Liminality is back. The unfinished legacy of the study of liminality is being reclaimed once again in order to explain contemporary states of indeterminacy. In two recent volumes, scholars utilise and update the concept to investigate an alleged release from normal constraints in our societies, yet the same question remains: what is the capacity of outsiders’ practices to effect substantive changes that directly impact social order? First of all, the study of liminality is a work on marginality and out-of-the-ordinary experiences, and as such might be expected to have its own effects on authors who choose to immerse themselves in the effort to understand it. It could also be that a given scholar shows interest in this concept because of an a priori predisposition or sympathy for the phenomenon itself (e.g. ‘Van Gennep had an awful habit of criticising authorities’ Thomassen, 2014, p. 40). Arguably, liminality never quite ‘made it’ to the core of disciplines such as anthropology, sociology, cultural studies or political science, despite being a concept that was coined more than one hundred years ago and that has repeatedly demonstrated its significance for examining how societies undergo change and transition. Two recent books, Liminality and the Modern: Living through the In-Between and Breaking Boundaries: Varieties of liminality illustrate the growing international attention to this approach, by aiming to reverse the under-utilisation of liminality and to explore its applicability to various cases of social transformation.
‘Van Gennep is no doubt one of the most under-rated social scientists – ever’, insists Thomassen (2014, p. 3). Even if Arnold van Gennep’s Les Rites de Passage (1960/1909) has been a well-cited work, its author barely found an academic position (he was never appointed professor), ending his days in the South of France raising chickens and dubbed ‘the Hermit of Bourg-la-Reine’. But let us put this into the context of van Gennep's time, with the origins of modern sociology and the era of Weber and Durkheim, in which Simmel also faced difficulties in securing an academic affiliation. During the early twentieth century, van Gennep disagreed with Durkheim's structural functionalism, particularly around the role of individual agency within periods of social transformation. Herein lies van Gennep's greatest contribution, but also the source of his isolation. Based on his observation of human experience in small-scale societies (rites of initiation), van Gennep proposed a three-fold structure: separation, suspension and re-integration; placing the emphasis on the transformation of the subject in a social setting. In this scheme, liminality referred to the phase of suspension, in other words, to in-between situations that involve a change of status and, eventually, the resolution of a personal crisis. Half a century later, the anthropologist Victor Turner recovered this sequential structure of ritual processes for his studies on Ndembu rites of transition, though he split the liminal suspension into two distinct periods: crisis and re-dression. Turner also explained that the crisis stage functioned as a threshold – a moment of meaning formation and condensed symbolism, which entailed an intense becoming.
So when we speak about liminality today, we are referring to a mature concept which has been endowed with the patina of age, undergone several waves of interest and has been deterritorialised to varied disciplines. But then what do I mean by saying ‘liminality is back’? First, the calibre of contributions reflecting on the concept and exploring its application indicates that liminality has reached new heights. The past few years have witnessed an increasing number of publications using this term, from tourism to geography, by way of youth and digital cultures, archaeology, international relations, literary studies and critical theory.
‘Liminality is back’ too because of its apparent significance for the study of globalisation, late modernity, and their inter-related implications – uncertainty, extension of security threats, quotidian transgression of boundaries and traditions, social acceleration, relentless change and innovation, disappearance of certainties. Arpad Szakolczai has in this regard diagnosed a form of ‘permanent liminality’: ‘If everything is constantly changing, then things always remain the same’ (2010, p. 226). As he argues, the intensification of instability –inherent to the modern project – has fixed the state of transitoriness and frozen the sequencing of the phases of transformation (separation, liminality, reaggregation). Thomassen draws on this idea to surmise that the current implosion of liminal conditions manifests the trivialisation of extreme acts (violence, sex, intoxication) as part of our leisure and normality. One of his arguments is that modernity has stretched and routinised liminality, along with play, gambling, comedy, sexuality, entertainment and violence.
