Rethinking liminality in refugee and migration studies

Abstract

Drawing on anthropological theories, this paper delves into the evolving discourse on liminality within contemporary refugee and migration studies. While refugee scholars have been at the forefront in applying liminality, there has been an increasing trend in employing it to describe the immigrant experience more generally. Thus, liminality has emerged as a significant concept in understanding the migration experience, akin to established notions such as “structure” and “practice”. The paper identifies three key themes in the discourse on liminality within the refugee and migration literature: the adoption of a linear understanding of the rites of passage; a debate on whether positive or negative characteristics accurately reflect the experience of the liminal refugee/migrant subject and finally claims that the refugee and/or migration experience can be conceived as a state of permanent liminality. Through an analysis of each of these themes, I argue that existing refugee and migration scholarship oversimplifies the idea of liminality by downplaying the dialectical and relational view found in the work of anthropologists such as Arnold van Gennep and Victor Turner. By systematically reengaging with these original anthropological sources and reconsidering concepts like van Gennep’s post-liminal via the work of Clay H. Trumbull and drawing on Turner’s concept of the liminoid, the paper advocates for a more multifaceted and nuanced conceptualization of liminality that is currently missing. This rethinking of liminality can enrich our understanding and provide a deeper analysis of the ritualistic and transformative aspects of the refugee and migration experience.

Introduction

Anthropological and sociological theorists have argued that liminality is a fundamental human experience, is central to the human and social sciences (Wydra et al., 2015: 8; Thomassen, 2009: 5) and is as noteworthy ‘as our notions of “structure” and “practice’” (Thomassen, 2014: 1). Others postulate that successive periods from history and prehistory illustrate the significance of liminality (Horvath, 2013: 15). This fascination with liminality has filtered into refugee and migration studies in which the migration journey reflects a ritual process that incorporates a transitional and transformative phase. The following provides an analytical discussion of how recent work applies liminality to the refugee and migration experience, specifically concentrating on those studies that have explicitly drawn on key anthropologists such as Arnold van Gennep (1908) and Victor Turner (1969, 1982) to illuminate how migrants/refugees can be conceptualised as liminal subjects and the refugee and migration journey as a ritual passage. Recent literature, rather than providing a clear account of the relationship between migration and liminality remains fragmented, contradictory and inconsistent in its application of liminality. Through a deeper and more rigorous engagement with the original anthropological sources, I will outline a richer and more complex interplay between theories of liminality and the refugee/migration experience that has hitherto been missing, showing that there has thus been a disconnect between how migration scholars conceptualise and apply the idea of liminality and the original anthropological research on liminality.

Such a disconnect can be addressed when analysing the key themes emerging from the contemporary literature: firstly, it is argued that liminality is a useful concept because the migration passage reflects the linear understanding of the ritual process. Liminality signifies a spatial and temporal position that captures the transitional phase between origin and destination country. While this linear account is generally accepted, I argue that we can identify a non-linear version of the ritual process that relies on a different understanding of the post-liminal. Secondly, there is an ongoing debate within the refugee/migration research on whether positive or negative characteristics fully capture the liminal position. This literature either over-estimates the negative features of the liminal refugee/migrant subject or places greater emphasis on how liminality promotes agency and empowerment. This binary position, as demonstrated below, ignores that, for Turner, liminality is not only an internally differentiated category, but it also differs to his conception of the liminoid actor. Finally, and in contradistinction to the linear approach, scholars note that the migration experience, specifically for refugees who become stuck in limbo, should be understood as occupying a prolonged liminal state; nonetheless we do find a tendency in the literature to view this state as more permanent. Although there is some evidence in the original anthropological literature to support the permanency thesis, a closer reading of the primary sources suggests a more dialectical theory of liminality is present.

Hence, drawing on van Gennep’s and Turner’s original anthropological work on liminality, the paper argues that the use of liminality in contemporary refugee/migration studies – while contributing to a rethinking of the refugee and migrant experience– overlooks some of the nuances of the threshold experience found in the work of these anthropologists. Specifically, the following discussion sheds light on the importance of Clay H. Trumbull’s (1896) work on van Gennep’s conceptualisation of the threshold experience and examines how he overlooks the potential of Trumbull’s idea of postliminium to reimagine such an experience. I then investigate Turner’s notion of the liminoid and his dialectical theory of liminality and advocate for a relational approach to liminality that allows us to reconceptualise the refugee/migration experience as a phenomenon that reflects the working of what can be categorised as structural liminality. By incorporating these neglected issues, a more comprehensive understanding of liminality and the refugee/migration journey as a ritual process becomes possible. Overall, I suggest that liminality has been under-explored and under-theorised in contemporary refugee/migration studies and thus the paper’s aim is to add and extend the conceptual and analytical insights on the relationship between liminality and the refugee/migration experience (Gazit, 2018).

Linear versus non-linear accounts of rites of passage

Both anthropological and refugee/migration scholarship on liminality acknowledge van Gennep as its ‘founding father’ and The Rites of Passage (1960 [1908]) as the foundational text. Some social theorists have noted that van Gennep must be seen as ‘a reference point for any discussion of transition periods’ (Thomassen 2015: 43; see also Babcock 2001; Szakolczai and Thomassen 2019: 41). Van Gennep contends that ‘regeneration’ is essential to life, and that it is accomplished through rites of passage which have three major stages: separation, transition (limen), and incorporation. These rites involve a transition from one state to another such as the preliminal, liminal, and postliminal phases. The preliminal phase occurs when individuals break away from the old social structures, routines and practices. During the liminal phase participants move away from their old status, identities and roles (pre-liminal) and enter a threshold stage where all old structures, routines and practices, identities are discarded. The participants are suspended in time in which neither the past nor the future are relevant. The postliminal phase is one of reintegration where individuals are re-introduced into society/community with a new position/status/identity.

