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"Contemporary challenges related to walls, borders and encirclement, such as migration, integration, and endemic historical conflicts, can only be understood properly from a long-term perspective. This book seeks to go beyond conventional definitions of the long durée by locating the social practice of walling and encirclement in the broadest context of human history, integrating insights from archaeology and anthropology. Such an approach, far from being simply academic, has crucial contemporary relevance, as its focus on origins helps to locate the essential dynamics of this practice, and provides a rare external position from which to view the phenomenon as a transformative exercise, with the area walled serving as an artificial womb or matrix. The modern world, with its ingrained ideas of borders, nation states and other entities, often makes it is very difficult to gain a critical distance and detachment to see beyond conventional perspectives. The unique approach of this book offers an antidote to this problem. Cases discussed in the book range from Palaeolithic caves, the ancient walls of Göbekli Tepe, Jericho, and Babylon, to the foundation of Rome, the Chinese Empire, medieval Europe and the Berlin Wall. The book also looks at contemporary developments such as the Palestinian wall, Eastern and Southern European examples, Trump's proposed Mexican wall, the use of Greece as a bulwark containing migration flows, and the transformative experience of voluntary work in a Calcutta hospice. In doing so, the book offers a political anthropology of one of the most fundamental yet perennially problematic human practices: the constructing of walls. As such, it will appeal to scholars of sociology, anthropology, and political theory"--

Boundaries --- Borderlands --- Liminality

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This book offers a comprehensive sociological study of the nature and dynamics of the modern world, through the use of a series of anthropological concepts, including the trickster, schismogenesis, imitation and liminality. Developing the view that with the theatre playing a central role, the modern world is conditioned as much by cultural processes as it is by economic, technological or scientific ones, the author contends the world is, to a considerable extent, theatrical - a phenomenon experienced as inauthenticity or a loss of direction and meaning. As such the novel is revealed as a means for studying our theatricalised reality, not simply because novels can be understood to be likening the world to theatre, but because they effectively capture and present the reality of a world that has been thoroughly 'theatricalised' - and they do so more effectively than the main instruments usually employed to analyse reality: philosophy and sociology. With analyses of some of the most important novelists and novels of modern culture, including Rilke, Hofmannsthal, Kafka, Mann, Blixen, Broch and Bulgakov, and focusing on fin-de-siècle Vienna as a crucial 'threshold' chronotope of modernity, Permanent Liminality and Modernity demonstrates that all seek to investigate and unmask the theatricalisation of modern life, with its progressive loss of meaning and our deteriorating capacity to distinguish between what is meaningful and what is artificial. Drawing on the work of Nietzsche, Bakhtin and Girard to examine the ways in which novels explore the reduction of human existence to a state of permanent liminality, in the form of a sacrificial carnival, this book will appeal to scholars of social, anthropological and literary theory.

Liminality --- Liminality in literature --- Rites and ceremonies --- Civilization, Modern

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Die Forschung zur Hagiographie hat bis heute dem Konzept des Martyriums in literarischer Hinsicht nur wenig Aufmerksamkeit geschenkt. Neben Verhör und Folter besteht der Vorgang des Martyriums aus einem weiteren Schritt, der den Forschungsgegenstand dieses Buches darstellt: die Gefängnisphase. Diese Arbeit analysiert die Rolle des Gefängnisses im Zusammenspiel von Struktur und Handlung der vormetaphrastischen Märtyrerakten und deren Umarbeitungen durch Symeon Metaphrastes (datiert vom 4. bis zum 10. Jahrhundert). In Anlehnung an das anthropologische Konzept der Liminalität wird dargelegt, dass das Gefängnis ein Schwellenraum ist, in dem die Entwicklung der körperlichen Ausdauer und der spirituellen Reife der Protagonisten stattfindet, was zu ihrer Identität als Märtyrer beiträgt. Untersucht werden diverse Aspekte des Gefängnisses und der betroffenen narrativen Figuren in Hinsicht auf Terminologie, Erzählstruktur, Gender und Empfindungen. Neben einer kritischen Lektüre der Quellen bietet diese Arbeit deutsche Übersetzungen der behandelten griechischen Passagen und liefert neue Einsichten in byzantinische hagiographische Studien. This volume investigates the literary depiction of prison as a liminal space in early and middle Byzantine martyrs' Passions. Prison proves to be a transitional space where both the formation of corporeal endurance and the spiritual maturation of the protagonists take place, contributing to their identity as martyrs. The aspects examined here include terminology, narrative structure, gender, emotions and the senses.

HISTORY / Medieval. --- Holiness. --- liminality. --- martyrdom. --- prison.

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Liminality has the potential to be a leading paradigm for understanding transformation in a globalizing world. As a fundamental human experience, liminality transmits cultural practices, codes, rituals, and meanings in situations that fall between defined structures and have uncertain outcomes. Based on case studies of some of the most important crises in history, society, and politics, this volume explores the methodological range and applicability of the concept to a variety of concrete social and political problems.

Liminality. --- Rites and ceremonies. --- Philosophical anthropology.

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82.09 --- Liminality in literature. --- Literaire kritiek --- 82.09 Literaire kritiek --- Liminality in literature