Liminal Experience Research Articles

A identidade cigana e o efeito de "nomeação": deslocamento das representações numa teia de discursos mitológico-científicos e práticas sociais

In this article I intend to show how gypsy cultural tradition has been able to arrange a dynamic and performative identity in spite of its complex diversity. I argue that the label gypsy, actually, is a stereotype made out of collective representations experienced by individuals of different cultural traditions along centuries of contact. The nomination effect in which social actors assymetrically positioned in the contact situation inscribe and assume collective distinctions (diacritics and frontiers) seems to strengthen the notion of unity in diversity present in common experiences of denial, differentiation and liminality. From a relational point of view one can observe that gypsy nomadism operates as a double face representation, a result of the coalition of mythological-scientific discourses and daily social practices: on one hand, nomadism is the terrifying consequence of endurable persecutions and exiles that are inscribed in individuals' body and reinforce the identity of common experience of difference; on the other, nomadism reinforces alterity when it is inscribed in the field of interethnic relationships as common collective experience of displacement in physical and social space.

Die digter in transito: reisverse en liminaliteit in <i>Lykdigte</i> en <i>Ruggespraak</i> van Joan Hambidge

The poet in transit: travel poetry and liminality in Joan Hambidge’s Lykdigte and Ruggespraak In the poem “Versugting” the first person narrator confesses: “reis na reis het ek in gedigte gekarteer, / in woorde opgevang elke slopende liefdeservaring”. The most important themes in Hambidge’s poetry converge in these two lines, namely the travel experience, reflection on the writing process, and love. These themes are the focus of this article. In both volumes under discussion the poet is presented as a traveller in real life. This concrete experience of reality becomes the isolated journey of the psyche and is “translated” and mapped in verse form. The journey as a liminal experience, the poet as the traveller and the writing process as the journey are some of the aspects that will be examined. For the poet the travel experience also implies the search for the beloved/love/the poem, while the transferral of the self causes a feeling of displacement. The city as destination also plays a role in the travel experience, which is experienced in a spatial-poetic manner, and finally becomes a poem itself.

Negotiating faith and identity in Muslim–Christian marriages in Britain

Marriage between Muslim men and Christian or Jewish women has been a recognized though controversial phenomenon through Islamic history. Qur'anic permission is given (Q 5:5) but the normative condition in Sharica is that Islam should predominate over another faith, particularly in the identification of children. In Britain and other Western countries the prevailing cultural and legal context of autonomy in relationship formation and choice of marriage partner means that Muslim–Christian marriages may happen without conformity to religious rules or familial preference, for example in the case of Muslim women marrying non-Muslim men. Nevertheless, amongst those surveyed, Muslim identification remained strong even where marriages were deemed transgressive. Amongst Christian partners, faith identification (of parents and children) was more likely to be treated as autonomous and personally negotiable in the context of marriage. The experience of hybridity and liminality in these marriages may influence attitudes to faith itself and there was evidence of both ‘universalizing’ and ‘particularist’ faith responses amongst couples.

Guess who's coming to dinner? Structures and uses of liminality in strategic management consultancy

Organizational studies have recently drawn our attention to the importance of liminality in our working lives. This transitional timespace is characteristic of precarious or mobile employment such as temporary, project and consulting work especially. It is understood as a fluid and largely unstructured space where normal order is suspended and which is experienced as both unsettling and creative. This article critically explores liminality through a detailed study of the neglected activities of business dinners and back-stage management consultancy. We argue that liminality can in fact be a highly and multi-structured, comfortable and strategic or tactical space. We find that the use of wider norms and routines of eating and socializing as well as of hierarchical patterns of working and of exclusion and inclusion shape the experience and outcomes of liminality. Moreover, we highlight how the context of liminality is sustained by highly structured organizational activities in the production of domestic and public meals. We conclude that business meals mark a traditional, rather than modern, practice where ‘official secrets’ continue to grease the wheels of commerce. At the most senior levels especially, the liminality between work and private spheres can be far from unsettling and fluid.