The origin story then moves onto the anthropologist Victor Turner as van Gennep’s successor because he has made the idea of liminality a key conceptual framework in the social sciences. The refugee/migration literature accepts this origin story and focuses on how the threshold phase of ritual passages is part of a sequential linear passage from the pre-liminal to the post-liminal. For migration scholars, this threshold, in-between space that both refugees and migrants occupy in their journey, manifests itself in multiple ways. In between spaces, for refugee scholars, have come to be represented by the physical borders between states such as between Zimbabwe and South Africa (Moyo, 2020), while migration studies have identified the border between Thailand and Burma (Wittekind, 2016) or between Mexico and the US (Elías, 2023). The liminal can likewise be represented by transitional countries/places. For example, for Sub-Saharan migrants on their way to Algeria and Libya via the Sahara, are forced to slow down and stop in transitional/liminal towns in northern Niger (Brachet, 2011). On the other hand, refugee studies have located these liminal spaces in the Greek border island of Lesvos (Tsoni, 2016) or the Greek Islands of Lesbos and Chios in which refugees wait until they move on to destination countries such as Turkey or within the EU (Tunaboylu and Van Liempt, 2021). In addition, not only can the liminal be associated with spaces between countries, but it can also manifest itself within destination countries. Refugee scholars have identified, for example, state sanctioned detention centres such as the Centre for the Temporary Stay of Immigrants in Spain (Sahraoui, 2020), asylum seeker centres found in the Netherlands (Pozzo and Ghorashi, 2022), liminal sites such as camps, apartments, or family homes (Mzayek, 2019) or the bureaucratic limbo places of the host society where one queues to pick-up or submit documentation (Nyakabawu, 2021: 10). Therefore, some have proposed expanding the notion of liminality to include those spaces which refugees ‘inhabit during the fleeing/asylum process and after gaining asylum’ (Wimark, 2021: 649).

These descriptions allude to the multifaceted spatial nature of liminality, but they still align with the conventional linear account of liminality in which something is left behind. Yet, a non-linear view which better captures the refugee/migration experience can be found in the work of a little-known American clergyman and author Clay H. Trumbull who van Gennep draws on to construct his theory of thresholds.

While van Gennep influenced and anticipated Turner’s work on liminality, Trumbull played a significant role in van Gennep’s understanding of liminality, especially if we acknowledge that the idea originates from the Latin word līmen, meaning ‘a threshold’. The liminal migration scholarship makes repeated reference to van Gennep, but the work of Clay H. Trumbull’s The Threshold Covenant (1896) is absent. Before van Gennep, Trumbull had pointed to the central role played by thresholds and threshold rites in human history. I do not want to minimise van Gennep’s contribution in placing liminality at the heart of ritual process and his role in making liminality and thresholds a key conceptual idea in the social sciences. If, however, liminality is synonymous with threshold, then Clay H. Trumbull’s The Threshold Covenant (1896) deserves some acknowledgement, especially if he adds something new to our understanding of the refugee/migration experience.

Although liminal migration scholars have overlooked Trumbull’s influence when referring to van Gennep, van Gennep does acknowledge the significance of his work in several places in The Rites of Passage, both within the text (1960: 19 & 20) and in multiple footnotes (1960: 19, 20, 22, 24, 26, 32, 60, 134, 192). These multiple citations in themselves are not the sole reason Trumbull is significant to van Gennep’s idea of liminality. Van Gennep also notes that frontier crossings and thresholds were first studied by Trumbull (Van Gennep, 1960: 19-20). He states in a footnote that ‘For details on the rites of passage pertaining to the threshold, I refer you to Trumbull’s The Threshold Covenant’. Later when his describes the symbolic role doors play in frontier or threshold crossings, he once again cites Trumbull as the authority (1960: 20 & 192). Not only do liminal migration scholars neglect van Gennep’s reading and acknowledgement of Trumbull, but when we look closely at Trumbull’s notion of the post-liminal, we find that it complicates and augments our understanding of the ritual process by introducing a non-linear interpretation. This has repercussions for how we view the postliminal (incorporation into the host society) and its relationship to the preliminal (origin country and culture) when conceptualising the refugee/migration journey and more broadly for theories of liminality/thresholds.

Rethinking the notion of the post-liminal

Trumbull explores the mythical origins of liminality and locates it in Roman mythology and jurisprudence. He offers a discussion of the Roman God Limentinus – the Threshold God (1896: 97) and he later speaks of ‘postliminium’ which designates re-crossing of the threshold which effectively returned liminal subjects to a condition before they entered the threshold (Trumbull 1896: 181). The postliminium means a literal return behind the threshold.

