Permanent Liminality Research Articles

Remnants of Urbicide and Shared Heritage: Uncovering Beirut’s Liminal Political Holes

ABSTRACT The article explores the ways deliberate and large-scale destruction within the urban environment of Beirut initiates a state of liminality resulting in “political holes”– empty areas dispersed throughout the cityscape. The existence of these political holes creates a shared heritage of liminality in the post-conflict territory of Beirut. Drawing from Coward’s (2008) framing of urbicide, Casati and Varzi’s (1994) definition of the hole, and van Gennep’s (1960) and Turner’s (1969) notions of liminality, the article introduces the term “political hole” as a physical liminal spatial entity – an absence – in the urban fabric achieved through an intentional political decision to demolish shared space. Based on a study of a series of demolitions in Beirut, Lebanon, between 1983 and 1994, the article demonstrates how urbicide led to the obliteration of heritage and the appearance of political holes in the city. Using aerial view observation and walking practices, the liminal ephemeral political holes are exposed as physical traces that sit in limbo, awaiting their replacement with a new building. Through analysis, these spaces are then uncovered as a representation of a history of urbicide, embodying the shared permanent liminality that was inflicted on Beirut’s urban landscape.

Transformations of the Beirut River: Between Temporary and Permanent Liminality

This article presents the case of the Beirut River corridor in Lebanon, which defines the administrative border between the capital Beirut, its eastern and south-eastern suburbs. The Beirut River has undergone several transformations from being a lotic environment to becoming complex urban infrastructure. This is often unnoticeable due to the scarcity of its running water and its walled existence at the edge of administrative boundaries. The separation from its riverbanks, disconnection from the urban fabric, and continuous pollution have contributed to its liminality, being simultaneously neither present nor absent. To understand this in-betweenness, the river’s spatial, temporal, and social liminality are analysed by identifying major events, actors, and key urban planning interventions that impacted the river at the national, city region, and local scales. The article explores the development of the river corridor both in terms of urbanisation and population dynamics; its distinct positionality in different periods that corresponded to major events and decisions made; and the contrasting river experiences and perceptions across generations, which vary between reminiscence and aversion. By examining the various transformative processes, collective practices, perceptions, and diverse actors, the article highlights the contextual implications of this obdurate liminality, but also Beirut River’s potential alternative future positionality amidst present and imminent urban challenges.

Coping with Permanent Liminality: Social Understanding and Action through Theatre in Late Communist Hungary

Coping with Permanent Liminality: Social Understanding and Action through Theatre in Late Communist Hungary

The Trickster: A Political Theology for Our Time

Political theology has traditionally been dominated by Christian concepts, specifically the concept of a law-giving and order-preserving god. Other political theologies are possible, however, and this essay considers one—the trickster—a culture hero and comic buffoon who delightedly and shamelessly violates and subverts order to inaugurate a new reality of his own making, if not of his own will. The first half of the essay introduces the trickster as a cross-cultural agent of creative destruction, a messenger and civilization-bringer, and a clever fool. The second half explores how the last two centuries of Western social and intellectual history have shifted the ground from under a god of order toward a spirit of flux, transience, paradox, and liminality. The essay concludes that the contemporary post-modern state of permanent liminality is better symbolized and grasped through the mythical lens of the trickster than the biblical god, including and especially contemporary global right-wing populism, whose leading figures reflect the wicked energy and appeal of the trickster impulse.

Pivoting Multiple Liminalities in Working Parenthood: Communicative Negotiations of Permanent, Transitional, and Limbo Liminalities

Drawing from the experiences of graduate students who become parents during graduate school in the United States, we argue that working parents encounter multiple liminalities, defined as “betwixt and between the original positions arrayed by law, custom, convention and ceremony” (Turner, 1977, p. 95) in their work-family negotiation. Findings revealed that graduate student parents (GSP) experienced permanent liminality when navigating parental leave policies, transitional liminality when managing work-family demands, and limbo liminality as GSPs are compared against “the ideal worker” in their everyday work. GSPs engaged in pivoting to unleash the agentic potential of their liminal positionality. Pivoting is enacted through (a) stepping into X or Y side of the liminal space to unlock oneself from the inbetweeness, (b) rotating back and forth between X and Y positions to attend to different roles, and (c) turning to an alternative space whereby the hybrid X-Y identities are embraced.

