Contemporary Liminality
About the Book Series
This series constitutes a forum for works that make use of concepts such as ‘imitation’, ‘trickster’ or ‘schismogenesis’, but which chiefly deploy the notion of ‘liminality’, as the basis of a new, anthropologically-focused paradigm in social theory. With its versatility and range of possible uses rivalling mainstream concepts such as ‘system’, ‘structure’ or ‘institution’, liminality by now is a new master concept that promises to spark a renewal in social thought.
While charges of Eurocentrism are widely discussed in sociology and anthropology, most theoretical tools in the social sciences continue to rely on approaches developed from within the modern Western intellectual tradition, whilst concepts developed on the basis of extensive anthropological evidence and which challenged commonplaces of modernist thinking, have been either marginalised and ignored, or trivialised. By challenging the taken-for-granted foundations of social theory through incorporating ideas from major thinkers, such as Nietzsche, Dilthey, Weber, Elias, Voegelin, Foucault and Koselleck, as well as perspectives gained through modern social and cultural anthropology and the central concerns of classical philosophical anthropology Contemporary Liminality offers a new direction in social thought.
Gnostic Fools: The Occult Origins of Our Ideological Age
1st Edition
By Agnes Horvath
November 11, 2025
This book offers a political anthropological discussion of our contemporary situation regarding sceptical attitudes towards scientific expertise and authority, and the increasing role of power and politics. It does so using an exploration of the “fool” or “gnostic fool” as a type, drawing on ideas ...
Magic and the Will to Science: A Political Anthropology of Liminal Technicality
1st Edition
By Agnes Horvath
July 31, 2025
This book offers a political anthropological perspective on the problematic character of science, combining insights from historical sociology, political theory, and cultural anthropology. Its central idea, departing from the works of Frances Yates and the Gnosticism thesis of Eric Voegelin, is ...
The French Revolution and Its Legacy: Leaping Democracy into the Unlimited
1st Edition
By Camil Francisc Roman
June 30, 2025
This book offers an interpretation of the French Revolution and modern democracy, arguing that the revolution gave rise to a democratic power that is liminal by nature, and therefore unlimited, unaccountable on principle, and the basis for a state religion of continuous transformation. It ...
The Power of Empty Places: From Megalithic Monuments to Social Media
1st Edition
By Kate Bollard
February 27, 2025
Social media has been established as a central feature of the modern world and a propagator of contemporary culture. Political anthropology is employed as a method to understand digital fascination in the modern world. The theory of the void is utilised to examine the destructive features of social...
The Western Crisis of Truth in the Early 21st Century: As the Enlightenment Dims
1st Edition
By Arvydas Grišinas
December 16, 2024
The Western Crisis of Truth in the Early 21st Century explores the symbolic, experiential, and associative side of contemporary political culture, arguing that phenomena such as ‘post-truth’, digitalization, mediatization, propaganda, illiberalism, or populism, far from being curiosities, have in ...
Liminal Politics in the New Age of Disease: Technocratic Mimetism
1st Edition
Edited
By Agnes Horvath, Paul O'Connor
August 26, 2024
Liminal Politics in the New Age of Disease explores the phenomenon of ‘liminal politics’: an open-ended ‘state of exception’ in which normal rules no longer apply, and things which were previously unimaginable become possible – even appearing remarkably quickly to represent a ‘new normal’. With ...
Inhabiting Liminal Spaces: Informalities in Governance, Housing, and Economic Activity in Contemporary Italy
1st Edition
By Isabella Clough Marinaro
May 27, 2024
This book draws together debates from two burgeoning fields, liminality and informality studies, to analyze how dynamics of rule-bending take shape in Rome today. Adopting a multiscalar and transdisciplinary approach, it unpacks how gaps and contradictions in institutional rulemaking and ...
Making Sense of Diseases and Disasters: Reflections of Political Theory from Antiquity to the Age of COVID
1st Edition
Edited
By Lee Trepanier
May 27, 2024
This book examines diseases and disasters from the perspective of social and political theory, exploring the ways in which political leaders, social activists, historians, philosophers, and writers have tried to make sense of the catastrophes that have plagued humankind from Thucydides to the ...
The Technologisation of the Social: A Political Anthropology of the Digital Machine
1st Edition
Edited
By Paul O'Connor, Marius Ion Benţa
January 29, 2024
In an era of digital revolution, artificial intelligence, big data and augmented reality, technology has shifted from being a tool of communication to a primary medium of experience and sociality. Some of the most basic human capacities are increasingly being outsourced to machines and we ...
Art and Enchantment: How Wonder Works
1st Edition
By Patrick Curry
March 17, 2023
This book concerns the experience of enchantment in art. Considering the essential characteristics, dynamics and conditions of the experience of enchantment in relation to art, including liminality, it offers studies of different kinds of artistic experience and activity, including painting, music,...
Political Anthropology as Method
1st Edition
By Arpad Szakolczai
February 27, 2023
This book explores considerations of method in the field of political anthropology, contending that this constitutes a distinct approach within the broader area of the human, social and political sciences. Faithful to the basic guiding ideas of anthropology, it nonetheless challenges and rejects ...
Liminality and the Philosophy of Presence: A New Direction in Political Theory
1st Edition
By Franziska Hoppen
January 09, 2023
This book departs from the attempt by political theory to confront the challenges of political life with new concepts, offering instead a mode of thought so far excluded from the canon of political theory: the philosophy of presence. Making the experience of liminality the very centre of thought, ...