Liminal Experience Research Articles

Winds of Consciousness: An Analysis of Revolutionary Narratives and Praxis

INTRODUCTIONThis paper intends to provide revolutionary narratives accounting for of political mobilization, participation, and organization. The tradition of psychoanalysis calls for attention to quality development of identity. Sociocultural theories of education and social reconstructivists emphasize life as narrative resulting from dynamic interactions among social, cultural, and personal factors that, turn, influence life construction and identity formation. According to Winnicott (1971) and Freire (1970), interactions or experiences that are attributed to development of selfand worldconsciousness come to exist through awareness of these relationships. Winnicott conceptualized phenomena as catalyst contact points at which people's subjectivity is distinguished and which identity emerges from the specific [and] quality experience. Guerra (2006) describes area, one's perpetual state of attachment undergoes a transition and moves to another state of beings (Guerra, 2006, p. 69). However, not all experiences are pertinent to identity development or are able to impact narrative patterns. In addition, phenomena are not yet identifiable and remain as something indescribable, [and] undefined (p. 69). Turner discussed state of liminality (Turner, 1969) as a threshold of transitional consciousness. McLaren's work Schooling as a Ritual Performance provides nuanced insights into pedagogical moments creating educational engagement, classroom instruction urban schooling context through anthropological lens of ritual. McLaren's work, particularly his research on resistant culture schooling, reveals that liminal experiences are those with symbolic, historical and lived meaning . . which contest legitimacy, power and significance of culture [and hegemony] (p. 146). In realm of liminality, social dramas, a series of breach, crisis, redressive action and reintegration (cited McLaren, p. 301), are enacted as rituals which people's subjectivities challenge dominant structure and consequently deauthorize and re-appropriate it. Symbolic events, performative rituals, and enactments of social dramas resemble Winnicott's concept of transitional phenomena. Similarly, liminal states of consciousness, people undergo the intermediary [...] experience which power and identity are calibrated through social relations and in intermediary area of feeling that one is truly alive (Guerra, 2006, p. 72).Cultural Work and Cultural WorkersSocial transformation is a massive movement of power, and power mobilization results organization of people and resources. Mobilization is persuasion. Rubin's analysis (2002) shows that mobilizing efforts are contextually specific, culturally meaningful, and historically inspired. Furthermore, political acts are ideologically instigated and affectively contagious. Hence, revolution demands objective conditions political and historical contexts. Subjective conditions are also indispensable (Guevara, 2003); that is, there exists a sense of exceptionalism (Guevara, 2003) that is characterized by historical uniqueness or particular factors, such as discipline leadership or symbolism revolutionary narratives. Rubin emphasized that idea is to be essentialised (2002) to be sufficiently generative and abstract for inclusive interpretation. For Rubin, goal of this idea is to enchant (Rubin, 2004).Eric Wolf, from tradition of Marxist historical anthropology, argues that to effectively transcend social strata and divisions, ideas [must] become concentrated into ideologies that are interpretive or representative of identity of masses and that are capable of inspiring general sentiments people. Wolf (Portis-Winner, 2006, p. 341) discusses conditions that mobilize social relations: (1) power of potency characterized by particular individuals; (2) an ego to impose its will for social action upon another; (3) tactical or organizational power, which individuals circumscribe actions of others; and (4) structural power that, if sufficiently powerful, organizes settings and specifies direction and distribution of energy flow. …

Liminal experience of East Asian backpackers

Acknowledging the increasing popularity of independent travel from East Asia, this article explores the backpacking experience of young travellers of the region, from a socio-anthropological angle. Using liminality theory as a guideline and adopting a qualitative investigative approach, 31 interviews with East Asian backpackers were conducted. The findings suggest there are dual facets of the liminal experiences of the backpackers. On one hand, young travellers were motivated to escape from temporal, spatial and social pressures at home. On the other, their narratives reflected a strong commitment to home through a sense of filial piety, an awareness of their identity and positive evaluation of home. These findings advance our understanding of the liminal experiences in an Asian backpacking context.