Though van Gennep speaks of the ‘postliminal stage’ which is the last phase of the ritual process, he pays less attention to Trumbull’s non-linear understanding that describes the situation of a Roman citizen being captured by their political enemies who then is returned or escapes and re-crosses the limen, the boundary between enemy territory and the Roman Empire. This return through the limen is a process that legally ‘resurrects or relives the returned captive as a citizen’ (Malka and Paz, 2021: 11). Unlike van Gennep’s idea, Trumbull’s postliminium signifies a return to an original status or identity before the crossing of the threshold rather than a position after the threshold where one is incorporated back into a society or community with a higher status or different identity. Trumbull’s notion of the postliminium allows us to view the migration/refugee journey in non-linear terms and has the potential to reconceptualise the idea of return as encapsulating both the resurrection and reworking of an original status and identity. The postliminium would allow us to describe a return through the threshold that signifies a return to previous migrant identities, values and cultural practices that were shed while in the liminal phase, but also illuminate how migrants and refugees change due to their journey. They never return completely the same. Van Gennep does acknowledge that in some ‘semicivilised’ societies a ritual process is circular (1960: 194). Yet, when providing an overall summary of his approach, a possible return through the threshold to the pre-liminal state is not seriously considered because he argues, although the positions of the rites of passage may vary depending on the phenomenon under observation: birth or death, initiation or marriage, there nevertheless exists an ‘underlying arrangement’ that ‘is always the same’. And he continues that ‘beneath a multiplicity of forms, either consciously expressed or merely implied, a typical pattern always recurs: the pattern of the rites of passage’ (1960: 191). He describes this pattern as overwhelmingly rectilinear or a straight-line sequential phenomenon. Due to its reliance on van Gennep, the liminal refugee/migration scholarship uncritically embraces this straight-line conception of the rites of passage. However, when describing the refugee/migration journey, Trumbull’s idea of the postliminium can illuminate a more intricate non-linear picture of this journey because it does not necessarily signify an end point but a return. And this ‘return’ to a pre-liminal refugee and migration state can reinforce but also demonstrate the emotional, cultural and social change that refugees and immigrants experience. Adopting Trumbull’s postliminium rather than van Gennep’s notion of the postliminal would allow researchers to move away from viewing the migrant and refugee experience as a sequential journey in which there is a beginning (pre-liminal), a middle (a transitional, liminal period) and an end (post-liminal), and more realistically view it as a looping spatial and temporal phenomenon. As migrants and refugees negotiate their lives, they not only move physically between here and there and back, but they also psychologically, socially and culturally loop between past, present and future in which they revisit, rework and reinforce their heritage, culture, language and identities. We find the beginnings of such an analysis in the work of Jiang & Li in which overlapping spatial and temporal liminalities can effectively capture how Chinese returnees ‘not only challenged their identities and sense of belonging but also prompted a critical re-evaluation of their sociocultural orientations.’ (2024: 5)

Nonetheless, what is surprising and paradoxical is that while some refugee scholars adopt the linear view of the rites of passage, their empirical work suggests otherwise. For example, although Richlen accepts van Gennep’s linear conception of liminality (2022: 1784), a non-linear account is evident in her research. For example, her description of the liminal refugee spaces resonates with Trumbull’s idea of the postliminium. She notes that in ‘response to identity oppression in Sudan, and in light of organizational freedom in Israel, community [liminal] centers promote cultural revival and resurgence particularly by teaching the languages and histories of the specific ethnic groups. These activities ground asylum seekers in the more solid pre-liminal place and time of Darfur, represent a source of pride and strength and, accordingly, are an important coping mechanism’ (2022: 1794: my emphasis). In another study, Rivera (2023) examines Chilean refugees to Wales and their experience of El Sueño Existe, a contemporary Welsh liminal festival in commemoration of the legacy of leftist movements and figures in Chile during the Chilean military regime in the early 1970s. The festival, for Rivera, recreates a liminal space in which the desire to continue the political project of the resistance movement can momentarily be satisfied. Rivera notes ‘this desire is connected to the temporal liminality of the festival, which evokes and reproduces ideas, images, and songs of a longed-for past time’ (Rivera, 2023: 180 my italics). In these descriptions, the transitional experience, rather than representing a place which transcends and disregards the identities and cultural practices of the pre-liminal stage, and is a step towards the future, reconnects migrants to a pre-liminal moment in which past values, customs and norms were cherished. Unintentionally, these studies demonstrate the explanatory value of Trumbull’s concept of the postliminium over van Gennep’s idea of the postliminal. Trumbull’s non-linear approach allows us to view liminality as a moment that prepares migrants not only for a time beyond the threshold – the experience of living in the host society – but a possible return – not only physically, but emotionally, psychologically and culturally - to a past before migration. Looping between past, present and future better illustrates how migrants negotiate multiple identities and stories across these various temporalities and thus move beyond and back through liminality. This non-linear view of the rites of passage is reminiscent of work conducted on transnational migrants in which the looping temporal underpinning of the migration experience is conceptualised in non-linear and transient terms (Baas and Yeoh 2019; Gomes 2021). Thus, the threshold refugee/migrant experience moves beyond a binary, linear conception of origin and destination country. If the constitution of a migrant/refugee experience is about mobility, and this movement reflects a rite of passage, then Trumbull reminds us that the migration journey, for both refugees and non-refugees, does not always occur in a linear fashion.

Liminality as a precarious place and identity

The following sections examine the negative and positive accounts of liminality and suggests that this either/or approach downplays the ambivalence of liminality found in Turner’s work. As Turner argues, whether we see liminality as a constructive or undesirable depends on the perspective one adopts. From the perspective of social structure, liminality is seen as an ambiguous, fluid and dangerous state. As Turner explains, for some, liminality may be the centre of insecurity and ‘the breakthrough of chaos into cosmos, of disorder into order rather than the site of creative inter-human satisfactions and achievements’ (Turner, 1982: 46). From the perspective of those who live within the confines of certain structures - in this case the native group - the liminal migrant/refugee subject is constructed as dangerous, polluting and a threat to the order of society because they fall between classificatory boundaries (Turner, 1982: 109). This perspectival account of liminality underpins the ambivalence of liminality that is overlooked when studies either focus on the positive or negative accounts of liminality. The following discussion firstly outlines these opposing positions before articulating a neglected third stance found in Turner’s work.

