On your first day you are added to a dozen chat groups and a new laptop is waiting on your desk. And you know perfectly well you are still an outsider. The moment you actually feel like one of them comes much later, and it happens somewhere specific — an all-hands where someone mentions your name and the room laughs.
This page takes that kind of occasion apart. It is easy to read as empty formality, but the mechanism is finer than that: the work is done by the stretch in the middle where you belong nowhere; the force people feel in a crowd comes from somewhere they systematically misidentify; and most of the modern occasions that feel intense change nobody's position at all.
You have handed in your resignation and the new job starts next month. Where are you for those two weeks? You are still in the old company's chat groups, but nobody tags you; the new company has not added you yet. You belong nowhere, and most people just want the stretch over with.
In 1909 the Frenchman Arnold van Gennep published Les rites de passage. He was an outsider who never held a proper chair at a French university. What he did was lay initiations, weddings, funerals and installations from all over the world side by side, and find that the skeleton was always the same: separation, liminality, incorporation. First you are prised off your old position, then you are held for a while in a state that is nothing at all, then you are fitted into another position. For that middle stretch he borrowed the Latin word limen, a doorway threshold, which is why it is now called liminality.
The person who made that stretch vivid was Victor Turner. From 1950 to 1954 he did fieldwork among the Ndembu of north-western Zambia, then Northern Rhodesia. One thing he recorded is called Mukanda: boys of a certain age are taken away from their mothers into a camp built in the bush and stay for months. The camp rules are hard — no ordinary clothes, no ordinary names, differences of birth flattened out.
In The Ritual Process (1969) Turner wrote that such people are neither here nor there: not one of the slots society keeps ready will fit them just then. And it is precisely in that slotless time that something grows, which he named communitas — the bare connection left between people once every difference of position has been stripped off. Those boys still recognise each other decades later on the strength of a few months.
The mechanism, plainly: a new identity cannot be loaded into someone who is still occupying the old one, so the old one has to be dismantled first. The discomfort is not a side effect of the transition; the discomfort is the dismantling. You have seen the small version at work — the real change never happens in the email announcing the reorg, it happens in the weeks afterwards when nobody knows who you report to.
Be clear about the evidence: this is a comparative framework plus a set of ethnographic cases, not a falsifiable hypothesis. Van Gennep did no such fieldwork himself; he worked entirely from other people's records. It holds up because a century later it still applies wherever you point it, not because it was ever tested.
In the second a goal goes in, tens of thousands of people stand up and shout the same syllable. You get goosebumps even if it is not your team. Afterwards it seems slightly absurd — you did not care that much who won.
In 1912 Émile Durkheim published The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life. He had never been to Australia; he worked from Baldwin Spencer and Frank Gillen's 1890s accounts of the Arunta (now usually written Arrernte), especially the all-night gatherings of a whole group. He read these as religion in its earliest form — a premise that no longer stands: the idea that the simplest society shows the earliest stage was an evolutionary assumption of the period, and the material was second-hand besides. What collapsed is the premise; what survived is the mechanism.
He called that mechanism collective effervescence. Ordinarily people live scattered lives; occasionally they assemble and sing, move and shout together, and the temperature in the room goes up. At that point people genuinely feel a force, and feel that it is not theirs — that it is pressing in from outside. Durkheim's decisive step: the force is the assembled group itself, and that is exactly what the people in it cannot perceive. So it gets hung onto something concrete and nearby — a pole, a flag, a logo.
Which yields something you would not otherwise see: sacredness is not a property of the object. It is the residual heat of an assembly, stored in an object. That explains the odd fact that a relic looks unremarkable on an ordinary day and can detonate a crowd the moment it is insulted.
Is there harder modern evidence? One piece. In 2011 Ivana Konvalinka and colleagues published, in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, a set of measurements from a fire-walking ritual in the Spanish town of San Pedro Manrique: heart-rate monitors on 12 fire-walkers and 26 spectators, nine of whom were relatives or close friends of a walker, the rest recruited at random hours before the ritual. The related spectators' heart-rate dynamics tracked the walkers'; the unrelated ones did not. Evidence: one site, a very small sample, and no way to randomly assign who is whose relative — it shows that co-presence produces physiological synchrony, not which way the causation runs.
The laboratory side has to be discounted. In 2009 Scott Wiltermuth and Chip Heath had people walk and sing in step and then cooperate more in economic games; in 2010 Schachner and Garvin ran a direct replication of the third of those experiments and did not get it. In 2017 Mogan, Fischer and Bulbulia pooled 42 studies (4,327 people) and put synchrony's effect on prosocial behaviour at around 0.28. So the force is real, but much smaller and much more conditional than a century of people quoting Durkheim have implied.
In 2004 Randall Collins, in Interaction Ritual Chains, broke it into four conditions you can check one at a time: bodies in the same place, a barrier keeping outsiders out, attention locked on the same thing, and a shared mood. With all four, people leave carrying what he calls emotional energy.
In 2013 Dimitris Xygalatas and colleagues published a study from Mauritius in Psychological Science. The local Hindu community keeps the festival of Thaipusam, which includes two rituals: one is collective prayer and singing; the other, the Kavadi, involves piercing the skin with hooks and skewers and dragging weights up to a temple. The researchers worked with 86 men and afterwards invited them to donate anonymously to a local temple.
The result has two layers: Kavadi performers gave more than prayer participants; and people who merely watched the Kavadi also gave more than prayer participants. The higher the self-reported pain, the larger the donation. Evidence: a field quasi-experiment, one site, an all-male sample — trust the direction, not the number as a universal constant.
The mechanism is that a cost settles the matter. Anyone can say they are one of us, and saying it costs nothing; taking on an ordeal that cannot be faked leaves nothing to doubt. Which is why the second layer matters most: the audience is not there to gawk, it is a required part — a cost nobody witnesses has no recipient.
So what are all the intense modern occasions? Turner poured cold water on that himself. In 1982 he proposed a second word, liminoid, for the things in industrial society that have the shape of liminality but not the substance: festivals, marathons, all-night hackathons. Two differences — they are optional, and your position is unchanged when they end; genuine liminality is compulsory, and the person who comes out has been rewritten. The word never caught on, but the distinction is hard: however intense the offsite, if you return to the same job it was not a rite of passage.
Real modern passages are elsewhere: graduations, weddings, courtroom oaths, being introduced to the room on your first day, funerals, a last day at work. What they share is not grandeur but a public declaration, after which other people genuinely treat you differently. Without that step the transition stays suspended — which is often why someone is still asking you to approve things six months after you left.
One side of this has to be stated plainly: a ritual that makes an in-group necessarily makes an out-group. The same mechanism that binds the people in the room also marks out who is not in it — the other face of the boundary-drawing covered in the piece on the power of groups. Functionalists read social integration in these facts; conflict theorists read exclusion and the reproduction of rank in the same facts. The disagreement is not about the observations but about which face counts as the main effect, and that is still contested.