Dr. Jonathan Schwartz—an educator for more than 25 years and a member of the New Canaan High School social studies department for the last 10—on Tuesday morning cited a cultural anthropologist’s 1909 term “liminal transformations” for 300-plus students in caps and gowns, and their hundreds of family members and friends in the stands at Dunning Field. Developed by Arnold Van Gennep, the term represents “the middle stage of significant cultural transformations,” Schwartz said. For Van Gennep, he said, “important rituals exist in every culture to bridge the liminal phase, as it is also a time of great upheaval and vulnerability for those members of society who are undergoing these transformations.”
“Although Van Gennep focused exclusively on small-scale tribal societies, it’s apparent to me that a high school graduation ceremony perfectly demonstrates what he was driving at,” Schwartz, guest speaker during the NCHS class of 2026 graduation ceremony, said from the podium on a comfortably sunny, breezy day. “You graduates have left the familiar routine of high school behind, but you haven’t yet stepped into what comes next. You are suspended between two worlds, sitting on this field in caps and gowns that make you look less like young adults and more like a secret society of initiates.”
And those new initiates also will experience something unique, with their vulnerabilities and insecurities, Schwartz said: “communitas.” That’s a 1967 idea developed by symbolic anthropologist Victor Turner where there’s a “unique state of being, a flash in time, in which a group of disparate individuals, all about to head off in unique directions and blaze new trails, will, just for one magical moment, be exactly the same,” Schwartz said, an “exceedingly vulnerable,” “achingly ephemeral” and “beautiful moment” that “will be forever etched in their collective memory” and upon which they will “build their future selves.”
“Our liminal phases, this liminal phase right now, matter precisely because there is a chain of events that lead to it, and that it might not have occurred had this community not banded together and done thousands of imperceptible and relatively tiny daily individual tasks that cumulatively allowed the great transformation of which these graduates are now on the cusp,” he said.