Studies which formulate the liminal refugee/migrant experience and the consequent identities as problematic contextualise it in terms of negative societal reactions to immigrants and refugees and focus on the actual experiences of these groups. Thus, liminality is experienced as insecure and dangerous from the perspective of both the host and the refugees and migrants. Migration and refugee research are reacting to criticism directed at Turner that he attributes overwhelmingly positive connotations to liminal situations (Thomassen, 2014: 9; Horvath, 2013: 2) and he disregards ‘some of the clearly dangerous or problematic aspects of liminality’ (Szakolczai and Thomassen, 2019: 184).

Consequently, some refugee scholars concur with such a position and claim that, in contrast to the overly positive transformative nature of liminality found in Turner’s work, liminality can become a site of destruction (O’Reilly, 2020: 140) or is synonymous with marginalization, racialisation, precarity, uncertainty, disorientation, and violence (Moyo, 2020: 61; Nyakabawu, 2021: 9; Sahraoui, 2020: 1815-1816). More specifically, refugee studies argue that the transitional stage fosters political, social and economic insecurities (Innes, 2023), in which a ‘rooted displacement’ occurs because home becomes a floating signifier for stateless liminal people; consequently, they become an invisible homogenous group who are impure and lack rights (Belton, 2015: 911). The liminal refugee space also captures the carceral and ‘paramilitarized’ nature of liminality in which occupants are constructed as deviant (Tsoni, 2016:44), or is a ‘space/time of annihilation and a negation of sociality’ (Gold, 2019:16) in which the liminal subject becomes invisible and is weakened rather than empowered (O’Reilly, 2020: 140). Moreover, liminality exposes the degrading conditions in which refugees find themselves in sociolegal limbo and feel existentially stuck (Tunaboylu and Van Liempt, 2021: 1561-1562) and experience ‘ontological insecurity’ (Hartonen et al., 2021: 1152-1153) or ‘ontological liminality’ (O’Reilly, 2020) which makes the possibility of experiencing a ‘fully autonomous subjective existence’ slim (Sahraoui, 2020: 1820). Others argue that a refugee status places ‘them in a space of liminality where identity loss and uncertainty became factors affecting their wellbeing’ (Mzayek, 2019: 373) and lead to mental health issues (Martino et al., 2022).

Those working on the liminal experience of migrants more generally come to similar conclusions. They note that the liminal migration experience fosters a condition ‘characterised by strangeness, suspension, undecidedness, uncertainties and in-betweenness’ (Ip, 2011: 176-177) as well as precarity, uncertainty and disorientation (Mitra and Evansluong, 2019; Richter, 2016). In addition, when seen from the native’s perspective, liminality is characterised by othering processes. This is evident in Michail and Christou’s (2018) work on how the liminal experience of second-generation youth in Greece could be understood through othering processes. Barry and Yilmaz also adopt the perspective of the host and argue that liminality can be understood as an othering process in which the host fears the presence of the stranger (Barry and Yilmaz, 2019: 1182) and thus imposes discriminatory structures on migrants. The ‘migrant group’ is thus ‘demonized as a threat to the society during the liminal phase’ (Barry and Yilmaz, 2019: 1168). For Barry & Yilmaz, the period of liminality does not highlight the liminal subject’s transgressive qualities rather it ‘is characterized by rejection by the majority as a problem for the society and a need for the migrant to work (both figuratively and literally) before they can gain the acceptance of the white Anglophone majority’ (Barry and Yilmaz, 2019: 1170). In highlighting the negative consequences of being liminal, Barry & Yilmaz adopt the perspective of the host in which the liminal migrant subject signifies anti-structure/order and falls between classificatory boundaries and thus contests the host’s hegemonic values and norms. The above studies suggest that to be a liminal refugee/migrant subject means experiencing a precarious and insecure existence.

Liminality as a critical and transformative passage

On the other side of the debate are those studies which emphasise liminality as a positive phenomenon in which the transformative, transgressive, autonomous, and agentic qualities of refugees and migrants are foregrounded. Here we see a shift away from the native’s perspective which views liminal subjects as dangerous and a threat to the hegemonic political and cultural structures of the host society towards ethnographic studies that focus on the transgressive experience of migrants and refugees. The classic refugee study by Malkki (1995) is an early work that adopts the latter paradigm. She draws on Turner’s idea of structural invisibility in which the liminal subject falls between classificatory boundaries and argues that the refugee category challenges and subverts the nationalist discourse because refugees are unclassifiable (1995: 7 and 253). More recently, Mathews (2023) noted that the rites of passage and liminality was a postive experience for male asylum-seekers in Hong Kong. Richlen (2022) also argues that in contrast to those who focus on the dark side of liminality, her findings on the experience of Darfurian refugees in Israel are consistent with Turner’s idea of liminality that ‘points to the potential of the liminal period to stimulate creativity, innovation, new ideas and novel forms of social life that challenge established social norms’ (2022: 1784). Such creativity and agency is further highlighted by how ‘multilingual co-creations facilitate convivial friendships in the liminal and super-diverse context of Dutch asylum seeker centres’ (Pozzo and Ghorashi, 2022: 683) or when ‘forcibly displaced actors…use even small amounts of agency available within existing structural constraints to gain some cognitive control over their position by co-constructing their indeterminate liminal state rather than submitting to its precarity’ (Alkhaled, 2022: 1584-1585). The experiences of refugee children in a liminal context also illustrate how the voiceless can be heard and transform their identity from victims to agentic beings (Arvanitis et al., 2019: 135). In other cases, such as Richlen’s study mentioned above, the involvement of Chilean exiles in a liminal festival event in Wales becomes a vehicle for change and critical reflection of society, especially Chilean society. Such cultural performances can challenge the official and hegemonic history of Chile in which a left-wing political alliance was demonised and for a period in the host society their political project can be acknowledged through these liminal festivals (Richlen 2022).

