Welcome To Shrinkonia. : About.

I have been there before. But when I get in the car I have no idea if I have to take a left or a right. If you follow someone you don’t pay attention to the actual route you are taking. You’re more occupied keeping up with the one before you. It’s something like that.

I need a map.

A map that describes the road from one culture to another. One that shows the transition from something to something else. One that marks Shrinkonia.

(Shrinkonian culture involves work as play; life and work as a beautiful, messy whole instead of as separate, needs-to-be-balanced parts; humans recognizing their potential as creators; humans getting more comfortable moving as collectives, individuals, and the space between; getting closer and allowing our lives to become exponentially better together.)

I know what Shrinkonia looks like. I have a poster hanging on my wall. I also know what it feels like if you are in between.

“In anthropology, liminality (from the Latin word līmen, meaning “a threshold”) is the quality of ambiguity or disorientation that occurs in the middle stage of rituals, when participants no longer hold their pre-ritual status but have not yet begun the transition to the status they will hold when the ritual is complete. During a ritual’s liminal stage, participants “stand at the threshold” between their previous way of structuring their identity, time, or community, and a new way, which the ritual establishes.” (source: Wikipedia)

If you focus for many years on projects you are obsessed with transition. You constantly work in a transitional state. Of course, you look at transitions, what else could you be looking for…

“During the liminal stage, normally accepted differences between the participants, such as social class, are often de-emphasized or ignored. A social structure of communitas forms: one based on common humanity and equality rather than recognized hierarchy. ‘”Communitas”…has positive values associated with it; good fellowship, spontaneity, warm contact…unhierarchised, undifferentiated social relations’. For example, during a pilgrimage, members of an upper class and members of a lower class might mix and converse as equals, when in normal life they would rarely converse at all or their conversation might be limited to giving or receiving orders. ‘Such collapsing of classes and occupations in the new community…a full-scale “Communitas” of equal beings’ may be of longer or short-lived duration. According to Turner, this sense of Communitas is created as the pilgrims “distance themselves from mundane structures and their social identities, leading to a homogenization of status”.” (source: Wikipedia)

Hmmmm. Could it be that I should be looking at the State of Shrinkonia is a Liminal State?

Does Wikipedia hold the map?

“Liminality has both spatial and temporal dimensions, and can be applied to a variety of subjects: individuals, larger groups (cohorts or villages), whole societies, and possibly even entire civilizations.The following chart summarizes the different dimensions and subjects of liminal experiences, and also provides the main characteristics and key examples of each category…”

	Individual	Group	Society
Moment	Sudden event affecting one’s life (death, divorce, illness) or individualized ritual passage (baptism, ritual passage to adulthood, as for example among the Ndembu).	Ritual passage to adulthood (almost always in cohorts); graduation ceremonies, etc.	A whole society facing a sudden event (sudden invasion, natural disaster, a plague) where social distinctions and normal hierarchy disappear; Carnivals; Revolutions.
Period	Critical life-stages; Puberty or teenage years.	Ritual passage to adulthood, which may extend into weeks or months in some societies; Group travels.	Wars; Revolutionary periods.
Epoch (or life-span duration)	Individuals standing “outside society”, by choice or designated; Monkhood; In some tribal societies, individuals remain “dangerous” because of a failed ritual passage; Twins are permanently liminal in some societies.	Religious Fraternities, Ethnic minorities, Social minorities, Transgender; Immigrant groups betwixt and between; Old and new culture; Groups that live at the edge of “normal structures”, often perceived as both dangerous and “holy”.	Prolonged wars, enduring political instability, prolonged intellectual confusion; Incorporation and reproduction of liminality into “structures”; Modernity as “permanent liminality”.

Hmmmm. Still sitting in my car. Parked. Monkhood? Seriously?