Liminality

How to Become an Iconic Social Thinker: The Intellectual Pursuits of Malinowski and Foucault

by Dominik Bartmanski

Published in European Journal of Social Theory

The present article develops a new approach to intellectual history and sociology of knowledge. Its point of departure... more The present article develops a new approach to intellectual history and sociology of knowledge. Its point of departure is to investigate the conditions under which social thinkers assume the iconic reputation. What does it take to become ‘a founding father’ of a humanistic discipline? How do social thinkers achieve the status of a trans-disciplinary star? Why some intellectuals attract tremendous attention and ‘go down in history’ despite personal and professional failures, while others enjoy only limited recognition or simply sink into oblivion, even if they have met all the standards of their day? Quite a few sociologists have tackled this elusive issue. Pierre Bourdieu, Michele Lamont and Randall Collins are among those who fleshed out strong explanatory frameworks. This project adds to this body of knowledge by emphasizing cultural factors that these authors downplayed in their seminal accounts, despite being aware of their significance. By showing why these underdeveloped aspects of their works need to be incorporated into the debate and how this can be achieved, this article introduces a new theorization of the iconic, lasting intellectual reputation substantiated by evidence from the lifeworks of Bronislaw Malinowski and Michel Foucault. As such, it aims, minimally, to make sociology of knowledge decisively ‘cultural’. Maximally, it seeks to demonstrate that the iconic success of intellectual intervention in social theory depends on carefully performed and contingently mediated engagement with the binary systems of symbolic classification.

Successful Icons of Failed Time. Rethinking Post-communist Nostalgia

by Dominik Bartmanski

published in Acta Sociologica 2011

Under what cultural conditions can the relics of symbolically polluted time re-emerge as its purified signifiers and... more Under what cultural conditions can the relics of symbolically polluted time re-emerge as its purified signifiers and culturally successful icons within new circumstances? What does it mean when people articulate ‘nostalgic’ commitments to social reality they have themselves recently jettisoned? Drawing on the ideas of the iconic turn and American cultural sociology, the article offers a new framework for understanding post-communist nostalgia. Specifically, it provides a comparative reinterpretation of the phenomenon of so-called Ostalgie as manifest in the streetscapes of Berlin and its counterpart in Warsaw. One of the key arguments holds that ‘nostalgic’ icons are successful because they play the cultural role of mnemonic bridges to rather than tokens of longing for the failed communist past. In this capacity they forge a communal sense of continuity in the liquid times of systemic transformation. As such, the article contributes to broader debates about meanings of material objects and urban space in relation to collective memory destabilized by liminal temporality.

Transitions in lifelong learning: public issues, private troubles, liminal identities

by John Field

Published in special issue of Studies for the Learning Society, an open access journal. See: http://versita.metapress.com/content/l07478170466/?p=cfe4336e822e4b03aea50a8b297aadc4&pi=0

We need to reconceptualise the significance of transitions in adult learning. The paper starts by considering how... more We need to reconceptualise the significance of transitions in adult learning. The paper starts by considering how lifelong learning and mobilities of various kinds have become absorbed into, and expressed in, the policy mainstream. It then discusses the ways in which researchers are addressing this topic. While researchers are pursuing many lines of inquiry into transitions, and using a wide range of methods (including new statistical techniques), the analysis in this paper is primarily concerned with questions of identity, and particularly the idea of learner identity. and it concludes by proposing the idea of a liminal identity, understood as shaped through social and cultural processes which are formed and re-formed in dynamic relationships with others.

Abstract of my PhD dissertation

by Natali Bogosyan Esayan

Occupy Wall Street: The Liminality of Zuccotti Park

by katherine sullivan

Spatialising the Refugee Camp

by Adam Ramadan

Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers

Ritual Water, Ritual Geist: An Application of Narratological Analysis to Luke's Development of Christian Initiation from John the Baptist to Pentecost

by David McCollough

This paper employs narratological analysis, especially focalization, the sequential development of entity... more This paper employs narratological analysis, especially focalization, the sequential development of entity representations and intertextuality, to demonstrate that through Luke 3, 11 and Acts 2, Luke prescribes a liminal ritual complex of initiation composed of four elements: repentance, water baptism, prayer and xenolalic experience understood as Spirit reception. The paper briefly explains focalization (the lens through which a narrator looks at something) and entity representations (ERs, the mental construct of a character, motif, procedure, network of relationships, etc., built up lineally through a narrative). It addresses the intertextual role of Isaiah and Malachi in the formation of the initiation ER, and implications of lukan Sinai imagery.
The paper traces the cumulative development of the initiation ER from John the Baptist’s prophecy of Spirit and fire baptism, to Jesus’ baptism, to Jesus’ teaching on prayer for the Spirit, to Pentecost. Luke’s use of priestly imagery is found to color his portrayal of believers. The Pentecost narrative is shown to redundantly focalize the xenolalia experience, and to identify it for the reader as the Spirit experience prophesied by Joel and promised by Jesus, and to prescribe that same xenolalic experience as a boundary marker obtainable through repentance, water baptism and prayer.
The paper will demonstrate that notwithstanding a strong, undeniable vocational role, narratological analysis indicates Luke subordinates Spirit experience under a broader soteriological heading which can be further refined as initiatory with a liminal aspect, thus ecclesiological.