Such novelty, creativity and agency are also evident in non-refugee studies. For example, those studying liminal transmigrants argue they continually move from here and there and develop fluid identities that contest binary frameworks (Ip, 2011), while accounts of young migrants living in in-between liminal spaces demonstrate how they ‘manipulate dichotomies and circumvent categorization’ (Wittekind, 2016: 181). Moreover, Cangià’s research on street performers in Japan and migrants in Switzerland and Italy suggests that the liminal state is transformative and liberating and contributes to ‘people’s creativity, desire, feelings and imagination qualities’ (2021: 5). Alarcón also discusses the anti-structural nature of liminality in her study on the creation of online liminal performance spaces by migrants in Columbia, Leicester and Mexico. These liminal online spaces are enriched by the ‘de-centering and the ‘unselfing’ of the migrant subject thereby establishing deeper and authentic connections between their inner and the outer worlds (Alarcón, 2014).

The ambivalence of liminality

Both positive and negative accounts of the liminal refugee/migrant experience outlined above downplay or ignore the ambivalence of the threshold evident in both van Gennep’s and Turner’s work. Such ambivalence can be found in van Gennep’s position concerning the paradoxical nature of boundaries and in Turner’s multiple construction of the liminal subject and its relationship to his idea of the liminoid. The current literature on the threshold migrant experience either conceptualises liminality as enforcing social, cultural and political boundaries of the host society which then places the liminal subject in a precarious situation or is a space which challenges and transcends them. This either/or binary approach is not reflected in the classical work on liminality.

For example, van Gennep’s text acknowledges that the function of thresholds is to both dissolve and perpetuate social and cultural boundaries and thus his work on thresholds foregrounds the ambivalence of boundaries, and indirectly, liminality. He argues that the transitional phase or the threshold paradoxically reinforces generational, status and gender differences for liminal subjects once they enter the post-liminal stage (Van Gennep, 1960: 2-3). The ambivalence of boundaries found in van Gennep’s theory of thresholds allows us to rethink the liminal migrant/refugee subject as one who may contest and transcend discriminatory and exclusionary boundaries imposed by the host society and within their own culture, but they can also reinforce other cultural boundaries that they maintain between themselves and host members and with other ethnic or racial communities.

Furthermore, although not always acknowledged by the liminal migration literature, Turner is cognizant of the ambiguity of liminality. Firstly, this is evident in Turner’s perspectival view outlined above but is also apparent in his description of both unfavourable and constructive qualities of liminal subjects. For example, he describes the characteristics of liminality in terms of “passivity, humility, near-nakedness” (1969: 95-96), weakness (1969: 99), submissiveness and silence (1969: 103) but he also speaks of liminality as capturing the ‘power of the weak’ who transgress pre-existing structures and come to ‘symbolize the moral values of communitas as against the coercive power of supreme political rulers’ (Turner, 1969: 109-110; see also p. 102). The threshold is also ‘potentially a period of scrutinization of the central values and axioms of the culture in which it occurs’ (1982: 167). Liminal, or threshold, people, explains Turner, are difficult to classify because they cannot be categorised within pre-existing values and rules; ‘they are betwixt and between the positions assigned and arrayed by law, custom, convention, and ceremonial’ (1969: 95) and they blur and merge distinctions and, in a state of liminality, ‘people ‘play’ with elements of the familiar and defamiliarize them’ (1982: 26-27). Thus, while liminal subjects may be ‘structurally inferior or ‘marginal’’ such as court jesters, institutionalized jokers, the homeless, the mysterious stranger, and ‘the poor and the deformed’, they are also able to express an “‘open’ as against ‘closed morality’” (Turner, 1969: 110). Such ambiguity speaks of a critical and radical consciousness born from the experience of marginalisation and oppression.

