The Epilogue discusses the book’s overall argument. It explores the general implications of the different epistemic shocks in anthropology arising from engagement with the weird, the paranormal, the unexplained, and the ineffable. It highlights the book’s conceptual innovation, with ideas such as not-knowing, blind spots, negative capability, the weird, and what lies outside reason. Drawing on the author’s personal experience of Songhay sorcery in Niger, the Epilogue describes the existential transformation that intimate encounters with the unknown and beyond reason can have in life. The immersion in liminal space offers creative potential, a possibility to think beyond reason, to unlearn, to play, and to imagine alternative futures. It also delineates a path to regain trust in human values and to transform anthropological thinking from within.

Chapter 4 explores the negotiation of free speech within Tunisia’s public schools following the 2014 constitution’s guarantee of expression rights. It focuses on high school teachers who initiate classroom dialogues aimed at reforming civic education. These discussions address the limits of free speech and acceptable dissent, reflecting broader societal debates about who belongs to the demos and how democratic citizens should communicate and act publicly. The chapter introduces two key concepts: the democratic grotesque, a mode of communication that disrupts the ideal of rational deliberation through irony, excess, and emotion; and dissensus, from Jacques Rancière, describing enduring disagreement that unsettles social hierarchies and renews democratic engagement. Together, these ideas challenge traditional understandings of the demos and highlight democracy’s liminal nature – an an ongoing, contested process of political expression and identity formation.

In the decades of Romanticism a new view on culture emerged: one in which culture was nationally specific (each nation having its own characteristic cultural traditions) and should be seen as process of historical development (rather than the condition of being civilized and refined). In the emergence of this new, historicist and nationally specific idea of culture, an initial impetus was provided by the ‘discovery’ in the 1760s of the epic poems of the ancient Scottish bard Ossian. The figure of Ossian amplified the aesthetics of the ‘sublime’ and a view of the poet as a prophetic, even mantic figure, drawing on a transcendent-spiritual intuition and hence being able to speak with an inspired wisdom that went beyond mere rational cognition. This became enshrined in the poetics of the nascent Romantic movement and fed into the Hegelian notion of poet–prophets as world-historical figures articulating the consciousness of their national communities.

This chapter differentiates nuclear status from nuclear capability. Nuclear capability refers to the material possession of different nuclear technologies that vary from uranium enrichment to nuclear testing. Nuclear status refers to the politics of identifying and being recognized as a nuclear or non-nuclear state. Existing views conflate these two distinct concepts. I argue that a state’s nuclear status cannot be respecified through material terms alone. States contest and construct their nuclear status and overlooking these contestations has practical implications for ongoing nuclear crises in states like Iran and North Korea. The chapter also introduces the theoretical foundation of the book around three factors that motivate states to contest their nuclear status: legality, instrumentality, and identity.

Kimberly Hope Belcher surveys an impressive number of authors and theories who have engaged with the broad human phenomenon of ritual. For it is evident that both classical ritual studies and more recent approaches have enormous potential for engaging in a dialogue with scholars of Christian liturgy and liturgies.

Chapter 8 shows that Palladio’s design for the unbuilt wings would have reinforced the villa’s hybrid character through their allusions to a range of urban and rural building types. Their evocation of the ancient triumphal arch would have made a bold claim for Pisani hegemony in Montagnana.

As every reader of Lucian knows, he always belongs to something without belonging to it wholly. His relationship to his own Greek identity is undoubtedly the most symbolic instance: although wholly mastering the Greek language, he emphasises his being a barbarian. Lucian’s foreignness is a typical mark of his protean authorial persona throughout his œuvre, producing a constant tension between an inside and an outside as Lucian emphasises his own paradoxical liminality. This chapter discusses six of his texts (True Histories, Scythian, The Hall, On Salaried Posts, Symposium, and Lexiphanes), suggesting that a movement towards the inside and then the outside marks Lucian’s textuality in disparate ways. Depending on the specific narrative context, this movement assumes different meanings (autobiographical, metaphorical, metapoetical, rhetorical) that are often combined with each other, but most importantly produces a fundamental tension between meaning itself and the absence of significance.

Chapter 7 discusses liminality from a pragmatic point of view. All interactionally complex rituals take the participants through a threshold to some degree, in that the rights and obligations and related conventions of pragmatic behaviour holding for rituals tend to differ from their counterparts in ‘ordinary’ life. Yet, it is relevant to study fully-fledged liminal rituals with a sense of irreversibility. For example, ritual public apologies are liminal in the fully-fledged sense because the person who realises such ritual apologies passes a threshold with no return. Liminal rituals come together with strong metapragmatic awareness: if the moral order and the related frame of the ritual are violated, both the participants and the observers tend to become alerted and engage in intensive metapragmatic reflections. Chapter 7 will present a case study focusing on the liminal rite of workplace dismissal. Such dismissals represent typical liminal rituals in the very sense of the word: they change the life of the recipient and as such they are very meaningful and irreversible. Because of this, perceived ‘errors’ in the realisation of this ritual tends to trigger particularly intensive metapragmatic reflections and evaluations.

This chapter argues that, in spite of inevitable differences, Mediterranean detectives are liminal characters who belong to minority cultures and often need to negotiate their sense of belonging with the hegemonic culture. All the identity variations present in Mediterranean crime fiction are symbolic of the complex network of cultures, identities and influences that characterise the Mediterranean area. The liminality of the detective speaks of a rich and diverse cultural and literary arena in which a national hegemonic culture is often – but unsuccessfully – politically superimposed. It also speaks of a desire to unsettle the populist rhetoric that sees ‘fortress Europe’ at the centre and northern African and eastern Mediterranean countries as periphery. Chapter 1 also highlights how Mediterranean detectives are ‘intellectual’ detectives who refer to Mediterranean history, culture and myths. This characteristic has a double function: on the one hand, it emphasises transculturality as a key feature of the Mediterranean basin; on the otherhand, it promotes a discourse on the dignity of crime fiction.

Because the birth of the Egyptian novel came so late in the Arabic literary tradition (1914) and coincided so closely with the country’s independence from the British, it is no surprise that questions of national identity and authenticity are an overlying preoccupation. What is perhaps surprising is the extent to which these questions are enacted in the arena of courtship and marriage. In the canon—as in the capital—liminal space remains prime real estate in the economy of desire. For those in Cairo who are unwilling or unable to marry at a conventional age, traditional values and familial structures, combined with a culture of surveillance and patriarchy, results in a thorny romantic landscape. All of this is exacerbated by neoliberal policies that stretch the preexistent wealth gap, as well as the increased privatization, militarization and monetization of public space. This chapter will explore possibilities for desire through liminal spaces in a select survey of (mostly) 20thcentury Cairene novels: Tawfiq Hakim’s 1933The Return of the Soul, Naguib Mahfouz’s 1947Midaq Alley, Latifa al-Zayyat’s 1960The Open Door, Enayat al-Zayyat’s 1963Love and Silence, Gamal al-Ghitani’s 1976The Zaafarani Files, Abdel Hakeem Qassem’s 1987An Attempt to Get Out, and Alaa al-Aswany’s 2002The Yacoubian Building.