Liminality

Victor Turner wrote a lot about ritual, and one of the concepts he expanded upon was that of the liminal state, the transition between one phase and another, a state rife with ambiguity, uncertainty, and often characterized by relative lack of structure. Some scholars have argued that an engagement period represents a form of liminality insofar as you are no longer truly single, but neither are you married. But I'm also currently in a liminal state for other reasons.


I currently live in the suburbs of Chicago and met my fiancé while he, too, was in school up here. When he finished his own schooling, he moved back to his home state of Tennessee, which is where we had agreed we wanted to live when we get married. The original plan was that I would move down there when I, too, finished school. But over a month after graduation, I'm still up here. Why? Because, to put it bluntly, humans are social beings and my grandmother has antediluvian morals. My very traditional grandmother has proclaimed that she would have a heart attack if we lived together before marriage (not an idle threat, because she does have cardiovascular problems... still, emotional blackmail much?) and on top of that has threatened to disown me. As infuriating as the situation is, it's not as though I can simply disregard her. She's batty and old-fashioned, but I still love her, and can't imagine her not being part of my life while she is still alive. 


Anyway, because of that whole situation, there are only two "legitimate" reasons for me to move down to Tennessee before the wedding: either be in school or have a job down there. Assuming everything even goes to plan (which is a whole other ball of wax), I would not be starting graduate school before fall semester of 2011. We want to get married before I start classes. So the key is to find a job down there, right? Unfortunately, it's hard to get employers to take you seriously when you're applying for positions from over five hundred miles away. (Since I plan to attend grad school, I'm not looking for anything serious or long-term, i.e. the kind of jobs where they might actually consider someone who plans to relocate.) And of course I can't get an apartment down there because no one will rent to me without having proof of some sort of income. Lovely little catch-22, isn't it?


The other thing currently nagging us is that we don't know where I'll be in graduate school. My top choice for both geographic and academic reasons is the University of Tennessee's Knoxville campus, but since this is graduate school, admissions is by no means guaranteed, and I have to have several contingency plans; hence the applications for Emory, University of Georgia, University of Kentucky, Appalachian State University, and my undergraduate alma mater the University of Illinois at Chicago (with the caveat that doing my MA and PhD at the same school as undergrad is not the most desirable option). Yes, my undergrad GPA was 3.76 with an in-major GPA of 3.88, but that doesn't guarantee anything. I still need to take the bloody GRE, and if I'm honest I'm terrified of not doing well on the mathematics section. It's not even just getting in with the programs; I also have to hope that schools will offer decent financial aid packages, assistantships, et cetera.


And to further complicate matters, UT has one of the most outstanding anthropology departments in the United States. I'm not sure if the fact that they're particularly geared toward biological anthropology helps or hurts me as a cultural anthropologist. There's one particular professor with whom I would love to work because his area of research dovetails beautifully with my preferred potential project; since UT attracts more biological anthropologists, there could conceivably be less "competition" to work with that particular professor. But if he isn't taking on new students for the semester I'm trying to get in, or if there are a bazillion more qualified candidates who want to work with the forensic anthropologists at UT and they take all the spots in that particular cohort, well, I'm SOL.


We have to proceed with the understanding that there is a not-insignificant possibility that I will be in Georgia, or Kentucky, or North Carolina, or even Illinois for graduate school instead of Tennessee. (My fiancé has stated that if necessary, he would move wherever I wound up in school, but I'd hate to do that to him.) Or worse, that I won't even get into grad school at all. But that's something I'd really prefer not to think about, because the prospects of that are simply devastating.


I miss being in school. Of course I am continuing to pursue independent research, but I miss the structure of having classes, of meeting with professors. I miss writing twenty-page papers and having someone who wants to read and grade them. It's bad enough that I'm seriously considering making the whole wedding planning process into a self-ethnography. (Kamy Wicoff sort of already did that in I Do But I Don't: Why the Way We Marry Matters, but this would be even more anthropological.)


Above all else.... I just wish there were a modicum of certainty about the relatively near future.


All of this is a long-winded way of saying, liminality can suck huge donkey balls.