The commercialization of hospitality established arguably the oldest profession. Historically small commercial hospitality establishments, known as inns in the western world, were of ill repute. Perhaps connected to their reputation, this category of accommodation facility has been seriously neglected as an area of academic inquiry, particularly from the perspective of the host. While there has been a huge growth in the interdisciplinary field of tourism studies in recent decades, little attention has been paid to the role of the host in the host-guest relationship at whatever level of analysis. This thesis seeks to redress the balance. Hospitality is a basic form of social bonding. This type of bonding, where a hierarchy between strangers is implicit (as with hosts and guests), may be termed ‘nexilitas’; nexilitas is a form of social bonding in liminal circumstances. To that extent it is comparable to ‘communitas’ which describes social bonding between equals in certain liminal circumstances. The difference is that nexilitas is a form of bonding between individuals in a complex power relationship. The host controls the hospitality space, but custom also empowers the guest with certain expectations, especially in the commercial context. The thesis identifies the various forms of hospitality – traditional ‘true’ or ‘pure’ hospitality, social hospitality, cultural hospitality and commercial hospitality – and discusses these critically in their historical and cross-cultural contexts, with emphasis on the perspective of the host. The passage of hospitality is then traced through the three phases of preliminality, liminality and post-liminality and discussed along the themes anticipation, arrival and accommodation and finally departure of the guest. While the historical and ethnographic review is mainly based on written histories and the experiences of other anthropologists as guests as well as ethnographers, the passage of hospitality draws on the multi-sited auto-anthropological experiences of the author, both as host and as ethnographer of contemporary South African hosts in small owner-managed commercial hospitality establishments.

In Ben Okri's The Famished Road, rituals such as baptism are easily lost in the dense symbolism. The novel is, in the words of Douglas McCabe, a "ramshackle and untidy affair, a hodge-podge of social ideologies, narrative forms, effusive enthusiasms, and precision-jeweled prose poems" (McCabe 17). This complex untidiness can be discouraging for readers and critics alike, and yet "there is something contagious about the digressive, meandering aesthetic of The Famished Road" that makes the novel difficult to consign to confusion (Omhovere 59). Commonly considered post-colonial, post-modern, and magical-realist, The Famished Road deals with, among other things, spiritualism, family relations, and political and sociological tensions in Nigeria in the decades before its publication in 1991. These themes are depicted with a rush of symbols, and in such a clamor, baptism and other rituals may have trouble making themselves heard. And yet, paying attention to the repeated performance of baptism transforms this audacious, ramshackle novel into a story of liminality, alienation, and reconciliation, a story which celebrates these things as inevitable and necessary parts of life. As readers, we can use baptism to decode The Famished Road. In doing so, the novel develops a cyclical, ongoing narrative focused on the difficulties of and increased agency in liminality and the necessity of ritual, on an individual, familial, and socio-cultural level, in navigating that in-betweeness. I will begin by exploring baptism in The Famished Road in order to understand the performance and power of ritual. Here, ritual acts as a doorway, giving characters a chance to navigate liminality without removing themselves from it. This navigation gives them an increased understanding of how the world works and how they may operate in it. After exploring baptism as a ritual, I will examine Okri's "universal abikuism" and its connection to the flexibility of liminality.

The presented philosophical-anthropological interpretation seeks to examine the issue of existential transformation and its understanding in the works of selected authors, in particular Jacques Derrida, Jan Patočka and Søren Kierkegaard. It builds upon a specific interpretation of philosophy as a source of normative images that determine the ways of man's self- understanding. From the perspective of philosophical anthropology, "being human" is the result of man's being interested in his own being. Thus it definitely cannot be considered an innate quality. Man's "humanness" is conditioned by his strive to live a truthful life. Hence, the focus of the interpretation is on the relation between the tradition and the individual sense- making as well as on the motives of death and mortality, constitution of individuality, responsability, interiority, faith and transformation.

The aim of this thesis is to provide a social anthropological analysis and interpretation of the freetekno party phenomenon in the Czech Republic from synchronic and diachronic perspective. The author bases his argument on both his own field research and professional literature on the topic. An extended case method serves as a basic methodological Framework. After introduction of selected theoretical concepts (music scene, neotribes, youth subculture, rites de passage, liminality and liminoidity, spontaneous communitas and rhizom) as well as outline of the current state of research in the area of study of the freetekno party phenomenon, there is an empirical part of the thesis which consists of two main parts: the historical-ethnographic and the analytical-interpretative. The first part describes the first rave party in Great Britain, expansion of this phenomenon in continental Europe, its adoption in the Czech Republic and its gradual evolution up to the present. The following part serves as an analytical-interpretation of the above-outlined situation and a subsequent socio-anthropological interpretation. Freetekno scene is described as neotribal rhizom and freetekno events are subsequently conceptualized as unique ritual processes. The transformation of the freetekno phenomenon is then...

As I began this research, and even as a younger person, I thought it was the responsibility of my father to teach me what it is to be a man and how to embrace manhood. However, through the tools of self-study and autoethnography as a research method, it has become apparent that the responsibility falls upon me to seek manhood and to develop a lifelong practice of building good character. In the words of Dr. Leon Wright (1975), “To know God, one must know all about man.” This research seeks to bring clarity to my efforts to find out who I am. It details my journey from boy to artist to man. It works to highlight the interplay between three aspects of identity that make up my sense of self: racial identity, social/emotional identity (manhood) and lastly, my professional identity as an artist. This writing works to establish a personal meaning for manhood gained through self-reflection, personal experience, and formal rites of passage participation. This research initiates as an investigation concerning the members of my family, and my interaction with the men who have had a direct involvement in my life. This is an endeavor to document my path toward gaining/acknowledging purpose while working to acquire the knowledge of myself. I started with confronting my pain, realizing my creativity and artistry, welcoming my personality, to eventually embracing spirituality, all as a quest for knowledge. The knowledge of myself leads to the comprehension of my purpose in life, without which, as David Deida writes, I would be “totally lost, drifting, adapting to events rather than creating events” (2007, p. 37). This document is my inquiry to this acquisition of life purpose. On this quest, I have since modified Dr. Wright’s words to suggest that, “To know God, one must know all about themselves.”

