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.

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

“Breaking Boundaries is valuable for both its content and the expectation that the hegemonic conceptions of politics might be modified.” • Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute “The book [is] highly recommendable for its theoretical perspectives and for offering a rich dialogue between anthropology and other social sciences.” • Anthropology Notebooks “In well integrated chapters, the [volume] proves the relevance of the concept across disciplines, particularly for the study of moments of instability and possibility, as well as for understanding the transformative potential of participation… In addition to helping one understand in-between experiences overall, [it] invites the reader to rethink the complicated relation between individual agency, social order and cultural transmission… a remarkable contribution to sociology, anthropology and critical theory.” • European Journal of Cultural and Political Sociology “A topic with a very broad appeal, namely liminality, [is] treated here as an analytical concept. While liminality has been a widespread concept in anthropology and social theory for decades, largely owing to Victor Turner's seminal work, it has rarely been scrutinized properly, and this volume is to be welcomed. In some ways, this kind of book is long overdue.” • Thomas Hylland Eriksen, University of Oslo “The book is a timely intervention which secures firmer grounding for liminality as one of the key concepts in social theory... Theoretically strong, and with an empirical range that takes in pre- and post-Revolutionary France, the frontier building of the American West, Egypt’s Tahrir Square, and the liminality of the postcommunist Eastern bloc, the book provides a valuable contribution to debates on liminality, transformation, and contingency in the social and political world.” • Les Roberts, University of Liverpool