HORVATH, Agnes; THOMASSEN, Bjrn; WYDRA, Harald.

Breaking Boundaries: Varieties of

Liminality. Berghahn Books. 2015.

Liminality and the search for Boundaries by the authors

p. 01

[] Liminality is a powerful tool of analysis that can be used to explore dierent problems at the
intersection of anthropology and political studies. Social scientists are increasingly sensitive to
concepts that advance their ethnographic and historical investigations. Liminality is such a
concept a prim through which to understand transformations in the contemporary world. []

p. 02

[] Originally referring to the ubiquitous rites of passage as a category of cultural experience,

liminality captures inbetween situations and conditions characterised by dislocation of
established structures, the reversal of hierarchies, and uncertainty about the continuity of tradition
and future outcomes. []

p. 03

[] As a fundamental human experience, liminality transmits cultural practices, codes, rituals, and
meanings in-between aggregate structures and uncertain outcomes. As a methodological tool it is
well placed to overcome disciplinary boundaries, which often direct attention to specific
structures or sectors of society. []

Liminality and Experience by Arpad Szakolczai

p. 12

[] The Latin limit is equivalent to the Greek press, so liminal, in the sense of removing the
limit, is identical to apeiron, the famous first word if Greek philosophy (Patoka 2002), contained
in Anaximanders first fragment. The word became a central category of Pythagorean thought,
and Plato and Aristotle discussed it in well known disquisitions.

p. 16

Dilthey intuited that human experience is not chaotic and random, to be constructed and
ordered by the abstract categories of the transcendental mind, or by a concrete, hubristic theorist;
rather, experiences has a structure of its own. However, he never managed to capture the exact
nature of this structure. []

p. 18

[] Whereas all rituals involve a real element of participation, initiatory rituals contain an extra
element of reality in the sense that initiates must succeed in their performance. The rite is not fully
scripted: the second phase involves a trial or test by which participants must prove themselves
ready to become adults, and they may fail to do so. Moreover, moving to another aspect of reality,
successful performance is not restricted to doing or completing something but extends to the
persons identity; success means the initiated becomes a new person: a child is converted into
an adult.

p. 22

Rites of passage suggest that the relationship between the limit and the unlimited is a matter of
sequential order. The limit has formative powers, this is why terms like limit, idea, form, and edits
are so central and linked for Plato. But these formative powers can be activated only if some
unformed material is available, that is, if lifting the previous limits creates a liminal situation. The
in-between, as a temporary situation betwixt two structured orders, is the apeiron itself. At this
moment the correct number can be imprinted, again the contrast between individual perspectives
is lifted and the shared experience leaves a common imprint. []

p.22

Greek language is particularly suited to capturing the ambivalence of liminal situations, as terms
like peras or peirar are markers of standards, while perao means both I pass through and
penetrated, pierce, or drive through with a pointed weapon; peira, trial and attempt; and
pera, beyond and further. For the Greeks, the limit as a separating device was inseparable
from the idea of actually going through the limit implying the experience of being at the limit. At
this point, we can move from Plato back to the contemporary theory and philosophy on the
experience of the limit, and the materiality and centrality of this limit.

p. 23

[] Much debate concerning performative speech acts and poststructuralism can thus be
resolved by recognising that under liminal conditions, discourses form reality and words might
become facts, whereas under stable, structured conditions words describe what exists.

p. 29

[] When trickster figures are mistaken for saviours, emotions are continually and repeatedly
incited until the community is reduced to a schematic state. Societies lacking stable external
referent points can maintain themselves in these oppressive, violent situations for a long time
without returning to normal order. Indeed, this is why schismogenic societies need to maintain
themselves in a perpetual state of was, presumably surrounded by enemies who try to conquer
and destroy them a presumption that, as a performative speech act, can become reality.

p. 29

The term transformation denotes part of a series. Something can be trans-formed only if it has
already been formed, and a formation process implies the existence of a thing to be formed:
some kind of human material that is ready for typing or stamping. Absent undue force and
violence, human attitudes, values, and identities can be formed only when previous certainties
have been at least partially dissolved by a move to the limit.

p. 30

The idea of the transformative events is not new; it is even common-sensical. After all, war,
revolution, or major economic crisis, just like major illness or a new emotional relationship,
changes lives of all those involved. Liminality, however, leads to understanding that such major
events literally and eectively transform the very mode of being of the individuals involved. The
formative power of liminality can be well illustrated through the phenomenon of love, which
appears not inside one person as a subject towards another person as the object, but exactly
in between.

p. 31

The striking receding of rituals in the modern times is nowhere more visible than in rites of
passage themselves, the most evident transformative rituals. []

