Liminality and the Modern

Living Through the In-Between

Bjørn Thomassen

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317105039
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Human Geography
• Index: Social Sciences

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.

PART I
Retrieving Liminality Within the History of Social Thought: From Arnold van Gennep to Victor Turner and Beyond

Chapter 1
Arnold van Gennep: Fragments of a Life-Work at the Thresholds

Qu’importe la mode d’activité, ce qui compte c’est l’homme.

Arnold van Gennep, Le génie de l’organisation¹

This chapter is a carefully framed introduction to the concept of liminality, a concept that was proposed by Arnold van Gennep more than a century ago to analyse the middle stage in ritual passages; it is an introduction that serves to ground an understanding of what the concept meant to van Gennep, of how he actually addressed it in his classical work on ritual passages, and of the role of this book in the context of his life and work as ethnographer, folklorist and social scientist.

However, this introduction must make more than formal mention of the man, Arnold van Gennep. It must do so for the simple reason that Arnold van Gennep is largely unknown as a writer and thinker. His 1909 book, Les Rites de Passage, became a classic when it was translated into English and published in 1960 as The Rites of Passage. The book has been widely quoted since and continues to be listed in almost any university course on religion. And yet, as a thinker, Arnold van Gennep is still today not really discussed outside a narrow circle of mostly French folklorists.

Course syllabi on the sociology or anthropology of religion most often insert an excerpt from Rites of Passage on their reading list. In the standard approach, this chapter is discussed as a supplement to Durkheim’s theory of ritual and religion. The common reception is that van Gennep simply offered a useful terminology for the study of ritual passages, whereas it was Durkheim – and later others – who provided anthropologists and sociologists with a broader theoretical framework. In Routledge’s authoritative Key Thinkers, in the short entry on van Gennep (Karady 1987: 255), it characteristically says that van Gennep’s approach was ‘essentially empirical with limited theoretical underpinning’. The same judgment is everywhere to be found. Arnold van Gennep is not considered an important anthropologist beyond his classificatory achievement, and sociologists quite simply do not read him. The first chapters of this book, and the whole of Part I, therefore, also represent an attempt to rectify that error.

In fact, as will be briefly discussed in what follows, Arnold van Gennep’s reception as a non-theoretical, idiosyncratic thinker is near-identical to the post-mortem reception of the work of Gabriel Tarde. Van Gennep and Tarde had much in common, not least – and for comparable reasons – their strong objections to Durkheiman sociology. This is why a revisiting of van Gennep likewise leads one to a recognition of important parallels in the thought of Tarde, and therefore also to a broader revisiting of the founding moments of sociology and anthropology, in France and beyond (Thomassen 2012d).

The truth is that van Gennep would have been thoroughly ill at ease in seeing his classification of rites represented as a supplement – or worse, a parenthesis – to Durkheim’s sociology of religion. His entire work was an effort to overcome what he saw as the most serious defects of Durkhemian anthropology and sociology. By continuing to neglect this fact we are in fact perpetuating that ‘death by silence’ which van Gennep suffered within the disciplines of anthropology and sociology during his lifetime. We need to know about this intellectual battle between two giants, and not only for the sake of intellectual history itself. We need to know about Arnold van Gennep’s anthropological project, and his opposition to Durkheim, both for generic reasons, but also because the concept of liminality starts to acquire its real potential only within a larger framework of analysis that very fundamentally breaks with functionalism and the Durkhemian version of neo-Kantian ‘forced theorizing’, creating models and explanations for human behaviour before the fact.

Van Gennep gave us a concept to think with, but he did much more than that. Van Gennep’s discovery of liminality was tied to an attempt to establish an experientially based social scientific project studying life, within what he called a ‘biological method’. This project shipwrecked; or rather, it was side-lined, and van Gennep would proceed to implement his ideas and energy to the building up of French folklore. Van Gennep never established any school of sociology and anthropology. But he did try. This chapter is also about that attempt. For it was not doomed to fail, and there is much for us to build on. And as the concept of liminality suggests, we cannot judge a project departing from outcomes. We have to study the events themselves, as they unfolded.

