Liminality Research Articles

“It Is (Not) What It Looks Like”: Chen Hangfeng’s Liminality

Born in 1974, Chen Hangfeng belongs to the fourth generation of Chinese artists after the Cultural Revolution. A generation of artists who were born after the Maoist era and grew up during the years of modernisation and opening up of the country. He is based in Shanghai where he was born and studied. Growing up and living in an increasingly westernized and permanently changing environment had a great impact on his work. His series of artworks seem to establish a confrontation between, on one side contemporary means of artistic expression or interpretation, and, on the other, forms of art which are considered to be traditional; namely between western “influences” and local “Chineseness”. Of interest is how the contact between those different forms is established. While the encounter seems to take the form of a dichotomy, it actually challenges the idea of a strict confrontation with two well-defined sides. The line where the contact is made is not a demarcation, it is neither definite, nor is it impermeable. The contact is not fixed or rigid. It is a moving, dynamic kind of encounter. The artworks consist of an intermingling set of practices, histories, memories, and even different temporalities. The now, the present of the image seems to contain the trace of the future along with that of the past.Ne en 1974 Chen Hangfeng appartient a la quatrieme generation d’artistes chinois apres la Revolution culturelle. Une generation d’artistes nes apres la periode Maoiste et ayant grandi durant les annees de modernisation et d’ouverture du pays. Il est aujourd’hui base a Shanghai, ville dans laquelle il est ne et a etudie. Vivre et avoir grandi dans cet environnement toujours plus occidentalise et en constante evolution a eu un impact notable sur son travail. Ses series artistiques semblent etablir une confrontation entre des media artistiques contemporains d’un cote et des pratiques considerees comme traditionnelles de l’autre ; entre des « influences » occidentales et une « sinite » locale. Il est toutefois interessant de se pencher sur la maniere dont le contact, la rencontre est mise en place. Si elle parait prendre la forme d’une dichotomie, elle defie en realite l’idee d’une stricte confrontation. La ligne de contact n’est pas une ligne de demarcation, elle n’est ni definie, ni impermeable. Le contact n’est pas fixe ou rigide. Il s’agit au contraire d’une rencontre dynamique et en mouvement. Les œuvres se composent d’un entremelement de pratiques, d’histoires et de souvenirs, ou les temporalites meme se melangent. Le maintenant, le present de l’image semble contenir des traces du passe aussi bien que du futur.

Liminality and Catullus's Attis

Liminality and Catullus's Attis

Liminality and In-Betweeness: The "Domestic Pieces" of Fillide Levasti

Liminality and In-Betweeness: The "Domestic Pieces" of Fillide Levasti

Visual silence and non-normative sexualities

Marginalization of people in non-hegemonic / non-normative gender roles and sexualities is often discussed in terms of their ‘silencing’. Besides, as silence tends to occupy liminal stages of communication and interaction, it is well suited to indexing marginalized subjectivities. This paper argues that in the context of artistic performance, that is when silence is displayed rather than imposed, silence can be re-valued as affirming and liberating. Art, which thrives on equivocality and understatement, tends to be silence-friendly due to its affordances of relative indeterminacy and ambiguity. Thus, the examples of transduction of silence in modern and contemporary art illustrate how art embraces, rather than obscures or disavows, male and female homosexual identities and non-heroic masculinities. The works examined include: Robert Rauschenberg’s and Agnes Martin’s monochromes, New York Dada drawings and photographs, and activist HIV/AIDS installations and photographs.

The Role of Dukun Suwuk and Dukun Prewangan in Curing Diseases in Kediri Community

Finding a cure when people get sick is an important thing. One of the efforts done by Kediri people in finding for a cure is to come to a Dukun (Shaman/traditional healer) Suwuk and Dukun Prewangan. The purposes of this research are to know the profiles and methods of Dukun Suwuk and Dukun Prewangan, and their role in curing diseases. This research used descriptive qualitative method. The results of this research show that (1) the process of healing and problem solution performed by Dukun Suwuk uses prayer as a key source of power. And Dukun Prewangan uses the help of supernatural beings who become their working partners to cure or resolve the problem, (2) Dukun Suwuk and Dukun Prewangan has an important role in society because of their presence is needed and respected. In addition, Dukun Suwuk and Dukun Prewangan who have been offering the services had experienced a lot of things as a living experience, (3) healing process performed by Dukun Suwuk and Dukun Prewangan is one solution for patients to be free from the ambiguous conditions of liminal stage. Choosing to go to a traditional healer healing is a rational choice for each patient.