Reflexive historical sociology: consciousness, experience and the author

This article examines the recent work of the sociologist Arpad Szakolczai as he attempts to conceptualize the programme of ‘reflexive historical sociology’ in the ‘life-works’ of Max Weber, Eric Voegelin and Michel Foucault as well as Norbert Elias, Lewis Mumford and Franz Borkenau. Particular attention is paid to the innovative manner in which the work of the anthropologist Victor Turner is used to explore the biographies of these social theorists as in effect performative life-works in which crucial liminal periods and experiences are seen as facilitating new understandings. It is suggested that the life-work approach to social theory adds an important reflexive dimension to the analysis of social thought.

Abortion Rights along the Irish-English Border and the Liminality of Women’s Experiences

My research in European abortion laws and restrictions focuses on the migration of thousands of Irish women who travel to England each year to access safe and legal abortion services. This article is an investigation of the Irish-English border as a symbol for reproductive freedom and the new value systems in which Irish women participate when they cross its boundary. I provide a brief history of abortion law in the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland and emphasize a specific case in which border crossing was severely restricted for a young rape victim desiring an abortion. Additionally, my research examines women’s experiences of liminality as they cross the Irish-English border and the complex, conflicting emotions that they may feel as they travel abroad. In particular, I address a recent pro-choice initiative by a Dutch organization called Women on Waves, which sent a ship converted into a reproductive clinic to Dublin to provide services to Irish women. The ship, which has since sailed to Poland and Portugal to offer further assistance to women in countries with bans on abortion, complicates the notion of crossing concrete national lines as it moves throughout international waters.

Understanding the PhD as a Phase in Time

The purpose of this article is to offer a contribution to the analysis of the time spent on researching and preparing a PhD thesis and its conceptualization as a ‘phase’. Prior research on PhD experiences used time to explain the doctorate in terms of the different lengths of time involved when comparing different disciplines and scientific areas of study (Bourdieu, 1983; Atkinson, 2000). To date, the PhD has not been considered as a genuine time experience. I intend to do so by bearing in mind the insights provided by time sociology frameworks. Thus, in this article it is assumed that respondents’ understanding of their PhD time as ‘a phase’ translates a deep experience of liminality, in which they understand themselves on the one hand as belonging simultaneously to a ‘now’ and a ‘then’ and, on the other, as being located in a linear temporal structure. In the light of the findings, it is suggested that the phase may be viewed as a key concept for theorizing the temporality of PhD experience.

Body/Mine: A Chaos Narrative of Cyborg Subjectivities and Liminal Experiences

This is a story about how I came to construct my postoperatively scarred body as a mine site, my liminal experiences of reconstructively normalizing its appearance as a cyborg, and what that means to me, conceptually and physically, as a feminist poststructuralist researcher interested in how the body of a theorist performs and is (re)presented within theoretical spaces. My story takes the form of a mitigated “chaos narrative” that questions linear modernist medical discourses of rehabilitation and restitution by discussing the chaotic dynamics of my cancer experiences, and relates concepts of cyborg subjectivities and other feminist poststructuralist work to my corporeal body and the body of my research in environmental education.

Ekstasis and the internet: liminality and computer-mediated communication

Anthropologist Victor Turner suggested that all social worlds are composed of two parallel, yet seemingly contrasting models: society as social structure and society as communitas. The relationships between these two basic elements of human social and cultural life are mediated by ephemeral experiences of liminality. Other major theoretical traditions also recognize these relationships, representing a distinct conceptual framework of direct significance to advancing understandings of the internet. The internet is a natural environment for liminality and ekstasis, a place where self and society must be made to exist in a process where both are translated into the conventions of the medium. Some people actively toy with these representations while others do not. However, in the final analysis these communicative dynamics are rooted in the liminal characteristics of the medium - not the motivations and intents of internet users themselves. Approaching the internet in this way stands in stark contrast to other latent conceptual orientations that are largely concerned with moral dynamics.