The ambiguity of liminality is likewise captured in Turner’s multiple construction of the liminal subject, something which the contemporary migration literature has overlooked. For Turner, not all liminal subjects are made equal. He outlines that the liminal subject’s transformative and transgressive qualities depend on the type of liminal ritual: life-cycle ritual as opposed to seasonal ritual. In the former, the post-liminal stage leads to enhanced status and power while seasonal rituals temporarily elevate the status of the liminal subject ‘before returning them to their permanent humbleness’ (1982: 25) of their pre-liminal stage. This also resonates with Trumbull’s non-linear version of the ritual process which there is a return through the threshold to pre-existing identities. Finally, while the threshold phase withdraws the liminal subject from the customs and values of their society, such a withdrawal does not make the liminal inherently transgressive. The liminal phase and the liminal subject emerging from it, writes Turner, ‘inverts but do not usually subvert the status quo’ (1982: 41, my italics). He continues and notes that the liminal is just a ‘subversive flicker’ put in the ‘service of normativeness as soon as it appears’ (1982: 44-45). Liminality is more about rebellion than revolution (Spiegel, 2011). At an analytical level, Turner’s observations allow us to rethink liminality, not as a process that is intrinsically anti-order or anti-structural or where structure and anti-structure are mutually exclusive, rather it is a process in which structure and anti-structure are co-constitutive. The liminal migration literature, relying on a one-dimensional view of the liminal subject, either over-states the agentic nature of liminality (anti-structure) or its negative (structural) features at the expense of viewing liminality as an ambiguous process as highlighted by Turner. The liminal phase – as the negative proponents claim - may lead to the reinforcement of the host’s structures via othering processes. On the other hand, as the positive migration accounts argue, the liminal migrant subject contests and questions these very same structures. Liminal subjects simultaneously challenge and are confined by structures. The analytical purchase of Turner’s notion of liminality is that it allows us to conceptualise it as inherently anti-structure but also a process which paradoxically enables structures.

Turner’s work allows us to rethink the threshold within refugee and migration studies as a process that involves structural liminality where liminality does not do away with structures but emphasises some structures at the expense of others. Applying the idea of structural liminality to migration research means understanding the transitional period between the social and cultural structures of home and those of the destination country as not doing away with structures but bringing them into sharper relief as migrants move between the pre-liminal and the post-liminal phase. Structural liminality would allow researchers to show the resistance and thus anti-structural nature of liminal subjects to fixed and essentialist refugee/migrant identities (the structures imposed by the host and origin society), but it also has the potential for researchers to demonstrate how refugees and migrants reclaim and rework what they believe are their pre-liminal identities (structures of the origin culture). While not conceived in these terms, there are traces of this structural liminality in some contemporary refugee and migration studies. For example, in one study, refugees simultaneously ‘acknowledged that they had to incorporate identity markers from their temporary host countries’ (Mzayek, 2019: 374) while wanting their children to integrate into American society even though they ‘maintained a refugee identity or a liminal status’ (Mzayek, 2019: 376). This paradoxical and entangled nature of structures can be further highlighted when examining the liminal experience of young migrants whose ability to move between different cultures and build intercultural relations is diminished as they negotiate the restrictive structures of their parent’s and host culture. Yet, this very liminal, in-between position, as Wang and Collins (2016) explore, is enabling because they develop cosmopolitan sensibilities that encourage self-reflection and creativity, and thus allowing them to link cultures and build relations across differences. These examples are less about rejecting structures per se and more to do with challenging the values and expectations (structures) of the host or origin culture and finding a balance between past and future identity structures. As opposed to a non-dialectal version of liminality that is evident in contemporary refugee and migration studies, structural liminality as an analytical tool would allow researchers to move beyond a binary framework that opposes structure with anti-structure (liminality) and capture the migrant and refugee experience as a continuous reinforcement, negotiation and contestations of structures.

Another oversight in the contemporary migration literature is Turner’s discussion of the liminoid which can more effectively highlight the agentic ‘revolutionary’ qualities expressed by some migrants and refugees. Unlike the liminal individual of tribal societies, the liminoid subject under modernity is characterised by choice and subversive qualities. In Turner’s words, ‘the liminoid is all play and choice, an entertainment’ while the liminal ‘is a matter of deep seriousness, even dread, it is demanding, compulsory’ (1982: 42-43). The liminoid as opposed to the liminal subject stresses a radical individuality that is prominent in the art and sciences because they foster the innovator and the ‘unique person who dares and opts to create’ (1982: 43). Specifically, it is the artist’s aesthetic sensibility and their access to an ‘authentic experience’ (1982: 15) that allows them to capture the depth of life. It is ‘the solitary artist’, writes Turner, that ‘creates the liminoid phenomena’ (1982: 52). The liminal and liminoid, however, are not mutually exclusive and are interconnected in modern societies because within liminality are the seeds of the liminoid waiting for the appropriate socio-cultural context to sprout (1982: 44).

This distinction is rarely addressed in contemporary refugee/migration scholarship, specifically how the liminoid can reinforce our understanding of refugees and migrants as enabling and agentic subjects. What would it mean to replace the liminal with the limonoid in refugee/migration research? Doing so would allow scholars to focus on the individuality and playfulness of liminoid migrant/refugee subject, in which the political, social and cultural structures of the host society and origin country are subject to subversion rather than inversion. Migrants, rather than invert the representational cultural systems of their origin and host societies, can play with these and capture the creativity and transgressive nature of their identities. Such an interpretation is possible through the idea of the liminoid where researchers can show that migrants or refugees, rather than moving between the essentialist identities of host and origin culture, play with fluid in-between identities that contest such essentialism. This critical liminoid hybrid subject speaks to a new cultural “third space” which counters and subverts the dominant representation of cultural, “ethnic,” and racial identity (Bhabha, 1994). If we conceptualise cultural hybrids as liminoid subjects, we are better able to highlight their non-conformity to the stereotypical constructions of a Lebanese, Italian, Sudanese, Greek, or Vietnamese identity. The liminoid can thus more effectively demonstrate how they challenge these nationalist and ethnic stereotypes and in the process of constructing a “Lebanese-American,” “Pakistani-British,” or “Chinese-Australian” identity problematize both sides of the binary. Adopting a liminoid hybrid identity as analytical lens would shed greater light on how cultures are not homogeneous essences and on the idea that hybrids are never simply a mixture of preexisting identities. Adopting and applying the liminoid means that when conducting research, we view all cultures – whether the “dominant” or “minority” – as already multiple, contradictory, mixed, porous, and fluid and that the cultural hybrid, in its liminoid dimension, exposes the fragile and fluid nature of contemporary identities (Marotta, 2020). In other words, it is the liminoid rather than the liminal that has the potential to provide greater analytical power and better reflects the transformative and subversive nature of the migrant/refugee threshold experience.

