90 Our current age: a liminal age? Kim de Wildt There have always been several diagnoses to describe in which day and age we life and what defines us currently. These diagnoses are a means to describe what defines us in comparison to past generations and dynamics and to provide a prospect of the future. Everybody has heard of generation babyboom and the current generation is called generation Y. In Germany you have the ‘68-er Generation’ and currently ‘Generation Praktikum’, in the Netherlands there was ‘Generation Nix’ and nowadays the screenagers. Since the 1980s paradigm chances have been called within the humanities ‘turns’, such as the linguistic turn, the performative turn and the spatial turn. These turns designate new focal points within the analysis of culture and society. Since the Second World War these turns have also been designated as new intellectual fashions which swiftly follow one another. 1 I will probably not start a new fashion and do not even want to, but as someone who occupies herself with space as well as with ritual I cannot withstand the need to express some of my thoughts concerning this topic. Unfortunately, I need to complicate the analysis of our current multi-layered day and age even more. Besides the already mentioned phenomena of generations and turns I need to address other phenomena as well, which question the self-evidence of the past decades even more. It has never been the case that a complete culture could be subsumed under one particular header, whether it is generation y or performative turn. But nevertheless these labels refer to a certain day and age with a certain atmosphere and show the current state of affairs. Our present day can be regarded as either positive or negative, dependant on the eye of the beholder. Negative in the meaning of a loss of traditional forms of family, community, religion and an increasing materialistic hedonism, to name but a few. Positive in the sense of increas- ing possibilities to mould our own life, to express ourselves and to experience the advantages