Stereotactic radiosurgery: the patient's experience

Stereotactic radiosurgery (SRS), a highly technical treatment for life-threatening brain tumors and vascular malformations, is provided at one site (Dunedin Hospital) for all New Zealand. The full-day procedure begins with the surgical attachment by bone screws of a metal helmet, followed by computerized tomography with or without angiography, and concludes with focused irradiation of the lesion. Previous SRS research has focused on therapeutic indications and outcomes; we report here patients’ experiences of this procedure using both qualitative and quantitative methods. Participants ( n = 12 ) uniformly described SRS as unusual and highly significant, a pivotal event shaping the future. For most, the procedure symbolized relief of symptoms, hope, reduction of risk, and recovery. Descriptions of the disruption produced by the onset of symptoms, diagnostic procedures and SRS, followed by a period of uncertain prognosis, also signaled experiences of liminality. Although patients experienced anxiolysis and described status changes following SRS, their lives are not returned to normal; they continue to inhabit a liminal state between health and normality on one hand, illness and disability on the other. Our findings indicate aspects of the experience of SRS for patients and their families that could assist in technically informing and emotionally supporting patients through this unusual treatment.

Pleasures of Fear: Antifascist Myth, Holocaust, and Soft Dissidence in Christa Wolf's "Kindheitsmuster"

Since 1989 many East German intellectuals and critical writers have been faulted for their accomodationist attitude towards the GDR state and its punitive politics. While accusations and counter accusations were flying, the question emerged: what was it about German culture or, for that matter about intellectuals, about their particular brand of emancipatory cultural politics that made them such blind and willing instruments of repression?1 In an effort to explain the apparent inconsequence of enlightened doubt among intellectuals in the GDR, scholars have pointed to a variety of psychological, political, and historical mechanisms at play.2 Antifascism and its constituent idea of the unity of all social, cultural, and political forces made for a powerful foundational program that implicated intellectuals in a web of power relations which supported the regime and entrapped critical thought. In a 1990 interview Christa Wolf herself asserted that her generation, a generation that had been socialized under fascism, felt reluctant to organize resistance against people who had been in concentration camps during the Nazi period.3 But if it had yielded to a state with a stained history, ruined economy, and demoralized population, how exactly could the antifascist narrative remain cohesive all the way until 1989 when in her speech Fur unser Land Wolf invoked antifascist ideals as the basis of a new socialist East German nation? In other words, as Dorothea Dornhof put it succinctly, how is it possible that intellectuals who pride themselves on an emancipa-tory understanding would not only enter power relations of their own free will but sustain them despite increasing doubts about their ability to realize any of their emancipatory goals? (63). Christa Wolfs Kindheitsmuster inadvertently points to a profound desire for preservation. Re-writing the state's foundational narrative of antifascism through a discourse of empathy with Jewish victims commonly neglected in the state's symbolic ritualization of communist resistance, Wolfs project engenders a soft dissidence that avoids challenging antifascism as a discourse of power. This is not to say, however, that the text hides its increasing doubts about the legitimacy of the GDR's ideological project. Quite to the contrary, Wolfs novel invests a great deal in a discourse of fear to perpetually regenerate a dilemma of linguistic impotence. This linguistic impasse in Wolfs works has often been read by critics in the context of modernist Sprachkritik, and thus as Wolfs relevant, if limited, contribution to an emancipatory political and aesthetic discourse in the GDR.4 Instead I suggest Kindheitsmuster continuously and quite consciously restages the liminal experience necessary to sustain the peculiar intimacy that lies at the heart of a particularly symbiotic dissidence, a brand of dissidence in which critical writer and state feed on each other.5 Seen in this light, the crucial question is then no longer whether or not the critical GDR writers who decided to stay in their country undermined or legitimized the East German state, but rather how could they do it both at once? How could they both support and corrode the authority of the state? How exactly is a soft dissidence (re)generated and how does it partake in the production of ideology? Kindheitsmuster has entered the canon as the German book exemplary of Vergangenheitsbewaltigung.6 Starting out as an examination of the individual and collective psychology of subjugation under socialist conditions, the book carefully reconstructs the coercive mechanisms surrounding the complicity of Wolfs generation with the Nazi past (Wie sind wir so geworden, wie wir heute sind? Horigkeit. 248). More than any other book of the 1970s, Wolfs novel negotiates, contests, and reworks the different politics of memory that evolved in both East and West Germany since the end of WW II. In contrast to the GDR state's mythologizing of the communist resistance to fascism, Kindheitsmuster suggests that a full and truthful account of Germany's national socialist past would lead to a more conscientious socialist present and serve to guide future-oriented action. …

