Introduction: re- mapping liminality

Abstract

While we would not wish to launch this collection of essays on liminality and landscape by proposing an ‘authoritative’ definition of the book’s two overarching concepts, we nevertheless feel it instructive to consider for a moment the ‘general’ meanings ascribed to these terms in order to get a sense of how we might go about negotiating understandings of the ways they are enacted, performed or theorised in practice. ‘Of or pertaining to a threshold’, the liminal already in some way connotes the spatial: a boundary, border, a transitional landscape, or a doorway in Simmel’s sense of a physical as well as psychic space of potentiality.1 The liminal is also, we note, the ‘initial stage of a process’. It therefore exhibits temporal qualities, marking a beginning as well as an end, but also duration in the unfolding of a spatio-temporal process: liminality as a generative act, a psychosocial intentionality of being. But what of landscape? A view or prospect, a piece of inland scenery (as long as it is not urban), we take from this the idea of landscape as image, vista, representation: a visual index of an area of land (the countryside) as viewed from a given perspective. But also, as a ‘tract’ of land we can infer a certain materiality and locatedness: a space one can inhabit and navigate one’s way through in an embodied sense. By extension, landscape is understood as something that is ‘shaped’ and ‘produced’, and which is thus contingent on human or natural ‘processes and agents’. Insofar, then, as,ontologically, landscapes are processual and in a constant state of transition and becoming is there not a case for suggesting that landscapes themselves are intrinsically liminal? Indeed, as David Crouch enquires in the afterword to this volume, ‘can landscape be anything but liminal?’ Or is this to over-stretch the conceptual parameters by which articulations of ‘liminality’ and ‘the liminal’ might (should?) otherwise be framed? These are questions that the multi-disciplinary contributions to this book in their different ways seek to confront. Conceptually, liminality, like landscape, fares none too well if restricted to what we can glean from the OED. So far, so obvious. Yet in approaching landscape through the prism of liminality (and vice versa) a ‘back-to-basics’ stripping down of the complex and in many ways plenitudinous structures of meaning that have coalesced around these concepts might be a fruitful way, for the purposes of this introduction, of taking stock of the ‘place’ of the liminal (rhetorically and spatially) in contemporary theory and debate. It is not our intention here to over-anticipate the rich imbrication of ideas of liminality, space and mobility as explored across and between the disciplinary fields of study represented in this collection, preferring instead to steer the reader towards the chapters themselves; it is rather to chart a provisional topography by which to identify and explore some of the common themes and preoccupations that present themselves for consideration at this historical moment. In this vein, the broader intent of Liminal Landscapes is, to borrow from the title of the 2010 symposium from which this book has evolved, to ‘re-map the field’ of debates in the social sciences and humanities around concepts of the liminal and liminality. Accordingly, what we set out below is a triangulation, of sorts, between three landscapes – two English and one Welsh – each of which harbours qualities, affects, or characteristics that may in some way be described as ‘liminal’: Margate beach in Kent, Morecambe Bay in Lancashire, and Mostyn on the Dee Estuary in Flintshire, North Wales. Along the way we identify some of the common theoretical and thematic threads running through the different contributions to the book. Our rationale for this approach is to purposefully avoid a stateof-the-art appraisal of liminality, or mapping a theoretical overview of the concept, or even tracing its intellectual provenance. Our altogether more cautious aim is to sketch a discursive landscape of the liminal, a three-fold process in which we set out to explore: a) the ways the concept is being applied and theorised in a contemporary context; b) the inherent spatialities of the liminal; and c) the extent to which current theories of liminality are still anchored in – or perhaps burdened by – some of the foundational ideas in anthropology from which they have developed. The other, more modest aim of this introduction is to chart the evolution of our own process of critical engagement with ideas of liminality; a journey which begins in the seaside resort of Margate.