From a Liminal Place

An Asian American Theology

Sang H. Lee

• Publisher: Fortress Press
• Year: 2010
• Print ISBN: 9780800696689
• eBook ISBN: 9781451418156
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

Chapter 1

THE CONTEXT OF ASIAN AMERICAN THEOLOGY

TWO DIMENSIONS OF THE ASIAN AMERICAN EXPERIENCE

There was no particular problem with my life in the United States when I thought of myself as a foreign student from Korea. All I had to do was study hard and get good grades. But when I began teaching in a small town in the Midwest with the prospect of living my entire life there, something disturbing began to emerge in my consciousness. However long I stayed in this country, I seemed to remain a stranger, an alien. People kept asking me, “Where are you from?” After fifty-three years in this country, they still ask me, “Where are you from?” And “Princeton, New Jersey” is hardly ever the correct answer to those who ask the question. Several times each and every day, someone reminds me that I do not belong here.

In the late 1960s I heard a Korean American sociologist present a paper at a conference on the Korean immigrant experience in the United States. He said that “marginality” is the term and concept that sociologists use to describe the social predicament especially of nonwhite minority peoples in this country. “I am a ‘marginal’ person,” I said to myself. I felt rather discouraged by the word but at the same time experienced a strange kind of exhilaration from finding out a definite name for my situation in American society.

From the first time I learned of the concept of “marginality,” however, I felt this concept, like my own experience of being a “stranger,” ambiguously combined two elements of nonwhite people’s experience in this country, one at least potentially positive, the other negative. In the preface I described the positive element of marginality as being a potentially creative condition and the negative element as being excluded by the dominant group. Everett V. Stonequist, who further developed sociologist Robert E. Park’s idea of “the marginal man [sic],” explains these two elements in more detail. A marginal person, according to Stonequist, “is poised in psychological uncertainty between two (or more) social worlds; reflecting in his soul the discords and harmonies, repulsions and attractions of these worlds, one of which is often ‘dominant’ over the other.”¹ Such a person “emulates and strives to be accepted by a group of which he is not yet, or is only peripherally a member.”² Stonequist states that marginality thus refers to the space “between two (or more) social worlds,” and the world in which a person is marginalized is “dominant” over that person’s original world.

Stonequist also noted the inherent creativity of a marginal situation as follows:

The marginal man [sic] is the key-personality in the contacts of cultures. It is in his mind that the cultures come together, conflict, and eventually work out some kind of mutual adjustment and interpenetration. He is the crucible of cultural fusion.… Thus the practical efforts of the marginal person to solve his own problem lead him consciously or unconsciously to change the situation itself. His interest may shift from himself to the objective social conditions and launch him upon the career of a nationalist, conciliator, interpreter, reformer, or teacher.³

H. F. Dickie-Clark, who has paid particular attention to the role of dominant groups in causing the marginalization of minority groups, clearly analyzes the negative nature of such exclusion. According to Dickie-Clark, marginality results from a hierarchical relationship of groups in which “a resistance is offered by members of the non-marginal and dominant group, to his [the marginal person’s] entry into the group and the enjoyment of its privileges.” Moreover, a “barrier [is] set up by that group, that an individual in a marginal situation who possesses characteristics (those gained through acculturation) which would ‘ordinarily’ give him [sic] a higher status, is not granted that status.” What makes a situation marginal, in other words, “lies in inconsistencies between rankings.” And such inconsistencies brought about by a higher and more powerful group deny “the enjoyment by an inferior one, of their powers, privileges and opportunities.”⁴ In this way, Dickie-Clark’s discussion helps to bring out clearly the fact that marginality is a condition affected by both status and power issues. The minority groups do not simply find themselves at the edges of their society; they are marginalized to be there.