A kinesthetic aesthetic: sense, art and liminal experience

The manner in which Eurocentric constructions of art appropriates fragments of African art and aims to manipulate their sensory reception as suited to western notions of art is criticised. It is suggested that the kinesthetic aesthetic of African art, based on a multiple sensory perception, should be acknowledged and included in western art history studies and practices in totality.

Combat Gnosticism: The Ideology of First World War Poetry Criticism

Combat Gnosticism: The Ideology of First World War Poetry Criticism James Campbell (bio) The war hastened everything—in politics, in economics, in behavior—but it started nothing. George Dangerfield 1 In The Romantic Ideology, Jerome McGann famously proclaimed that the criticism of literary Romanticism (that of M. H. Abrams in particular) was more concerned with promulgating the worldview of its topic than subjecting it to rigorous critique. For McGann, mainstream Romantic criticism was not criticism at all, but the application of literary/aesthetic criteria to a period of literary history that that period had itself generated: “the scholarship and criticism of Romanticism and its works are dominated by a Romantic Ideology, by an uncritical absorption in Romanticism’s own self-representations.” 2 I want to borrow McGann’s terms, if not his entire methodology, to make some similar inquiries into the criticism of First World War poetry. I see a comparable genealogy operating within this critical discourse: the mainstream criticism of First World War poetry, most conspicuously Paul Fussell’s The Great War and Modern Memory, has formed itself around a certain set of aesthetic and ethical principles that it garners from its own subject. 3 In other words, the scholarship in question does not so much criticize the poetry which forms its subject as replicate the poetry’s ideology. I see this ideology primarily in two forms: an aesthetic criterion of realism and an ethical criterion of a humanism of passivity. Furthermore, these criteria are combined by both the poets and their critics to create an ideology of what I term “combat gnosticism,” the belief that combat represents a qualitatively separate order of experience that is difficult if not impossible to communicate to any who have not undergone an identical experience. Such an ideology has served both to limit severely the canon of texts that mainstream First World War criticism has seen as legitimate war writing and has simultaneously promoted war literature’s status as a discrete body of work with almost no relation to non-war writing. The critical tradition that I identify as mainstream and dominant is [End Page 203] one that equates the term “war” with the term “combat.” As a result, what it legitimates as war literature is produced exclusively by combat experience; the knowledge of combat is a prerequisite for the production of a literary text that adequately deals with war. This is what I mean by combat gnosticism: a construction that gives us war experience as a kind of gnosis, a secret knowledge which only an initiated elite knows. Only men (there is, of course, a tacit gender exclusion operating here) who have actively engaged in combat have access to certain experiences that are productive of, perhaps even constitutive of, an arcane knowledge. Furthermore, mere military status does not signify initiation, but only status as a combatant. It is not the label of “soldier” that is privileged so much as the label of “warrior.” The results of such a construction are fairly obvious: the canonization of male war writers who not only have combat experience but represent such experience in their texts. Siegfried Sassoon, Wilfred Owen, and Robert Graves become the exemplary figures of the genre. The attitude toward war of any particular writer is less an issue than his first-hand experience; Sassoon’s use of his war experience to promote a sort of pacifism and his friend Graves’s opposing occasional retention of militarism are seen less as contradictions than contrasting uses of a commodity (war experience) that remains essentially unaltered. 4 To use the language set forth in Eric Leed’s No Man’s Land, combat is a liminal experience that sets the veteran irrevocably apart from those who have not crossed the ritual threshold of war. 5 It can, indeed has, been seen as the ultimate rite of passage: a definitive coming to manhood for the industrial age, in which boys become men by confronting mechanical horror and discovering their essential masculinity, perhaps even their essential humanity, in a realm from which feminine presence is banished. The primary type of literary text that generates this ideology of combat gnosticism is what I would like to refer to as the...

