On liminality Conceptualizing ‘in between-ness’
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2008-06
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en
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Abstract
In recent years, the concept of liminality could regularly be found in geographical literature.
This concept was introduced in 1909 by the ethnologist Arnold van Gennep in his Les rites de
passage, where it referred to a state of ‘in between-ness’ during such rites. More precisely, it
denoted a category in between ‘normal’ social categories, which brought about connotations
of sacredness, empowerment and comradeship, but also of death and darkness. Obviously
because of the imaginative power of this, the concept was introduced in other disciplines, one
of which was human geography. However, as a result, and even more as a result of the
concept surviving the paradigm shift from modernism to postmodernism – a shift that
implicated that categories lost their meaning and should be approached more critically – the
original meaning of the concept has come to shift and weave.
In the first part of this thesis, I have therefore tried to answer the question, if it is still
clear what liminality refers to and what it has come to mean in a society that is sometimes
viewed as more fragmented. From a content analysis of contemporary geographical literature,
in which the concept is applied to situations in contemporary society, I have concluded that
liminality actually has little to do nowadays with the things it originally intended to describe –
especially in the context of ritual. Because of that, I have argued to abandon the concept as it
was intended and as it has become to be used. However, from a reconceptualization of its
Roman roots, we may emphasize its political connotation to matters of power and identity,
which makes the concept still suitable for theorizing contemporary society.
From a perspective on the European Union as an empire, I have tried in the second
part of this thesis to exemplify how in particular the concept’s relation to Limes (the northern
frontier of the Roman Empire) can give us insights to the current state of affairs in regard of a
political reality at the EU’s extreme ends – the Outermost Regions and the Overseas
Countries and Territories. In this part, in other words, I have hypothesized how the position of
the Overseas Countries and Territories and the Outermost Regions of the European Union can
be regarded as liminality and can be explained by referring to their political-geographical
significance as the Limes of the European Union as empire.
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Faculteit der Managementwetenschappen