TONANTZIN: VICTOR TURNER, WALTER BENJAMIN E ANTROPOLOGIA DA EXPERIÊNCIA

Resumo A partir dos escritos de Victor Turner sobre antropologia da experiência e da performance, revisitamos o seu ensaio sobre Hidalgo e a Revolução Mexicana de Independência. Nas margens interiores dessa antropologia encontramos algumas das afinidades entre Turner e Walter Benjamin. Três delas se evidenciam: 1) ao realizarem uma arqueologia da experiência, Turner encontra a experiência do liminar, e Benjamin a grande tradição narrativa; 2) ao discutirem transformações que acompanham o capitalismo industrial, Turner fala de um sparagmos, ou desmembramento das formas de ação simbólica; Benjamin da ruína da experiência e do estilhaçamento da tradição; e 3) na busca por formas de reconstituir uma experiência, as atenções de Turner se dirigem às formas liminóides de ação simbólica, e as de Benjamin às novas formas narrativas. Emergem questões. No fundo de cada uma delas, lampeja a imagem de Tonantzin. E a força de alguns dos elementos mais surpreendentes do pensamento de Turner.

A different kind of animal: liminal experiences of social work doctoral students

Evidence suggests that social and academic integration is a vital factor in doctoral student retention. This paper describes findings from a qualitative study which explored the experiences of a cohort of social work doctoral students during the first year in their programme of study. We used the anthropological concept of liminality which describes disorientation through transformative rites of passage, as a sensitising concept, through which to interpret the data. Thematic analysis indicated that the transition into new doctoral student was characterised by uncertainty and chaos and left the participants in an ambiguous position, betwixt and between socially prescribed roles. The findings demonstrate the need for anticipatory guidance and structured, sustained support, particularly within students’ first year. Efforts to enhance cohort relationships and mentoring may also help.

Towards an anthropology of critique: The modern experience of liminality and crisis

Critique can be located anthropologically in liminality, particularly the experience of communitas wherein everything is open to question and structures appear as external and meaningless. Rather than an intellectual preserve or an individual achievement, I argue that critique emerges from crises; that it diffuses proliferates and extends these liminal events and can be observed in contemporary politics, economics, media and everyday life. This anthropology of critique is situated alongside the emergent sociology of critique of Boltanski and others, and is historically grounded within chronic crises in modernity characterized by Szakolczai as ‘permanent liminality’. Thus, modernity is constituted by critique and has become, amongst other things, a critical society.

Stories of Liminality

The purpose of the study is to examine liminal experiences of living with the uncertainty of life-threatening illness. Increasing numbers of people with life-threatening illness live in-between the promise of treatment and the threat of recurrence or progression of disease, and yet this experience is not well understood. A narrative inquiry methodology within a constructionist frame was used. Semistructured in-depth interviews were conducted with 32 participants from three populations of interest: (a) 10 people living with cancer, (b) 13 people with chronic renal disease, and (c) 9 people living with HIV/AIDS. An overarching theme of "pervasive liminality" and four narratives are identified: storying into fear(lessness), being alive but not living; knowing and not knowing, and the (in)visibility of disease. Over time, living with a life-threatening illness produces complex and paradoxical experiences that do not easily fit within familiar categories of experience. Findings highlight pervasive liminal experiences as in-between narratives that are neither problematic nor need to be resolved, and endure over time.

The Tempest Speaks

This essay examines liminal experience in the Coen brothers' 2009 film, A Serious Man. It explores the themes of uncertainty, initiation, and religious experience, ultimately suggesting that this nihilistic story tilts toward a hidden but genuine spiritual response to the questions of psychic and cultural fragmentation.

Australians Abroad: Narrative Paths and Divagations

Although commonly characterized as an immigrant nation, Australia has been shaped just as importantly by the overseas journeys of its people, and the liminal experiences thus provided have not only been self-defining and defining of the other, but at times nation-defining. This special issue proposes a multidisciplinary analysis of Australian travellers and expatriates past and present: the reasons for and destinations of their travel, its impact on their identity, the roles they play, their writings and reflections, their linguistic and intercultural competence. 
 
 Clusters of travellers to particular destinations give rise to narrative patterns which solidify into templates, the narrative equivalent of the beaten track. The essays that follow highlight both discursive grooves and off-piste accounts that challenge the patterns. In both cases, the emphasis in the essays is on the travellers’ active engagement in the experience and on their negotiation of existing discourses. For even those who follow the trail invest it with personal meanings.

Loving in the context of community mental health practice: a clinical case study and reflection on mystical experience

Current research on mystical experience is offering community mental health professionals the opportunity to re-consider the role of love within clinical care. In psychological literature the historical conflation of love and sexuality is fraught with ethical concerns about professional impropriety, and the abuse of power. But the intimacy, intensity and beauty to be found within the therapeutic process bears the hallmark of the mystical, alluded to by Carl Rogers near the end of his career. This embodied experience that researchers are striving to understand in client populations is overlooked within the context of the therapeutic relationship. Described as the “essence” of love, or mystical consciousness, this liminal and transformational experience has the capacity to challenge and refresh the medicalised, often inhospitable, culture of community mental health by helping “professionals” re-discover that in treating the help-seeker they are always treating the Sacred Self.

