“All things are so very uncertain, and that’s exactly what makes me feel reassured,” one of the Moomins observes in Tove Jansson’s masterwork of philosophy disguised as a children’s book. It takes a great spaciousness and sobriety of spirit to be vitalized rather than paralyzed by uncertainty. Most of the time, we brace behind structures of certainty to keep the native chaos of the universe, the fundamental indeterminacy and unpredictability of life, from drowning us in helplessness. But each time we part the bars of conviction and opinion to step out from this cell of certitude, or are evicted from it by some existential cataclysm, we discover that the most interesting parts of life, the most fulfilling experiences, the richest relationships, are found in the spaces between categories, in the unclassifiable, the unnameable, the deliriously disorienting.

In 1969, after nearly two decades of living among the Ndembu people of Zambia, the Scottish cultural anthropologist Victor Turner (May 28, 1920–December 18, 1983) took up the question of how we classify and declassify life in his classic The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure (public library).

Terming these fertile in-between spaces liminality — a word coined a generation earlier by the French ethnographer and folklorist Arnold van Gennep from limen, Latin for “threshold” — Turner observes that all rites of passage have liminality at their center: the moment between renouncing the familiar fixed point and reincorporating into the transformed state. This is why in every society those who live in liminality — those who either choose to or are forced to exist in the margins — are those most likely to be catalysts for transformation.

Half a century before Rebecca Solnit insisted in her epochal manifesto for active hope that “power comes from the shadows and the margins,” Turner writes:

The attributes of liminality or of liminal personae (“threshold people”) are necessarily ambiguous, since this condition and these persons elude or slip through the network of classifications that normally locate states and positions in cultural space. Liminal entities are neither here nor there; they are betwixt and between the positions assigned and arrayed by law, custom, convention… Liminality is frequently 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.

Liminality is a function of, and made possible by, what Turner terms communitas — the recognition of “an essential and generic human bond, without which there could be no society.” Different from community in that it doesn’t necessarily involve “an area of common living,” communitas is a kind of social anti-structure — an alternative organizing principle to the standard model of society as “a structured, differentiated, and often hierarchical system of politico-legal-economic positions with many types of evaluation, separating [people] in terms of ‘more’ or ‘less.'”

Ursula K. Le Guin, whose daring defiance of gender, race, and class structures was greatly influenced by Turner’s work, captures the contrast perfectly:

Structure in society… is cognitive, communitas existential; structure provides a model, communitas a potential; structure classifies, communitas reclassifies; structure is expressed in legal and political institutions, communitas in art and religion.

Turner writes:

Communitas breaks in through the interstices of structure, in liminality; at the edges of structure, in marginality; and from beneath structure, in inferiority. It is almost everywhere held to be sacred or “holy,” possibly because it transgresses or dissolves the norms that govern structured and institutionalized relationships and is accompanied by experiences of unprecedented potency… Instinctual energies are surely liberated by these processes.

Intuition — what we call these “instinctual energies” — may indeed be nothing more than those rare moments when we break the rim of our structured reality and glimpse, however briefly, a truth larger and more fluid than any container can hold, touching within it the sacred liminality of life itself.