Arnold van Gennep and What We (don’t) Know about Him

Arnold van Gennep (1873–1957) published Les Rites de Passage in Paris in 1909, having finished and written the preface to the book in December 1908. Van Gennep himself considered the book a breakthrough, resulting from nothing less than an inner illumination:

I confess sincerely that though I set little store by my other books, my Rites de Passage is like a part of my flesh, and was the result of a kind of inner illumination that suddenly dispelled a sort of darkness in which I had been floundering for almost ten years. (from a review article on Frazer’s, The Golden Bough, here as quoted and translated in Belmont 1979: 58)

This assertion of his own work was made a few years after its publication in 1909. The language chosen is charged and significant. It is a confession, and it is sincere. Van Gennep wrote many books (more than thirty, with the exact number depending on definitions of what really counts as a book). But Rites of Passage was more than just a book. It was a breakthrough, an illumination, and in more than one way: it dispelled an intellectual and probably also personal darkness with one stroke of light. How so? How could van Gennep consider it ‘part of his flesh’? And what did he mean by ‘ten years of darkness’? In a way we cannot know with precision, and it may be better to leave aside second guesses. But van Gennep’s own remarks beg for a contextualization of van Gennep’s life’s work, the roads that led him to writing Rites of Passage, and the role this book played within his own larger life-project. In reconstructing this story, we will of necessity have to enter the formative period of the social sciences in France; in this and in the following chapter we will therefore also have to discuss Arnold van Gennep in relation to two of his endlessly more famous contemporaries, Emile Durkheim and Marcel Mauss.

What follows is not intended to represent even a rudimentary biography of Arnold van Gennep. Such a work, unfortunately, is still not available. It must and will be written, and hopefully sooner rather than later. The literature on Arnold van Gennep is not huge, and what we have is scattered here and there, in various pockets of the various branches of the social sciences, including first and foremost religious studies, anthropology, and of course folklore. One can also find references to van Gennep in minor disciplines or subject areas to which he contributed, such as numismatics, Homeric studies or comparative literature.

The complete works of Arnold van Gennep were assembled and introduced by his daughter (and only child), Ketty van Gennep (1964). It contains exact bibliographical (though not annotated) references to 437 of his publications. It is not a complete list. It excludes, for example, newspaper articles and various other non-academic writings which actually came to play quite a role in his life. We have van Gennep’s self-compiled list of publications which he used for one of his applications to the Collège de France, running until 1911 (van Gennep 1911a). This list is 43 pages long and contains quite a few references not included in his daughter’s bibliography. All the same, Ketty van Gennep’s bibliography remains the best and fullest overview of his academic production. Moreover, the short introduction written by her stands as a precious biographical testimony, factual and personal at the same time, told from the perspective of a daughter’s loving memory. Several of the details concerning van Gennep’s life are used in the reconstruction that follows.

Nicole Belmont wrote a short (133 pages) appraisal of van Gennep as the founder of French folklore which was translated into English in 1979 as Arnold van Gennep. The Creator of French Ethnography (Belmont 1979 [1974]). Undisputedly one of the world’s leading van Gennep experts (perhaps indeed the leading expert), Belmont’s own rich work on French and European folklore draws extensively on van Gennep. Her book is so far without a doubt the most precious contribution toward an appreciation of the depth of his writings, and also provides glimpses into his complicated struggles to pave his way into French academia.² It will be drawn upon throughout our discussion here, but with a slightly different emphasis, and in two ways so.

