Imagined communities: Reflections on the origin and spread of nationalism

Benedict Anderson’s deservedly famous thesis about the origins and nature
of modern nationalism turns around the central notion of an “imagined
community.” This category provides him with a matrix out of which one
can apprehend-theoretically and historically-the different variants of nationalist discourse formulated over the last two hundred years. We will refer,
in the brief comments that follow, to three basic dimensions structuring
the fabric of Anderson’s argument: 1) the presuppositions implicit in the
notion of an “imagined” community; 2) the kind of substitutability or solidarity which is required to be a member of such a community; 3) the kind
of relationship that is established between such a community-which is by
definition finite or limited-and its outside. Before that, however, let us
describe the main features of Anderson’s thesis.

On Imagined Communities

Rabelais and His World.

Europe and the People without History

Anderson, Benedict. 1991. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso. Briggs, Asa and Peter Burke. 2005. A Social History of the Media from Gutenberg to the Internet. Cambridge: Polity Press. Chun, Wendy Hui Kyong. 2006. \"Introduction: Did Somebody Say New Media?\" In Wendy Hui Kyong Chun and Thomas Kennan eds., New Media/Old Media: A History and Theory Reader. New York: Routledge, pp. 1-11. Deibert, Ronald. 1997. Parchment, Printing and Hypermedia: Communication in World Order Transformation. New York: Columbia University Press. Elsaesser, Thomas. 2006. \"Early Film History and Multi-Media: An Archaeology of Possible Futures?\" In Wendy Hui Kyong Chun and Thomas Kennan eds., New Media/Old Media: A History and Theory Reader. New York: Routledge, pp. 13-26. Jenkins, Henry. 2006. Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide. New York: New York University Press. Luhman, Niklas. 2000. The Reality of the Mass Media. Cambridge: Polity Press. Mirzoeff, Nicholas. 2006. \"Network Subjects or, The Ghost is the Message.\" In Wendy Hui Kyong Chun and Thomas Keenan eds., New Media/Old Media: A History and Theory Reader. New York: Routledge, pp. 335-345. Saenger, Paul. 1997. \"Introduction\" to Space Between Words: The Origins of Silent Reading. Stanford: Stanford University Press, pp. 1-17. Thorburn, David and Henry Jenkins eds. 2003. Rethinking Media Change: The Aesthetics of Transition. Boston: MIT Press.

Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (review)

The Uses and Meaning of Liminality

This book provides the history and genealogy of an increasingly important subject: liminality. Coming to the fore in recent years in social and political theory and extending beyond is original use as developed within anthropology, liminality has come to denote spaces and moments in which the taken-for-granted order of the world ceases to exist and novel forms emerge, often in unpredictable ways. Liminality and the Modern offers a comprehensive introduction to this concept, discussing its development and laying out a conceptual and experiential framework for thinking about change in terms of liminality. Applying this framework to questions surrounding the implosion of ’non-spaces’, the analysis of major historical periods and the study of political revolution, the book also explores its possible uses in social science research and its implications for our understanding of the uncertainty and contingency of the liquid structures of modern society. Shedding new light on a concept central to social thought, as well as its capacity for pushing social and political theory in new directions, this book will be of interest to scholars across the social sciences and philosophy working in fields such as social, political and anthropological theory, cultural studies, social and cultural geography, and historical anthropology and sociology.

Liminality and the Modern: Living Through the In-Between

While resistance and rebellion have remained core themes in anthropology at least since the 1960s, anthropologists have paid much less attention to the study of political revolutions as real historical events. Yet there are compelling real-world reasons why they should orient their analytical apparatus and ethnographic efforts towards revolutionary events. This article advances a series of reasons why anthropology can enrich and supplement existing political science and history traditions in the study of political revolutions. Anthropology can do so via key concepts developed by Victor Turner: “liminality,” “social drama,” “communitas,” “frame,” and “play.” Turner's ritual approach gains further relevance when linked to another series of concepts developed by Marcel Mauss, Gabriel Tarde, Georg Simmel, and Gregory Bateson, such as “imitation,” “trickster,” “schismogenesis,” and “crowd behavior.” To study revolutions implies not only a focus on political behavior “from below,” but also recognition of moments where “high and low” are relativized or subverted, and where the micro- and macro-levels fuse in critical conjunctions.