Trapped in limbo – Academics' identity negotiation in conditions of perpetual liminality

PurposeThis paper aims to investigate the experiences of permanent liminality of academics and the associated multidimensional processes of identity negotiation.Design/methodology/approachThe article draws upon a three-and-a-half-year at-home ethnography. The first author – as insider, participant and researcher – investigated the consequences of an organizational redesign that pushed members of a local university department into a situation of permanent liminality.FindingsThe paper describes how academics simultaneously followed multiple trajectories in their identity negotiation as a response to ongoing experiences of ambiguity, disorientation, powerlessness and loss of status.Practical implicationsManagement decisions in higher education institutions based on administrative concerns can have adverse effects for academics, particularly when such decisions disturb, complicate or even render impossible identification processes. University managers need to realize and to respond to the struggle of academics getting lost in an endless quest for defining who they are.Originality/valueThe paper highlights the dual character of identity negotiation in conditions of permanent liminality as unresolved identity work through simultaneous identification and dis-identification. It further shows the multidimensionality of this identity work and argues that identity negotiation as a response to perpetual liminality is informed by notions of struggle and notions of opportunity.

Managing liminal time in the fly-in fly-out work camp.

Fly-in fly-out (FIFO) work camps are built and organized to ensure that long-distance rotational workers are fed, housed, and mobilized in sync with the pressing yet unpredictable rhythms of resource extraction. Positioned thus ‘betwixt and between’ the complex relations of work and life (Johnsen and Sørensen, 2015), the work camp is a generative yet hitherto neglected example of the temporal operations of permanent liminality (Bamber et al., 2017). But what does this mean for workers? If camp does the liminal work of managing the temporal challenges of the resource-based mobility regime, how do FIFO workers experience and respond to its inevitable lived consequences? Drawing on rare qualitative fieldwork in Canada’s Athabasca Oil Sands, we explain the effects of camp time—disorientation, monotony, and entrapment—and examine the temporal tactics workers deploy to manage those effects, from embracing and disrupting internal camp routines to aligning and syncing with outside and future-oriented temporalities. We argue that workers’ tactics make them ‘competent liminars’ (Borg and Söderlund, 2015) of camp time, which is, in turn, crucial to the latter’s disciplining function within the FIFO mobility regime. Our findings invite renewed attention to the temporal mediation accomplished by liminal people and places, especially in organizational contexts aimed at institutionally harnessing social time to productive imperatives.

Reconceptualization of status liminality in the sociological theory

This article aims at filling some theoretical gaps in understanding status liminality as a transition state in the processes of social mobility. Based on the ideas of A. van Gennep and V. Turner on the nature of rites de passage, the author reconstructs the types of status liminality - ascending, descending, recursive, permanent liminality and liminoidity. The article identified some features that distinguish liminality from marginality and deviance: transitivity - the altered preliminal position and identity combined with the incomplete metamorphosis; temporality - normative temporal and (possibly) spatial boundaries of the transition period; consequentiality - social significance of the postliminal status transformation for both its bearer and society or social groups involved. The phenomenon of communitas discovered by Turner is of particular importance for understanding the state of liminality for it represents a tendency of liminal people to depart from the mundane domain into the anti- and non-structural social-psychological state in which social ties are vividly affective and social experience has a profound existential effect. For each type of status liminality, the author provides examples from the traditional and modern societies using research in sociology of death, medical sociology, criminal sociology, sociology of tourism, social psychology, etc. To conclude, the author considers such phenomena as precariat, morphological freedom and edgework in the liminality perspective. Thus, the heuristic potential of the concept liminality can make a significant contribution to the study of social changes and understanding mechanisms of reproducing social order at the individual, group and societal levels.

Understanding Difficult Consumer Transitions: The In/Dividual Consumer in Permanent Liminality

AbstractSome life transitions are difficult and prolonged, such as becoming an independent adult, forming a family, or adopting healthy consumption habits. Permanent liminality describes transitions that can span years and even a lifetime with no anticipated end. To understand how consumers are caught in permanent liminality, we examine how Pentecostal converts consume religious services in their difficult transition from the secular “world” to Pentecostalism. We draw on the concept of in/dividual personhood to explain how the Pentecostal dividual is coconstituted in an endless movement between the undesired “worldly” in/dividual and the contiguous incorporation into the desired Pentecostal in/dividual and structure. Pentecostals’ permanent liminality thus involves ongoing cycles of separation and incorporation within zones of indeterminacy, in which neither separation nor incorporation is ever completed. This theoretical framework explains the unfinished transition of Pentecostal converts as contested dividuals. We extend this theoretical explanation for future research on liquid modernity and consumers caught in permanent liminality.