The X-Factor enigma

In this paper we take a cultural perspective to understand the success of Simon Cowell’s X Factor TV talent show and its various brand extensions which, we suggest, epitomize the new marketing priorities of the media convergence era. We seek insights not from formal theories of marketing management but in the myth and magic of Cowell’s enchanted TV presence as the mystical authority, the trickster figure, conducting a mass-mediated experience of Turner’s (1969) ‘existential liminality’. Detached from formal rites of passage, this simulation of liminal ritual, temporarily and symbolically, subverts formal social barriers and opens up for the contestants the possibility of transformed identity. We suggest that X Factor viewers partake both vicariously and actually in this marketized experience of existential liminality. We review literary as well as anthropological antecedents of the media role Cowell personifies and we critique and extend previous applications of Turner’s work in marketing and consumption to suggest a wider resonance beyond the exemplar of X Factor in a range of ordinary, as well as extraordinary, consumption phenomena.

Miłosz i Lévinas – modernistyczny dwugłos o zadaniach literatury

Summary The article examines a parallel between Emmanuel Lévinas’s and Czesław Miłosz’s philosophical reflection about the duties of literature. The common ground can be found in Lévinas’s well-known idea of encountering the Other through the Face. This form of communication, which is by no means easy, is given extra depth by liminal experiences of transience and death. As the examples from the second part of this article show these experiences seem to mark the greatest achievements of twentieth-century literature. Finally, the question is asked about the two writers’ views on the place of philosophy and reflection on transcendence. Even though they do not see eye to eye on these points, the plurality of values and judgments expressed by them should not compel us to classify their work as completely disparate and incomparable.

Liminality as a framework for understanding the experience of cancer survivorship: a literature review

To report a narrative review of literature that drew on the concept of liminality as a framework for understanding the cancer experience. In doing so, we explored the utility of liminality for guiding research on experiences of cancer survivorship. The 'rites of passage' model uses the concept of liminality to explore transition. Taking cancer survivorship as a process, liminality may facilitate our understanding of this phenomenon. Searches of Medline, PsycInfo, British Nursing Index, Cinahl, ASSIA, Web of Science, Cochrane Library and British Library databases were conducted, covering 1985-2011. Search terms were cancer and liminal* or rite* of passage. A narrative review, using a textual narrative approach, was undertaken to provide a comprehensive overview of the topic. Studies were arranged into groups according to the stage of the cancer trajectory on which they focused. Findings from each study were presented to highlight facets of the liminal experience at each stage. Ten studies were included for review. Liminality depicts the ambiguity and uncertainty often experienced by people affected by cancer. Although liminality appears useful for understanding experiences of cancer risk, diagnosis, treatment and the period following active treatment, little research has explored the concept with respect to long-term survivorship. Gaps in current evidence highlight the need for additional research to ascertain the utility of liminality for understanding experiences of long-term survivorship. Research exploring the personal and social implications of living a liminal life, at all stages of the cancer trajectory, is also warranted.

Political (Re)Learning and Consumer Culture in Post-GDR Society

Private consumption may be seen both as a means of individual social legitimation and as an expression of collective values and identities. As such, consumer behaviour may evidence the nature and extent of adaptation of political values and orientations during periods of political transition. This study identifies and analyses recent trends in consumer behaviour in the former German Democratic Republic (GDR) as expressions of identity adaptation. It argues that East Germans' distinctive socialisation, combined with the liminal experience of German unification, has promoted the development of a consumer culture that is compatible with liberal, late-capitalist values and yet differs in key respects from the West German ‘reference culture’. The emerging East German consumer culture can be characterised as pragmatic-experimental. The unusually politicised role of consumer cultures in the post-GDR transition trajectory enhances the potential for consumer behaviours to be co-constitutive, as well as illustrative, of East German political identity.

Classification, Subjectivities, and Personal Visibility

This article proposes extending the empirical sociological debate regarding the complex ways social classifications construct scenarios of subjectivity. Based on the case study of the Boarding School for the Gifted Disadvantaged in Israel, the article describes how a new cultural order created a new scenario of subjectivity (“gifted disadvantaged”) that had not been known before. This scenario was shaped in relation both to the ethnic classification in Israel, as well as to two social categories that were well‐known in the educational field (“gifted” and “disadvantaged”). To understand the institutional dynamics involved in the construction of a new scenario of subjectivity, content analysis of the organizational documents that accompanied the founding of the school was carried out, and in‐depth interviews with graduates of the school were conducted in order to understand how those who populate the new scenario experience their subjectivity years after its construction. The findings indicate a specific connection between classifications, subjectivity, and personal visibility. Specifically, the study reveals a number of phenomenological aspects that enhance the experience of visibility: the cognitive identification of two types of self; the experience of cognitive liminality; and the consciousness of having a subjectivity deserving of special nurturance.

