Faculty Commencement Address Liminality

By Rebekah Barry, History Department Chair

Good morning, and to the Class of 2023, congratulations. Today is your day. It is a day to celebrate all that you have accomplished over the last four years and all that is to come. As you look out at the family, friends, classmates, and teachers here in celebration of you, know that even as you move forward you can always tap back into the strength and support of this community.

Indeed, if I had to start and finish with a single lesson that would be it: As you move through life, find those with whom you can most fully be yourself, and turn to them, for laughter, love, and guidance. But you know this already.

Throughout the year, you have modeled self-reflection and vulnerability in your Servons talks, mining lessons from The Princess Diaries and Dr. Seuss, Rosie the Tarantula and Max the Dog, Tyler Steinkamp and Kendrick Lamar, Mama Mia and “ghost trains.” And let’s not forget the two T’s: Teacups and Taylor Swift.

Although your voices and your journeys were distinct, again and again, you spoke about finding, trusting, and learning from each other. Hold on to this.

Hoping that you will carry that lesson forward, today I thought I would instead begin with a concept known as liminality. In simplest terms, liminality accounts for the mid-points in life, where one stands at the threshold of a new status. You all – in this very moment – are in a liminal state, with our graduation ceremony serving as a ritual rite of passage that marks your transition from high school student, to graduate, and to all the possibilities that that new identity holds. On a deeper level though, liminality allows us to explore what anthropologist Victor Turner described as a sort of in-betweenness or “subjunctive mood,” where we hover on the cusp of what is: not real…yet.

It is these “not real, yet” transitions that I want to explore further by sharing three short anecdotes. The first story is about a cave, the second takes place at the Pentagon, and the third is a story not my own, but of a woman who was called “the biggest, loudest, and indisputably, the rudest mouth” of feminism and radical politics in 1974.

All three highlight how the power to imagine can be a call to action. For it is precisely in these moments – where anything is possible because nothing is yet certain – that our capacity to imagine catalyzes forward momentum.

The first anecdote takes place on a high desert plain abutting the Sierra Blanca Mountains of New Mexico. Here, if you look closely across the horizon, you might perceive a subtle and unexpected dip, a place where the earth attempted to swallow itself: a steeply-sided sinkhole, at the bottom of which is a craggy, mouthlike entrance that gives way to a vast and awe-inspiring cave system.

In the 1990s, I had a chance to explore this cave as part of a four-person research team, and although there is a much longer backstory – not just of the cave’s geological evolution but also its connections to Kit Carson, Billy the Kid, and the Apache Wars of Resistance – given our liminal focus today, I figured I’d start in the middle, quite literally. It had been slow going for over five hours as our team, guided only by the glow of our headlamps, traversed limestone ravines, lept across crevices slick with mud, and scrambled through passages with names such as Bat Cave, Devil’s Backbone, Hell Hole, and Satan’s Shoofly.

We eventually arrived at what seemed to be a dead-end; but here, the lead researcher instructed us to snap off our headlamps and sit in the pitch-black stillness. At first, nothing. But slowly, as our eyes adjusted to the absence of light and our ears became attuned to the silence outside of one’s own pulse, there it was. A whisper of air: the telltale sign of a much larger passage beyond.

We dug clear the headway of what proved to be a hidden, man-made tunnel, and up second, I scrambled toward the small opening. Suffice to say, this was a one-at-a-time sort of operation, a precaution in case the tunnel collapsed.

To enter, you had to turn yourself upside down, easing your head and shoulders into the hole and then slithering your now-inverted body down a slope, until you could draw yourself flat onto your belly. From there, you would push your pack in front of you, and then use your elbows to drag the rest of your body forward. Over and over again, for more than 150 feet, about the length of two back-to-back tennis courts.

Halfway through, I paused to rest. As I did so, I shifted my head, my helmet scraping the ceiling of the passageway, and rocks rained down on the backside of my body. There I was: buried underground, suspended in fear, neither here nor there. It was a liminal moment in every sense: frozen at the mid-point of the passage in what felt like middle earth. Heart pounding in my ears, and panic, like a lead weight, settling into my belly.

Standing here today, you will have guessed that I made it through – twice in fact, as this was a round-trip situation. But my story thus far is really just a preamble to help you imagine a more important consideration: that the tunnel existed in the first place. As a point of fact, the manmade tunnel that I found myself suspended in took seven years of digging, with a hundred excursions mounted in the 1960s by just a handful of cavers. Take a moment to picture this: bucket-by-bucket, meticulously excavating a 150-foot passageway sized by one’s own shoulder girth and guided only by the lure of faint airflow…for seven years. Talk about existing in a subjunctive state of “not real, yet.”

As female spelunkers Sue Carson and Becky Rohwer described in a witty “cave ballad,” digging cave tunnels requires “dirt and sweat and pain” and that you be “a little bit insane.” I would argue that what Sue and Becky joke about as insanity is, in reality, unmitigated conviction, and that this is critical fertilizer for discovery.

But what is most striking to me is that the dirt, sweat, and pain that spelunkers endure as they weasel their way through rock, stone, and earth – never knowing what they may find on the other side – is seeded by just a hint of air. I think that leads to a question that is worth holding on to as you all cross this threshold into the next stage of your lives: What does it mean to follow the wisp of a dream, to pursue the allure of even faint possibility? There is the question too of what to do when you get stuck. Here, cavers have some back-pocket wisdom that I also think is worth holding onto. As long-time tunneler, Lee Skinner, boils it down, “Dreaming and digging are two different things, and only the latter [makes] any progress.”

