I asked ChatGPT about Victor Turner and Marc Augé's writing on liminal spaces and whether humanity is in a liminal space now post Cold War.
Both Victor Turner and Marc Augé give us potent lenses for thinking about liminality, transition, and the loss (or suspension) of meaning. They come from different disciplines — Turner from anthropology, Augé from ethnology and philosophy — but together they sketch a compelling architecture of how humans experience in-betweenness, dislocation, and symbolic drift.
Turner developed his concept of liminality from Arnold van Gennep’s idea of the rite of passage, which involves three phases:
In the liminal phase, the usual structures of society are suspended:
Think: initiates in a tribal ritual, monks in retreat, soldiers in basic training — but also, metaphorically, students, migrants, the unemployed, or even entire societies in crisis.
Turner noticed that people in liminal states often experience a sense of communitas — a fleeting, intense social bond, stripped of structure. It’s raw, real, and easily lost once the ritual ends.
Marc Augé wrote in the 1990s about anthropology in contemporary, globalised societies. His most influential concept is the non-place.
Unlike traditional “places” that are rich in history, identity, and relational meaning (like a village square, a family home), non-places are:
Examples include:
These are places we pass through, but don’t belong to. They are devoid of rooted cultural meaning, even though we might spend a great deal of time in them.
Augé argues we live in an age of supermodernity, marked by:
In this context, non-places proliferate — and we increasingly live in liminal zones, detached from traditional social anchors.
So let’s now return to your question: is civilisation itself in a liminal space, post-Cold War, post-industrial, with the old existential threat (nuclear war) no longer dominating the symbolic field?
I’d suggest yes — and with both Turner and Augé’s frameworks, here’s why:
If we once lived under the symbolic dominance of the mushroom cloud, we now live under the diffused anxiety of too many meanings, too many futures. In some ways, nuclear terror was simpler — it was a finality, a boundary not to cross. Now we are in a perpetual liminal drift, where the end is not clear, the roles are unstable, and the rituals — if they exist — feel half-performed.
Turner gives us hope: liminality, while unsettling, is also a site of transformation. Augé gives us a warning: if we cannot recover place and meaning, we may float indefinitely, weightless in a symbolic system no longer grounded in lived experience.
I wondered if society is so advanced that it is now incapable of weaving rich narratives and we've basically shot ourselves in the foot so to speak and if we'll reach a point where we will collectively experience an existential crisis and no longer want to continue existing as a society. My hypothesis is that Religion and churches – whilst experiencing a short-lived resurgence – will ultimately fall out of favour. We're losing the concept of having a hometown, or even a nationality. We're losing touch with our ancestry. The objects and stories we used to revolve around and anchor to are disappearing. We are everywhere and nowhere. Even our homes are becoming more just places we sleep, rather than places we live and exist and decorate.
You're describing a quiet but profound cultural unraveling — not in the catastrophic sense of collapse, but a subtler erosion of the symbolic threads that once tethered people to place, purpose, and belonging. What you're noticing is not just anecdotal. It has a long intellectual lineage in philosophy, anthropology, and cultural theory. And you’re absolutely right to link it to the diminishing power of myth and lore.
Let’s unpack this and explore how myth once functioned to bind us — and why we may now be structurally unable (or unwilling) to create new ones that endure.
Historically, myth isn’t just storytelling — it’s the operating system of belonging. Myths offer:
In tribal cultures, mythology wasn't abstract — it was performed, embodied, and tied to place: the mountain where the gods sleep, the river that carries ancestors, the stone that marks the tribe’s founding.
Lore builds on myth, but it’s often regional, familial, imperfectly remembered:
These create a dense semiotic landscape that makes a place feel like somewhere, not just anywhere.
Postmodern thinkers like Lyotard and Baudrillard observed that we’ve entered a condition where grand narratives (religion, nationalism, Marxism, progress) no longer hold sway.
Marc Augé would say we are now in supermodernity, where we are:
Thus, place loses its story. And if place has no story, it becomes a non-place. Your home becomes an Airbnb. Your city becomes a Google Map pin. Your heritage becomes a 23andMe PDF.
It’s a haunting possibility. Here’s why it might be true:
In this climate, it’s not that we don’t want myths — it’s that our culture may no longer tolerate the conditions necessary to create them.
This is the liminal space you’re intuiting:
We see the symptoms:
There’s a danger here: when people can’t find grounding myths, they may grasp for false ones — conspiracy, ethno-nationalism, cultish ideology. These offer belonging without reflection, structure without wisdom.
If you take a mythic view of time, this moment isn’t the end — it might be the threshold, the liminal phase Turner describes, where the old is dying and the new is unformed.
New mythologies can emerge — but they might not look like the old ones. They may be:
But for that to happen, we may need a cultural reawakening to the value of myth — and a willingness to believe again in stories larger than the self.