Modernist Short Fiction by Women: The Liminal in Katherine Mansfield, Dorothy Richardson, May Sinclair and Virginia Woolf (review)

Reviewed by: Modernist Short Fiction by Women: The Liminal in Katherine Mansfield, Dorothy Richardson, May Sinclair and Virginia Woolf Anne Besnault-Levita Modernist Short Fiction by Women: The Liminal in Katherine Mansfield, Dorothy Richardson, May Sinclair and Virginia Woolf. Claire Drewery. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2011. Pp. 150. $99.95 (cloth). In the last decade, there has been an increased interest in modernist fiction by women. Within the context of the diversified new modernist studies, much work has focused on reviving supposedly minor writers while others have offered new critical perspectives on the short fiction of famous authors such as Katherine Mansfield and Virginia Woolf.1 But since Dominic Head's 1992 study of the modernist short story and his statement that the genre "ought to be seen as centrally involved in the revolution in fictional practice,"2 Claire Drewery's book is the first to take up the subject of modernist short fiction's specificity by examining the complex interconnections between genre, gender, and liminality through an original corpus of texts. In fact, one of the achievements of her book is to convince us, if need be, that the marginalized Richardson and Sinclair should be included in a study of female modernism. Her research also makes a valuable [End Page 214] contribution to recent scholarship on the literary codings of female experience in modernist fiction, although she specifies in her introduction that "the liminal themes common to women's short fiction are . . . characteristic traits of both modernism and the short story in general" (11). Drewery's book maps the locations of liminality in the short stories of Mansfield, Woolf, Richardson, and Sinclair not just as a "pervasive theme" but as a trope expressing "the condition of short fiction as genre" and revealing how it is often preoccupied with "in-between spaces," "moments of interlude," "crises of identity," and the transgression of "boundaries, whether psychological or social, thematic or theoretical" (3). As the liminal is a "complex phenomenon," "both palpable and intangible" (4), Drewery draws on the fields of anthropology, psychoanalysis, and post-structuralist theory with illuminating readings from Arnold van Gennep, Victor Turner, Sigmund Freud, Melanie Klein, Julia Kristeva, and Terry Eagleton, among others. Her main thesis is that "as writers, as modernists, and as women," Mansfield, Richardson, Sinclair, and Woolf "negotiate [liminality's] embodiment of an ominous threat of exclusion with a realm of creative and potentially subversive possibility" (13). As such, her work offers a new reading of the tensions, paradoxes, and ambivalences that are central to the aesthetics of the modernist short story while showing the intimate ties between liminality and "women's subjectivities" (11). The book falls into six chapters, all of them exploring a different aspect of the liminal through the textual analysis of a few representative stories. The first chapter focuses on the spiritual and aesthetic metaphor of the journey as a spatial, temporal, and psychological experience of alienation, exile, and transience. In the second chapter, Drewery addresses the subject of mortality and mourning, two hardly articulable liminal and subjective conditions the representation of which challenges the modernist drive towards formal and structural unity. She offers particularly subtle and convincing pages on Mansfield's fictions of haunting memories. The third chapter logically moves from "impossible mourning" to the study of death as a pervading theme and generic trope whereby modernist short fiction negotiates its intrinsic impulse towards an absent "other." Expanding on the recent research on modernism's nostalgia for the past and its resulting "uncanny tradition" (67), the fourth chapter offers a thought-provoking discussion on the psychological and psychoanalytical gothic in a few short fictions by Sinclair and Woolf, and analyses how this other type of liminal experience is conveyed through an experimental and elliptic prose. In the following chapter, Drewery uses Julia Kristeva's theory of signification, Judith Butler's notion of performativity (to me the most useful reference here), and the work of sociologist Zygmunt Bauman on Modernity and Ambivalence to look in a fresh way at the modernist literary representation of "inner life," its paradoxes and dilemmas. Her concluding chapter explores the link between the modernist epiphanic moment and the liminal condition by building on the recent research on...

