Sixty years after van Gennep, an anthropologist working among the Ndembu in what is now Zambia went back to the middle movement and stayed in it for a book.

Liminal entities are neither here nor there; they are betwixt and between the positions assigned and arrayed by law, custom, convention, and ceremonial.

Victor Turner, The Ritual Process, 1969

The person in the margin is described by subtraction. No status, no property, no insignia, no rank, no kinship position, nothing worn that would mark them off from anyone beside them. They are ground down to a uniform condition, and the grinding is the point, because what is being removed is everything that would tell them apart.

What appears in the space is not disorder. Turner calls it communitas: the flat, unstructured, intensely felt fellowship of people who are all equally without position. It is the thing everyone remembers about the trench, the ward, the retreat, the flood.

Then the observation this work is built on. Some people do not come out. Monks, mendicants, court jesters, whole orders and movements take the middle phase and settle in it, and the condition that was designed to be temporary turns out to be habitable, and a society can hold a permanent population of the not-yet-anything.

van Gennep described a corridor. Turner found people living in it.