Hostname: page-component-848d4c4894-5nwft Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-05-19T02:01:05.662Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Introduction to the Forum on Liminality

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 February 2012

IVER B. NEUMANN
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

In 1909, Arnold van Gennep wrote a book on the rites of passage where he discussed what he called the liminal phase (from Lat. limes, border, pl. limites) through which boys in a number of cultures had to pass in order to become men. With his Dutch name, his German birth, his move to France with his divorced mother at the ripe age of six, and his interest in the Arab world, he was nothing if not a man in transition between different life worlds. His scholarly life, too, was a life of transit; from haute école to haute école, from France to Switzerland. To top it all, when the institutionalisation of the social sciences in France was finally hitting its stride with the emergence of Durkheim's année-school, van Gennep was marginalised. There was no closure to his scholarly travels. Van Gennep remained liminal, remained in becoming. In his own terms, his rite de passage never ended. He went from pre-liminality to liminality – a condition that his greatest follower, the symbolic interactionalist anthropologist Victor Turner characterised as existing betwixt and between socially recognised positions – without entering the post-liminal phase of having been fully incorporated into one of those already existing positions. Van Gennep made it his life to deal with the uncertainties and the danger that any social order ascribes to those who are between categories. With this Forum, liminality arrives within the discipline of International Relations (IR) in earnest. The rest of this Introduction will give some historical background that situates the Forum's three post-structural protagonists, note how their undertaking is part of a wider thrust towards process-oriented and relation-oriented work within the social sciences and introduce the pieces.

Type
Forum
Information
Review of International Studies , Volume 38 , Issue 2 , April 2012 , pp. 473 - 479
Copyright
Copyright © British International Studies Association 2011

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1 van Gennep, Arnold, The Rites of Passage (Chicago, IL & London: The University of Chicago Press, 1909/1960)Google Scholar. My thanks to the contributors for comments, and to Ingvild Johnsen for research assistance.

2 Turner, Victor, The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure (New York, NY: Aldine De Gruyter, 1969/1995)Google Scholar.

3 See Dosse, François, History of Structuralism, vol. two: The Sign Sets, 1967–Present (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1998)Google Scholar.

4 See Michel Foucault, ‘Des espaces autres’, available at: {http://foucault.info/documents/heteroTopia/foucault.heteroTopia.fr.html} accessed 19 September 2011. Foucault's essay was first published in 1967.

5 Deleuze, Gilles, A Thousand Plateaus (London: Continuum, 1980/2004)Google Scholar.

6 Norton, Anne, Reflections on Political Identity (Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988)Google Scholar.

7 Neumann, Iver B., ‘Self and Other in International Relations’, European Journal of International Relations, 2:2 (1996), pp. 139–74CrossRefGoogle Scholar; ‘European Identity, EU Expansion and the Integration/Exclusion Nexus’, Alternatives 23:3 (1998), pp. 397–416.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

8 See, for example, Ashley, Richard K., ‘Living on Borderlines: Man, Poststructuralism, and War’, in Der Derian, James and Shapiro, Michael J. (eds), International/Intertextual Relations: Postmodern Readings of World Politics (Lexington, MA: Lexington, 1989), pp. 259–321Google Scholar. Comp. Derrida, Jacques, ‘Living On/Border Lines’, in Bloom, Harold et al. (eds), Deconstructionism and Criticism (New York, NY: Seabury, 1979), pp. 75–176Google Scholar.

9 James, Wendy and Allen, N. J. (eds), Marcel Mauss: A Centenary Tribute (Oxford: Berghahn, 1998)Google Scholar.

10 For an authoritative reading of Waltz as a structural functionalist, see Goddard, Stacie E. and Nexon, Daniel C., ‘Pradigm Lost? Reassessing Theory of International Politics’, European Journal of International Relations, 11:1 (2005), pp. 9–61CrossRefGoogle Scholar. In December 2010, in Copenhagen, I had the chance of asking Waltz what he thought of that analysis. He concurred. When I asked why he had referenced one particular anthropologist extensively, namely Nadel, and not others, he answered that Nadel was the one he had come across first.

11 Abbott, Andrew, ‘Things of Boundaries – Defining the Boundaries of Social Inquiry’, Social Research, 62:4 (1995), pp. 857–82Google Scholar.

12 Simmel, George, ‘The Stranger’, in Levine, David N. (ed.), On Individuality and Social Forces: Selected Writings (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1970), pp. 143–9, at p. 144Google Scholar.

13 See Hindess, Barry, ‘Citizenship in the International Management of Populations’, American Behavioural Scientist, 43:9 (2000), pp. 1486–97CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

14 See, for example, Reuven, Amitai and Biran, Michal (eds), Mongols, Turks, and Others: Eurasian Nomads and the Sedentary World (Leiden: Brill, 2005)Google Scholar.