saintadatha

gah! hmmm....
brain oozing through eyeballs.

question: what really does it for you?
yeah. that should be open ended enough.

what tweaks your intellectual nipple, as it were?
what nibbles on your cerebral (insert body part that you like nibbled)?
what gets your goat?

mine is victor turner. give him to me and i'm a happy, if eventually overloaded brain on legs... he was an anthropologist born in 1920, initially trained in poetry and classics, who did his fieldwork in africa (as was the case for most of his mancunian, doctorate colleagues... shal i risk a beating by suggesting that he and his ilk might, imho, be the best thing to emerge from manchester?).

but what's so special about him? just what's so marvelous? well, he said that society isn't just a system of parts which function to keep the status quo of the entire social organism (as was the established 'structural-functionist' view up till then, which can be seen to sort of survive up till today)...

No! he said. Hell no! he said.

It's about the way these little parts (sociopolitical, psychosocial, ritualistic etc.) interact: its about the processes; its about the in-betweens.

And he went further. He looked at what he called "social dramas" and he eventually perceived them in terms of this lovely (and pretty accurate) tripartite model.
1. BREACH. something is wrong. there is a tear. the normative, 'rightness' of society isn't functioning correctly. something is fishy and there is a rip in the standard way things are put together. stuff breaks down. (often specifically rather than generally.)
2. LIMINALITY. liminal is a term he took from an earlier dutch anthropologist called van Gennep, and is based on the latin 'limen', meaning 'boundary' or 'margin'. what happens here is that the individual or group who suffer this breach, who move away from a particular social status or position exist without a status. they are between. they are nameless, they float in a pseudo-void between social boundaries...
Interestingly, this point in many rituals is associated with symbolism for all kinds of interesting bits n bobs: androgyny, filth, negation, death, bi- or asexuality, a stripping of social status through name, clothing, social contact... then:
3. REDRESS. Having been stripped of social status (or having removed it actively), the individual or group is then free to adopt the associations and attributes of a new status. Problem fixed. Or is it?

Interesting bits:
Once you take a system apart, he implied, and put it back together, it is never the same. So everytime there is a ritual for social repair (which is what all this boils down to: something is rotten in the state of denmark... better fix it!), you end up not repairing it, but changing it. It's about letting off steam, but with consequences. And all of this occurs implicitly and unspoken within sociocultural frameworks!

For me liminality is a period and process that transcends obvious rituals. In our societies (mainly anglo-american or euro-american) we have shed many of the more overt ways of ritual expression, and yet the liminar sounds a lot like a pubescent to me. Or a sucider. Floating, undefined, uncertain, without a place, without a function, without status, without a name... think bacchus, think loki; think release, think inversion; think as you like it, midsummer night's dream, lear, hamlet; think pinter; perhaps even think yeats ("mere anarchy") & elliot...?

And what if you consture this liminoid phase as a status in and of itself?!...

Right. Enough of this. As you can see, this truly gets my goat. And once i pop, i just can't stop (gods bless advertising slogans!).

I'm gonna head back to college for my tutorial where i can say all of this and more, and get some healthy intellectual feedback with much more wondrous, wondrous jargon to boot.

When I'm back, I want to hear all about your intellectual nipples...

[/end rant]

xxx