Abstract

Moving from the structure of rites of passage, since Arnold Van Gennep’s renowned work (1909), to the essence of liminality captured by Victor Turner (1967), I propose a neurocognitive anthropological approach dealing with the bistable liminality found in human narrative imaginaries. In a brain-culture nexus, I will examine the liminal phase of the rites of passage by drawing on the enactive cognitive bistability property of the human brain. Recalling that the fundamental property of bistable systems is the alternation of two distinct states of stable equilibrium, I propose a model that identifies the neurocognitive bases on which the transcultural variations of narrative motifs related to metamorphosis can be woven.