Synopsis: Liminality & Ekstasis

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Summary Ekstasis and the Internet: liminality and computer-mediated communication. —

Dennis D. Waskul is a scholar at the Minnesota state university and writes a lot about sexuality and the online. This article is less about sexuality but tries to articulate a new conceptual framework through which we can understand the internet. Waskul does this by applying the concept of liminality as described by anthropologist Victor Turner to the internet.

The texts start by explaining how nothing in the digital world is ‘there’, everything needs to be constructed - made to exist - through symbols, words and images that represents ‘us’. The question is how must we understand the internet in relation to our society, culture, communication and personhood? The article aims to analyse and understand the internet from a distance and create a framework base on the theoretical model of liminality articulated by Victor Turner (1967, 1969).

So what is this concept of liminality? According to Victor Turner (who in his turn based it on the work of anthropologist Arnold van Gennep (1909)) there are two parallels that we live by in this world. On the one hand the ‘structure of rural, political and economic positions, offices, statuses, and roles, in which the individual is only ambiguously grasped behind the social persona’ and on the other end there is the ‘society as a communitas’ a relatively unstructured and undifferentiated comitatus, community or even communion of individuals.

The text continues looking at different anthropologists who used liminality in their writings, ending with George Herbet Mead. He sees human selfhood exists out of separate, yet dialectical poles of a single process; the I (the acting self-reflexive persona) and the ‘me’ (the social-self, composed of internalised sets of expectations largely embodied within the roles and structures of society),