In such situations, “the very structure of society temporarily suspended” one where normal limits to thought, self-understanding, and behavior are undone. Turner posits that, if liminality is regarded as a time and place of withdrawal from normal modes of social action, it potentially can be seen as a period of scrutiny for central values and axioms of the culture where it occurs. One's sense of identity dissolves to some extent, bringing about disorientation, but also the possibility of new perspectives.

'The attributes of liminality or of liminal personae ('threshold people') are necessarily ambiguous'. He became aware that liminality “.served not only to identify the importance of in-between periods, but also to understand the human reactions to liminal experiences: the way liminality shaped personality, the sudden foregrounding of agency, and the sometimes dramatic tying together of thought and experience”. In the various works he completed while conducting his fieldwork amongst the Ndembu in Zambia, he made numerous connections between tribal and non-tribal societies, “sensing that what he argued for the Ndembu had relevance far beyond the specific ethnographic context”.

Within the works of Turner, liminality began to wander away from its narrow application to ritual passages in small-scale societies. In 1967 he published his book The Forest of Symbols, which included an essay entitled Betwixt and Between: The Liminal Period in Rites of Passage. Turner, who is considered to have “re-discovered the importance of liminality”, first came across van Gennep’s work in 1963.

Turner the forest of symbols