Liminal to Liminoid, in Play, Flow, and Ritual: An Essay in Comparative Symbology

First I will describe what 1 mean by "comparative symbology" and how, in a broad way, it differs from such disciplines as "semiotics" (or "semiology") and "symbolic anthropology," which are also concerned with the study of such terms as symbols, signs, signals, significations, icons, signifiers, signif ied~, sign-vehicles, and so on. Here, I want to discuss some of the types of sociocultural processes and settings in which new symbols, verbal and nonverbal, tend to be generated. This will lead me into a comparison of "liminal" and "liminoid" phenomena, terms which 1 will consider shortly. According to Josiah Webster's lexicographical progeny, the people who produced the second College edition of Webster's New World Dictionary, "symbology" is "the study or interpretation of symbols"; it is also "representation or expression by means of symbols." The term "comparative" merely means that this branch of study involves comparison as a method, as does, for example, comparative linguistics. Comparative symbology is narrower than "semiotics" or "semiology" (to use Saussure's and Roland Barthes's terms), and wider than "symbolic anthropology" in range and scope of data and problems. "Semiotics" is "a general theory of signs and symbols, especially, the analysis of the nature and relationship of signs in language, usually including three branches, syntactics, semantics, and pragmatics." 1) Syntactics: The formal relationships of signs and symbols to one another apart from their users or external reference; the organization and relationship of groups, phrases, clauses, sentences, and sentence structure. 2)Semantics: The relationship of signs and symbols to the things to which they refer, that is, their referential meaning. 3) Pragmatics: The relations of signs and symbols with their users. In my own analyses of ritual symbols, "syntactics" is roughly similar to what I call "positional meaning"; "semantics" is similar to "exegetical meaning"; and "pragmatics" is similar to "operational meaning." Semiology seems to have rather wider aspirations than semiotics, since it is defined as "the science of signs in general" whereas semiotics restricts itself to signs in language, though Roland Barthes is now taking the position that "lin-