Exploring Limbo: The Experience of Job-Loss and Unemployment in a Jewellery City in Italy

The article investigates the experience of job-loss and the following unemployment. Based on the ethnographic research conducted in Valenza, Italy, between 2008 and 2012, the article challenges an interpretation of unemployment as a liminal phase. I argue former workers experience unemployment as a “Limbo” – an existential condition underpinned by the ambiguity of being and at the same time not-being a worker. The exploration of this “Limbo” sheds light on the emotional, physical and symbolic labour that laid-off workers undertake facing their new condition. This research offers elements to read the loss of a job as an exit from a community of practices and to investigate the ways in which individual negotiate this departure.

Abolish the army? The ideal of democracy and the transformation of the Czechoslovak military after 1918 and 1989

This article deals with the relationship between the democratic transformations in Czechoslovakia after 1918 and 1989 and the armed forces. The democratic ideal of transformation seemed to be alien to the military institution, which upheld the old regime and paradigmatically represented undemocratic patterns of governance. In order to accommodate the popular demand to ‘abolish’ the army, the new political elite strived to initiate an institutional transformation that would re-legitimize the armed forces. Whereas after 1918 the military improved its reputation by changing into a ‘school of nation’, after 1989 the military, expected to become fully professional, went through a period in which its inner organisational culture was liberalized and personal freedoms of the soldiers were strengthened. The decline of previous authorities and the rise of civic self-confidence connected to the process of democratisation also led to the demoralisation of the soldiers. The liminal phase of military transformation was marked by the experience of the first ‘post-war war’, the Czechoslovak-Hungarian War in 1919 and the Gulf War in 1991, which indicated the needs of the new security environment and gave the idealistic thinking about the democratic military a touch of reality.

Party on wheels: mobile party spaces in the Norwegian high school graduation celebration.

Research on partying and nightlife often emphasizes commercial control while overlooking participants' creativity and agency. Due to their age, appearance and transgressive partying, participants in the Norwegian high school graduation celebration have limited access to bars and pubs in the ordinary night-time economy. To create alternative party spaces under their own control they utilize the spatial opportunities offered by automobility. Groups of students get together many years in advance and buy old buses which they refurbish to become rolling nightclubs that enable them to 'transcend space' through partying while on the move. These mobile party spaces provide a material and symbolic centre of communion and a tight space for physical assembly that enhances the production of intense positive emotions. In a cat-and-mouse game with the police, the buses provide a sense of nomadic autonomy, and enable participants to drink heavily for days on end. The study examines how youth may creatively zone their own party spaces within the context of automobility and how these mobile spaces again shape the partying that goes on within them. While this party practice opens up for autonomy, creativity and social transgressions reminiscent of liminal phases or carnivals, at a deeper level participants clearly reproduce class-based differences and exaggerate conventional practices and symbols.

Man Thou Art Dust: Rites of Passage in Austere Times.

In response to recent calls for further cross-disciplinary research on austerity and a deeper sociological understanding of the impact and aftermath of the economic crisis on individuals and societies, this article builds on extant austerity literature through an exploration of its effects on European men. Informed by theories of liminality and rites of passage, this qualitative investigation examines the experience of austerity from the perspective of 11 men through the three liminal stages of separation, transition and reaggregation and investigates its impact on their identity, responsibilities and expectations. Our findings reveal the negative experiences of alienation and outsiderhood alongside positive experiences of communitas, solidarity and comradeship. The study provides a nuanced understanding of modern male Europeans and their ‘rites of passage’ through austere times.

Introduction: Anchoritism, Liminality, and the Boundaries of Vocational Withdrawal

Introduction: Anchoritism, Liminality, and the Boundaries of Vocational Withdrawal

The Unbearable Liminality of Blackness: Reconsidering Violence in Steve McQueen's <em>12 Years a Slave</em>

The Unbearable Liminality of Blackness: Reconsidering Violence in Steve McQueen's <em>12 Years a Slave</em>

