Breaking Boundaries (eBook)

Harald Wydra is a Fellow of St Catharine’s College at the University of Cambridge, where he has taught politics since 2003, and is a co-founder and editor of the journal International Political Anthropology. His books include Communism and the Emergence of Democracy (Cambridge University Press, 2007), Democracy and Myth in Russia and Eastern Europe (co-edited with Alexander Wöll, Routledge, 2008), and Politics and the Sacred (Cambridge University Press, 2015).

Bjørn Thomassen is Associate Professor in the Department of Society and Globalisation, Roskilde University, and is a founding editor of the journal International Political Anthropology. His recent publications include Liminality and the Modern: Living Through the In-Between (Ashgate 2014), and the edited collection Global Rome: Changing Faces of the Eternal City (Indiana University Press, 2014).

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