Losing liminality: Turner’s theory of transition in the funerary archaeology of Prepalatial Crete

Abstract

Over fifty years after the publication of Arnold van Gennep’s (1909) Les Rites de passage, anthropologist Victor Turner (1967) adapted and expanded upon van Gennep’s theory of transition, formulating the now ubiquitous concept of ‘liminality’. From education to performance studies, geography to psychology, there are few disciplines which have yet to embrace the ‘liminal’ in interpretative discussion, defined by Turner as a precarious, interstructural position in social dynamics, frequently associated with pollution and taboo. Another fifty years since Turner’s development of the concept, this paper argues that the popularity of liminality in archaeology has led to its interpretative depreciation, now so far removed from its theoretical origins that it has become an unhelpful synonym for all that is unfamiliar or anomalous, rather than the transitory process of becoming Turner proposed. Through the discussion of the Prepalatial tombs of Crete, it is illustrated that the uncritical invocation of the ‘liminal’ hinders the investigation of other interpretative lines of inquiry: questions of marginality, exceptionality, and the impact of our own unfamiliarity with bodily decomposition on our perception of the past. By highlighting the continued influence of the liminal – despite contradictory archaeological data – on our understanding of prehistoric practices and beliefs, it is argued that liminality cannot continue to be accepted either as a universally applicable concept or convenient metaphor, but must instead be recognised and critically evaluated as a fundamentally theoretical model.