strikes spontaneously in the group like a thunderbolt. It has not been called for, but all of a sudden it is there. It has something magical about it, for all people present. It is like a divine grace. One has the feeling that all problems have come to an end, when one may hold on to this moment of 'inter subjective illumination’ (28). Soon however this feeling of common understanding dissolves again into structure.

During such moments of spontaneous communitas one attaches great value to honesty, openness, friendliness, simpleness. Spontaneous communitas can be studied in different cultures, not only in tribal societies. Thus this form of communitas arose in early-Christian communities. Turner also mentions the ‘happenings’ of the hippies in the sixties as an example of spontaneous communitas. Spontaneous communitas always stands outside of structure (29).

2. Ideological communitas

As soon as people start to experience a feeling of spontaneous communitas, they want to hold on to it. This feeling has been so strong and has evoked such deep feelings of happiness, that they want to establish a theoretical model to perpetuate this feeling. Such a model will have to reduplicate the concrete feeling of communitas in words. One constructs Utopia's where to experience this feeling of communitas. Thinking of the Utopia keeps the communitas alive. Most religions know such Utopia's, like the biblical  ‘Thy kingdom come'. This kingdom is caritas, agape, love, viz. communitas (30).

Soon such ideological communitas is again confronted with structure . Utopia's are often structured in a highly hierarchical order (e.g. the Civitas Dei of Augustinus).

3. Normative communitas

One must define two types of normative communitas, not to be confused with one another. The first type arises in groups which want to consolidate feelings of spontaneous communitas. One starts a movement, in which communitas becomes normative. One wants to turn communitas into rule. In the group one feels free from the suffocating pressures of surrounding society. One wants to hold on to this freedom.

However, as soon as the group starts to organise itself - and it must if it wants to survive - structure again comes in. Thus a paradoxical situation presents itself: although a group has communitas as its ideological and normative basis, it is nevertheless obliged to allow structure.

These normative groups are frequently rigidly structured, because from the very start they feel threatened by the surrounding society. They develop a system of defence which tends to become rather rigid as pressure on the group increases.

As an example one can point out the early-Christian communities, who were obliged to call in structure though they started off as a communitas group. Such strong hierarchizing may again provoke new movements of communitas, like with the Franciscans and other Christian cults in medieval Europe.

In this first type of normative communitas one wants to make communitas the norm, meant to eliminate structure. This is doomed to failure from the very start, because communitas cannot divorce itself from structure and be made the rule. Communitas is more a matter of ‘grace’, exception, miracle, than of rule (31).

Also in the second type of normative communitas one wants to regulate communitas in order to control it. The difference with the first type however is that one does not want to make communitas the rule, but the exception. As an exception she is normatively built into the social system, besides structure (as temporary anti-structure).

This type of normative communitas has more chance to succeed, being more in line with its own nature (communitas is essentially more of an exception than a rule) and because structure is taken into account and not banned altogether. Examples of this second type of communitas are the cyclic and calendrical rituals we will the discuss later on. By means of calendrical rituals one tries to evoke communitas (32).

6. Communitas in liminality, marginality and inferiority

In the preceding we saw communitas being potentially present within liminality. But not only within liminality. Also marginality and inferiority may generate communitas. The term liminality relates to a certain phase in the ritual (33). The terms marginality and inferiority however refer to the place one occupies within structure.

Marginality is standing on the outside, being on the fringes of society. One belongs to no group (except the marginals, of course). One is without status.

With inferiority is meant the status of the most lowly structured groups. The ones occupying the bottom rungs of the hierarchical ladder (like e.g. the shudra’s in India).

Turner's research shows that the terms liminality, marginality and inferiority stand in a close relation to communitas: “Communitas breaks in through the interstices of structure in liminality;  at the edges of structure, in marginality; and from beneath structure, in inferiority” (34).

Frequently inferior groups prove to be the promoter of the communitas principle in a ritual. Thus the chief of the tribe of the Ndembu, in current Zimbabwe, is at his inauguration made well aware of the fact that he is not to govern for himself, but for his people. (35). This is made explicit by means of a ritual. In this ritual the Katwana’s play an important role. The Katwana’s are a tribe subjected long ago by the Ndembu. In daily life they form an inferior group. In the ritual they are the ones making clear to the chief that he is, just like them, simply human.

As marginals being the promoters of the communitas principle Turner mentions the monks of the different world religions. They oppose the structure of 'the world’ with all of its power and money games. According to their beliefs the true nature of man tends to get lost in 'the world', only to be found again in solitary confinement: “The Christian is a stranger to the world, a pilgrim, a traveller with no place to rest his head” (36): The monks occupy a place at the fringes of society.

Although Turner himself uses the term liminality at times rather confusingly, it is best to reserve the use of this term for ritual situations. The terms marginality and inferiority however may also be used outside of a ritual context. One is marginal or inferior to the social system external to a ritual context also. Thus the promotion of communitas is not only a matter of rituals. Nevertheless, the marginals and inferiors are often the ones promoting the communitas principle from within the liminality of a ritual context.

7. From liminality to liminoidity

We saw that tribal and agrarian (pre-industrial) societies, in the liminal situation of rituals, stop the clock to reach a higher level of awareness. One reflects about the place of man in the cosmos and about his relation with his fellow human beings and with nature. One tries to find a solution for existential problems. Old answers are again examined, new answers are sought for, when the old answers are no longer found to be valid. But one also honours the good of the tradition, underlining the fundamental correctness of her conceptions. In several ‘rites de passage’ reality is periodically reclassified. People are incited both to new thinking and to new actions.

In the more complex post-industrial societies of the West the ‘rites de passage’ no longer function in their old form. The community is no longer closed, like in tribal societies. Reflection is no longer a collective, but an individual event.