First, Belmont was a student and collaborator of Claude Lévi-Strauss, and while this should hardly be considered a handicap in a general sense, it does mean that Belmont at places tends to see Van Gennep’s work as a precursor to a fully mature structuralism, and therefore as lacking in something. In an article from 1974, Senn likewise concluded that van Gennep ‘deserves a place as an early and significant structural folklorist’ (Senn 1974: 242). This positioning of van Gennep is perhaps most explicitly stated in Belmont’s chapter that discusses van Gennep’s work on Totemism, where Belmont refers to van Gennep’s strikingly ‘modern’ understanding of Totemism as a classifying system (and not just a force of social cohesion), and then ends with the following statement: ‘We are very close here to Lévi-Strauss’s totemic operator and yet very far away too: there remains only one more bridge to be crossed, but it is apparently an impassable one’ (Belmont 1979: 35). Belmont, despite her deep, detailed and thoughtful understanding of van Gennep, to some extent perpetuates the image that van Gennep was, after all, a ‘weak theoretician’ (ibid.: 10). We will have ample chance to indicate why this is in many ways not correct – although any such assessment of course relates to the underlying question, what we mean by ‘theory’. But here again van Gennep did have something to offer, as he insisted that theorizing could only take place by departing from facts in their concrete coming to life: ‘faits naissants’, as he called them, in conscious opposition to the Durkheim’s externalized ‘social facts’. While it is true that van Gennep left a lot of material open to further theoretical discussion, Lévi-Straussian structuralism is not the only direction to take it – in fact, in many ways it is probably the wrong direction. This general point becomes all the more salient the moment we move our discussion into the domain of rituals and transition periods. Lévi-Straussian structuralism used finished texts (myths, kinship terminologies, cooking recipes) as its data. Liminality, and indeed van Gennep’s entire approach to the social sciences, makes sense only within social dramas as they unfold. It is exactly because van Gennep refused to endorse or engage in stifled -isms that we can return to his work and find value in it, again and again – and this in fact coheres with Belmont’s own conclusion (ibid.: 132). And that is, by any standard, the definition of a ‘classic’: a work we can visit and revisit, a work whose relevance goes beyond the specific time and place in which it was written.

Second, and relatedly, while Belmont’s book (in chapters 2–4 most explicitly) pays ample attention to van Gennep’s early scholarship where he moved rather freely between ethnography, sociology and folklore, as the title of her book indicates, she does privilege the analysis of his work in the direction of his enormous contributions to folklore: a both natural and legitimate orientation, as this is indeed Belmont’s own discipline. The ‘late’ van Gennep, the ‘French-folklore van Gennep’, will not be our focus here; what will be stressed, instead, is van Gennep’s larger relevance, and especially his potentiality, for the social sciences. And this relevance is most vividly and explicitly present in his writings prior to 1925, including of course Rites of Passage. We desperately need to move our discussions of van Gennep beyond the confines of what became his ‘refuge’ in French folklore.

In 1981, a workshop was organized in Neuchâtel, in recognition of Arnold van Gennep’s pivotal role for Swiss folklore and ethnology. An edited volume (Centlivres et Hainard 1986) was published as a follow-up to that conference, with a fine collection of chapters with contributions from the then rather small group of van Gennep experts, including Nicole Belmont herself. Pierre Bourdieu was present at the workshop, and gave a paper on the social powers at play in Rites of Passage. The paper was published as Les rites comme actes d’institution in Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales (Bourdieu 1982) and reprinted in Ce que parler veut dire. The article was then translated into English as Rites of Institution, and published as a chapter in Language and Symbolic Power (Bourdieu 1992: 117–26). It is certainly one of Bourdieu’s most frequently read and quoted papers. One might therefore have thought that this could have been a turning point for the sociological reception of Arnold van Gennep, for Bourdieu was in that period becoming established as one of the major figures in contemporary sociology, bridging his anthropological background with the main concerns of social theory. The ceremonial and symbolic aspects of power always played a huge role in Bourdieu’s writings. Moreover, Bourdieu’s empirical research areas, with a focus on rural France and Algeria, brought him – potentially – into extremely close contact with van Gennep’s work. If there ever was a chance that van Gennep could have made it into the sociological canon, this was it.

