Experience On The Edge Theorizing Liminality

Liminality has become a key concept within the social sciences, with a growing number of publications devoted to it in recent years. The concept is needed to address those aspects of human experience and social life that fall outside of ordered structures. In contrast to the clearly defined roles and routines that define so much of industrial work and economic life, it highlights spaces of transition, indefiniteness, ambiguity, play and creativity. Thus, it is an indispensable concept and a necessary counterweight to the overemphasis on structural influences on human behavior. This book aims to use the concept of liminality to develop a culturally and experientially sensitive psychology. This is accomplished by first setting out an original theoretical framework focused on understanding the ‘liminal sources of cultural experience,’ and second an application of concept to a number of different domains, such as tourism, pilgrimage, aesthetics, children’s play, art therapy, and medical diagnosis. Finally, all these domains are then brought together in a concluding commentary chapter that puts them in relation to an overarching theoretical framework. This book will be useful for graduate students and researchers in cultural psychology, critical psychology, psychosocial psychology, developmental psychology, health psychology, anthropology and the social sciences, cultural studies among others.

Beyond Liminality: Ontologies of Abundant Betweenness examines the concept of liminality in the social sciences and humanities, and advocates for a more critical use of the concept while offering more precise alternatives. Originally conceived in response to the near-universal ritualization of changes of status (i.e., "rites of passage"), liminality was a welcome and much-needed correction to the reigning static and structural models of culture at the time. However, it soon escaped its initial realm and was enthusiastically—and mostly uncritically—absorbed by many if not all scholarly disciplines. The very success of the concept suggests that there is something about it that resonates with our own cultural sentiments. However, the assumptions that underlie diagnoses of liminality are seldom noted and even more seldom analyzed and critiqued. This book examines the history of the concept, its evolution, and its current status, and asks whether liminality accurately reflects lived realities which might better be described by fluidity, hybridity, multiplicity, constant motion and recombination, and abundant betweenness. Beyond Liminality: Ontologies of Abundant Betweenness is key reading for scholars and students across the social sciences and humanities interested in ritual, performance, identity formation, rights, ontology, and epistemology.

Is it possible to identify the positive and negative effects of globalization on religious tourism or to estimate the transformation of the internal and external constructs of pilgrimage by these effects? In order to address these questions, this book highlights the importance of the search for identity and transformative experience during religious tourism. It also looks at how, recently, globalization has played a part in the changes of the concept of personal and social identity and the transformative experience of pilgrimage. This book will be suitable for researchers and students of religious tourism, pilgrimage, identity tourism, as well as related subjects such as sociology, anthropology, psychology, theology, history and cultural studies.

The first volume of the Yearbook of Idiographic Science (YIS) was published on 2009. In a nutshell, the idea at the grounds of the YIS project is that idiography and nomothetic are not juxtaposed logics and that the science cannot but be both nomothetic - in the aim - and idiographic - in the modes. About thirteen years later, the sense and the direction of the YIS project envisaged in the first volume’s introduction - together with the difficulties to pursue it - are still alive and valid. Thus, to both celebrate the milestone of the tenth issue and to plan the future, we asked to some colleagues, almost all contributors of previous volumes, to discuss what idiographic science means today, and what can mean tomorrow. The works they have generously provided are very instructive - each of them pictures a peculiar perspective on idiography that enables to recognize old and new challenges, thus paving the way to innovative ideas and directions.

This book breathes new life into the study of liminal experiences of transition and transformation, or ‘becoming’. It brings fresh insight into affect and emotion, dream and imagination, and fabulation and symbolism by tracing their relation to experiences of liminality. The author proposes a distinctive theory of the relationship between psychology and the social sciences with much to share with the arts. Its premise is that psychosocial existence is not made of ‘stuff’ like building blocks, but of happenings and events in which the many elements that compose our lives are temporarily drawn together. The social is not a thing but a flow of processes, and our personal subjectivity is part of that flow, ‘selves’ being tightly interwoven with ‘others’. But there are breaks and ruptures in the flow, and during these liminal occasions our experience unravels and is rewoven. This book puts such moments at the core of the psychosocial research agenda. Of transdisciplinary scope, it will appeal beyond psychosocial studies and social psychology to all scholars interested in the interface between experience and social (dis)order.

This book presents an integrative perspective on home or Heimat showing that it is much more than the place we were born or where we live. This book brings fresh theoretical and empirical perspectives on what home is and can be from different viewpoints. The chapters invite the reader to face challenging questions of what we learn about Heimat, when it is taken from us, threatened, left on purpose or when we set out on the journey to find one. The chapters are written by psychologists throughout, but are expanded in perspective by comments from the groups of people featured in the chapters, who are thus given their own voice. The book concludes with a suggestion on how to unite all the different perspectives within a general model rooted in cultural psychology. All in all, the reader of this volume gains an access to the most complex phenomenon of human existence—that of home. Impossible to define in terms of the scientific lore of psychology, intuitively understandable in everyday life, and basis for deep desires if the feeling of home is lost. This book will be a rewarding read for professionals and students from cultural psychology, cultural and psychological anthropology, sociology, and related disciplines, asking the question of what home is and how individuals can be supported in finding it.

In a time of flexible and mutable work arrangements, there is hardly a domain of organizing that has not been affected by liminality. Temporary workers who switch companies based on projects, consultants who operate at the boundaries between the consultant and the client companies, or ‘hybrid entrepreneurs’ who start new ventures, while still keeping their previous job, are examples of liminality in organizations. Liminality is also felt by managers who handle interorganizational relationships within customer-supplier networks or scientists who, albeit affiliated with R&D units, have strong ties with their scientific communities, acknowledging that they belong to neither setting thoroughly. Precious hints for enriching our comprehension of liminality in organizational settings can be conveyed by the reflection that has flourished in different fields. This book advances knowledge of liminality management by elaborating on a model that puts together aspects of the liminal process that have been mostly described in a separate way so far, benefiting from the input provided by experience in sociology, medicine, and education. Through the articulation of a model that accounts for the antecedents, content, and consequences of liminality in organizations, the book intends to prompt quantitative research on this topic. It will be of value to those interested in organizational behavior, organization and management, marketing, sociology of work, and sociology of organizations.

Volume two of Theorizing Rituals mainly consists of an annotated bibliography of more than 400 items covering those books, edited volumes and essays that are considered most relevant for the field of ritual theory.