Breaking Boundaries

Agnes Horvath is a co-founder and acting editor-in-chief of the peer-reviewed journal International Political Anthropology and is a visiting fellow in the Centre for the Study of the Moral Foundations of Economy & Society, University College Cork (Ireland). She is the author or co-author of eight books, including, most recently, Walling, Boundaries and Liminality: A political anthropology of transformations (co-edited with Marius Bentza, Routledge, 2018); Walking into the Void: A Historical, Sociological and Political Anthropology of Walking (co-edited with Arpad Szakolczai, Routledge, 2017), and Modernism and Charisma (Palgrave, 2013).

List of Figures



Introduction: Liminality and the Search for Boundaries

Harald Wydra, Bjørn Thomassen, and Agnes Horvath



PART I: FRAMING LIMINALITY



Chapter 1. Liminality and Experience: Structuring transitory situations and transformative events

Arpad Szakolczai



Chapter 2. Thinking with Liminality: To the Boundaries of an Anthropological Concept

Bjørn Thomassen



PART II: LIMINALITY AND THE SOCIAL



Chapter 3. Inbetweenness and Ambivalence

Bernhard Giesen



Chapter 4. The Genealogy of Political Alchemy: the technological invention of identity change

Agnes Horvath



Chapter 5. Critical Processes and Political Fluidity: a Theoretical Appraisal

Michel Dobry



Chapter 6. Liminality and the Frontier Myth in the Building of the American Empire

Stephen Mennell



Chapter 7. On the Margins of the Public and the Private: Louis XIV at Versailles

Peter Burke



PART III: LIMINALITY AND THE POLITICAL



Chapter 8. Liminality, the execution of Louis XVI and the rise of terror during the French Revolution

Camil Roman



Chapter 9. In Search of Antistructure: The Meaning of Tahrir Square in Egypt’s Ongoing Social Drama

Mark Allen Peterson



Chapter 10. Liminality and Democracy

Harald Wydra



Chapter 11. Liminality and Postcommunism: The Twenty-First Century as the Subject of History

Richard Sakwa



Chapter 12. The Challenge of Liminality for International Relations Theory

Maria Malksoo



Notes on Contributors

Index