Breaking boundaries: varieties of liminality

4e de couv. : "A topic with a very broad appeal, namely liminality, [is] treated here as an analytical concept. While liminality has been a widespread concept in anthropology and social theory for decades, largely owing to Victor Turner's seminal work, it has rarely been scrutinized properly, and this volume is to be welcomed. In some ways, this kind of book is long overdue." - Thomas Hylland Eriksen, University of Oslo. - "The book is a timely intervention which secures firmer grounding for liminality as one of the key concepts in social theory... Theoretically strong, and with an empirical range that takes in pre- and post-Revolutionary France, the frontier building of the American West, Egypt's Tahrir Square, and the liminality of the postcommunist Eastern bloc, the book provides a valuable contribution to debates on liminality, transformation, and contingency in the social and political world." · Les Roberts, University of Liverpool Liminality has the potential to be a leading paradigm for understanding transformation in a globalizing world. As a fundamental human experience, liminality transmits cultural practices, codes, rituals, and meanings in situations that fall between defined structures and have uncertain outcomes. Based on case studies of some of the most important crises in history, society, and politics, this volume explores the methodological range and applicability of the concept to a variety of concrete social and political problems.

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Introduction : liminality and the search for boundaries / Harald Wydra, Bjørn Thomassen, Agnes Horvath -- Liminality and experience : structuring transitory situations and transformative events / Arpad Szakolczai -- Uses and meanings of liminality / Bjørn Thomassen -- Inbetweenness and ambivalence / Bernhard Giesen -- The genealogy of political alchemy : the technological invention of identity change / Agnes Horvath -- Critical processes and political fluidity : a theoretical appraisal / Michel Dobry -- Liminality and the frontier myth in the building of the American empire / Stephen Mennell -- On the margins of the public and the private : Louis XIV at Versailles / Peter Burke -- Liminality, the execution of Louis XVI and the rise of terror during the French Revolution / Camil Roman -- In search of antistructure : the meaning of Tahrir Square in Egypt's ongoing social drama / Mark Allen Peterson -- Liminality and democracy / Harald Wydra -- Liminality and postcommunism : the twenty-first century as the subject of history / Richard Sakwa -- The challenge of liminality for international relations theory / Maria Mälksoo