For those who are not familiar with Arthur Van Gennep's liminal theory, later used by the anthropologist Victor Turner, it goes as follows:
There are three stages: Separation, Liminality, and Reaggregation. First a person is separated from their community; then they are in a state that is called Liminality where they are neither a member of the community, nor a stranger; then, once whatever rites of passage need to be completed, they are taken in again, or reaggregated, back into society with a new status. The concept comes from the Latin word limen meaning "threshold". When you are on the threshold you are neither in nor out of the house. You are in a state of liminality.
Apply this then to the notion of Other. I will direct you to Alison's post at In The Middle where she says, regarding the role of disabled people in the sacraments in the Middle Ages, that
[t]he ritual difference between a child and an adult is the basis for my use of the term “sacral disability”: being barred or hindered from full participation (inclusion in the rites and sacred responsibilities considered the norm for their age) in the religious life of the community due to a perceived Otherness. Spiritual adulthood carries different rights and responsibilities than legal adulthood, and thus the requirements for sacral adulthood do not necessarily correspond to the requirements for legal adulthood, and this highlights the need to examine each vernacular in its own context.What we see here in this suggestion is that in the case of sacral disability, someone is being denied permission to take part in an essential rite of maturity in a community: they may not step onto and across that limen that will take them to adulthood. Disability, then, may be described in terms of whether or not one is permitted to undertake that liminal experience at all. If one is not permitted to take the Sacrament of Penance or the Eucharist, why? If it is a status question, in terms of not having attained adult or mature status through the community's rite of passage, why have they not undertaken this rite? If the community is blocking them, why and how? Preventing an individual from undertaking a rite of passage must be for a reason and it is liable to set up a state of Other, although may not necessarily do so.
This may not describe all cases of Other, but it is a different way of considering the notion which I must examine further.
1 comment:
I can't believe I missed this post. You might be curious to read about this same paradigm of "integration/liminality" in Paxton's book "Christianizing Death."
It's a curious and interesting notion, however. Does a denial of access to social rituals constitute "otherness," or is "otherness" expressed in such denials, among other things? For what Turner is describing, liminality is always followed by a reintegration -- I think Durkheim and Durkheimian social functionalists might argue that such reintegration further strengthens social bonds, because it plays off the fragility of the individual. But what happens when liminality is a permanent state, one which is perhaps forced upon a person by his or her social group? I think what would be interesting would be to look at where reintegration occurs or does not occur, and the repercussions of its denial, both on the person being denied, and the community doing the denying: what did it mean to each group?
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