This is to say, sometimes you just have to “dig in,” which is ultimately what I had to do. Elbow over elbow, I slithered through. And on the other side of my panic was hands-down one of the most exceptional things I have ever seen – an underground canyon with 50-foot flowstone walls, dry rimstone pools, pristine stalactites and stalagmites, and rare “velvet” and “rainbow” rock formations. What a gift.

Seeing however, that most of us rarely find ourselves in caves, I want to offer another anecdote, where the qualities of “dreaming and digging” borrowed from Skinner might be applied to a very different realm and, moreover, inspire us to think – not just about discovery – but also about societal change.

As such, I am going to draw you forward to the early 2000s, when I was working for the Air Force in their strategy division at the Pentagon. One project that I was involved with was a publication called The Handbook for Joint Urban Operations. In simplest terms, these Handbooks provide a common playbook used across all the different military branches to ensure coordinated operations. A key feature of these documents is that they are typically based on precedent and thus reinforce preexisting rules and norms.

I should pause and note that I was the only woman in this division, and generally the only woman in any given meeting that I attended at the Pentagon. And although many of my immediate male colleagues quickly became mentors and role models, this was still a time when it was all too frequently assumed that I was in the room to take notes.

Perhaps that provides some context for why, in the last round of editing the Handbook, I decided to swap out every “he” and “him” pronoun with “he/she” and “him/her” in referring to what is known as the Joint Force Commander. It was only a slight grammatical adjustment, but it did break a well-established precedent in countering the assumption that military leadership is male.

In the final review of the Handbook, one of the Marines who I was coordinating with commented, “But there has never been a female Joint Force Commander.” And I remember responding, “But there could be.”

When I was working at the Pentagon in the early 2000s, it felt ambitious to imagine a female Joint Force Commander. At that time, there were only 30 female commanders period, much less a commander with authority over a multi-service force. Today, 23 years later, women such as Air Force General Lori Robinson – who is the first woman to lead a top-tier combat command – continue to shatter glass ceilings. The persistence of women, such as Robinson and so many others, is a reminder of the grit and determination involved in trailblazing.

This recollection also makes me appreciate the linguistic adaptations our LGBT and queer friends are asking for, as an act of envisioning a world where “they” can more fully belong. As civil rights activist DeRay McKesson argues, “We can’t fight for what we can’t imagine.” He points out that historically marginalized communities and their allies and accomplices are fighting for a world that we have never lived in, and that part of the work is to speak that world into existence through the act of imagination.

It is this sort of imagining that Black Lives Matter co-founder Alicia Garza describes as having the potential to carry us “fearlessly further than we’ve gone before.” Unlike the whisper of possibility that motivates cavers to tunnel further toward new discoveries, here, many already share a clear vision for where we hope to go – a vision for a kinder, more equitable, more just, and sustainable world – and while that world has not been fully realized yet, we hold on to the possibility that “it could be.”

You all will play a role in moving us forward, and there will be smaller acts, a commitment to more inclusive language perhaps, as well as larger efforts and watershed moments. Some of you, like General Robinson, may even become a “first.”

And yes, there may be times when you tune into the news and feel defeated or stuck, but as anthropologist Margaret Mead once said, “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.” Like Skinner’s acknowledgment that it takes “dreaming and digging” to make any real progress, societal change requires both as well. As McKesson notes: “Hope is not magic; hope is work...The work at hand is hope-work.”

One of the joys of teaching is that it fills me with hope, year after year after year. The knowledge that we are graduating students like you into the world is inspiring, as you have already proven to be dreamers and diggers in so many ways…and you have only just begun. For while your future paths are “not real, yet,” they are marked by what Turner described as the “unprecedented potency” of the subjunctive moment.

My advice to you is thus to always create space for possibility, even if it is a mere whisper, and then forge ahead, digging in and doing the work, whatever that may mean or be for you.

And lastly, perhaps you will take a page from the playbook of lawyer, civil rights activist, and radical feminist Florynce Kennedy, aka “Flo.” In her biography film, Gloria Steinem said, “Sometimes the only way you can get attention to the problem…is to break the form. You have to stop playing the game in order to change the content.”

Steinem was describing her good friend Flo. Tireless, fierce, and flamboyant, Flo pursued change, relentlessly, and she did so on her own terms and in her own way, typically wearing her signature cowboy hat and pink sunglasses. Flo’s story reminds us that: as important as “dreaming and digging” a better world into existence is the imagining of self.

Four years ago, you took a leap of faith in joining this community, not knowing what it would be like or who exactly you would be in it. You found your way, and you also found yourselves. As your Servons talks so beautifully captured, during your time here you had to envision – and at times, re-envision –the “you” that you wanted to be. Keep doing this. Throughout your life, and like Flo, unapologetically so. Because as Kiowa novelist and poet N. Scott Momaday writes, “We are what we imagine…Our best destiny is to imagine, at least, completely, who and what, and that we are.”

To conclude – especially on a day that is awash with so many words – I will leave you with just a handful.

Dream and dig toward discovery. Hope and work toward change. The former inspires the latter; yet, to make real progress, we have to do both. And along the way, don’t be afraid of “breaking form” and “changing the game” as you envision both our world and your place in it. Because we are what we imagine… or at least, we could be.

Thank you, and heartfelt congratulations to the exceptional Class of 2023. It has been an honor sharing these past four years with you.