Marginality is a spatial metaphor. To this metaphor must be added the power dynamic of the dominant group’s act of marginalizing certain groups of people if one is to have an adequate picture of the predicament of Asian Americans as a people at the margins. Like other nonwhite minority groups in America, Asian Americans are not just in an “in-between” or peripheral predicament but are pushed to be there and forced to remain there by dominant power structures.

Vietnamese American theologian Peter C. Phan describes the spatial, political, and cultural dimensions of the negative aspects of being in-between as follows:

To be betwixt and between is to be neither here nor there, to be neither this thing nor that. Spatially, it is to dwell at the periphery or at the boundaries. Politically, it means not residing at the centers of power of the two intersecting worlds but occupying the precarious and narrow margins where the two dominant groups meet and clash, and [being] denied the opportunity to wield powers in matters of a minority, a member of a marginal(ized) group. Culturally, it means not fully integrated into and accepted by either cultural system, being mestizo, a person of mixed race.

Lifting up the positive dimension of Asian Americans’ predicament, Phan further writes:

Being neither this nor that allows one to be both this and that. Belonging to both worlds and cultures, marginal(ized) persons have the opportunity to fuse them together and, out of their respective resources, fashion a new, different world, so that persons at the margins stand not only between these worlds and cultures but also beyond them. Thus being betwixt and between can bring about personal and social transformation and enrichment.⁵

Besides Phan, a significant number of Asian American scholars and writers have described the Asian Americans’ situation in the United States as one of “in-between-ness” or being at the “margin” or periphery and also of being pushed or marginalized into the space of margin or periphery.⁶

As noted above, I use in this book two different terms to refer to these two elements in marginality. Marginality as the result of marginalization is the powerless and demoralizing space into which Asian Americans are pushed into by racism in American society. I shall use anthropologist Victor Turner’s term liminality (limen the Latin word for “threshold”) to refer to the positive, creative nature of the in-betweenness in marginality.

A person can enter into a liminal or in-between space without being marginalized, while marginalization (being pushed into the periphery) inevitably places a person in a liminal, peripheral, and in-between place. Liminality does not have to be marginality. But marginality includes a liminal aspect. When persons, like Asian Americans, are pushed to the liminal and peripheral places by two worlds (Asia and America), their liminality means their being in the space between two worlds and at the same time at the peripheries, edges, or margins of both worlds. Asian Americans find themselves not fully accepted by, or fully belonging to, either the American world or the Asian. White Americans who are marginalized to the periphery of American society are at the edge or margin of that society only, but not between two worlds.

By making a distinction between liminality and marginalization, we avoid the danger of romanticizing marginality. Marginalization is dehumanizing and oppressive. And the space of marginality as the space into which a minority group is marginalized is a space of dehumanization, and there is nothing good in it. The liminal space that also results from marginalization, however, has the potential of being used as a creative space of resistance and solidarity. Marginalizing space and liminal space overlap. bell hooks, an African American womanist theorist, explains, “I make a definite distinction between that marginality which is imposed by oppressive structures and that marginality one chooses as the site of resistance—as location of radical openness and possibility.”⁷ I choose to call hooks’s second marginality “liminality.”

LIMINALITY AND ITS CREATIVE POSSIBILITIES

Victor Turner developed Arnold van Gennep’s theory of the rites of passage into a general theory of social change. Like the rites of passage, according to Turner, social change involves three stages: (1) the first stage of separation (the departure from social structure, especially social status and social role); (2) the middle stage of liminality in which a person is neither one thing nor another but betwixt and between; and (3) the final state of reaggregation or reincorporation into structure with a new identity or with a new perspective on the existing structure.⁸

For Turner, liminality is a space where a person is freed up from the usual ways of thinking and acting and is therefore open to radically new ideas. Freed from structure, persons in liminality are also available to a genuine communion (communitas) with others. Liminal space is also where a person can become acutely aware of the problems of the existing structure. A person in a liminal space, therefore, often reenters social structure with alternative ideas of human relatedness and also with a desire to reform the existing social structure.

