Back to the Future? Towards the Post-Liminal Phase of Covid-19

The Covid-19 crisis represents one of those situations in life, where ‘normality’ as we know it is temporarily suspended; situations that make some of us immobile. After this crisis, are we going back to our habitual routines and ways of moving like before? Or are we going back to a future that we (re)imagined during the lockdown at the individual, community, or global levels?

In the short movie ‘Quarantine mood’ Alessandro Marinelli documented what he saw from his terrace during the Covid-19 lockdown in Rome. People were passing time on balconies sitting, playing, kissing, dancing, running, riding a bicycle, singing, and applauding the community. It is impossible to say if these are habitual or unusual activities. And yet something about them during the quarantine makes immobility “a mode of engagement with the world” (Bissell and Fuller 2010), bringing new societal and ethical concerns to the fore, as well as the potential for undetermined transformation.

As a transitional experience, the Covid-19 pandemic and the subsequent immobility might generate “a condition of potentiality for being affected and affecting events” (Kofoed and Stenner 2017), for consolidating a new sense of community and imagining what may be from this point on. This is what makes the pandemic a liminal event, or better yet a liminal hotspot like Stenner and Kaposi suggested: “a phase which comes between past and future yet belongs neither to the past as we knew it, nor to the future as we imagined it.”

The Covid-19 as a ‘Liminal (Im)mobile Event’

Liminality is a concept developed in anthropology to study those rites in life-course transitions (e.g., birth, marriage) that mark the passage from a social situation and status to another (Van Gennep 1961). The pandemic follows the three-phase structure of rites: 1) in the phase of separation, the person/group separates physically and symbolically from a previous social status/state; 2) in the liminal phase, the past state/status and norms are temporarily suspended, and the future is not reached yet; 3) in the post-liminal phase, the person/group re-integrates with a new status/state.

Liminality is now also a prism for understanding our contemporary world, in particular, those experiences that throw us into unpredictable, ambivalent, and (permanently) suspended situations (e.g., global terrorism, revolutions, gambling) with the disappearance of previously existing boundaries (Thomassen 2014). While in a classical liminal experience we know that the event will end sooner or later, in this pandemic, like other contemporary events (Szakolczai 2017), a permanent ‘liminal hotspot’ condition is created, without any certainty as to when or if the transition will end (Stenner, Greco, and Motzkau 2017). At the time of writing in May 2020, when some were gradually returning to ‘normality’, many questions such as, when the virus started, where it came from, whether and when it would end and what would come after, remained unanswered.

1. The Separation: #Stayathome Or #Underlockdown

In January 2020, the coronavirus started to spread globally. Entire countries were put in quarantine. People were asked to stay home. This lockdown had a major impact on our capacity to move or simply plan our movements, as well as on the way we relate to others. For a starter, the immobility of the lockdown, environmental analysts admitted, had an impact on the ecosystem and emissions of CO2 over a period of few months, leading to an incomparable drop in carbon output. The lockdown had given space to wild animals to move around in the urban areas, while restricting the movements of other travelers, like migrants, refugees, tourists, students or businessmen. The effects on mobility were diverse, however, especially for those who could not rely on a secure shelter or income, and for whom staying home was not possible (Cresswell 2020). The pandemic had brought to the fore the relational interplay of mobility and immobility: the immobility of some was clearly contingent on the mobility of others. While some worked from home, others had to continue moving to deliver goods to those who stayed in. The effects of immobility were very diverse. ‘Home’ had become an unsafe place for those experiencing domestic violence. Some families were also confronted with gender imbalance when attempting to reconcile work and child-care. Some people, moreover, may have lost their jobs during the lockdown.

2. The Liminal: How Can We Move Now?

A transition might lead to identity changes, the learning of new activities, but also new meanings attributed to the world surrounding us vis-à-vis the present situation (Zittoun 2006). Staying or not home, maintaining or not the distance, wearing or not the mask, for example, came to inform the making of symbolic (and moral) boundaries between (new) categories (e.g., the ‘runner’). The crisis, in certain cases, led to increasing waves of populism and xenophobia (Vertovec 2020). On a more positive note, the lockdown has influenced narratives about possible responses to climate change and made us reflect on more sustainable mobilities (e.g., smart-working, cycling). In the last months, there has been an increase of attention towards unsafe life and work conditions for some, such as refugees, women and children; victims of abuse, day laborers or mobile workers, such as couriers. Some of us might have engaged in activities we would have never imagined before, for fun or necessity; some might have started running, dancing, cooking, painting, singing, or have contacted old friends we rarely were in contact with. Or engaged in daydreaming and imaginative journeys to escape the present, reach alternative destinations through imagination (Cangià and Zittoun 2020), and picture the holidays we would probably not have this year.

3. The Post-liminal: Future (Im)mobilities

Some may be considering a return to the past, as things were before as if nothing has happened. Hopefully, however, all these emerging concerns could help develop more sensitive policies from the part of governments across the globe. But how could we configure the post-liminal phase of the pandemic? Disciplinary boundary-crossing across social sciences, humanities, and other sciences could contribute in this sense to understanding this crisis and its aftermath (Salazar 2020). The concept of liminality, in particular, provides us with a critical, transdisciplinary, and temporally sensitive lens to understand the existential and societal consequences of this massive event in contexts and with regard to phenomena that are usually considered unrelated (Thomassen 2014). At the same time, this concept might help unpack the diverse human experiences of a transition, while shedding light on the inequalities and potentialities of (im)mobility.

Liminality is much more than the experience of an in-between phase, it is also about a potential becoming (Stenner 2017), both about what will be and what could be in the future (Turner 2001). By considering the transformative qualities inherent to a liminal event like the pandemic, we could understand immobility as a terrain for change (Cangià in press 2021) and possibly “collaboration across difference” (Tsing 2015), avoid the risk of permanentizing this experience by feeling stuck in the present, and rather build on our visions of the future. We could reflect on past ways of traveling and how to travel from now on, while keeping in mind the inequalities of mobility that were amplified during the crisis, as some scholars on tourism have already done (Lew et al. 2020). Or explore meanings, practices, and encounters during the lockdown, and see how these affect the way we remember the past, re-configure the present, and re-imagine future (im)mobilities. Through imagination, rather than simply picturing the future, we could look from the future back to the present and imagine memories of the lockdown and the whole crisis (Horx 2020). We could then ask ourselves how our lives have changed with this event, or whether and why they have not changed at all.

Flavia Cangià is a Senior Researcher at the University of Fribourg (Switzerland) associated with the NCCR Lives and the nccr – on the-move.

References:

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– Cangià, F. (in press 2021). Liminal Moves. Travelling Along Places, Meanings and Times. Berghahn Books.
– Cangià, Flavia, and Tania Zittoun. 2020. Editorial Special Issue: Exploring the Interplay between (Im)Mobility and Imagination. Culture & Psychology, 2020.
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