Esta tesis se propone lleva a cabo un análisis de gran alcance del periodismo literario escrito entre 1914 y 1918. Para ello, explora dieciséis obras escritas por autores británicos y norteamericanos que están situadas en una zona liminal desde un punto de vista físico, genérico, temporal y espacial. Los textos estudiados son: First from the Front (Harold Ashton 1914), With the Allies (Richard Harding Davis 1914), Fighting in Flanders (Alexander Powell 1914), The Soul of the War (Philip Gibbs 1915), Over There: War Scenes on the Western Front (Arnold Bennett 1915), France at War (Rudyard Kipling 1915), Kings, Queens and Pawns: An American Woman at the Front (Mary Roberts Rinehart 1915), A Journal of Impressions in Belgium (May Sinclair 1915), Fighting France: From Dunkerque to Belfort (Edith Wharton 1915), A Visit to Three Fronts: Glimpses of the British, Italian and French Lines (Arthur Conan Doyle 1916), With the British on the Somme (William Beach Thomas 1917), My Round of the War (Basil Clarke 1917), The Turning Point: The Battle of the Somme (Harry Perry Robinson 1917), The Glory of the Coming: What Mine Eyes Have Seen of Americans in Action in This Year of Grace and Allied Endeavor (Irvin S. Cobb 1918), And They Thought We Wouldn’t Fight (Floyd Gibbons 1918) y A Reporter at Armageddon: Letters from the Front and Behind the Lines of the Great War (Will Irwin 1918). El viaje físico que llevó a estos periodistas a la zona bélica y las características de dicho viaje permiten agrupar los textos que resultaron de estas expediciones bajo un mismo marco teórico-antropológico. Este marco teórico se basa en las teorías sobre liminalidad tal y como las articuló originalmente Arnold van Gennep en Los Ritos de Paso (1909), que fueron más tarde desarrolladas por Victor Turner. Además de clasificar, contextualizar y discutir críticamente un conjunto de obras que no han sido comparadas con anterioridad, este estudio da respuesta a cuatro preguntas fundamentales: en primer lugar, esta tesis investiga si los textos analizados responden a los marcos críticos con los que hemos aprendido a interpretar la guerra, sobre todo en lo referente al concepto de “el mito de la guerra” establecido por Samuel Hynes en su estudio A War Imagined. En segundo lugar, esta tesis evalúa si algunos de los cambios retóricos y estilísticos que Paul Fussell identificó en la literatura de los combatientes se pueden encontrar en los textos analizados. Asimismo, atiende al desarrollo cronológico de la guerra y evalúa si existe una variación en el modo en que ésta fue representada a medida que avanzó el conflicto. En tercer lugar, el estudio adopta una perspectiva comparatista, confrontando los textos escritos desde ambos lados del Atlántico, para determinar hasta qué punto la nacionalidad de los autores y la postura de sus países en un estadio concreto de la guerra afectó a su forma de escribir. Finalmente, se propone determinar si existen diferencias sustanciales en la forma en que hombres y mujeres concibieron y retrataron su experiencia liminal en el frente.

Amongst the Iron Age Scandinavian elite, there are several supra-regional and multifaceted tripartite (or threefold) symbolic expressions. These include expressions found in art, artefacts and monuments, such as the triangular stone-settings, or Sw. treuddar, which may be the strongest manifestation in the landscape. In addition, tripartite symbolism is found in the elite’s óðal-claims and also Norse mythological structures. Due to the widespread pervasiveness of tripartite symbology within the culture of the Iron Age elite, these phenomena are conceptualised in the theoretical framework of a ‘tripartite ideology’. This study addresses the questions of why was the tripartite ideology so enduring within the Nordic Iron Age, in what ways did it manifest and what positions did it hold in the Iron Age elite’s socio-cultural and religious thought-world? This research examines the monumental, artefactual, social and mythological manifestations of the tripartite ideology in Iron Age Scandinavia. The objective is to formulate a theory which synthesises the various expressions of tripartite symbology using a source-pluralistic methodology, which combines archaeological evidence with both emic (insider) and etic (outsider) historical sources, alongside religious studies and semiotics in order to provide a more representative picture of the function of treuddar and tripartite symbolism in the Iron Age elite milieu. The result of this methodology is that the tripartite ideology is connected with the Iron Age elite’s ancestral óðal-claims based on a legendary or divine descent, along with acting as a‘liminal locus’ whereby the Other World could be accessed.

No description available.

No description available.

In this essay I use Mikhail Bakhtins theory of the chronotope to come to a deeper understanding of the spatio-temporal relationships in Momo and the Time Thieves. I use it to investigate the chronotopic structure of childhood, how it relates to the idea of the idyll, threshold experiences and heterotopic and liminal chronotopes. There is also a discussion on the function of mythic and linear time in building the narrative, and how Ende reverses and subverts some of the given patterns of myth, folklore and fantasy to create a dialogue between chronotopes and genres. / <p>Slutgiltigt godkännandedatum: 2023-05-31</p>