According to Turner, human beings cannot exist in liminality for an indefinite period. They have to enter some structure, at least for survival as human beings. Thus, social change involves a dialectic movement between liminality/communitas and structure. Without occasional immersion into liminality/communitas, society becomes static.⁹

In terms of the three phases of rites of passage, Asian Americans, or their parents or grandparents, left their original homeland and have been in the liminal or in-between phase, but have not been able to be “reincorporated” into the American structure. Cultural assimilation (being able to live and work) in this country is possible. But for Asian Americans, like other nonwhite minority groups, social or structural assimilation (becoming “one of us” with the members of the dominant group) does not occur.¹⁰ So Asian Americans are still in the wilderness of in-between “limbo,” not being able to be reincorporated fully into a social structure.¹¹ To a limited degree, Asian Americans do enter American structure. They use the roads, shop at the supermarket, and conduct businesses. But their life in American structure involves only what sociologists call “secondary relationships,” not “primary relationships,” with the dominant white population.¹² There is still no meaningful social integration.

Asian Americans have only one foot in the heart of America. At best we are still dangling at the doorstep of their newly adopted country. Many Asian American individuals have important positions deep in the American structure, but only occupationally and not sociopolitically. They, like other Asian Americans, are still in the wilderness of liminal in-betweenness, making regular visits to their workplaces, but without enjoying genuine human contact.

Those Asian Americans who were born in the United States have only this country as their home. But at some point in their early youth, they discover that white Americans do not consider them as “one of us.” They find themselves “strangers” in their own homeland. They find themselves socially located at the periphery of American society and also in the liminal space of betweenness—between their birth place, America, and the their place of “origin,” Asia. They are liminal or “out of structure,” both in the sense of not fully belonging to America and also in the sense of not belonging to their ancestral place back in Asia. They are at the edge of America, and also between America and Asia. They are liminal in more ways than one.

What, according to Victor Turner, are the creative potentialities of the liminal space? Turner does not make a list of these creative potentialities of liminality, but we can find the following three elements in his discussions of liminality:¹³

1. Openness to the new. The revitalization of a society, according to Turner, involves a dialectical movement between structure and antistructure. The antistructure is experienced as a transitional condition wherein certain individuals have left behind them the social structures (such as social roles, statutes, etc.) and entered a condition from which they can return to revitalize said structures. The condition of being freed from social structure, according to Turner, is the liminal situation of being in a “temporary antinomic liberation from behavioral norms and cognitive rules.” It is a kind of social limbo or the predicament of not being at a fixed place but, rather, “betwixt and between.”¹⁴ And, for Turner, it is in this liminal experience that something new in a society can emerge. Liminality is the realm of possibility where the factors of culture may be put into “free and ‘ludic’ recombination in any and every possible pattern.”¹⁵ The old social category no longer holds, and the new one is not yet applicable. Being neither “this” nor “that,” those in a liminal condition are not obligated to perform the usual social duties expected of occupants of a particular status or social identity. Liminality is society’s “subjunctive mood, where suppositions, desires and hypotheses, possibilities and so forth, all become legitimate.”¹⁶

Liminality is an openness and potentiality for what is new and different. According to Turner, liminality creates a framework within which participants can experiment with the familiar elements of normative social life, reconfiguring them in novel ways and discovering new arrangements and possibilities. Persons in a liminal situation are “neither here nor there; the...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Chapter 1: The Context of Asian American Theology
• Chapter 2: God’s Strategic Alliance with the Liminal and Marginalized
• Chapter 3: God and Liminality
• Chapter 4: The Way of the Liminal Jesus as the Christ
• Chapter 5: Redemption in Asian American Context
• Chapter 6: Asian American Identity and the Christian Faith
• Chapter 7: Asian American Church
• Chapter 8: The New Liminality and Asian American Discipleship
• Chapter 9: Liminality and Reconciliation
• Chapter 10: A New Heaven and a New Earth
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Index