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Notes towards an Anthropology of Political Revolutions

Introduction
Liminal spaces are attractive. They are the places we go to in search of a break 
from the normal. They can be real places, parts of a larger territory, or they can 
be imagined or dreamed. Liminal landscapes are found at the fringes, at the 
limits. However, there is more to it than that. Had we just been talking about the 
peripheral, or the far-away, we would be dealing with marginality: that which is 
the furthest away from the centre. Liminal landscapes are in-between spaces. 
Seasides and beaches are archetypical liminal landscapes. The seaside is something more than just the end of dry and inhabited land: it is a coastline with 
something on the other side of the threshold. Liminality implicates the existence 
of a boundary, a limes, the Latin word for threshold from which the concept of 
limitality derives. This limit is not simply there: it is there to be confronted. The 
ancient Greeks had two words for the sea. Pelagos was the standard word used 
to refer to the sea as a simple ‘fact’. Pontos indicated something else: it was the 
sea facing the human being, a trial to overcome, a threshold to pass, an open sea 
to be crossed, a danger, a challenge. The etymology speaks to this, as pontos 
belongs to a group of significant words with roots in Proto-Indo-European 
(*pent) ‘to go, to pass; path, bridge’, also related to pateo ‘I step’. When asked 
who were the most numerous, the living or the dead, Anacharsis (the sixth 
century bc Scythian sage) is supposed to have retorted, ‘where do you place 
those who are sailing the seas?’ (as quoted in Endsjo, 2000: 370).
 The Greeks knew very well that the middle stage in a ritual passage had its 
own spatial reality. The Athenian ephebes (neophytes) were sent out to the 
uncultivated mountainsides to have their civic status altered in a rite of passage. 
Mythology confirmed geography: the adolescent Odysseus was sent to the 
mountain slopes of Parnassus to undergo his rite of passage to manhood, with 
Autolycus, his maternal grandfather, acting as ceremony master (Endsjo2000: 358). The Ndembu that Turner studied for so many years also knew their 
liminal geography. When the neophytes were thrown into the ritual passage, this 
happened initially by a spatial separation from their village as the ceremony 
master took them into the wilderness, and brought them to a sacred site where 
they were subjected to a series of tests and personality transforming ordeals.
 For a variety of Stone Age peoples caves almost surely functioned as spaces 
of liminality (Barnatt and Edmonds 2002). Caves were certainly used for funerary and ritual purposes in the majority of Neolithic cultures. Upper Paleolithic 
and Neolithic caves typically took the shape of dangerous passage ways, quite 
literally. It is likely that these passage-type caves represented passages to another 
world: the world of the gods or/and the world of the dead. Caves have been, in 
many cultures, crucial liminal spaces where shamanistic ekstases occurred, 
bringing humans into contact with the spirits or the beyond. For the Maya, caves 
were the entrances to the underworld, not pyramids. It is now a well-accepted 
hypothesis that cave paintings, such as the famous ones at Lascaux, must be 
interpreted as being part of ritual passages and actual liminal experiences.
 Liminal spaces are evidently part of any culture. The purpose of this chapter 
is to open up a question: what is happening to liminal spaces in contemporary, 
‘Western’ and ‘modern’ societies? Such a question is much too big to be 
addressed, let alone answered, in a single chapter. Rather than answering the 
question, the aim will be to search for a meaningful formulation of the problem. 
My discussion will depart from a short introduction to the concept of liminality 
via Arnold van Gennep and Victor Turner. A typology of liminal experiences 
will be presented, followed by a discussion of current applications of the liminality concept which will end on a warning note: that the very dominant tendency in postmodern and poststructuralist literature to take a celebratory stance 
toward the ‘interstitial’ is a critical development that does not really enable our 
analysis of liminality and that does not, ultimately, pay respect to the original 
analysis offered by van Gennep. I argue that Victor Turner’s proposal to see the 
modern world as ‘liminoid’ is not the best starting point in our attempts to 
capture the role of liminal space in the world of today. While it is to the merit of 
Victor Turner that we can think with liminality, in taking up the concept of liminality today we have to step carefully. This is especially the case as the term is 
increasingly used to talk about almost anything. I will instead argue that Turner’s own observation that liminal states may at times become institutionalized 
provides a key toward understanding both temporal and spatial liminality in 
modernity. In this context, the work of the contemporary social theorist, Arpad 
Szakolczai, will be discussed.

Bjørn Thomassen

Papers

The Uses and Meaning of Liminality

Liminality and the Modern: Living Through the In-Between

Notes towards an Anthropology of Political Revolutions

Revisiting liminality: the danger of empty spaces

Breaking Boundaries: Varieties of Liminality