Liminal Experience Research Articles

Political life in Japan: democracy in a reversible world

To understand how change occurs in politics, we should turn from concentrating on intentional political actions to exploring everyday life, especially marginal frames of mind in which people are open to questioning existing ideas and institutions. In so contending, Takako Kishima offers fresh understandings of contemporary Japanese politicians and the Japanese political process, while she also proposes an innovative method of looking at politics in general. Kishima points out that taken-for-granted values and beliefs are revealed as arbitrary when people experience intrusions of the marginal, or liminal. Social marginals, such as outcastes or so-called misfits, are the most likely people to invoke these intrusions, but more ordinary folk are also subjected to them under special conditions ranging from the seemingly trivial--daydreaming, dancing, or getting drunk--to the more profound--war, natural disaster, or ecstatic ritual. During an intrusion the flow of ordinary time seems to stop, and the utilitarian principles of commonplace existence are invalidated--as described by the chapter on Nakasone, Shedding Tears: Suspension of Politics. Drawing on insights from phenomenology, symbolic anthropology, and post-structuralism, as well as from political science, Kishima shows that the prevalence of liminal experiences in society prevents the reification of authority, allows the transcendence of formal political differences, and permits political change over time. Originally published in 1991. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Accommodation and Resistance in Andean Ritual Dance

Each year in Cusco on the Sunday before Corpus Christi thousands of people gather at the foot of an icy glacier called Qolquepunku (silver door) to honor the miraculous appearance of the white Christ child of Qoyllur Rit'i (starry snows). Although it takes place at a high, remote shrine, the festival of Qoyllur Rit'i attracts pilgrims from all walks of life. Runa, or Quechua-speaking peasants, come by the thousands. But so do hundreds of mestizo schoolteachers, policemen, storeowners, truckdrivers, merchants, and middlemen. They, along with numerous foreign tourists, Peruvian university students, and international film crews, are readily accepted by the more traditional pilgrims. These runa, for their part, see the presence of such as testimony to both the power of their miraculous Christ and the increasing-and they believe, well-deservedpopularity of his cult. It has been said of religious pilgrimage that it is a ritual which serves to annul, or temporarily cancel out, the hierarchical divisions of daily social life (Turner and Turner I978). The confluence of runa, mestizo, cholo, and gringo pilgrims to Qoyllur Rit'i can seen to fulfill such a function, if looked at from a certain, historically specialized, vantage point.' Thus, for the increasing number of both foreign and national (i.e., Peruvian) tourists who now attend this feast, participation in the Christ of Qoyllur Rit'i's festival is an unparalleled leveling experience. For them, the fiesta is a unique occasion to sleep outside, to suffer the cold and frost, to be a runa, and to attempt to come to grips with the obviously powerful forces of nature-the glaciers and high grasslands-that constitute the shrine's sacred surroundings. This experience of momentary liminality (or, as I would prefer to call it, ahistoricity) is made all the more powerful for these outsiders by a historiographic ideology according to which Qoyllur Rit'i's feast provides them access not only to a timeless nature, but to an ancient, authentic culture whose non-Western, precolonial roots these Peruvian and foreign tourists have come to idealize as a less complex, less coercive, less historically compromising way of life.

Liminal Experiences of Miyako Shamans: Reading a Shaman's Diary

Liminal Experiences of Miyako Shamans: Reading a Shaman's Diary

The Center out There: Pilgrim's Goal

The Center out There: Pilgrim's Goal

Kreowanie doświadczeń liminalnych w szkole z wykorzystaniem metody dramy edukacyjnej

The aim of the paper is to consider the possibility of creating liminal experiences at school with the method of educational drama and the pedagogical potential of such activities. Treated as the medium phase of rite, I define liminality in line with Arnold van Genepp and Victor Turner. By claiming that for many reasons school is a liminal space and showing that the fact that this function is neglected at the cost of the transmission function is a problem, I present drama as a possible antidote.

Betwixt and Between: Academic Women in Transition

University culture is increasingly being influenced by globalization, competition, the commercialization of research, and external demands for accountability. Corporate managerial practices that value individualism and productivity bump up against more democratic and collaborative practices inherent in the traditional academic culture and governance. Tensions result as faculty members are left on their own to make sense of the shifting political, economic and social landscape of higher education and to understand the implications for their professional identity within their Faculty. In an unstable institutional culture that lacks rules or mechanisms to shepherd faculty through this process, individuals can feel anxious, confused or incompetent as they negotiate the contradictions in their professional lives and deal with issues of power and resistance.
 Grounded in their own experiences of liminality, this paper uses an autoethnographic approach to explore and describe the experiences of three academic women “betwixt and between” their senior management positions, taking up positions as academic members of a Faculty, and the strategies they used to support each other, to reconstruct their professional identities and to understand the norms of the Faculty culture. The paper speaks to the importance of post-heroic forms of leadership, dialogue and collaborative communities that contribute to the creation of a culture in which faculty members can flourish.