The following quote is from pg 35 of Playing Indian by Phillip Deloria.
"The liminary participants enter a peculiar and ambiguous social space. 'Betwixt and between' the categories of social life, liminality is the experience of the social 'other.' Neither here nor there, the perticipant in the liminal experience is, socially speaking, 'elsewhere.'
This confers immunity for otherwise unlawful acts; it provides an alibi and an excuse. It is also, perhaps, the fulfillment of wishes that cannot ordinarily be satisfied, or in other words utopia."
A couple of years ago I read My Freshman Year by Rebekah Nathan. The author, an anthropology professor, lives in the dorms and takes classes with all the other freshman. In the process, she gains an understanding of student culture. This drastically alters the way that she teaches, and she wrote the book to share her insights with the higher education community. Towards the end of the book, she analyzes her experience through an anthropology lens, and describes college as a liminal experience. Unfortunately, I had no idea what a liminal experience was. This is why I was excited to find a good definition of the word liminal, and to find that I was in the same boat as colonial America.
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