Thinking with Liminality by Bjrn Thomassen

p. 40

[] Simply put, liminality is about how human beings, in their various social and cultural contexts,
deal with change. That dealing with change can pertain to something highly personal and
deeply intimate like falling in love, or to collective event, as when a community is forced to cope
with sudden occurrence like a natural disaster. []

p. 44

[] The key dierence for our purposes here is that Durkheim saw rites as simply the vectors by
which individuals became socially determined as acting and thinking beings. But because he
distinguished between religion as a collective and magic as private, Durkheim overlooked a
crucial aspect of rites that van Gennep stressed throughout Rites of Passage, namely, that they
can act at individual and collective levels simultaneously.

p. 47

[] Turner downplayed the extent to which liminal moments or liminal experiences might be
equally present in political or social transformations, that is, outside culture, in a narrow
understanding of that term. []

p. 50

[] Moreover, and as indicated from the outset, this schemes identification of types of liminal
experiences by no means implies that all these experiences are demarcated with a transition rite
at least, not clearly recognisable, institutionalised rites with identifiable masters of ceremonies, as
studies in the work of van Gennep.

p. 54

[] Liminality cannot be posited as the ultimate goal of human existence in limitless freedom, for
despite limit experiences importance, there has to be something to fall back upon. The constant
pressures to innovate and transgress boundaries at all levels of social life are in dire need of
problematisation. In this view, liminality stands as a crucial concept to diagnose the times in
which we live. why is it so bad the constant liminal space?

Inbetweeness and Ambivalence by Bernhard Giesen

p. 61

Social action presupposes a cultural order that in a structuralist tradition is generated by

applying distinctions and classifications. The two sides of a distinction refer to contrasting or
oppositional meanings that, by this opposition, constitute each other: thus inside hints at outside,
past at future, equality at inequality, salvation at condemnation, rationality at irrationality, justice at
injustice, parents at children, masters at servants. We do not know a concepts meaning unless
we can conceive of its opposite. However, our regular thinking tends not to refer to this opposite:
if is the excluded or silenced other possibility (Derrida 2010). Thus, reconstructing the excluded
has become the royal path of poststructuralist reasoning. But although mainstream cultural
sociology has only marginally theorised a third possibility the space in between the opposites,
the their possibility, the transition between inside and outside, the neither nor or the as well
as, the space of hybridity despite its centrality for non sociologists such as Homi Babha,
Gilles Deleuze, Michel Serres, and Yuri Lotman.

p. 62

The sociology of ambivalence reverses this position. It claims that ambivalences, disturbances,
paradoxes, misunderstandings, and exceptions are not critical risks to social order but rather
indispensable elements of this order. That is, stability of social order relies not only on neat
oppositions but also on the acceptance of the unclassifiable of surprises and coincidences,
ambiguity and fuzziness. []

p. 68

The transition that encourage male seduction was driven by a structural change that turned feudal
warriors into courtiers and, in the princely court, turned close encounters between men and
women who were not married to each other into a permanent experience. Violence and distance
could no longer regulate gender relationships under these conditions, so they were replaced by
dances, ceremonies, letter exchange, and courtesy. This shift was triggered and supported by a
change in the cultural framing of war. After a century of incessant warfare in Europe, was had lost
its heroic aura and was slowly changing into a matter of bodily drill of commoners. Baroque
warfare required the mechanical movements of bodies. In this context, mental qualities like
courage and daring decisiveness were an impediment rather than a propelling cause. Aristocracy,
having been militarily castrated by the princely sovereign, had to turn to new fields of noble
excellence. Thus the court intrigue substituted the battle and the exchange of erotic letters began
to rival the duel.

The Genealogy Political Alchemy by Agnes Horvath

p. 72

[] Though technology is widely considered a mere tool, and technological growth the highway to
property and a key to progress, a significant stream in social theory and political philosophy
(Heidegger 1967, 1969; Mumford 1967; Foucault 1974, 1982) has long argued that technologys
impact on social life is broad and deep, and that the transformation of nature and use of its forces
through technological means are ofter modelled on the similar organisation of human forces.

p. 90

Unlike inanimate stones, human beings put up strong resistance to external eorts to forcibly alter
their identity and destroy their integrity. But this resistance can be overcome by manipulative
stimulation of the strongest human aective impulse, Eros. Human beings whose desires are
artificially stimulated enter a state if deprivation and longing to regain their previous state of unity.
Thus they become ready to unify or mingle in way their previous state of integrity or intactness
would not have permitted.