A Temporary Liminal Space Counteracting the Permanent ‘in between’ in Working Life

Ambiguous liminality used to exist ‘in between’, in a transition to a new social-structural order, but recently, it has gained a more permanent and normalized presence in working life, where existing boundaries are becoming blurred. However, liminality as a continuous state can be individually demanding. This paper elaborates upon a theoretical understanding of permanent and temporary liminality in working life and examines possible measures to tame excessive liminality. To illustrate the theoretical development, forms of permanent and temporary liminality in the lives of three professionals are analyzed. We found that dealing with multiple and complex work roles independently could be conducive to fracturing work routines, which we identify as habitualized, permanent liminality. Withdrawal to an alternative work environment – a rural Finnish archipelago – formed a liminal space in its original sense, a creative and reflective phase that illuminated work-related challenges. It is suggested that such spaces are designed to achieve simplicity.

Doctoral rites and liminal spaces: academics without PhDs in South Africa and Australia

ABSTRACTAcademics without PhDs are common in developing countries and among lecturers from marginalised communities, yet the literature on doctoral education largely ignores them. This qualitative study aimed to address that gap by interviewing academics without PhDs in South Africa and Australia. Their narratives of betwixt and betweenness contribute to theories of liminality as well as doctoral education. Liminality is traditionally conceptualised as a linear, vertical process with clear rites of passage. However, in our study, the interviewees were not only facing a vertical trajectory between non-PhD and post-PhD status but also a lateral trajectory between staff and student identity. The research confirms the importance of distinguishing between transient and permanent liminality in an occupational context. For those who had given up studying, liminality was permanent. Liminality was also affected by dynamically interconnecting factors including age, gender, race, ethnicity, relations with supervisors, time and location.

Transitional optics: Exploring liminal spaces after conflict

The purpose of this article is to engage in a new conceptualisation of liminality, as it applies to space and place in societies emerging from conflict but not yet at peace. We adopt a case study approach of two urban environments: Derry/Londonderry, a city that experienced acute levels of violence during the Northern Ireland conflict, and Bilbao, the largest city in the Basque Country, which has been at the crux of the cultural and economic struggle for Basque independence. The visual, built environment has been significantly reconfigured in both cities to communicate the transition from conflict. Yet the optics of peacebuilding does not necessarily reflect the experiences of communities as they move through complex processes. A more nuanced and critical reading of the urban environment often reveals stagnation within peace processes and the existence of liminal, inbetween spaces. This paper suggests that ‘transitional optics’ in societies moving out of conflict can physically illuminate the complex nature of building peace, and argues that the idea of permanent liminality can offer new ways of understanding the ways in which transitional processes can become trapped. An ‘end-point’ is not always achievable, or perhaps, for some, desirable. The characteristics of permanent liminality can be identified in three main areas: political imagery, physical regeneration and public space as a conflict arena.

Byzantine spirit of the Undead and its legacy in the Sick Man of Europe

Abstract This paper examines the source and consequences of permanent liminality in the political-legal administration of the Byzantine Empire. The paper argues ambiguous and incomplete identities of individuals, groups, and society associated with certain authoritarian political arrangements and consequent arrested liminal period(s) contributed to the decline of the Empire. Further, and significantly, the unresolved situation of disaggregated identity, or spirited away demos, persisted in the Ottoman Era and continues to infect contemporary socio-political affairs in regions in the Balkans and other countries of the former Soviet Union which now seek to balance the interests of a nation-state with the diversity of Europe. The paper does not consider the Orthodox Spirit, but rather analyzes the role of pseudo-intellectuals and sophists who derail the democratic and philosophical Hellenist traditions with authoritarian policies and tools. The research compares and links the institutional attempts of the Byzantine and Ottoman Empires to manage and manipulate differences and distinctions through mechanisms such as theatricalization and the millets. The argument concludes that these strategies created the basis for the perpetualization of the sick man of Europe to the extent they focused on juggling the distinctions and identities of the empires rather than pursuing the development of the democratic self. Thus, in liminality is revealed and contained undead and viral authoritarian spirits, sometimes manifested in populist or extremist ethnic leaders, whose technologies trick the demos and disrupt the democratic imagination.

Szakolczai, A.Novels and the Sociology of the Contemporary2016Routledge 374 pp.Szakolczai, A.Permanent Liminality and Modernity: Analysing the Sacrificial Carnival through Novels2017Routledge 271 pp.

Szakolczai, A.Novels and the Sociology of the Contemporary2016Routledge 374 pp.Szakolczai, A.Permanent Liminality and Modernity: Analysing the Sacrificial Carnival through Novels2017Routledge 271 pp.