Women’s Experience of Birth: Childbirth as a Rite of Passage

BACKGROUND:Within midwifery, there is a move toward reclaiming and promoting physiological birth. Because midwifery is woman-centered in nature, it is essential that the experience of birth is understood from the woman’s perspective. To date, there has been little research focusing exclusively on women’s experience of physiological birth.AIM:The aim of this study was to explore women’s experiences of physiological birth.METHOD:A narrative approach was taken, and in-depth face-to-face interviews were used to gather birth stories. The participants were 10 women who had recently experienced a physiological birth. Data were analyzed to identify themes occurring across the narratives.FINDINGS:The findings are presented within the explanatory framework of childbirth as a rite of passage composing of three phases: separation, liminal, and incorporation. During birth, women separated from the external world and sought to minimize external and internal distractions. In the liminal phase, they entered “their own world” and experienced an altered state of consciousness. After their baby was born, they reintegrated with the external world and incorporated their birth experience into their sense of self.CONCLUSION:The findings of this study suggest that women’s experiences during physiological birth are multidimensional and not aligned with biomedical descriptions of physically defined stages of labor. Birth was an empowering and transformative experience for the women in the study. The rites of passage framework may assist with developing a discourse about birth that resonates with women’s experiences.

Keynote Address: Whose Space Is It, Anyway?

Keynote AddressWhose Space Is It, Anyway? Marvin Carlson (bio) The normal image of a theatrical performance is one that takes place inside a space particularly created for such activity. Almost all theatrical cultures have developed some sort of performance space set apart from the normal world of human activity, a space that serves as a site of imagination subject to certain rules, a fundamental one being that the audience agrees to serve as spectators and accept the fictive world the actors present to them. The performance space itself thus serves as a kind of “frame” emphasizing this dynamic (indeed, an alternative name for the proscenium arch theatre is the “picture-frame stage,” and some late nineteenth-century British theatres in fact surrounded the stage on all four sides with an ornate frame). In most cases this performance space, the stage and auditorium, is not even entered directly from the outside world, but is separated from that world by a liminal area, as a kind of mimetic airlock, the theatre lobby, which allows audiences to move by stages into the illusory realm of the theatre. Theatrical performances that were not “protected” by this house of illusion have been much more susceptible to incursions from the physical world. Even the classic Greek stage, forming a partial enclosure, could and apparently did take advantage of the “real world” accessible to its audiences, the open sky above them. Thus, many of the extant plays, among them Oedipus and Antigone, begin at or near dawn, and it is difficult to imagine that the plays which were presented at that time of day did not take advantage of this contribution from the real world. In the very earliest liturgical dramas of the Middle Ages we find already a complex mixture of theatrical elements and real spaces. Early liturgical drama was staged in parts of medieval cathedrals, but although these were real locations, they were accepted as suitable symbolically, reinforcing the effect of the performance on an emblematic if not on a realistic level. When religious dramas began to be performed outside the cathedrals, [End Page 9] the utilization of the physical surroundings became much more complex. Often these plays remained in the vicinity of the cathedral, particularly on its wide front platform and steps, and the cathedral performed not merely as a rich decorative background, like the classic Roman scenic façade, but also in its “true” role as the abode of God and the angelic choirs. In some cases this “theatricalization” of real places could involve a large part of the city, most notably in the Passion processionals that are still echoed in the widespread Via Dolorosa process of modern times. As early as the fifteenth century, the city of Vienna staged the public humiliation of Christ in the city marketplace, and then the actor bore his cross through the winding streets of the city to the distant cemetery where the crucifixion and resurrection were to be enacted. The market, the streets, the cemetery, and even the watching public were thus elements of the real world imaginatively refigured as parts of the universal city, Jerusalem.1 There is still of course a certain slippage between the Vienna cemetery and what it represents, because although it is a real cemetery, it is not the site it imaginatively represents. This distinction is of particular importance in reference to sacred sites, which inevitably take on some aura of the actions that reportedly occurred there. In fact the most ancient records that we have of theatrical activity are ritual observances carried out in specific sacred locations, which are essential to the event. The ancient Egyptian text from Abydos, whose “passion play” of Osiris is often cited as the earliest known theatrical text, was performed annually for some two thousand years, beginning in the second millennia bce. These were presented at the most sacred site in Egypt, the island where Osiris was reportedly buried.2 Jerusalem also witnessed theatrical activities at its major sites from very early times, as may be seen in the first detailed reports that we have from a pilgrim to that city, Egeria, in 381–84 ce. She reports a number of commemorative activities at...

