What I've learned about transformation design thus far #10

The anthropologist Victor Turner, working half a century after Van Gennep, developed the concept of liminality into something profound.

Turner noticed that the liminal phase, the threshold, the between state, had particular characteristics. Those in liminality were stripped of status. The banker’s daughter and the baker’s son, both undergoing initiation, became equals. Social hierarchies dissolved. Normal rules were suspended. A different kind of social bond emerged, one Turner called communitas: an intense, unstructured community of equals, united not by social position but by shared experience of the threshold.

This communitas is qualitatively different from ordinary social bonds. It is characterized by directness, intensity, and mutual recognition. People in communitas see each other, actually see each other, in ways that social roles normally prevent. They are connected not by what they have or do but by what they are undergoing together.