Montagu (1983) recommends instead instilling a sense of wonder and discovery, where school could become a “magic casement that opens on unending vistas of excitement,” instead of “a restrictive, linear, one-dimensional, only too often narrowing experience" (p. 147). Montague highly recommends:

good movies, good theater, the ballet, dance, art galleries and museums, good periodicals of every sort, all substantially contribute to that human literacy that is at once them most vital and the most rejuvenating of all our accomplishments. We learn by looking toward the future, and how we learn, and what we learn will to a great extent influence that future. (p. 147) ∆RC[mp5]

Lastly, Homi Bhaba’s concept of the "third space" provides a hybrid position between fundamentalism (gerontomorphic) and its liberal response (pedomorphic), and is similar to what Mary Poppins herself does, providing a third space between the fundamentalism of George Banks and the liberal response of his wife, Winifred. Bhaba (1990) explicates:

Rather hybridity to me is the "third space," which enables other positions to emerge. This third space displaces the histories that constitute it, and sets up new structures of authority, new political initiatives, which are inadequately understood through received wisdom . . . . The process of cultural hybridity gives rise to something different, something new and unrecognizable, a new area of negotiation of meaning and representation. (p. 211)

Lastly, we see this move afoot in the culture, during the 1960s at the time that Mary Poppins was released. The gerontomorphic strategy was be represented by the establishment, while the pedomorphic strategy was adopted by the counterculture. These two opposing strategies were polarized during that decade, and still are in our world today. Mary Poppins represents a third way, between the fundamental and the liberal, and the course that Anzaldúa (1999) and Bhaba (1990) posit, a hybridity between banks may be our only hope. During the scene-play, we will see these gerontomorphic and pedomorphic dynamics play out further. Another “in-between” third space is liminality, so let us take the opportunity to take yet another look at liminality. ∆RC[mp6]

Excursion into Liminality

Here We Go Again—Liminality Reiterated

Here we go again with liminality, which shows up about as often as the eternal return, and it should, because liminality is intimately related to the eternal return, being a part of this pervasive pattern. Liminality is a concept that was introduced by Arnold van Gennep in 1908 in his book Rites de Passage, which was not translated into English until 1960. van Gennep uses the term liminality to describe the transition phase of rites of passage and it comes from the Latin limen, which van Gennep notes means threshold, a doorway, or entranceway.

Thresholds are also a piece of hardwood or stone at the bottom of a doorway. Separating grains or seeds from their stalks, husks, etcetera is called threshing, which is usually done by slapping the stalks against something. The Indo-European root for threshold is ter II: with some derivatives referring to twisting, boring, or drilling and piercing, and others referring to the rubbing of cereal grain to remove the husks, and thence to the process of threshing either by the trampling of oxen or by flailing with flails, to rub, turn. Thresh and threshold come from the Germanic threskan to thresh or to tread (AHD, 2000c, p. 2051), while other derivatives of ter II are from the Greek tornos, meaning a tool for drawing a circle, lathe, and the Latin tornare, to turn as in a lathe. From tornos and tornare come words like tornado, return, turn, detour and attorney (Shipley, 1988, pp. 407-408). I find it interesting that Victor Turner would write about thresholds, and that I as an attorney would be so drawn to them! By looking at the etymology of threshold, we can anticipate that the stage of liminality, is not always pleasant. But grains do get set free of their old structures when they are threshed and then new things can be made from them or they can be planted and the cycle will continue. ∆RC[mp7]

van Gennep’s rite of passage applied to all rituals of transition: from calendrical and cyclical rites involving entire societies, including travel and territorial passages; to life transitions involving the change in status of individuals or groups; initiation rites such as puberty, marriage, and death; but also including pilgrimages, and visionquests. van Gennep saw that these rites had in common three different phases, which he labeled separation, transition, and incorporation.

Different rites would focus on different phases. Marriage rites, for example, would typically focus on the incorporation phase, while funeral rites would typically focus on the separation phase. In the separation phase, the focus was on clearly demarcating a space and time from the profane, or the construction of a cultural realm that was defined as out of time (van Gennep, 1908/1960, p. 24). In Mary Poppins, we see this separation phase at the beginning when Bert “sets the mood,” so to speak. This occurs just after the opening credits finish, when in a spontaneous reverie, Bert alludes to the eternal return—“I feel what’s to happen all happened before.” At Disneyland, Main Street USA, too, has this function. [This idea is explained more fully in the "Child of the Times" excursion, located on Main Street USA in the "Extra Excursions" chapter] Symbolic behavior during these rites concentrated on detaching from previous social positions and statuses, and often there was reversal or inversion of the status quo.

The transition phase, also referred to as margin or limen was a period or area of ambiguity, which Victor Turner later characterized as antistructure and where symbolic behavior continued to involve inversion and reversal. V. Turner was most interested in this phase, which we will be exploring in more depth. The incorporation or reaggregation phase concerned a return to a new status and relatively well-defined positions. During the liminal phase, old statuses were no more, and new statuses were yet to be. V. Turner talks about antistructure as involving liminality and communitas. Communitas is a particular quality often present in liminality. V. Turner found that participants in rites of passage and pilgrimages often experienced communitas—a feeling of connectedness, of familiarity, freedom and equality. By communitas, V. Turner (1982b) meant “a liberation of human capacities of cognition, affection, volition, creativity, etc. from the normative constraints” of ordinary life with all its cultural categories, roles and statuses (p. 44).