This was not what happened; possibly quite the contrary. Should any curious sociologist have wanted to go further into detail with what van Gennep had actually written, Bourdieu warned them off from the outset with these opening lines:

With the notion of rites of passage, Arnold van Gennep named, indeed described a social phenomenon of great importance. I do not believe that he did much more … In fact, it seems to me that in order to develop the theory of rites of passage any further, one has to ask the questions that this theory does not raise, and in particular those regarding the social function of ritual and the social significance of the boundaries or limits which the ritual allows one to pass over or transgress in a lawful way. (Bourdieu 1992: 117)

Bourdieu then moves on to suggest the term, ‘rites of institution’³ to replace rites of passage, as this would serve to identify the social and institutional aspect of such rites, and in particular, the way in which they primarily – in Bourdieu’s reading – serve as power vectors for those who hold knowledge and hence as mechanisms of social exclusion. This is the real importance of such rituals, says Bourdieu, much more so than the cultural inclusion aspects, which allegedly was the only interest held by van Gennep. Here Bourdieu simply repeated what institutionalized French academia, since Durkheim, had decided upon as a verdict, namely that van Gennep himself had nothing theoretical to offer, and that in order to take his concepts anywhere, one would now need to re-inject it with a sociological dimension, and start to ask all the questions that van Gennep had failed to address. In fact, Bourdieu makes no further mention of van Gennep in the analysis that follows. There is no sign whatsoever that Bourdieu had actually read van Gennep.

If Bourdieu had actually bothered to engage with van Gennep’s work, he would have discovered that van Gennep’s entire approach was eminently directed towards those social dimensions that Bourdieu feels he has to re-invent half a century later. In Chapter VI, ‘Initiation Rites’, by far the longest chapter in Rites of Passage, van Gennep paid close attention exactly to how rites of passage simultaneously bring together and set apart. This is because for van Gennep, in contrast to Durkheim, rituals are essentially linked to processes of differentiation (or, ‘distinction’, as Bourdieu would have it). He analyses this process, for example, with respect to gender differentiation (another blind spot in Durkheim’s theory). How groups and sub-groups use rites of passage to set themselves apart is an omnipresent theme in van Gennep. In fact, the examples that van Gennep invokes in this chapter are surprisingly clear-cut examples of precisely that dimension which Bourdieu declares absent: rites of passage into secret societies, ordinations of priests or magicians, the enthroning of a king, the consecration of monks and nuns, or of sacred prostitutes (van Gennep 1960: 65). On page 113 van Gennep anticipates Bourdieu’s entire argument, and as usual with a directness of words that we have, for all sorts of reasons, almost lost: ‘The counterpart of initiation rites are the rites of banishment, expulsion and excommunication – essentially rites of separation and de-sanctification’ (ibid.: 113). Those rites, says van Gennep, are essentially about the setting apart of objects or persons. The innocence of ceremony is drowned by the seriousness of its social effects.

Everything that is valid in Bourdieu’s conceptualization is already there in van Gennep, at least embryonically. In his own approach to rites, Bourdieu himself ends up with a rather dull and deceptive mixture of Durkheimian functionalism⁴ and a Marxist-inspired reductionist reading of rites as the mystification or ‘naturalization’ of power (Bourdieu 1992: 126). That Pierre Bourdieu, France’s most eminent sociologist of the post-war period, trained in anthropology, can get away with an assessment of van Gennep which states that he did not pay attention to the social level or to mechanisms of exclusion and hierarchical differentiation in rites of passage serves as a sad testimony to the genuine non-reception of van Gennep’s work in sociological circles. Rather than paying homage to Arnold van Gennep, engaging with his work from within, and taking seriously Victor Turner’s elaboration which by then had reached its mature stage, Bourdieu confines van Gennep’s fine-grained analytical framework to the dustbin of intellectual history, armed with Marx and Durkheim. With a use of language that characteristically smacks of sophistry, he then reduces rites to the social structure they serve to maintain. It is a quite astonishing example of theoretical retrogression.

Rosemary Zumwalt, who wrote her Berkeley M.A thesis in folklore on Arnold van Gennep’s work (1988), summarized her findings in an article, Arnold van Gennep: The Hermit of Bourg-la-Reine, publi...