Beyond Liminality

Beyond Liminality: Ontologies of Abundant Betweenness examines the concept of liminality in the social sciences, humanities, and practical fields like management and medicine, exposing and critiquing its ontological assumptions.

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. However, it soon escaped its initial realm and was enthusiastically absorbed by many if not all scholarly disciplines, without consideration of its own state-based (that is, transition from one fixed state to another) ontology. Any status that was not normative, from gay or trans to disabled, irregularly employed, or afflicted with cancer, was interpreted as 'liminal.' By investigating process-based ontologies like those in Daoism, Buddhism, and pre-contact Aztec and contemporary African philosophies, as well as cross-cultural systems of gender, personhood, shamanism, and humanness itself, together with alleged (post)modern "permanent liminality," this book exposes the binary ontology underlying the liminality concept and advocates an alternative ontology of instability, flux, compositeness, emergence, and diversity in abundance.

Beyond Liminality: Ontologies of Abundant Betweenness is key reading for scholars and students across the social sciences, humanities, and applied disciplines interested in ritual, performance, change, ontology, and epistemology.