Breaking Boundaries

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.

List of Figures

Introduction: Liminality and the Search for Boundaries
Harald Wydra, Bjørn Thomassen, and Agnes Horvath

PART I: FRAMING LIMINALITY

Chapter 1. Liminality and Experience: Structuring transitory situations and transformative events
Arpad Szakolczai

Chapter 2. Thinking with Liminality: To the Boundaries of an Anthropological Concept
Bjørn Thomassen

PART II: LIMINALITY AND THE SOCIAL

Chapter 3. Inbetweenness and Ambivalence
Bernhard Giesen

Chapter 4. The Genealogy of Political Alchemy: the technological invention of identity change
Agnes Horvath

Chapter 5. Critical Processes and Political Fluidity: a Theoretical Appraisal
Michel Dobry

Chapter 6. Liminality and the Frontier Myth in the Building of the American Empire
Stephen Mennell

Chapter 7. On the Margins of the Public and the Private: Louis XIV at Versailles
Peter Burke

PART III: LIMINALITY AND THE POLITICAL

Chapter 8. Liminality, the execution of Louis XVI and the rise of terror during the French Revolution
Camil Roman

Chapter 9. In Search of Antistructure: The Meaning of Tahrir Square in Egypt’s Ongoing Social Drama
Mark Allen Peterson

Chapter 10. Liminality and Democracy
Harald Wydra

Chapter 11. Liminality and Postcommunism: The Twenty-First Century as the Subject of History
Richard Sakwa

Chapter 12. The Challenge of Liminality for International Relations Theory
Maria Malksoo

Notes on Contributors
Index