Introduction to “Frontier Tibet: Trade and Boundaries of Authority in Kham”

Introduction to “Frontier Tibet:Trade and Boundaries of Authority in Kham” Stéphane Gros (bio) This special issue of Cross-Currents focuses on the region of the Sino-Tibetan borderlands that Tibetans call Kham: a historical frontier where several spheres of authority have competed, expanded or retracted, and sometimes overlapped. It has long constituted a buffer zone between the larger political entities of Central Tibet and China proper, and is an area that crosses cultural, ecological, and political boundaries. Kham is one of three traditional divisions of the geographical space that makes up what is often called “cultural Tibet” or “ethnographic Tibet,” together with the central region of Ü-Tsang and the northeastern region of Amdo (see map 1). What makes the history of eastern Tibet special, as Wim van Spengen and Lama Jabb (2009, 7) have rightly argued, is its “relative location” vis-à-vis China and Central Tibet, an in-betweenness that make it a “contingent region” (Tsomu 2015, 1), both an interface and a place in its own right. Despite evidence of the relative autonomy—or even sometimes independence—of the disjointed polities that have made up Kham throughout history, its intermediate location and relationship with the neighboring centers of power have contributed to its evolving topology. The articles in this special issue of Cross-Currents stem from a collaborative project called “Territories, Communities, and Exchanges in the Kham Sino-Tibetan Borderlands.”1 Within the framework of this research project, the authors whose work appears here have avoided naturalizing any particular definition of Kham—although it is an inescapably endogenous category. [End Page 209] Regions are the products of contested historical and socio-spatial processes. In Kham, influences from multiple centers have been exercised with varying intensity, and belongings and allegiances themselves have been multiple and variable. As Peter Perdue (2005, 41) contended, “the frontier zone was a liminal space where cultural identities merged and shifted, as peoples of different ethnic and linguistic roots interacted for common economic purposes.” These liminal areas can be seen as “microcosms,” as Nicola Di Cosmo and Don J. Wyatt (2003) have proposed, where cultures and identities are constantly recomposed. In this issue, we adopt a multipolar approach to the adaptive and intrinsically mixed properties of border areas, which goes against unitary visions of China or Tibet. In doing so, we highlight the time-specific processes that took place in the history of this frontier, especially from the eighteenth century onward. Click for larger view View full resolution Map 1. Geographical location of Kham. Source: Created by Rémi Chaix, based on data from NASA’s Shuttle Radar Topography Mission (SRTM). In order to decipher the processes that unfolded on the frontier, it is necessary to look closely at a wide range of issues, including migration, ethnic demographics, trade networks, indigenous notions of power or potency, political negotiations, political administration, and dissemination of knowledge about the frontier. This collective endeavor historicizes the frontier enterprise and brings to the fore aspects of state-building policies and processes [End Page 210] of territorialization manifest on both the Tibetan and Chinese sides. Perhaps more importantly, it seeks to lend greater visibility to the agency of local actors—as well as non-Han actors—in their varied responses to, and involvements and negotiations with, these “civilizing projects” and forces of change (Harrell 1995a; Shneiderman 2006). The contributions in this issue focus on the period from the eighteenth to the early twentieth century, when this “frontier Tibet” formed a middle ground in which local communities, the central Tibetan government (Ganden Phodrang), the Chinese imperial government (Qing), and later the republican authorities negotiated means of accommodation and established new institutions and practices. Against this historical background, the articles address questions of economic history, cultural interchange, and political legitimation and contestation at critical historical junctures. They show in particular how historical developments in trade and commerce are interlaced with notions of wealth and value, and linked to political control and authority.2 Together they bring new, ethnographically oriented historical studies into the arena of theoretical approaches to borderlands and corridors of contact. In what follows, I highlight some of the main threads that tie the articles together. The articles do not...

Reversing Polarities: Anarchical (Failed) States versus International Progress

The article explores how the literature on 'failed states' (re)produces the modern state as a regulatory ideal, obscuring its contingent character and its violent foundation. So, discursive practices, based on an Eurocentric account, construct the 'failed state' as deviant. The resultant hierarchy of states, in turn, creates favorable conditions for interventionist practices, whose agents are depicted as members of a 'progressive' and 'benevolent' 'international community'. As state failure is interpreted as exclusively domestic process, a well-demarcated boundary between the domestic level of 'anarchy' and the international realm of 'order' and 'progress' results. This article shows that the traditional image of an anarchical system versus an ordered and progressive state is turned on its head when viewed from the perspective of 'failed states'. In the latter, domestic anarchy is contrary to a modernizing international realm. By labelling the 'other' as 'traditional', 'failed', and 'backward' in distinction to a 'modern', 'successful' and 'progressive' international, the dominant discourse conditions us to conceive of these realms as homogeneous in themselves and radically different from each other, rather than as liminal areas with numerous ambiguities and overlaps.