In Thomassen's book, Liminality and the Modern, what stands out to the reader is the theoretical introduction to the idea of liminality, which is substantial, accessible, and complemented by a genealogy of the term. In the second half of the book, Thomassen brings the notion of liminality into contemporary social settings through examples of gambling, bungee-jumping and political revolutions. Then, by extending the framework developed by Victor Turner, he offers a new term: ‘limivoid’, used to link liminality with emptiness in order to examine those contemporary experiences that have no formative impact on the subject and appear as ‘a desperate search for experience’ in a world characterised by ‘excess’ (p. 16).
If liminality refers to transit, heightened conscious, the ‘betwixt and between’ and interstices, the term ‘liminoid’ (coined by Turner in 1974) describes the domestication of liminal experiences, reduced within modern societies to a reflexive playfulness, a secular leisure version which is decoupled from social and biological cycles and does not necessarily imply a change in the social status of the individual. Overall, the concept of liminality helped Turner to understand the limits and contradictions of social structure. Initially, he was interested in how structure confronts liminal transgressions in pre-modern societies. Later, Turner developed his own theory about the anti-structural qualities of liminal beings (such as communitas), a notion that entails an utopian bias.
Thomassen tries to give a new twist to the original notion of liminality by connecting contemporary feelings of danger and risk-seeking to the hermeneutics of threshold experiences. In my opinion, this is the weakest point of the monograph. On the one hand, the term still needs further elaboration in order to work as an analytical tool. On the other hand, the work which attempts to ground this new concept has significant lacunas, as for instance a complete lack of reference to recent works reflecting on the same phenomena (e.g. Patrick Laviolette's Extreme landscapes of leisure, 2011; and Bradley Garrett's Explore everything, 2013; as well as Anthony Giddens and Ulrich Beck's conceptualisation of risk societies).
The volume Breaking Boundaries: Varieties of Liminality is a collection of 12 essays, elaborated as close-up contextual analyses of liminal situations. In well-integrated chapters, they prove the relevance of the concept across disciplines, particularly for the study of moments of instability and possibility, as well as for understanding the transformative potential of participation. Already on the first page, the editors emphasise their aim ‘to transport the concept of liminality from the ethnographic study of ritual passages in small-scale settings to the heart of social theory of the modern’ (p. 1). Indeed, one of the robust arguments of this work is its project of regarding liminality as a condition that favours social change and political beginnings.
The first two essays (by Szakolczai and Thomassen) survey the intellectual history of the concept, complementing the editors’ introduction and opening new debates about the importance of ambivalent spaces to sustaining social reality and the very structure of human experiences. The subsequent essays explore the application of liminality as an analytical tool to explain narratives of public and private, frontier-effects and state formation, the afterlife of historic events, crises such as revolutions, the ritualised disruptions of democratic societies, and post-communist politics. Then, in the final chapter, Maria Mälksoo reflects on what liminality offers to the discipline of International Relations, an endeavour also invoked by Rumelili (2012). Here the novelty brought by Mälksoo is the way in which she applies the concept to concrete cases of warfare, diplomatic play and geopolitical borders. As she concludes, liminality highlights ‘the processual nature of all international life, with a particular interest in the study of social change. It entails a cyclical rather than progressive understanding of international politics, and a relational rather than absolute conceptualization of power’ (p. 227).
In addition to helping one understand in-between experiences overall, these two volumes invite the reader to rethink the complicated relation between individual agency, social order and cultural transmission. Whilst Thomassen's book puts the focus on liminality as an epistemological category – tracing its origins throughout the twentieth century and trying to give another twist to the term – the collection Breaking Boundaries: Varieties of Liminality deals with more comparative applications of the concept, showing a stronger empirical range as well as exploring the limits of its transfer capacity. What these two volumes have in common is the goal of bringing the concept of liminality to the foreground by making clear its actual significance in explaining uncertain outcomes. Hence both works complement each other and stand as a remarkable contribution to sociology, anthropology and critical theory.