Arnold van Gennep in the context of "Rites of passage"

Historical anthropology is a historiographical movement which applies methodologies and objectives from social and cultural anthropology to the study of historical societies. Like most such movements, it is understood in different ways by different scholars, and to some may be synonymous with the history of mentalities, cultural history, ethnohistory, microhistory, history from below or Alltagsgeschichte. Anthropologists whose work has been particularly inspirational to historical anthropology include Emile Durkheim, Heinrich Schurtz, Arnold van Gennep, Lucien Lévy-Bruhl, Marcel Mauss, Clifford Geertz, Jack Goody, and Victor Turner.

Peter Burke has contrasted historical anthropology with social history, finding that historical anthropology tends to focus on qualitative rather than quantitative data, smaller communities, and symbolic aspects of culture. Thus it reflects a turn in 1960s Marxist historiography away from 'the orthodox Marxist approach to human behaviour in which actors are seen as motivated in the first instance by economics, and only secondarily by culture or ideology', in the work of historians such as E. P. Thompson.

In anthropology, liminality (from Latin limen 'a threshold') is the quality of ambiguity or disorientation that occurs in the middle stage of a rite of passage, when participants no longer hold their pre-ritual status but have not yet begun the transition to the status they will hold when the rite is complete. During a rite's liminal stage, participants "stand at the threshold" between their previous way of structuring their identity, time, or community, and a new way (which completing the rite establishes).

The concept of liminality was first developed in the early twentieth century by folklorist Arnold van Gennep and later taken up by Victor Turner.