Theatre/Ritual/Play/Liminality

Liminality To some extent my understanding of liminality is based on Turner's popularization and elaboration of Van Gepp's original definition. Much like I do with Deep Play in this book, I will be taking these concepts into some new territory as well, modifying and inflecting them in new ways. In terms of what is brought to the table in the original definitions, there is certainly relevance to me in the departure from and return to a defined state of being, but my real fixation is on the "betwixt and between". As this in-between state is only understood to be possible by the states it departs from and moves into, I am more interested in an understanding of liminality as a potentially semi-permanent or permanent state of being. This means the relationality between an individual and society takes on greater significance, as the passage from one state to another is actually understood as a passage from being part of society to becoming a fringe memeber, as opposed to a passage from one state of being to another within that society. The liminality is determined by those who keep open the transitional state of being within society. In a sense liminality as I understand it is synonomous with marginality, but it embodies something much greater than simply living on the fringes of society. It's a kind of dissolution of traditional roles as well as an inevitably significant transformation of one's own being, which implies something far deeper than marginality. Still, the states as they are transcended, realized or re-realized mean these liminal spaces are also intermittent spaces for social dramas, as well as high drama. Exploring Arnold van Gennep’s framing of rites of passage which he had broken down into three phases of separation, transition, and reincorporation, Turner describes the transitional phase as being “betwixt and between”; in such a state a person does not belong to the society they were a member of and they have yet to be reincorporated into it. Turner defines this in-between state as being partly typified by humility, seclusion, tests, and communitas, an unstructured community where all members are equal (Turner, 1969, p.94). This definition can be extended in evidential ways to the experience of travel in general, where actors leave familiar circumstances and engage one another in foreign contexts; it resonates explicitly with hitch-hiking and train-hopping. One objective is to discern how actors make sense of their engagement with one another as strangers and/or fellow-travelers in such contexts. I am interested in how sociality in and around these liminal or off-the-grid spaces can shed light on our understanding of how the ‘stranger’ shapes social space in otherwise non-liminal contexts. I look to Anthropologists Michael Herzfeld and Victor Crapanzano for cues on studying fringe actors as juxtaposed against the dominant cultural milieus. They argue that we can learn about a society’s center by examining its margins. Herzfeld studied sheep thieves in Greece. With his notion of structural nostalgia he explores how Cretan villagers’ view the church and state as “intrusive and demeaning… The villagers’ view of the state is indeed a considerable embarrassment, for the state appears to them as the antithesis of trust and as an alien source of authority” (Herzfeld, p. 34, 1997). This dynamic between actors and the state resonates with the perspective of those in the hitch-hiking/train-hopping realm, and that of the state. It might also prove useful to explore in my own study Herzfeld’s claim in his that “the symbolism of official history as well as that of modernist social theory is drawn from the same sources as their own rebellious inversion of official ideology”, since in my research and experience I have found that the behavior of marginal actors, sometimes rendered through acts that overtly mock or subvert mainstream behavior or ideas, is often handled as an embarrassment by non-marginal actors and by the police. Citing an example from my own research, I was once standing on the street corner with a train-hopper I had just met. He turned to a young man on the bus stop and asked for a bite of the man’s sandwich. The man blushed and laughed, finally asking if my companion “Oz” was serious. The notion of sharing a bite of his sandwich with a stranger clearly, however temporarily, toyed with his social expectations. Crapanzano’s study of a Moroccan schizophrenic treats fringe v. mainstream/core v. periphery in arguing that we can learn about the “normal” behavior of individuals in a (Moroccan) population by positioning ourselves “outside” of it; ethnographically, by taking the disposition of an actor with schizophrenia as our starting point. Rather than viewing the schizophrenic as an objective anomaly Crapanzano assumes it as one equally valid subjective position in the whole, despite its marginality. In terms of the periphery, I argue that train-hopping and hitch-hiking occur in liminal, hybrid, marginal spaces where particular kinds of social engagements take place. These engagements help to define the spaces as semi-autonomous and anarchist in nature. In these spaces interpersonal experiences occur where the human stakes are raised for empathy and compassion or for violence and harm. Ted Conover elucidates many such examples of compassion and violence in Rolling Nowhere. In one instance a “home guard” greets Conover as he walks into town after getting off of a freight train: “Prince Valiant turned back toward me. “Buddy, you look beat”, he said, in an accent I had tentatively placed as backwoods Southern. He glanced at my bedroll. “You just in?”. I nodded. “Well lookee here, I’ll gitcha some coffee” (p.59). --> Deep Play is owning the imagination against the dominant order. The stranger. Disposition to the life-world. Risk-taking. In particular, I engage the theoretical position of ontological anarchism as espoused by Hakim Bey. Bey’s approach addresses key aspects of my own ethnographic paradigm that draws on questions of the stranger, deep play, and risk taking. My initial research has shown that the people engaging in these activities are largely falling into these zones of autonomy or practicing anarchism not self-consciously or as a political act but rather as apolitical incidents of self-autonomy. These “accidental anarchists” engage geographical spaces (in what as been called traveling subcultures [footnote]) in ways that engage a metageographical imaginary in which semi-autonomous zones are carved out of the landscape of public and privately owned territories. Freight train hopping and hitchhiking are two modes of traversing space and place in ways that retain the conditions of autonomy, risk taking, deep play and engagement with the stranger as intimate interlocutor. Bey addresses this well in his writings on ontological anarchism through such notions as poetic terrorism, semi-autonomous zones, and of course the broader category of ontological anarchism. [footnotes]His descriptions of such notions elucidate clear connexions between carvnivalesque actions and events, pirates (pirate utopias) and train hoppers, alternative meta-geographies, and social drama. When Turner writes about “dramatic time “ replacing routinized social living and locates the roots of theatre in social drama (Turner 1982, p. 10/11), his conception of “the human seriousness of play” starts to resonate with other projects like St. John’s work on the Carnivalesque and Bey’s work on poetic terrorism that substantiate connexions between the concepts of strangers, deep play, and risk-taking (Turner, p. 17). Part of Bey’s argument is that the preconditions for revolution are actually manifest in lived experiences as exemplified in his theory of poetic terrorism. More problematic and less worthy of treatment for Bey are the consequences of these preconditions which always seem to result in static ideas that already fail by becoming solutions. The key is to create and reside in temporary spaces of uncertainty that hold open spaces of possibility. From this vantage point on experience and Bey’s stress on it’s value to the anarchist project it is interesting to note Turner’s analysis of the etymology of experience: “to attempt, to venture, to risk, danger, sudden calamity, experiment, straining towards, trial, drama” and finally links the roots of the word to “pirate”, “forward”, and “through”. Turner concludes this reflection: If we put these various sense together we have a “laminated” semantic system focused on “experience”, which portrays it as a journey, a test (of self, of suppositions about others), a ritual passage, and exposure to peril or risk, a source of fear. By means of experience, we “fare”, “fearfully” through “perils”, taking “experimental” steps”. Anarchism is often cited as a philosophy predicated on knowing we do not have the answers but moving forward with the faith that we will figure it out as we go (Graeber. Bey insists that the “audience reaction or aesthetic-shock produced by PT [poetic terrorism] ought to be at least as strong as the emotion of terror” and describes it as an act in a theatre of cruelty. He insists further that poetic terrorism must be against the law and that its performers are wild children who engage in a “barbaric enticement to liberty” (Bey, ) (mock it) dreams are a story of what life looks like lived without fear