Associations between transition‐specific stress experience, nocturnal decline in ambulatory blood pressure, and C‐reactive protein levels among transgender men

To characterize challenges experienced during stages of female-to-male sex transition and investigate associations between transition-specific measures of psychosocial stress, nocturnal decline in ambulatory blood pressure (amBP), and changes in C-reactive protein (CRP) levels. For this biocultural study, 65 healthy transmen who were using testosterone (T) therapy participated in interviews to assess transition-specific stress experience. They provided perceived stress scores, self-esteem scores, 24-h amBP measures, salivary samples for T levels, and a blood spot for CRP levels. Psychosocial stress was examined in relation to amBP and CRP using linear regression while adjusting for age, body mass index, and smoking. There were no differences in mean levels of amBP in association with stage of transition. Men reporting stress associated with being "out" as transgender had significantly diminished nocturnal decline in systolic and diastolic amBP compared to men who did not report such stress. The associations remained significant when examined among men in stages 1 and 2 (≤ 3 years on T), but not among men in stage 3 (>3 years on T) of transition. Men reporting stress related to "passing" as someone born male had higher CRP levels than those who did not report such stress. The association remained significant when examined among men in stages 2 and 3 (>0.5-3 years on T). Measures of stress that captured individuals' experiences of gender liminality were associated with diminished nocturnal decline in amBP and increased levels of CRP. There are significant differences between men grouped into different stages of the transition process.

“Bettering Her Education and Widening Her Sphere”

This article is a focused response to the call for a “conscious use of crystallization,” in qualitative research. To this end, the author brings into play a full-bodied textual metaphor, the palimpsest, to stimulate the expansion of an integrated crystallization typology—comprised of woven and patched approaches. Appropriated as a textual artifact, the author uses the palimpsest to ground and figure the methodological development of palimpsestuous crystallization. The novel crystallization process places foci on the involved relationship between texts and discourses, that is, intertextuality and interdiscursivity. The author works at developing palimpsestuous crystallization by interleaving liminal coeducational experiences between interrelated texts signifying persistent and dominant discourses on postsecondary coeducation. Wholly, the article is constituent of a larger methodological undertaking in its early stages. The article emerges from a situated and personal narrative that is typified as “more than a back story.”

Bastardised whiteness: ‘zef’-culture, Die Antwoord and the reconfiguration of contemporary Afrikaans identities

This paper argues that post-apartheid South Africa destabilised what it means to be white and Afrikaans in South Africa. In particular, it explores the emergence into visibility of so-called ‘zef’-culture as mediated through musical acts like Die Antwoord and Jack Parow and to a lesser extent websites such as Watkykjy. The authors argue that the reconfiguration of white Afrikaans identities as mediated through ‘zef’-cultural artefacts is deliberate in that it speaks to the perceived sense of marginal and liminal experience of white Afrikaans youth in post-apartheid South Africa.

Living in Non-permanent Accommodation in England: Liminal Experiences of Home

This paper reports research on people who live in housing that is defined as non-permanent by policy makers in England, and focuses on two particular groups: residents of park homes and residential boaters. The paper emphasises how the distinctive environments in which such housing is set may facilitate particular lifestyles, contributing to residents' identities. The notion of liminality is used as a framework to help understand the views of residents, highlighting the diversity of their experiences. Both park home residents and residential boaters ascribed a range of positive qualities to the environments in which they lived, underscored by the perception that the spaces that such accommodation occupied were often associated with leisure. Nevertheless, the nature of tenure relations in both settings potentially leads to vulnerabilities in the way that some people can maintain these lifestyles. These positive and negative facets were reflected in ambivalent feelings towards home both between groups of respondents and within individuals.

A Study of Fools in Shakespeare's Comedies: the Case of Falstaff

This article explores the role and function of fools in Shakespeare’s comedies in terms of liminal experiences and carnivalesque laughter. Through a detailed analysis of Falstaff in The Merry Wives of Windsor (1600), the article will show how fools mainly play with the grotesque realism of physical bodies and how they can impose primitive playfulness and subversive awareness on both characters and audience. In a rigid Elizabethan society with stringent control and hierarchy, fools provided their audience with the experience of temporary displacement and trespass using uncontrollable bodies and floating discourses of them. Moreover, fools effectively implement their subversive roles to reveal the unpleasant conflicts and disorders existed in a society refusing the fictional concept of seamlessly harmonious social structure. They also created the laughter which effectively delivers serious and ridiculous meanings of the subjects in a community. Thus, Shakespeare powerfully displays ambiguous and complex characteristics of comedies by integrating fools with the carnivalesque energy of laughter.