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Three Stages

 

            
             In Victor Turner's The Ritual Process, he argues the significance of rites of passage as religious practices. In explaining their significance Turner identifies three stages that mark the transition in rites of passage. The three stages he identifies are the preliminal stage, the liminal stage, and the postliminal stage. .
             Turner describes the preliminal stage as the separation from structure. He argues that the preliminal stage is significant because it is "likened to death, to being in the womb, to invisibility, to darkness, to bisexuality, to the wilderness, and to an eclipse of the sun or moon."(p.95) In this stage a person is "neither here nor there,"(p.95) but somewhere in the middle. In the preliminal stage a person is no longer in their previous state but has not ye moved on the their next state.
             In the liminal stage there is separation from structure but it is more closely related to an anti-structure rather than a return to structure. In the liminal stage there is a community that provides structure. This community is composed of all of the people that made the transition from the preliminal stage. The difference between communities and structure is that "communitas is of the now; structure is tooted in the past and extends it to the future through language, law, and custom."(p.113) This community, Turner speaks of, plays a very big role in the rites of passage. "Community is the being no longer side be side (and above and below) but with one another of a multitude of persons, And this multitude, though it moves toward one goal, yet experiences everywhere a turning to, a dynamic facing of, the others, a flowing from I to thou. Community is where community happens."(p.51) The community in the liminality stage helps to shape society because people's desires to reach liminality again is what keeps them functioning in society on a day to day basis. And people's day to day actions mirror society, therefore liminality shapes society.


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