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This article proposes that Homo sapiens is best understood not as a fixed species, but as a fundamentally liminal one — suspended between the biological and the symbolic, the instinctive and the transcendent, the animal and the imagined. Drawing on Victor Turner’s concept of liminality and recent evolutionary anthropology, the paper argues that our defining human traits — bipedal posture, symbolic language, permanent sexuality, awareness of death — are not stable endpoints, but transitional structures. They emerge from an evolutionary trajectory marked by rupture, ambiguity, and the constant crossing of thresholds.
The article examines multiple dimensions of this liminality: the body as symbolic surface; the mind as boundary between sensation and abstraction; the erotic as displaced instinct; and the sacred as a response to existential discontinuity. It concludes that Homo sapiens’ creative, unstable identity is rooted in its status as a species eternally crossing thresholds — never fully animal, never fully divine, and never entirely at home in the world it has transformed.
This liminal condition, far from being a weakness, may be the source of our unique symbolic capacities — and of our deepest discontents.
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Title Homo sapiens as a Liminal Species: Ambiguity, Symbolism, and the Evolutionary Unfinished
This article proposes that Homo sapiens is best understood not as a fixed species, but as a fundamentally liminal one — suspended between the biological and the symbolic, the instinctive and the transcendent, the animal and the imagined. Drawing on Victor Turner’s concept of liminality and recent evolutionary anthropology, the paper argues that our defining human traits — bipedal posture, symbolic language, permanent sexuality, awareness of death — are not stable endpoints, but transitional structures. They emerge from an evolutionary trajectory marked by rupture, ambiguity, and the constant crossing of thresholds.
The article examines multiple dimensions of this liminality: the body as symbolic surface; the mind as boundary between sensation and abstraction; the erotic as displaced instinct; and the sacred as a response to existential discontinuity. It concludes that Homo sapiens’ creative, unstable identity is rooted in its status as a species eternally crossing thresholds — never fully animal, never fully divine, and never entirely at home in the world it has transformed.
This liminal condition, far from being a weakness, may be the source of our unique symbolic capacities — and of our deepest discontents.
Work type Narrative, Essay
Tags sexual signaling, death and ritual, symbolic mind, liminality, bipedalism, posthumanism, narrative identity
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Identifier 2507102460513
Entry date Jul 10, 2025, 12:07 PM UTC
License All rights reserved
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Author. Holder Fernando Olalla Carabias. Date Jul 10, 2025.
Information available at https://www.safecreative.org/work/2507102460513-homo-sapiens-as-a-liminal-species-ambiguity-symbolism-and-the-evolutionary-unfinished
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Registration: 2507102460513
