Despite the predominant policy focus on event economic impact, event organisers and host community residents are calling for attention to be paid to the social value of events. Anthropological work ...on events demonstrates that their celebratory nature engenders a liminoid space that can foster social value, particularly through a sense of communitas. In order to enable and amplify liminality and communitas, event organisers and host community planners should foster social interaction and prompt a feeling of celebration by enabling sociability among event visitors, creating event-related social events, facilitating informal social opportunities, producing ancillary events, and theming widely. The resulting narratives, symbols, meanings, and affect can then be leveraged to address social issues, build networks, and empower community action. These may be furthered when the arts are used to complement sport, and when commercial elements support social leverage. Future research should explore and examine the strategic and tactical bases for social leverage.
Recent times have seen an emergence of cold-water sea swimming as a popular pasttime for increased numbers of people in coastal regions. Within this paper, we seek to outline the philosophical ...relationship between water and society, right back to Thales. From this we continue through anthropological sources to highlight the relationship between culture and the sea throughout much of human history. Sociology offers only piecemeal theoretical bases for this relationship. Here, the concept of liminality is deployed as a mechanism through which we can interpret human-water relations. On from this, the concept of the ‘oceanic feeling’, coined by French intellectual Romain Rolland, is discussed to situate how the experience of swimming might offer one among many means through which we can return to the world as it is given to us, in a Nietzschean sense, and in doing so return at once to an experience of the eternal borne from presence.
In an effort to combine tourism with pro-social giving and personal development, more and more people choose to go abroad on volunteer tourism trips. We explore the potential transformational ...influence such trips have on travelers, aiming to map the transformation process stages and examine their boundary conditions. In doing so, we follow a mixed methods approach using a qualitative study comprising ethnographically informed in-depth interviews and a quantitative one, by means of a structured questionnaire. Findings indicate that the transformation process volunteer tourists undergo involves three stages related to liminality. We conceptualize the degree of liminality as immersiveness and show how the transformation process is significantly influenced by the degree of authenticity and the immersiveness of volunteer tourists’ experiences, as well as their own perceptions on how societally meaningful their actions were during their trips. Based on our conclusions, we present important implications for academics, managers, and tour operators.
Within policy and practice there is an increasing interest in the care of frail elders. However understanding of the experience and challenges of living and dying with frailty in older age is ...currently undeveloped. Frailty is often used as a synonym for the increasing infirmities that accompany ageing and the slow dwindling dying trajectory of many elders. However, there is little empirical work on the experience of being frail to inform social gerontological perspectives and welfare provision. Through analysis of repeated in-depth interviews over 17 months (2006–2008) with 17 frail elders living at home in the U.K., key factors that shape elders’ experience of being frail emerged. The study argues that the visible markers of functional limitations and the increasing social losses of old age bring finitude to the fore. To retain anchorage in this state of imbalance, frail elders work actively to develop and sustain connections to their physical environment, routines and social networks. This experience can be conceptualised as persistent liminality; a state of imbalance “betwixt and between” active living and clinically recognised dying. This paper highlights the precarious and often protracted dying trajectory of frail older people. Whilst it could be argued that developing into death in older age is part of a normal and successful course after a life long-lived, recognition of and support for older people deemed frail is lacking. Frail elders find themselves living in the margin between the Third and Fourth Age with little recognition of or support for the work of living and dying over time. This experience of frailty contests dominant cultural and welfare practices and policy frameworks that operate in binary modes: social or health; independent or dependent; living or dying.
► Frailty in older age is a period “betwixt and between” active living and clinically recognised dying. ► Frail elders actively engage in creating and sustaining connections to manage their uncertain, protracted dying trajectory. ► Accumulated losses, including loss of social networks, militate against connection with health and social care services. ► Older frail people’s experience between the Third and Fourth Age can be conceptualised as persistent liminality.
How do higher education institutions “do” diversity in the context of protracted national conflict? The present study examines a diversity and inclusion program in an Israeli university through a ...case study of one of the program’s initiatives in practice: a dialog workshop for Palestinian-Arab and Jewish students. Analyzing observational, interview and documentary data, and drawing on the theoretical constructs of liminality and play, we explore the workshop as a liminal space within a de-politicized diversity regime. We contribute to critical diversity literature by exploring the unfolding of inclusion work in the context of protracted national conflict, in which the university’s policy of imposing a strict apolitical agenda resulted in benign commitment to diversity and inclusion, as well as silencing of staff and students who attempted to bring up “off-limits” topics. We also contribute to research on liminality and play in organizational contexts by examining the dialog workshop as a case of a structured and regulated liminal space. In particular, we reveal how leisure time and play, specifically role play and role reversal, serve as “small openings”: outlets for experimentation and reflection within the predetermined confines of the liminal space.
The current epoch is characterised by a series of critical events that have upset fieldwork research and continue to affect it. The industrial district of the Brianza has always proved to be ...resilient and capable of overcoming market turbulences, but the rapid sequence of critical events in an industrial context already exposed to other frailties is producing further uncertainty and liminality. The researcher is likewise facing his own uncertainties. The time lag between the observation of the fast changing situation and the writing moment which, occurring necessarily after the observation period, seems to be unable to keep up with the shifting reality. Thus, both interlocutors and researcher are seeking new conceptual inventories in their own ways to understand the present and imagine the future in a context of prolonged liminality.
The current epoch is characterised by a series of critical events that have upset fieldwork research and continue to affect it. The industrial district of the Brianza has always proved to be ...resilient and capable of overcoming market turbulences, but the rapid sequence of critical events in an industrial context already exposed to other frailties is producing further uncertainty and liminality. The researcher is likewise facing his own uncertainties. The time lag between the observation of the fast changing situation and the writing moment which, occurring necessarily after the observation period, seems to be unable to keep up with the shifting reality. Thus, both interlocutors and researcher are seeking new conceptual inventories in their own ways to understand the present and imagine the future in a context of prolonged liminality.
Hadi et al. (Journal of Consumer Psychology, 34, 2023) have created a masterful and wide‐sweeping review of the consumer behavior literature on the Metaverse. They envision our encounter with the ...Metaverse as a consumer journey. In this commentary, I highlight some of their unique contributions and suggest additional insights that emerge when we view the digital frontier as a liminal place betwixt and between now and then, here and there, and reality and virtuality. The Metaverse is also a metaphor and I entertain three metaphoric interpretations. First, the Metaverse is an experience machine of the sort that Robert Nozick imagined in his thought experiment involving real and artificial pleasures. Alternatively, consumers themselves can be seen as desiring machines as Gilles Deleuze and Féliz Guattari characterized them, and the Metaverse can be seen as an instantiation of our collective desires. Or thirdly, the Metaverse can be regarded as a shared hallucination. As these diverse metaphors suggest, imagining the metaverse is a projective exercise. But the consequences may involve up to a trillion dollars in revenues, so I hope these provocations prove useful whether they are ultimately borne out or not.
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