Communitas—The Power of Connection

Communitas is characterized by spontaneity and immediacy, and is not usually long lasting. Spontaneous communitas is a “direct immediate and total confrontation of human identities,” which, when experienced makes you “think of mankind as a homogeneous, unstructured, free community" (V. Turner, 1974, p. 169). V. Turner (1969) notes that “communitas emerges where social structure is not” (p. 126), and so the liminal period, when the normal social structure is temporarily absent would be a logical place for it.

V. Turner (1969) notes that “communitas has also an aspect of potentiality; it is often in the subjunctive mood, relations between total beings are generative of symbols and metaphors and comparisons; art and religion are their products rather than legal and political structures.” V. Turner felt that “we may catch glimpses of that unused evolutionary potential in mankind which has not yet been externalized and fixed in structure” in the works of prophets and artists, who tend to be liminal and marginal people (pp. 127-128). ∆RC[mp8]

In Mary Poppins, communitas is present in “Jolly Holiday,” “I Love to Laugh,” the “Rooftops of London” adventure, “Step In Time,” and “Let's Go Fly a Kite.” The spirit of communitas is most truly portrayed however in the liminal lullaby “Feed the Birds,” which songwriter Richard Sherman (Stevenson, 2004, DVD) notes is the heart of the movie. During the scene-play, we will explore this in greater detail but "Feed the Birds" was Walt Disney’s favorite, because Sherman explains, "it summarized what to him what life is all about, humankindness." V. Turner (1969) explains the importance of communitas:

the notion that there is a generic bond between men, and its related sentiment of “humankindness,” are not epiphenomena of some kind of herd instinct but are products of “men in their wholeness wholly attending.” Liminality, marginality and structural-inferiority are conditions in which are frequently generated myths, symbols, rituals, philosophical systems and works of art. These cultural forms provide men with a set of templates or models, which are at one level, periodical reclassifications of reality and man’s relationship to society, nature, and culture. But they are more than classifications, since they incite men to action as well as to thought. Each of these productions has a multivocal character, having many meanings, and each is capable of moving people at many psycho-biological levels simultaneously. (pp.128-129)

Mary Poppins is a liminal mandala, which begins and ends in the twilight skies over London, and contains different “loops” or complementary scenes that open and then close around this central scene of “Feed the Birds. [link to liminal mandala] Mandalas according to Jung were symbols of wholeness, and before he came upon the mandala term, he used the term kaleidoscope (de Marrais, 2003, unpublished manuscript).

Mary Poppins was trying to create conditions for communitas, and this is also what Disney himself was trying to create in Disneyland. Disneyland combines two different parts of antistructure: commerce and communitas, because the marketplace Bakhtin (1963/1968) notes was a place of liminality especially in ancient and feudal times, as well as of communitas, because differences did not make as much difference when commerce was concerned.

As Hansen (2001) remarks “the bonds of communitas are antistructural in the sense that they are undifferentiated, equalitarian, direct” (p. 57). Hansen explains that such situations can occur spontaneously but they can also be organized as in initiations and rite of passage. As an example of spontaneous communitas, Hansen notes that V. Turner mentions the hippies of Haight-Ashbury in San Francisco in the 1960s. Hansen adds that drugs facilitated destructururing of consciousness (p. 57).

Turner’s Topic Mirrors the Turbulent Times

Synchronistically, in 1964, V. Turner wrote a paper about liminality called “Betwixt and Between: The Liminal Period in Rites de Passage.” This betwixt and between condition refers to the placement of the liminal period between two stable conditions. V. Turner's book The Ritual Process: Structure and Antistructure, published in 1969, elaborates on these ideas.

Hansen (2001) explains that rituals serve to assist individuals with psychological changes that occur as a result of these changes in status and they also help to solidify the new structure. Hansen also points out the dangers inherent in liminal periods, and quoting anthropologist Mary Douglas notes:

“Ritual recognizes the potency of disorder. In the disorder of the mind, in dreams, faints and frenzies, ritual expects to find powers and truths which cannot be reached by conscious effort. Energy to command and special powers of healing come to those who can abandon rational control for a time.” In disorder, comes power, too, in disorder there is danger . . . . All this is directly applicable to the trickster because he is a denizen of the interstitial realm. (pp. 66-67)

When things or people change, whether states, positions, styles of organization, etcetera, there is an interval of liminality, which however brief, constitutes a moment of “pure potentiality” where the past is momentarily negated, suspended, or abrogated and the future has not yet begun” and in this instant, “everything, as it were, trembles in the balance.” (V. Turner, 1982b, p. 44)

V. Turner (1982b) then discusses revolutions, insurrections and romanticism as “late social processes”—in these times or movements there is an inversion and the liminal becomes the norm:

For in these modern processes and movements, the seeds of cultural transformation, discontent with the way things are culturally, and social criticism, always implicit in the preindustrially liminal have become situationally central . . . . Thus revolutions, whether successful or not, become the liminal, with all their initiatory overtones, between major distinctive structural forms or orderings of society . . . . Revolutions, whether violent or nonviolent, may be the totalizing liminal phases for which the liminal of tribal rites de passage were merely foreshadowings or premonitions. (p. 45)

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