Books in the Contemporary Liminality series

Presenting studies of contemporary political figures, this book employs the anthropologically based concept of 'the trickster' to shed light on the rise of the - often anonymous - political leader, looking beyond the commonly invoked notion of 'charisma' to revisit the question of political leadership in an increasingly populist era.

Going beyond conventional definitions of `the long term¿, this book locates the social practice of walling and encirclement in the broadest context of human history, integrating insights from archaeology and anthropology. It locates the essential dynamics of the practice, showing how walling produces a paranoid vision of the world in which whatever falls outside the wall becomes demonised and threatening, and stands in need of ever-renewed attempts to exterminate it. A study of the isolating practice of walling, Walling, Boundaries and Liminality explores the links between the kind of dangerous expansion that walling represents, and its accompanying loss of certainty and inner conviction.

This book offers a political anthropological discussion of subversion, exploring its imbrication with technological and divinization practices and uncovering some of its particular effects on human existence, from prehistory until the contemporary age.

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.

This book explores the technologization of the social and the attendant penetration of permanent liminality into those aspects of the lifeworld where individuals had previously sought stability and meaning. Drawing on a range of concepts from anthropology, it thus problematises the logic of limitless technological expansion.