preliminal rites (or rites of separation): This stage involves a metaphorical 'death', as the initiate is forced to leave something behind by breaking with previous practices and routines.This three-fold structure, as established by van Gennep, is made up of the following components: In doing so, he placed a particular emphasis on rites of passage, and claimed that 'such rituals marking, helping, or celebrating individual or collective passages through the cycle of life or of nature exist in every culture, and share a specific three-fold sequential structure'. He distinguished between those that result in a change of status for an individual or social group, and those that signify transitions in the passage of time. Van Gennep began his book by identifying the various categories of rites. Van Gennep, who coined the term liminality, published in 1909 his Rites de Passage, a work that explores and develops the concept of liminality in the context of rites in small-scale societies. The term has also passed into popular usage and has been expanded to include liminoid experiences that are more relevant to post-industrial society. The dissolution of order during liminality creates a fluid, malleable situation that enables new institutions and customs to become established.

During liminal periods of all kinds, social hierarchies may be reversed or temporarily dissolved, continuity of tradition may become uncertain, and future outcomes once taken for granted may be thrown into doubt. More recently, usage of the term has broadened to describe political and cultural change as well as rites. The concept of liminality was first developed in the early twentieth century by folklorist Arnold van Gennep and later taken up by Victor Turner.

During a rite's liminal stage, participants 'stand at the threshold' between their previous way of structuring their identity, time, or community, and a new way (which completing the rite establishes). In anthropology, liminality (from Latin līmen 'a threshold') is the quality of ambiguity or disorientation that occurs in the middle stage of a rite of passage, when participants no longer hold their pre-ritual status but have not yet begun the transition to the status they will hold when the rite is complete.

Sooner than later synonym