Conference Review
Liminality and Cultures of Change
13-14 February 2009
This conference was, to my knowledge, the first one ever to be dedicated in its entirety to the exploration of the liminality paradigm as a conceptual tool and theoretical perspective for grasping moments of transformation of social, cultural, and political life. It provided a unique opportunity for scholars from various disciplines to contribute to the understanding of how universal patterns of rites of passage can be used to understand problems of transformation from an experiential and ‘non- rationalist’ position. The three panels were structured thematically, focusing on Political Crises and War (panel 1), leadership and Order (panel 2), and the challenges of globalisation (panel 3).
In panel 1, Harald Wydra focused on the phenomenon of ‘democratic revolution’ and conceptualised contemporary politics as an ‘empty place of power’ where the ritualisation of uncertainty in democratic politics is challenged by different types of identity-crises in democracies, in particular with regard to the role and influence of the ‘people’. Izabela Kisilowska presented an analytical framework for understanding radical policy changes in extraordinary situations as characterised by the scarcity of political supply for policy propositions that are opposed to the dominant ones. Michel Dobry presented a theory of political crises based on the understanding that major crises should be grasped in terms of continuity of structure, however, by recognising their fluidity or liquidity. Finally, Richard Sakwa turned the attention to the liminal tension between the 20th century as a subject of history and the need for reconciliation and mutual understanding in order to prevent the ever more menacing prospects of proliferation of wars.
In panel 2, Peter Burke presented a historical anthropology of the rituals that shaped of the personality of King Louis XIV., mainly focused on his adoption of different roles and masks in the constant liminal in-between public and private. Reaching out for a dialogue between Turner’s understanding of liminal communitas and Rene Girard’s concept of undifferentiation and the sacrificial mechanisms, Pierpaolo Antonello suggested that origins of cultural order can be traced back to the particular modalities of a mimetic crisis that occurred under conditions of liminality, i.e. a condition were legal boundaries are blurred and hierarchies reversed. Agnes Horvath used a genealogy of alchemy and the concrete case of Bolshevik communism in Russia in order to show how mimes and trickster figures artificially create liminal moments of uncertainty with a view to disseminate confusion and introduce schismogenetic processes into a society.
Panel 3 dealt with some issues regarding the significance of liminal processes of social and political transformation for the understanding of the contemporary world. Maria Mälksoo used the controversy of the statue of the Bronze soldier in Tallinn to elaborate upon the liminal position of east-central Europe in general and the Baltics in particular, which underlies the complex processes of identity-formation, mainly in the area of discourses about security and belonging in Europe. Lisa Smirl explored the biographical trajectories of international development aid workers whose stays abroad can be interpreted as ritual initiations into new forms of individual lives but also as indicative of a whole new culture of humanitarian aid and development. Stephen Mennell harked back to the historical genesis of the United States and in particular to the myth of the frontier and of manifest Destiny in the building of the American Empire. Finally, Bjorn Thomassen developed a typology for different applications of the concept of liminality (from the individual, the group, and the level of whole societies and polities) through the prism of its foundation in anthropology and its increasing importance for the understanding of civilisational dynamics.
Arpad Szakolczai’s key note address gave an authoritative statement on the origins of the concept across various disciplines and its potential to re-orient thinking in social theory and political anthropology, mainly through the idea that a liminal hypothesis is a hermeneutic device that can help structuring and understanding so- called unstructured and chaotic experiences.
The final discussion brought together a host of different interpretive threads that had been touched upon throughout this two-day conference. As well as the spatial and chronological aspects of rites of passage, many participants highlighted the interpretive power of the paradigm, especially given the fact that uncertainty, unpredictability, and crisis have become fundamental experiences in all walks of social life. Similarly, the idea was evoked that liminality in modernity has become a permanent condition. Some participants also pointed to the reservations that empirical social science may harbour with regard to a paradigm that puts forward an ‘irrationalist’ hypothesis by which to grasp human behaviour and social arrangements. In order to maintain the dynamic generated by this conference, International Political Anthropology will publish a selection of these papers in a special thematic issue in summer 2009.