Liminal mothers’ negotiation of conflicting service consumption

ABSTRACTPregnancy is a significant period of transition, transforming ‘women’ into ‘mothers’. The mid or liminal phase of transition is particularly ripe for consumer researchers. Transformative services research (TSR) considers that services may deliver objective well-being outcomes (e.g. consumer health). This article extends TSR into liminality and considers that services may also encompass hedonic (mood, satisfaction and happiness) and eudaimonic (mastery, autonomy, positive relations and self-acceptance) dimensions. The article unpacks women’s service experiences to enrich and expand understanding of positive and negative consumption meanings. It identifies that unanticipated outcomes emerge as a feature of transformative services. It demonstrates that services situates new mothers at the centre of a multiplicity of consumption. This may both overwhelm and act as transitional resource developing mothers as postmodern bricoleurs.

Performance enhancement: A whole of person approach to first year Dance students’ transition into tertiary training

The transition into university presents very particular challenges for students. The First Year Experience (FYE) is a transitional liminal phase, fraught with uncertainty, ripe with potential. The complexity inherent in this initial phase of tertiary education is well documented and continues to be interrogated. Providing timely and effective support and interventions for potentially at-risk first year students as they transition into tertiary study is a key priority for universities across the globe (Gale et al., 2015). This article outlines the evolution of an established and highly successful Transitional Training Program (TTP) for first year tertiary dance students, with particular reference to the 2015 iteration of the program. TTP design embraces three dimensions: physical training in transition, learning in transition, and teaching for transition, with an emphasis on developing and encouraging a mindset that enables information to be transferred into alternative settings for practice and learning throughout life. The aim of the 2015 TTP was to drive substantial change in first year Dance students’ satisfaction, connectedness, and overall performance within the Bachelor of Fine Arts (BFA) Dance course, through the development and delivery of innovative curriculum and pedagogical practices that promote the successful transition of dance students into their first year of university. The program targeted first year BFA Dance students through the integration of specific career guidance; performance psychology; academic skills support; practical dance skills support; and specialized curricula and pedagogy.

Becoming sensory disabled: Exploring self-transformation through rites of passage

Based on Van Gennep's framework of rites of passage, this research examines the self-transformation process of consumers who acquire a sensory disability. The analysis of 15 in-depth interviews reveals a complex three-stage process. With the onset of disability, individuals experience a forced withdrawal from their consumption activities. This withdrawal gives way to liminality of undetermined duration, nurtured by consumers' memories of the past, sufferings in the present, and fears of the future. Consumers achieve self-transformation by attributing new meanings to their consumption. These results have two contributions: (1) the liminal phase of the rite of passage has a multitemporal structure that might inhibit the formation of a new self and (2) redefining the boundaries of normalcy helps consumers achieve self-transformation.

Exile and Liminality: Experience between Cultures and Identities

To describe the exilic condition, many scholars have made use of the concept of liminality. Being neither here (Great Britain as a place of exile) nor there (Latvian exile society as a substitute of a nation) characterizes the life of one of the best Latvian existentialist prose writers – Guntis Zariņš (1926–1965). In Zariņš’ life and work he negotiated several liminal areas – from his war and professional experience, literary presentation to his standing in the Latvian exile community. Whether it is voluntary/involuntary or internal/external, the process of exile is one where an individual is removed from a place of origin (a homeland) therefore one of the crucial questions to solve is a relationship between the experience of cultural displacement and the construction of cultural identity. The time when Guntis Zariņš became prominent in Latvian exile literature, coincided with the time when the change of generations had started. Guntis Zariņš was one of the first exile writers who visited Soviet Latvia in order to personally meet colleagues-writers from the other side of Iron Curtain and cooperate with them in the field of literature but he was trapped between two powers – Britain and Soviet secret services that eventually led to his mental instability and suicide. Zariņš’ case is an example of an individual and undesired exile where prolonged liminal phase and inability to integrate neither into the host society nor to establish apolitical and cultural contacts with homeland resulted in an excellent existentialist prose on the one hand and ruined individuality on the other.

Life(and)death in Harry Potter : The Immortality of Love and Soul

This essay examines various features belonging to the liminal area between life and death in the world of Harry Potter . Being fantasy novels, Rowling’s works are free of the reins of empirical thinking. The border they posit between possible and impossible may be displaced; still, it is more or less firmly set.