Sled Dog Racing: The Celebration of Co-operation in a Competitive Sport

To prepare for distance sled dog racing, a highly competitive sport, mushers embody mainstream American values of individualism and competition. Yet the race as ritually constructed subordinates that competitiveness to a celebration of co-operation. Using Turner's idea of communitas, the A. examines how the sled dog community is constituted. She argues that the race is constructed as a liminal experience; outside roles and statuses are leveled and an alternative moral order emerges. This dynamic is explored further in tensions existing between traditional mushers and those who reflect the competitive values of American society, and in comparison with rodeos, where co-operation in competition also exists. (Sled dog racing, communitas, values, sports, co-operation).

Rereading and Resistance

There is a particular photograph that comes to mind when the issue of black masculinity in South Africa is raised. It is a 1968 picture by Peter Magubane depicting more than a dozen black men, lined up and naked in what appears to be a dimly lit shower room. The photograph's caption states that the men are being inspected by a health official before being allowed to begin employment in farms and mines. Wenela is identified as a private organization in Johannesburg that recruits farm and mine labour in all the tribal areas.(1) The photograph intersects a number of discourses about social death and its consequent mourning, as well as sexuality, race, civility and other associated discourses that marked the second phase of intense colonial prohibitions in South Africa. Over the years this particular photograph has spurred a multitude of readings. These captions extend the historical and political relevance of photography and apartheid in South Africa, and suggest that the two cannot be kept separate (particularly if one understands the history and the politics of the construction of deviant peoples and subjectivities in colonialist, racist and sexist photographic discourses). In fact, as I came to later learn, one of the popular oral historical references informs that outside this particular room in which the photograph was taken, there was a signboard warning passersby of the presence of natives in a state of undress. My first reaction upon seeing this photograph, and reading the information about its nature and context, was a kind of cynical laughter. Of course this is not what the caption hoped to elicit - quite the contrary - even though some of those oral historical references that were later attached to it were indeed remembered with the same cynical laughter. In fact, the tone of Magubane's parenthetical statement in the caption, [s]ince we did this story in 1968, the men no longer have to strip like this, which is very offensive to Africans, establishes a serious political agenda for the photograph, and does not seem to anticipate a reading of the context different from that in which the photograph is read as a response to national crisis.(2) When I first read Looking for Trouble (1991), Kobena Mercer's rereading of Robert Mapplethorpe's black male nudes and semi-nudes, originally published in Transition, this photograph immediately sprung to mind. Although I generally accepted Mercer's argument, it was only later that I examined its implications. In the intervening years I had read Alan Paton's Too Late the Phalarope (1953), Nadine Gordimer's An Occasion for Loving (1963), Lewis Nkosi's Mating Birds (1986) and other books that deal with what most commentators refer to as the distortion of love relationships in apartheid South Africa. I sensed something terribly wrong with Mercer's rereading of what he identified as his initial misreading of Mapplethorpe's agenda in staging and photographing nude and semi-nude black men. Here was a critic, with an evidently sharp sense of irony and ambivalence, unnecessarily entangling himself in an of feeling, at precisely the moment he was claiming to shake himself of it. Concerning Mapplethorpe's Black Book, Mercer writes: When a friend lent me his copy of the book it circulated between us as an illicit and highly problematic object of desire. We were fascinated by the beautiful bodies and drawn in by the pleasure of looking as we went over the repertoire of images again and again. We wanted to look, but we didn't always find what we wanted to see. We were, of course, disturbed by the racial dimension of the imagery and, above all, angered by the aesthetic objectification that reduced these black male bodies to abstract visual things, silenced in their own right as subjects and serving only to enhance the name of the white gay male artist in the privileged world of art photography. In other words, we were stuck in an intransitive structure of feeling; caught out in a liminal experience of textual ambivalence. …