Permanent liminality versus transitional liminality

Anthropological and sociological accounts of liminality (Szakolczai, 2016; Thomassen, 2009) have theorised it as a permanent condition or an experience that entails a continuous way of being and belonging. Such a reading can also be found in refugee and migration studies due to the increasing importance given to the temporal gaze in migration research (Jacobsen and Karlsen, 2021). The application of liminality now extends beyond the physical and social realm and is manifested as a temporal condition, especially when waiting becomes the paramount experience of the refugee and migration journey. This is clearly captured in the following statement in a study on forced migration which surmises that while ‘liminality primarily denotes a state of exception, the participant’s narratives of displacement reveal that liminality can be also experienced as a “normal” condition’ (Murcia, 2019: 1523).

The potentially permanent nature of liminality has been specifically highlighted by those examining the refugee experience. The liminal refugee space manifests itself through waiting, uncertainty and a lack of control of one’s life (O’Reilly, 2020: 185) or a ‘protracted socio-legal ambiguity and abstruseness’ (Tsoni, 2016). For others, the refugee liminal experience is ‘more pervasive, capturing people in a prolonged state of ‘in-betweenness’ without necessarily providing closure to the period of crisis’ (Gold, 2019: 16). Hence ‘[c]ompared to transitional liminality, actors in perpetual liminality tend to have less control over the ambiguous social structure, leaving them to engage in identity work that remains unresolved’ (Alkhaled, 2022: 1584). This extended nature of liminality is also evident in the process of seeking asylum, and this is especially the case amongst queer refugees (Wimark, 2021: 649) whose experience of liminality can be understood as liminal homemaking because home, like liminality, is a place of enduring ambiguity in which inclusionary and exclusionary practices co-exist (Wimark, 2021: 654 & 656). The ‘enduring ambiguity’ or ‘permanent temporariness’ of the liminal refugee subject (O’Reilly, 2020: 139), according to some studies, may never allow refugees to ‘overcome the identity, label, and related experiences of “asylum seeker,”’ (Rainbird, 2014: 463). In other cases, it leads to alienation and emotional fragmentation because they are trapped in limbo and struggle to find meaning in their lives (Murcia, 2019: 1524), and finally this permanent state of ‘ontological liminality’ leads refugees to lose their individuality and status as adults and become just numbers in a bureaucratic machine (O’Reilly, 2020: 177-178).

The shift from transitional to permanent liminality - as an analytical lens – is increasingly evident in research on migrants more generally. Bajalia argues that the condition of waiting that encapsulates the experience of Moroccan immigrants’ journey is not necessarily a fleeting liminal condition but an enduring condition (Bajalia, 2023: 20). Studies on migrant workers and European migrants in the UK argue that liminality cannot be considered a moment in time but a state of ‘permanent temporariness’ (Constable, 2022) or understood as ‘protracted periods of in- betweenness’ (Genova and Zontini, 2020). The idea that liminality can be normalised is specifically adopted by transnational migration scholars. Transnational migrant identities, it is noted, are neither here nor there and these studies refuse ‘to accept that things are fixed or static’ and embrace ‘the framework that sees things are in a state of becoming, a process that is organically unstoppable’. In this account, living within liminality no longer refers to a transitional phase, but a permanent condition (Ip, 2011: 177). While these accounts of permanent liminality do capture some aspect of the refugee and migration experience in which migrants and refugees feel stuck between different life-worlds, this idea of permanent liminality provides an incomplete reading of van Gennep and Turner.

Liminality as a relational concept

Viewing liminality as permanent or extended period rather than a transitional state has provided greater insights into the refugee and migration journey. Nonetheless, this conception of liminality overlooks the dialectical and relational understanding of liminality found in van Gennep’s and Turner’s work. Firstly, van Gennep suggests that the permanency of liminality is less evident in pre-modern societies because ‘the liminal phenomena are predominantly restricted to ‘primitive’ tribal societies [where] they are experienced collectively…’ (Spiegel, 2011: 14). Based on the binary and hierarchical nature of the modern/primitive divide (1906: 2), van Gennep observes that the liminal and transitional constitutes the ontological condition of the non-modern (1906: 3) because these processes – as shown above - dissolve and reinforce boundaries. In contrast, for van Gennep, modernity tends to signify the dissolution of boundaries. The idea that liminality relies on those very distinctions and boundaries which the modern dissolves suggest that, for van Gennep, liminality while thriving under pre-modern conditions is not a continuous boundary dissolving process. The function of liminality is ambiguous because it both dissolves and enables boundaries. Conceptually, van Gennep allows us to think of liminality as a relational term. Liminality and boundaries are co-constitutive. If there are no boundaries to cross because we are in a constant state of liminality, then the analytical value of liminality is weakened; one cannot exist in a permanent boundless state because such a state relies on what it means to live within boundaries. Liminality is a relational idea. One cannot champion liminality if there is nothing against which it can be contrasted, for example, structures.