Transitional Space

by Monika Kostera

Co-authored with Jerzy Kociatkiewicz
Published (2011) in Tamara Special Issue on Organizing Transitional Space, Tamara 9/3-4: 7-9.
Editorial

Liminality is the state betwixt and between more stable states and realities. In anthropology authors such as Arnold... more Liminality is the state betwixt and between more stable states and realities. In anthropology authors such as Arnold von Gennep (1909/1960), Erving Goffman (1959), and Victor Turner (1974) have described liminality as a transitory stage in rituals, especially in rites of passage (Turner, 1969). It is conceived of as a state of blurred boundaries, a mode where the usual constraints of normality, common sense, and cultural definitions do not apply, where norms are relaxed and there is a particular openness to experimentation and the creation of a sense of community. During the liminal phase there develops a special bond between those who go through it together, known as communitas – based on humanity and disregarding of structures and hierarchies of the outside culture.

Memoir as Iranian exile cultural production: A case study of Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis series

by Amy Malek

Are New Media Narratives Inhuman (e)? Over-Lubricating the Frictions Between Theory and Practice

by Louise Krasniewicz

Liminality in Marina Carr's Woman and Scarecrow and Emma Dante's Vita mia

by Brenda Donohue

Published in February 2012
Focus: Papers in English Literary and Cultural Studies VIII. IIssue on Interfaces between Irish and European Theatre. Ed. Mária Kurdi. Pécs: University of Pécs, Institute of English and American Studies, 2012.

This article examines the work of an Irish playwright, Marina Carr and an Italian playwright, Emma Dante. Both female... more This article examines the work of an Irish playwright, Marina Carr and an Italian playwright, Emma Dante. Both female playwrights show a recurring preoccupation with death, dying and living in their work. Contrasting the modern taste for signalling a clear divide between life and death, in Carr and Dante’s work the lines and divisions between this world and the next are not clearly drawn. A number of characters across the writers’ oeuvre occupy liminal spaces within the spectrum of life and death. Neither alive nor dead, these characters blur the edges of our modern understanding of death. Using Victor Turner’s theory of liminality, this paper seeks to investigate the position of two of these ‘betwixt and between’ characters, focussing on Woman in Marina Carr’s Woman and Scarecrow and Chicco in Dante’s Vita mia.

Zu Tisch im Jenseits. Totenmahl und Ahnenkult in der Levante (1600 –700 v. u. Z.)

by Alessandra Gilibert

published in M. Friedlander – C. Kugelmann (eds.), Koscher & Co. Über Essen und Religion, Berlin 2009, 288-29

This paper discusses the Ancient Near Eastern "system" of food and drink offerings to the dead as known from... more This paper discusses the Ancient Near Eastern "system" of food and drink offerings to the dead as known from Late Bronze and Iron Age sources.
The conceptual background of these mortuary and commemorative rites, their ties to a specific belief about life after death and the rules imposed by the latter to ancestor cults are described. Then, three different forms in which food and drink offerings to the dead took place are analysed: the presentation of food and drink offerings to an image of a dead ancestor, the partaking in cultic meals inside a funrary crypt, and the organization of "dining parties" in honor of a dead member of a male sodality.

Drawing OUT the ‘Anatomy of the Edge’: in-between-ness in the verandas of South-East Queensland

by Chris Brisbin

Refereed conferance paper in published proceedings of Architecture @ the Edge, Association of Architecture Schools of Australasia 2011 International Conference, 18th – 21st September 2011, Geelong, Victoria, Australia.

The Queenslander and the veranda have become ubiquitous terms of the Australian architectural lexicon. The veranda has... more The Queenslander and the veranda have become ubiquitous terms of the Australian architectural lexicon. The veranda has a long historical tradition in vernacular residential building typologies across Australia, but nowhere more prolific than in the sub-tropical regions of South-East Queensland. The veranda is generally discussed in terms of its functional ‘threshold’ characteristics; the space held in tension between the domestic interior and urban/landscape exterior. Its phenomenological uniqueness mythologised by writers such as David Malouf; underpinning the conceptual and spatial organisation of the architectural imaginings of Brit Andresen & Peter O’Gorman and Donovan Hill. Whilst some research has been conducted in order to establish a historical lineage of the veranda as an architectural typology, little is actually known, or has been researched, about either the veranda’s anatomy or the specifics of its place-making physiognomy. This research outlines the initial phase of a teaching-research nexus project commenced in 2009/10 at the Queensland University of Technology which aimed to explore the South-East Queensland veranda through a combination of historical research, conducted through sectional measured-drawings, in combination with speculative research, conducted through experimental mixed-media. Its emphasis was on the technical and the experiential; based on the scale of people, at moments of either transition from inside or out, or inhabitation of the in-between. As a result, this project aimed to document variations of the veranda’s anatomy in its context and, in so doing, speculate upon the nature of its relevancy in architecture today.

“Beam Me Across, Scotty: Star Trek as a Case Study in the Liminality of 'Cult'."

by Thomas Clark

Cult Fiction & Cult Film: Multiple Perspectives. Ed. Marcel Arbeit and Roman Trušník. Olomouc: VUP, 2008: 195-208.

Sociolinguistics, cultural studies, and New Erthnicities in Interaction

by Ben Rampton

Hacia el lugar de los dioses: una aproximación a la peregrinación religiosa en la Hispania indoeuropea

by Silvia Alfayé

ESPACIOS LIMINALES Y PRÁCTICAS RITUALES EN EL NOROESTE PENINSULAR

by Silvia Alfayé

Co-authored with Javier Rodríguez Corral

Rituales relacionados con murallas en el ámbito celtibérico

by Silvia Alfayé

Shopping with each other: Liminal exchanges on the Northcote Road

by Joe Deville

Liminality as Linguistic Process. Immigrant Youths and Experiences of Language in Germany and the United States

by Julia Eksner

(2005). Co-authored with Marjorie F. Orellana, . In J. Knoerre (Ed.), Childhood and Migration (pp. 175-206)