Liminality: a major category of the experience of cancer illness

Narrative analysis is well established as a means of examining the subjective experience of those who suffer chronic illness and cancer. In a study of perceptions of the outcomes of treatment of cancer of the colon, we have been struck by the consistency with which patients record three particular observations of their subjective experience: (1) the immediate impact of the cancer diagnosis and a persisting identification as a cancer patient, regardless of the time since treatment and of the presence or absence of persistent or recurrent disease; (2) a state of variable alienation from social familiars, expressed as an inability to communicate the nature of the experience of the illness, its diagnosis and treatment; and (3) a persistent sense of boundedness, an awareness of limits to space, empowerment and available time. These subjectivities were experienced in varying degree by all patients in our study. Individual responses to these experiences were complex and variable. The experiences are best understood under the rubric of a category we call “liminality”. We believe that all cancer patients enter and experience liminality as a process which begins with the first manifestations of their malignancy. An initial acute phase of liminality is marked by disorientation, a sense of loss and of loss of control, and a sense of uncertainty. An adaptive, enduring phase of suspended liminality supervenes, in which each patient constructs and reconstructs meaning for their experience by means of narrative. This phase persists, probably for the rest of the cancer patient's life. The experience of liminality is firmly grounded in the changing and experiencing body that houses both the disease and the self. Insights into the nature of the experience can be gained from the Existentialist philosophers and from the history of attitudes to death. Understanding liminality helps us to understand what it is that patients with cancer (and other serious illnesses) seek from the system to which they turn for help. Its explication should therefore be important for those who provide health care, those who educate health care workers and those concerned to study and use outcomes as administrative and policy making instruments.

Models of creativity abroad: migrants, strangers and travellers

Migration, the role of the stranger and travelling are all creativity-enhancing although for different reasons. The migrant model verifies Koestler's hypothesis that new ideas often arise out of combinations of separate frames of thinking. Simmel's theory of the stranger emphasizes the increased objectivity of limited commitments. Rudwick's recently suggested model of liminal experience might help us explain why the seemingly purposeless activity of travelling might also stimulate creativity.

Religious Community in a Cuban Refugee Camp: Bringing Order Out of Chaos

An authentic religious community may function as a stabilizing and ordering device for people living in a refugee camp. This article examines this phenomenon in a Cuban refugee camp. The Cuban refugees described left one social structure but were not incorporated into a new one. After a prolonged period of liminality, hopelessness, aggression, and self-destructive behavior characterized the general population. Religious community countered the destructive aspects of the liminal experience by giving participating refugees an informal social structure and a sense of hope. Victor Turner's concept of ritual process serves as an interpretive model. The findings of this study have important missiological implications for those who work with refugees or other displaced populations.

Exploring the relationships among liminal transitions, symbolic consumption, and the extended self

Integrating Belk's (1988) notion of the “extended self” with van Gennep's (1960) framework of “liminal transitions,” a model of symbolic consumption activities and psychological phenomena that occur during major life transitions is developed. In an initial investigation, the transition from high school to college is used to explore the nature of the liminal experience, the role that symbolic consumption assumes in the process, and the effects of both on consumers' psychological states. The results suggest that certain negative psychological consequences are indicative of existence in a liminal state. Further, consumers in transition appear to rely on possessions that symbolize the past, as well as those that represent the new role, to help facilitate a major life transition. Directions for future research are offered. © 1997 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

Collectivistic and individualistic motives among kibbutz youth volunteering for community service

About one third of each age cohort of high school graduates in the Israeli kibbutz opt for a year of community service before enlistment into the military. The motives that underlie this volunteering were explored from the perspective of kibbutz youth's prolonged transition to adulthood. The analysis revealed a blend of individualistic and collectivistic orientations linked with expectations of satisfying instrumental as well as explorative and expressive needs within a context of moratorial and liminal experience. Particular combinations of motives were also found to vary by the intended field of activity during this year.