On the other hand, unlike van Gennep, Turner does make a reference to the permanence of liminality under both pre and modern institutionalised conditions. He states that, under pre-modern conditions, this institutionalisation process is no ‘more clearly marked and defined than in the monastic and mendicant states in the great world religions’ (1969: 107). On the other hand, the specialisation, complexity, social differentiation, and division of labour within modern society has meant that what ‘was in tribal society principally a set of transitional qualities ‘betwixt and between’ defined states of culture and society has become itself an institutionalized state’. Under such conditions ‘[t]ransition has here become a permanent condition’, writes Turner, and this ‘institutionalization of liminality’ has been evident under modern but – in contrast to van Gennep, also in traditional settings.

Although the permanence of liminality is evident through its institutionalization, such a conception sits alongside Turner’s dialectical understanding of communitas (anti-structural liminal processes) within modernity. Turner notes that human relationships can be understood in terms of oscillating between two juxtaposing and alternating societies or modalities. Societies move from structure to liminality and back again. They do not remain in one permanent position. For ‘individuals and groups’, he explains ‘social life is a type of dialectical process that involves successive experience of high and low, communitas and structure, homogeneity and differentiation, equality and inequality. The passage from lower to higher status is through a limbo of statuslessness.’ (1969: 97). He notes that the ‘spontaneity and immediacy of communitas…can seldom be sustained for long’ (1982: 47 my emphasis). Societies oscillate between structure and anti-structure (communitas/liminality) because within communitas are the seeds of its own demise. They ‘become what they behold’ (1982: 49) writes Turner because the expansive tendencies of communitas may touch off a repressive campaign (1982: 51). The condition of communitas has the potential ‘to transform into a normative controlling structure which indicates its vulnerability to the structural environment’ (1982: 47). The oscillating nature of the modalities of structure and liminality means that to speak of permanent liminality understates Turner’s dialectical approach to a theory of thresholds.

While the idea of communitas/liminality as a permanent state has been advocated by social theorists and now refugee and migration scholars, as I have argued above, this understates Turner’s conception of communitas and structure as alternating dialectical states or modalities of experience. Such a dialectical process in which neither liminality nor structure are static ways of being in the world more effectively captures the refugee and migration experience. What would it mean for refugee and migrant researchers if we reconceptualised liminality as dialectical and relational idea rather than either a transitional or permanent state? While one can acknowledge that refugees and migrants do live in a state of in-betweenness, this state also captures the non-static dialectical and relational processes of this experience. For example, we can show how the cultural, social and political structures/boundaries of the host and origin culture impose themselves on refugees and migrants while simultaneously demonstrating how they contest these very same structures and boundaries in their liminal state. The in-betweenness of the liminal refugee/migrant subject here is not an ongoing experience because in their everyday lives, for example, second-generation immigrants momentarily reside in structures such as the norms and values of the host and parent cultures. Such structures can be experienced as either liberating or confining or both. Nonetheless, the point being that liminal subjects are constantly moving in and out of liminality as they experience the boundaries and structures of their multiple worlds. If we accept the relational dialectical notion of liminality found in the original work of van Gennep and Turner, then to reduce it to a permanent, static experience simplifies this experience and overlooks how migrants and refugees experience the world through the shifting modalities of structure and liminality. Migrants and refugees experience the world – like many of us - through structures and order as much as they experience it through fluid and open-ended processes. Neither are permanent conditions and as such the refugee and migrant threshold experience oscillates between periods of structure and fluidity never resting too long in either modality.

Conclusion

By providing a more detailed and deeper reading of van Gennep and Turner that is absent in contemporary refugee and migration research, the above discussion has provided a more complex and rigorous reading of the liminal refugee/migrant experience and theories of thresholds. In addition, I have introduced Trumbull’s conception of postliminium which has allowed us to move beyond the linear sequential account of thresholds evident in contemporary scholarship, consequently reconceptualising the threshold/liminal experience as part of a looping phenomenon in which the third stage of the ritual process is not an endpoint but potentially the beginning of new journeys back through the threshold. This return is not just a physical journey back home, but can represent a cultural, emotional and psychological return home in the present. Moreover, this return, in its various manifestations, would allow researchers to better demonstrate how the refugee and migrant experience encompasses revisiting and reinforcing previous identities, values, practices and statuses (the postliminium process) but also how this return illuminates how refugees and migrants have renegotiated, resisted and reworked what encapsulated ‘home’. The return is never a return to the same. In addition, I have argued that the negative and positive accounts of the liminal refugee/migrant experience adopt an either/or approach when evaluating the analytical potential of liminality. This understates the ambivalence of liminality found in van Gennep’s work and minimises Turner’s dialectical assessment of liminality and its relationship to the liminoid. To conceptualise liminality as internally differentiated in which some types of liminal subjects revert to that which they contest means to acknowledge the existence of multiple liminal migrant/refugee subjects. Drawing on both the liminal and the liminoid would provide deeper insights into the migration journey. Additionally, at an analytical level, incorporating the idea of structural liminality is more reflective of the refugee and migration experience in which neither structure nor liminality is privileged. Such a conceptualisation means that the permanency thesis adopted by some of the migration and refugee literature overlooks how liminality and structures are mutually constitutive processes. Reinterpreting the liminal refugee/migrant experience as one of shifting modalities in which migrants may alternate between a world of order and structure – whether that be the host or origin culture - and one of fluidity and flexibility means that researchers can provide a more nuanced picture in which refugees/migrants may not always settle within one mode of existence.