Liminality
Headlines in past weeks have touted reduced greenhouse gas emissions as COVID-19 halts travel and industrial activity. If not for the suffering and death, the pandemic could be a climate activist’s dream: grounded flights and idle cars.
It’s tempting to see emissions reductions as a silver lining in this bleak time, but the Wall Street Journal reports that past economic slowdowns have caused only temporary reductions in emissions. A few months of reduced emissions will mean nothing if we return to business as usual once the pandemic is over.
This pandemic offers us something else if we can look a little deeper: the chance for a mindset shift in our society and culture.
Anthropologists who study transitions discuss “liminality” or “liminal space:” the ambiguous spaces that lie between two ways of being or two ways of seeing the world. We know that liminal spaces hold special power—they are time out of time, spaces outside the ordinary where familiar structures and certainties dissolve.
Societies intentionally create liminality to facilitate transitions, removing people from the ordinary through rites of passage, pilgrimages, monastic living, or initiation ceremonies. In the secular, modern United States, we create liminality by sending young people into the wilderness, to retreats, to volunteer placements, or to foreign countries. We expect them to return carrying new wisdom.
As an educator on study-abroad courses, I watch students enter a liminal space as they learn to function in communities and cultures different from their own. After a few months, their routines, demeanors, and baseline assumptions about the world begin to align with the local people’s. Researchers studying students who return from foreign cultures find that the effects of liminality linger well past the immediate culture shock. Even after a decade, the process of reintegration leaves them with new beliefs, habits, and ways of relating to the world. Things are never quite the same.
This moment in history is a liminal moment. Liminality does not give us answers; rather, it gives us a choice where none seemed to exist before—a choice as to how we should continue living in the future. This moment of paused emissions is important because we have left behind the “usual” and are not just thinking about alternatives, but living them. Our culture itself is being thrown into question.
“Culture” can be hard to identify under “normal” circumstances, and even more so for those who have never lived outside their home context. In this moment, we are like fish out of water, looking back at our culture, the water from which we emerged. A few months ago, it would be difficult to imagine some of our recent departures from the norm: a near total shutdown of commercial air travel, payment of a universal basic income, or entire cities agreeing to stay within a mile of home. We have loosened our membership in the ever-growing crescendo of busyness and spending that characterizes our system.
This liminal space is an extraordinary opportunity to look more deeply not just at our culture, but at the way we approach problems. With climate change, we’re caught in a paradox: we need large-scale policy shifts, but most of those policies imply lifestyle and cultural shifts that the general public is unprepared to implement. Without a societal commitment towards sustainability, we’re just asking how we can feel environmentally friendly while maintaining our affluent way of life. So our approach to climate change isn’t open to all solutions; we’re open only to solutions that also prop up what is familiar and comfortable to us. That’s why we are attracted to solutions like electric cars. They let us feel good without challenging our membership in the system that spawned climate change in the first place. Yet while this system is on pause, liminality can expand our ideas of what is possible and help break us out of entrenched ways of thought.
When I give talks about culture and climate change, people almost always ask me the same question: “What can I do in my own life to address climate change?” They’re usually looking for a quick fix—a silver bullet they can incorporate into their life and sidestep the tension of the truth: our culture causes climate change. Really, what they are asking for is a way to avoid the uncertainty of stepping into a liminal space.
I answer that question with a reminder: you constantly take part in creating the cultural landscape in which you live. Our current landscape is inhospitable to many climate change solutions, including large-scale climate policy—they’re outside of what we define as allowable and normal. We need a culture that is open to more than just new technologies. After all, many of those technologies serve to reinforce cultural causes of climate change like our individualism, our fast pace of life, our consumerism, and our fragmented communities. We need to be accepting of lifestyles that are localized and focus on non-material goals. We need to remember how to be happy with what we have.
Shifting culture is no small task, but we need a new cultural landscape where a sustainable future can take root. When the pandemic is over, will we rush to return to our former conceptions of normal? Perhaps, instead, we will allow ourselves to lean into this liminal space, let it transform us, and with it transform the cultural water in which we swim.
In This Issue
Baan Tamui’s Forced Adaptation
Adversity pushes us; it can be uncomfortable and unsettling. A community in the Mekong River Basin, living in synchronicity with the natural rhythms of the Earth, presents a model of adaptation as they overcome major disruptions that threaten their livelihood and identity.
Snapshots
Shapshots is one of our reflection activities, part of the series “Digging In.” This is a tool to help understand the power that liminal spaces hold, and how it can affect your own life.