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The challenge of liminality for International Relations theory

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 February 2012

MARIA MÄLKSOO
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Extract

The concept of liminality favours a broad interpretation, lending itself easily to disciplinary contexts outside of the original framework of cultural anthropology. Developed by Arnold van Gennep and Victor Turner by exploring the rites of passage, liminality points to in-between situations and conditions where established structures are dislocated, hierarchies reversed, and traditional settings of authority possibly endangered. The liminal state is a central phase in all social and cultural transitions as it marks the passage of the subject through ‘a cultural realm that has few or none of the attributes of the past or coming state’. It is thus a realm of great ambiguity, since the ‘liminal entities are neither here nor there; they are betwixt and between the positions assigned and arrayed by law, custom, convention, and ceremonial’. Yet, as a threshold situation, liminality is also a vital moment of creativity, a potential platform for renewing the societal make-up.

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Review of International Studies , Volume 38 , Issue 2 , April 2012 , pp. 481 - 494
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Copyright © British International Studies Association 2011

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References

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34 Thomassen, ‘Uses and meanings of liminality’, pp. 20–3. Turner often pointed to liminality as an ‘original state’ of a kind, the formless reality out of which new forms emerge, the zone of new beginnings. The crux of the matter is touched upon in his famous essay ‘Betwixt and Between’ as follows: ‘Liminality may perhaps be regarded as the Nay to all positive structural assertions, but as in some sense the source of them all, and, more than that, as a realm of pure possibility whence novel configurations of ideas and relations may arise’. See Turner, Victor W., ‘Betwixt and Between: The Liminal Period in Rites de Passage’, The Forest of Symbols (New York: Cornell University Press, 1987 [1967]), p. 97Google Scholar.

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