There are moments in life when we are no longer what we were, but we are not yet what we will become. It is in these suspended, uncertain and sometimes disorienting spaces that liminality is located: a condition of transition which, from an anthropological concept, has today become a key to understanding the sense of confusion widespread in contemporary societies, especially among the new generations.
What is liminality: the anthropological meaning
The term “liminality” comes from Latin limenor “threshold”. It was introduced and coined by the anthropologist Arnold Van Gennep way back in 1909, in the work Rites of passagewhere he described the rituals that accompany changes in social status, the most common of which are: birth, puberty, marriage and death. Van Gennep identified three phases in which the individual experienced liminality, or the transition to a new identity: separation, the margin (or liminal phase in which one turns to change) and reintegration into society with the new “form”.
Subsequently, Victor Turner deepened and took up the concept again, defining the liminal phase as a state “betwixt and between” (translatable into Italian as “in the balance” or “halfway”): an ambiguous condition in which ordinary social structures are suspended and the individual does not fully belong to either the previous or future position.
In many traditional societies, this suspension was governed by collective rituals that provided meaning, direction, and symbolic containment.
From modernity to liquidity
In contemporary societies, however, rites of passage have become weakened or fragmented. The entry into adulthood, for example, is no longer marked by a symbolically shared event, but by a series of often long and discontinuous transitions: end of studies, independent living, emotional stability.
The sociologist Zygumnt Bauman, in this sense, describes our era as “liquid modernity”, characterized by precariousness, mobility and instability of identities. In this context, liminality is no longer a short and ritualized phase, but tends to become a chronic condition. Having said this, Bauman wants to tell us that uncertainty does not simply precede change, but becomes its norm: the boundaries between one phase of life and another are postponed or dissolve, generating a condition of continuous social indeterminacy.
In this sense, numerous contemporary demographic studies actually show a progressive postponement of the stages traditionally associated with adulthood. According to the data Eurostat 2024the average age at which young Europeans leave their parents’ home today exceeds 27, with peaks above 30 in some Southern European countries. At the same time, the average age at first child and the duration of educational courses appear to be increasing.
Jeffrey Arnett, a social scholar, defined this phase emerging adulthooda new socio-psychological category that would extend approximately between the ages of 18 and 29, characterized by identity exploration, instability and a sense of possibility but also uncertainty. In anthropological terms, we could interpret it as a prolonged liminality: a threshold (or margin, as Van Gennep said) that extends over time, without a clear moment of reintegration.
Rethink loss in a positive light
It has been fully analyzed how the liminal phase involves a temporary loss of references: the categories that defined our role as student, child, partner or worker become unstable and transitory, change or fall. In the absence of collective rituals that offer meaning to these transformations, the individual can experience anxiety, a sense of inadequacy, a perception of being behind peers or even of personal failure. What in other eras was recognized as a shared passage today tends to be internalized as a private difficulty.
However, liminality is not just vulnerability. As Turner observed, it is also a space of potential creative transformation. In fact, it is precisely in the suspension of social structures and roles that possibilities for redefining identity, experimentation and social innovation open up. The threshold, in other words, is not just a void, it is an open space, full of possibilities.
The critical issue of contemporaneity is therefore not the existence of the threshold, but its growing individualization. When the transition is experienced in solitude, without collective narratives that legitimize it, it risks being perceived as a deviation from the norm rather than a shared condition. For this reason it becomes crucial to recover a more social and community dimension of the liminal experience. Sharing uncertainty, through networks of peers, educational spaces and communities, including digital ones, means giving change back a relational framework that makes it less threatening and more intelligible.
Recognizing liminality as an analytical category, in this sense, means removing confusion from individual guilt and placing it in a shared social framework.