Therefore manipulation of aectivity is a key aspect of liminality, the central way to elicit human
beings witness to give up previous identities and acquire new, ready-made, homogenised forms.
In our times, this mode of transformation dominates and has radically altered the world, all but
eliminating the borderline between nature and technology. []

Critical Processes and Political Fluidity by Michel Dobry

p. 98

To this end, the theory of fluid conjunctures (Dobry 1983, 1986) deals with the event by
replacing the focus on its outcome with sustained attention to, so to speak, what critical events or
processes are made of. To cope with the inextricable, complex range of junctions and collisions
among multiple and heterogeneous historical causal chains, this theory attempts to identify
classes of situation or configurations of interdependence, enabling us to think about systems of
constraints that constitute dierent types of logics of situation (or situational logics) that impose
themselves on the perception, anticipation, calculations, and practices of actors who act in the
event, thereby shaping it.

p. 101

The phenomena that we call social structure and more generally institutions and social relations,
even though they are strongly objectified or institutionalised, are not necessarily more solid than
matter. Structures and social relations can likewise experience transformations of their states and
therefore experience dierent states.

Liminality and the Frontier Myth in the Building of the American Empire by Stephen Mennell

p. 115

There is much in Turners vocabulary the jars in modern ears. When Turner wrote about
civilisation, he used the word in the accustomed nineteenth-century sense redolent of
progress, with the implication that white European and American society at the time
represented the leading edge of human history, and the opposite of civilisation was barbarism.

On the Margins of the Public and the Private by Peter Burke

p.132

[] In what follows, the emphasis will fall not on the making or cultural construction of the king,
but on his reconstruction, in other words the maintenance of his position through everyday
performances, the daily metamorphosis of a rather small man into Louis le Grand (his ocial
title), thanks for rituals and other props to identity, such as clothes as the novelist William
Thackery brilliantly demonstrated in a satirical drawing (Burke 1992: figure 27).

p. 136

[] One might describe these servants as liminal people in the sense that they were both there
and not there at the same time.

Liminality, the Execution of Lous XVI, and the Rise of Terror during the French Revolution by Camil
Francisc Roman

p. 143

For Walzer, given all the mentioned characteristics of the royal oce, the king could die as both a
natural body and an embodiment of the realm; that is, he could die as a symbol, but only if he
died in public. To this end, a ceremony had to play out, not just in front of the nation but in ways
that involve and implicate the nation because the former subjects of the king must witness the
destruction of kingship; they must somehow share in the renunciation of their own
servitude (Walzer 1992: 13, 88, 89).

p. 154

[] The trial and death of Louis XVI became a ritual on the altar of the republic performed by all
the deputies in concert, irrespective of their intentions or actual final votes on the sentence. []

p. 155

[] Just as small-scale communities pass through phases of transition and experience an

unsettling undierentitation between the pure and the impure, the sacred and profane (van
Gennep, 1960), the lifeworld opened up by the liminal period of the revolution was characterised
by a sense of blurred reality in need of strict lines of dierentiation between the maleficent and the
benevolent sacred. The attempt to rally popular unanimity around the royal execution served as a
ritual of incorporation into a new cultural order with new gods and a new sense of good and evil.
[]

Liminality and Democracy by Harald Wydra

p. 186

[] The essence of democracy is not in a substance or an incorporated certainty. Rather,

democracy means the permanence of an authority vacuum, where the place of power is empty
and can only be appropriated temporarily. []

p. 190

[] Representative democracy is a formidable system for resolving conflicts, except for the
incapacity of questioning the conditions of its own democratic source (Ankersmith 2002).

p. 197

[] The reality of the ritual is independent from the consent of the individual. The crucial element
is not the individuals view but the serious, public disposition of the community celebrating the
ritual, which is no theatre, exercise, or game. Rituals are not only performances during transitions;
they also create these transitions in the first place.

p. 198

[] Everyday democratic politics may look like an arrangement of autonomous beings based on
individual self-interest, but this is only half of the story. According to Hayek, competition draws on
aective forces of imitation. The few who are skilful at taking appropriate measures to achieve
their ends will make gains in competition, thus obliging others to emulate them, in order to
prevail. Thus, rational methods will progressively be developed and spread by imitation. It is not
rationality that makes competition work; rather, competition produces rational behaviour (Hayek
1979 75-76). []

Institutions

CRASSH Center for Research in Arts, Social Sciences, and Humanities. Cambridge

Texts

PLATO. Philebus

References

SCHTZ Me, here, now, this

JACKSON, Frederick. The Significance of the Frontier in American History

GOFFMAN, Erving. The presentation of Self in Everyday Life

CAMUS, Albert. The Rebel

SEWELL. Three temporalities: Toward an Eventful Sociology