Liminality
Victor Turner's term, from the Latin limen (threshold), for the ambiguous, 'betwixt and between' condition of a person passing through the margin phase of a rite of passage — stripped of ordinary status markers and often treated as ritually dangerous or polluting. Turner argued liminality produces communitas, an intense, temporary sense of leveled equality among people undergoing it together, unstructured by the hierarchies that govern them the rest of the time.