According to Turner the function which liminality has in tribal societies, is in more complex societies replaced by something he calls liminoidity (37). This is no longer anti-structure, although in liminoidity there may be much criticism of structure presented also. By liminoidity he understands the reflective attitude concerning human beings and their condition as presented in the different genres of literature, art, music, drama, film etc. This reflection liminoidity has in common with liminality. These however are the differences between both terms (38):

1. liminoidity is taken out from its ritual context and is individualised: the artist creates her works of art in relative isolation. She is free to manage the cultural heritage all by herself. The community is free to take over her ideas and concepts. The artist may however also be ignored. Liminality on the other hand is always a collective event, a collective experience of liminal symbols.

2. Liminal phenomena are firmly coupled to calendrical, biological or socio-cultural rhythms or to crises in social processes. They arise at natural 'breaking points’ in the biological and social processes of a community. Liminioid phenomena are not cyclic or calendrical, but are generated continuously.

3. Liminal phenomena are incorporated into the whole social process (built into the social system). Liminioid phenomena develop apart from the central economic and political system, on the fringes (margins), in the breaches of the central social institutions. They are plural, fragmentary and experimental by nature.

4. Liminal phenomena confront all members of a community with symbols having the same intellectual and emotional meaning for all members of the group. They reflect on the history of the whole group, its collective experience as time goes by. Liminoid phenomena are generated more idiosyncratically, by isolated individuals or groups (‘schools’). They must compete with each other for general acceptance. The symbolism in liminoid phenomena addresses more the individual-personal than the social-objective part of the psyche.

5. Liminal phenomena are functional for the efficiency of social structures. Liminality makes structure work without too much tension. Liminoid phenomena show the injustices, the inadequacy and the immorality of the main stream of economic and political structures. But this is all they can do.

Notes

1. V. Turner: ‘the Forest or Symbols, aspects of Ndembu Ritual” (Ithaca + London 1970) (FS) p. 19

2. See for a more exhaustive treatment of the relation between myth and ritual my paper ‘The relation between myth and ritual in classical Antiquity’ presented in March 1986 to the faculty of Symbolic Anthropology of the Free University, Amsterdam.

3. A. Van Gennep: ‘The rites or Passage’, translated by Monika B. Vizedom and Gabrielle L. Caffe (London 1960 first published 1908) (RP)

4. Turner (FS) (p. 7)

5. Turner: ‘From Ritual to Theatre; the human Seriousness of Play (New York 1982) (RT) (p. 24)

6. Turner: the Ritual Process (Chicago 1969) (RP) (p. 166 ev.)

7. Turner (RP) (p. 167): time and place of withdrawal from normal vogues of social action

8. Van Gennep (RP) p. 114)

9. Th.C.W. Oudemands and A.P.M.H. Lardinois: ’Tragic Ambiguity; Anthropology, Philosophy and Sophocles’ Antigone (Leiden 1987) (TA) (p. 56): ‘Where ambiguity reigns, transgression or pollution cannot be separated from holiness’.

10. Oudemans and Lardinois (TA) (p. 58)

11. M. Douglas: ‘Purity and Danger (London 1966), translated into Dutch by E. Marije (Utrecht/Antwerp 1976) (p. 213 ev.)

12. R. Girard: ‘La Violence et le Sacre (paris 1972) (Eng. transl. London 1977)

13. W. Burkert ‘Structure and History in Greek Mythology and Ritual (California 1979) (Chapter III p. 59 sq.): The Greeks performed this ritual on the festival of Apollo, the Thagelia, every autumn at harvest time.

14. The Greeks called the pharmakos a katharsis: Burkert (SHGMR) (p. 65)

15. Oudemans and Lardinois (TA) (p. 56): “It saves the whole society from disaster.”

16. Turner (RT) (p. 44): “Sociocultural systems drive so steadily towards consistency that human individuals only get off these normative hooks in rare situations in small scale societies (...).” rituals can give this release in the ‘rare situations’ of liminality.

17. Turner: ‘Drama’s, Fields and Metaphors’ (p. 24)

18. Turner (RT) (p. 46)

19. Turner: ‘Liminality and Morality (in a paper not published(?)) (p. 30)

20. One may think for example of labour disputes.

21. Turner (RP) (p. 201)

22. Turner (RP) (p. 139)

23. Turner (RP) (p. 127)

24. Turner (RP) (p. 128)

25. Turner (RP): “the ultimate desideratum however is to act in terms of communitas values even while playing structural roles (p. 177)

26. Turner (RP) (p. 185)

27. Turner (RP) (p. 47)

28. Turner (RP) (p. 48) 

29. Turner (RP): "[Spontaneous communitas] can never be adequately expressed in a structural form". (p. 137)

30. Turner (RP) (p. 49) 

31. Turner (RP) (p. 49)

32. Turner (RP) “In pre-literate society the social and individual development cycles are punctuated by more or less prolonged instants of ritually guarded and stimulated liminality, each with its core of potential communitas” (p. 137). In the next chapter we will see that this not only applies to 'pre-literate society ', but also to the literate society of the Greek polis of the fifth century.

33. See par. 3

34. Turner (RP) (p. 128)

35. Turner (RP) (p. 104) “The chief must not keep his chieftainship to himself.”

36. Turner (RP) (p. 107)

37. Turner (RP) (p. 55): liminality also occurs in these more complex societies but she no longer involves the whole group. Ritual liminality may occur in the activities of churches, sects, movements, initiation rituals of clubs, brotherhoods, free masonry lodges etc. But these groups form only one small segment of the large group to which one belongs.

38. Turner (RP) (p. 52-55)

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