As noted above, Turner borrowed van Gennep’s concept of liminality and expanded it into a conceptual tool for understanding special phases in social life when transition is the dominant theme. “If our basic model of society,” Turner wrote, “is that of a ‘structure of positions,’ we must regard the period of margin or ‘liminality’ as an interstructural situation” (1967:93). Periods of transition during rites of passage or other rituals or during pilgrimages are similar in that they are neither here nor there; they are betwixt and between the positions assigned and arrayed by law, custom, convention, and ceremonial. As such, their ambiguous and indeterminate attributes are expressed by a rich variety of symbols in the many societies that ritualize social and cultural transitions.(Turner 1969:95)
Liminal periods fascinated Turner because they frequently are characterized by changes in and suspension of normal social relationships. Liminal periods are not just in and out of time but are also “in and out of social structure” (Turner 1969:96), suggesting the existence of two major models of human relationships: The first is of society as a structured, differentiated, and often hierarchical system of politico-legal-economic positions with many types of evaluation, separating men in terms of “more”
or “less.” The second, which emerges recognizably in the liminal period, is of society as an unstructured or rudimentarily structured and relatively undifferentiated communitas, community, or even communion of equal individuals who submit together to the general authority of the ritual elders. (Turner 1969:96)
Turner lists a number of binary oppositions that parallel the associated properties of communitas versus structure: transition/ state, equality/inequality, anonymity/systems of nomenclature, silence/speech, absence of status/status, and so on (1969:106–107).
Such properties are part of rites of passage in traditional societies, but they also characterize moments in the major religions, particularly during pilgrimages. The imagery of pilgrimage underscores its transitional nature; it is a recurrent metaphor in Christian literature, such as in the most famous pilgrimage in English literature, Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales: This world nis but a thrughfareful of wo And we ben pilgrims, passinge to and fro; Death is an end of every worldy soore and this nineteenth-century American hymn:
This world is not my home, I’m just a passin’ through. My treasures are laid up Somewhere beyond the blue.
Christian imagery emphasizes the liminal nature of pilgrimage. After all, Christ was born while in transition, his human existence a brief separation from his true nature. Outside the Christian tradition, pilgrimages are liminal phenomena exhibiting the quality of communitas in their social relations (Turner 1974:166–167). Such liminality may be communicated by removing the outward symbols of social differences. Turner comments on the bond that exists between communitas, liminality, and lowermost status. It is often believed that the lowest castes and classes in stratified societies exhibit the greatest immediacy and involuntariness of behavior. This may or not be empirically true, but it is at any rate a persistent belief. . . . Those who would maximize communitas often begin by minimizing or even eliminating the outward signs of rank as, for example, Tolstoy and Gandhi tried to do in their own persons. In other words, they approximate in dress and behavior the condition of the poor. (1974:243)
Pilgrimages are a type of social process with basic properties: they are liminal social relations characterized by communitas, and they employ symbols emphasizing the merger or inversion of normal social rankings. Shrines, the objects of pilgrimages, may create a ritual topography in which paramount shrines, related shrines, and the paths between them mark a network of social process. Pilgrimages touched on Turner’s basic theoretical interests as he listed them: “the study of ‘processual units,’ ‘antistructure,’ and the semantics of ritual symbols. All these interests converge on pilgrimage processes” (1974:166).