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Liminal identities and processes of domestication and subversion in International Relations

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 February 2012

BAHAR RUMELILI
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Extract

In the course of his ethnographic study of the Ndembu tribes, the renowned anthropologist Victor Turner focused on the elaborate rituals that marked various phases of social transition, such as puberty and marriage. Also drawing on the work of Arnold van Gennep on rites of passage, Turner identified the entities going through social transitions as liminals, that ‘are neither here nor there; they are betwixt and between the positions assigned and arrayed by law, custom, convention, and ceremonial’. According to Turner, the defining attribute of liminal positions is their ambiguity and indeterminacy because they ‘elude or slip through the network of classifications that normally locate states and positions in cultural space’.

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Forum
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Review of International Studies , Volume 38 , Issue 2 , April 2012 , pp. 495 - 508
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Copyright © British International Studies Association 2011

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References

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2 Ibid.

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5 Ibid., p. 128.

6 Turner was primarily interested in the subversive enactments of liminality because they challenged the prevailing structuralism in sociology. The framework that I offer encompasses both reproductive and subversive enactments of liminality.

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27 Many studies note the remarkable historical continuity in the European discourses on Turkey. See in particular, Neumann, Iver B. and Welsh, Jennifer, ‘The Other in European Self-Definition: an Addendum to the Literature on International Society’, Review of International Studies, 17:4 (1991), pp. 327–48CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Naff, Thomas, ‘The Ottoman Empire and European States System’, in Bull, Hedley and Watson, A. (eds), The Expansion of International Society (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984)Google Scholar; and Ulusoy, Kivanc, ‘The Changing Challenge of Europeanization to Politics and Governance in Turkey’, International Political Science Review, 30:4 (2009), pp. 363–84CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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29 For a historical analysis of how Turkey's representational practices have shaped and negotiated discourses on European identity, see Morozov, Viatcheslav and Rumelili, Bahar, ‘The External Constitution of European Identity: Russia and Turkey as Europe-makers’, Cooperation and Conflict (forthcoming)Google Scholar.

30 Rumelili, Bahar, Constructing Regional Community and Order in Europe and Southeast Asia (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2007), p. 77CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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32 Bilgin, Pinar and Bilgic, Ali, ‘Turkey's “New” Foreign Policy towards Eurasia’, Eurasian Geography and Economics, 52:2 (2011), pp. 173–95CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Rumelili, Bahar, ‘Turkey: Identity, Foreign Policy, and Socialization in a Post-Enlargement Europe’, Journal of European Integration, 33:2 (2011), pp. 235–49CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

33 For detailed analysis of these developments, see Rumelili, ‘Turkey: Identity’.

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