Occupational limbo, transitional liminality and permanent liminality: New conceptual distinctions

This article contributes new theoretical perspectives and empirical findings to the conceptualization of occupational liminality. Here, we posit ‘occupational limbo’ as a state distinct from both transitional and permanent liminality; an important analytic distinction in better understanding occupational experiences. In its anthropological sense, liminality refers to a state of being betwixt and between; it is temporary and transitional. Permanent liminality refers to a state of being neither-this-nor-that, or both-this-and-that. We extend this framework in proposing a conceptualization of occupational limbo as always- this- and-never- that, where this is less desirable than that. Based on interviews with 51 teaching-only staff at 20 research-intensive ‘Russell Group’ universities in the United Kingdom, the findings highlight some challenging occupational experiences. Interviewees reported feeling ‘locked-in’ to an uncomfortable state by a set of structural and social barriers often perceived as insurmountable. Teaching-only staff were found to engage in negative and often self-depreciatory identity talk that highlighted a felt inability to cross the līmen to the elevated status of ‘proper academics’. The research findings and the new conceptual framework provide analytic insights with wider application to other occupational spheres, and can thus enhance the understanding not just of teaching-only staff and academics, but also of other workers and managers.

Permanent (trickster) liminality: The reasons of the heart and of the mind

The term liminality is often used to celebrate escape from rigid structures or to promote creativity. However, the collapse of the stable frameworks of social life also generates anguishing conditions of uncertainty. This article introduces the term “permanent liminality” for situations in which the temporary suspension of normality becomes permanent. Such situations of entrapment within an interstitial dimension produce an emotional overheat, generating a “liminal hotspot.” This paper addresses the possibility of ending such entrapment. Reasoning cannot guide out of permanent liminality, as—in the absence of stability necessary to apprehend ratio, or harmonious proportionality—it is also liable to short-circuit, being closely associated under liminal conditions with imitativity. A solution is offered, through Pascal rather than Kant, by the heart. Such an idea also receives support from the Palaeolithic Age, maternal heartbeat in the womb, and long-distance walking pilgrimage.

Defending the Nation from her Nationalism(s)

This article offers and applies a framework for understanding nation-(re)-building after a major transition and crisis, like a war. It suggests socioanthropological concepts: liminality, mimesis, rites of passage, and tricksters. An understanding of the logic behind the emergence of nationalist tricksters can offer knowledge for an arguably better conflict-handling mechanism in deeply divided societies. It addresses, via the case study of Bosnia and Herzegovina (B&H), the following question: What is an adequate understanding of the postconflict self in B&H? The aim is to reconceptualize nationalism and the break-up of Yugoslavia (as well as the post-Dayton B&H) as a liminal process, in which trickster nationalists perpetuate schismatic conflict. The article concludes that trickster nationalists seem to be responsible for the current state of permanent liminality in B&H societies.

Drinking in the North of European Russia: From Traditional to Totalising Liminality

AbstractThis article* explores the topic of alcohol consumption in Russia. My fieldwork was conducted in the north of European Russia between 2010 and 2014 in Arkhangelskaya and Vologodskaya oblasts. The main idea of the paper is to look at alcohol drinking through the lens of rites of passage and especially liminality. I argue that the traditional festivities, and alcohol consumption with the traditional type of liminality, were based on a small amount of sugar and money and also the long period of time required to make beer. In 1960s, afterukrupneniyeand the urbanisation of villages, money and spirits came to the villages. Together with an existing prohibition on ceremonies and rites they created a new permanent liminality of drinking. This new liminality included getting dead drunk and was paradoxically approved by Soviet ideology.

EU–Hamas actors in a state of permanent liminality

This article contributes to the debate on liminality within International Relations (IR) theory by focusing on the actorness of the European Union (EU) and Hamas. The concept of liminality as a transitional process is applied to frame the situation of both the EU and Hamas as political actors in-between socially established categories. This article explores how the liminal identity of these two actors impacts, on the one hand, their relations with each other and, on the other hand, their relations of ‘self’. Exploring the procedural relations of the EU and Hamas, it argues for the necessity of recognising liminal categories in IR theory and practice, while, at the same time, it highlights the limits of such in-between categories in a world order still structured around the state.

Life-as-Lived Today: Perpetual (Undesired) Liminality of the Half-widows of Kashmir

According to Victor Turner, all liminality must eventually dissolve, for it is a state of great intensity that cannot exist very long without some sort of structure to stabilize it. This paper takes his lead and attempts to describe the liminal status of those women, the whereabouts of whose husbands are not known (they are locally referred to as ‘half-widows’) in the conflict zone of Kashmir, India. The article examines the concept of liminality based on life as lived today by these half-widows and shows how the effects of liminality operate in their day to day life, making them extremely vulnerable victims. In this, it is an attempt to expand upon the concept of liminality, originally linked almost exclusively to rites of passage. Furthermore, this paper reflects on the idea of permanent liminality that has been elaborated by sociologist Arpad Szakolczai. The narratives of the half-widows of Kashmir provide an example of how they are trapped in a form of “permanent liminality” far beyond what was initially defined as a “temporal state”.