Introduction An Anthropological Lens on End-of-life Transitions and Liminality

The end of life and death are moments of transition and liminality (Jordan et al. 2015). Without clear markers to establish the threshold at which a person begins to die (Kaufman and Morgan 2005), several transitions nonetheless mark the non-linear trajectories of people who are on this pathway: a time of illness, a time of end-of-life (hours, days before death), a time of death (Fortin and Le Gall 2025) and a time beyond death (Lavoie et al. 2009). More precisely, this liminality is an in-between phase, a transition between the representations of “no longer” and “not yet” (Zulato et al. 2025). Introduced by Arnold van Gennep at the start of the last century (1969 [1909]) through a study on the rites of passage, the concept of liminality clarifies the phases of transformation from one state to another: the phase of separation from an initial state, the liminal phase where the person experiences their marginalization in relation to a normalized state, and lastly, the phase of a new state of being. As expressed by Victor Turner (1977, 37), the liminal phase is the one that “evades ordinary cognitive classification, too, for their neither-this-nor-that, here-nor-there, one-thing-not-the-other. [...] They are in a sense ‘dead’ to the world, and liminality has many symbols of death.” Following the example of van Gennep and beyond the phenomenon of rites of passage, this concept has been rethought many times since in an effort to better grasp the social phenomena experienced by humans. Existence is made up of routines and repetitions, but is also punctuated by situations that are outside of “everyday normality” (Thomassen 2014, 2), such as the experiences of dying and death touched upon in this issue. More recently, with Bjørn Thomassen (2014) and Basak Tanulku and Simone Pekelsma (2024), the experience of liminality becomes that of inbetweenness (Thomassen 2015, 40). This transitional experience, whether individual or collective, concerns beings in the making rather than fixed entities (Horvath, Thomassen and Wydra 2015, Tanulku and Pekelsma 2024). It applies simultaneously to spaces (thresholds, zones, places), time (moments, periods, eras), and to the experiences of humans at the individual and collective level, that is, groups (social) or the whole of society (Thomassen 2014). This experience can arise (which is often the case) without immediately calling into question everyday life (in other words, liminality is not intrinsically extraordinary), just as a space can be liminal for one person without being so for another. That is the nature of a palliative care home, for example. It is a liminal place for a patient and their relatives, while being the day-to-day for the healthcare staff. This in-betweenness, this in-between zone, belongs to people who cross the boundaries of several categories, as well as to those who simultaneously experience illness and health, life and death (MacArtney 2016), or physical vulnerabilities and an objectified social identity (Nicholson et al. 2012), on the margin of normal social classification. In this context, this liminality becomes disruption, ambiguity, continuity or even permanence. However, not everything that is liminal is perceived negatively. This in-betweenness can also represent hope, or even the sacred in societies that bestow a status or special role upon it (Cummings, this issue). Sometimes, it’s also an invisible (such as pain, for example) and potentially stigmatizing experience as it is not associated with an illness or dysfunction (Jackson 2005). This liminality is both the bearer of uncertainty and suffering and of hope and transformation for the sick person and their relatives. It is also an agent of reorganization, transformation or way of being in the world and in relation to time, space, and others …