Esta pesquisa trata dos processos que envolvem a experiência performática e os fluxos entre memória, resistência e criação no âmbito do entrecruzamento de culturas. Parte-se da instauração de interlocuções no contexto das aldeias indígenas Guarani da capital de São Paulo que, apesar das dinâmicas de contato com a metrópole, ainda mantêm vivos seu idioma e práticas ritualísticas tradicionais. O eixo de reflexão se volta para a percepção de possíveis fricções, intersecções e contaminações poéticas deflagradas neste contato. Performance é aqui compreendida com ênfase na experiência, como campo relacional. Ritual e Arte, e seus respectivos meios e processos, aproximados pela perspectiva da experiência liminar proposta por Victor Turner, são postos em deslocamento numa ruptura entre as fronteiras de distintos gêneros de performance cultural. À luz dos Estudos da Performance e da Antropologia da Performance é sugerida uma apreensão do intervalo entre culturas distintas, como um entre-lugar potencialmente transformador, gerador de novos sentidos. / This research deals with the processes which involve the performatic experience and flows between memory, resistance and creation within the crossing of cultures. It starts with the establishment of dialogues in the context of Guarani Indian villages from the capital of Sao Paulo that, despite the dynamic contact with the metropolis, still keep alive their language and traditional ritual practices. The axis of reflection goes to the perception of possible intersections and poetic contamination deflagrated in intercultural contact. Performance is understood here with emphasis on experience, as a relational field in the proposition of the meeting with the -other culturally different?. Ritual and Art, and their respective environments and processes, approximated by the perspective of liminal experience, proposed by Victor Turner, are put on the move on a rupture between the boundaries of different kinds of cultural performance. In light of Performance Studies and Anthropology of Performance is suggested an apprehension of interval between different cultures, as a potentially transformative in-between place, generating new meanings.

This thesis utilizes Foucault’s concept of “technologies of the self” to examine three texts from 1980s British literature for the ways that postmodern writers compose the self. The first chapter “Liminality and the Art of Self-Composition” explores the ways in which liminal space and time contributes to the self-composition in J.L. Carr’s hybrid Victorian/postmodern novel A Month in the Country (1980). The chapter on Jeanette Winterson’s novel Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit (1985) titled “Intertextuality and the Art of Self-Composition” argues that Winterson’s intertextual play enables her protagonist Jeanette to resist the dominance of religious discipline and discourse and compose a more autonomous, artistically oriented self. The third chapter, titled “Spatial Experimentation and the Art of Self-Composition,” examines R.S. Thomas’s collection The Echoes Return Slow (1988), a hybrid text of prose and poetry, arguing that Thomas explores spatial gaps in the text as generative spaces for self-composition.

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.

In this dissertation, I investigate the characteristics and quality of liminality among the Tibetan exile community in Dharamsala, India, and the United States. I argue that the quality of their liminality defines this exile community’s ability to maneuver and voice their influence to geo-political community of states that surround them, all while within their liminal condition. The Tibetan exile people live as stateless foreigners in India but have a better standard of living and better opportunities to acquire transnational resources than their surrounding host community. In the U.S., Tibetan diaspora people live as asylum-seekers and naturalized Tibetan-Americans but have established a popular political campaign (which enjoys the support of considerably many Americans) addressing the plight of Tibetans imposed by China. I argue that the Tibetan diaspora have achieved this unique social and political success as a marginalized community by adopting a cultural practice that I call “flexible liminality.” Flexible liminality is a Tibetan cultural practice that helps transient people adjust to any situation, people, and geo-politics circumstance. Flexible liminality relies on two factors: first, political interest from various nation-states; second, a group’s ability to adjust their cultural practices to match external influences. In the case of the Tibetan exile community, it is important to note that they are excluded by multiple nation-states (China, India, the Western countries) in different ways simultaneously. Therefore, the world collective of Tibetan refugees are not fixed in one state of liminality but experience a variety of liminalities in relation to different nation-states. Second, the Tibetan exile community has adjusted their cultural practices to assimilate with host communities in whichever countries their exile-hood has landed them. Since Tibetans cannot acquire Indian citizenship, the Tibetan exile community uses India as a space to promote their political activism against China, and form better relationship with Western foreigners. In Dharamsala, the Tibetan community has organized institutions that guides Tibetan individuals to form relationships with foreign tourists, and acquire skills (i.e. language, behavior, education, philosophy) that would help them assimilate better when resettling in Western host countries. In both, Dharamsala and the U.S., the Tibetan diaspora have a cultivated cultural practice to advocate Tibetan political plight against China, and to communicate Tibetan religio-socio traditions with the foreign host community. As a result, Tibetans are able to achieve political popularity, and to socially draw empathy from foreign communities that aids in producing a space for Tibetan cultural preservation in exile. The case study on Tibetan exile community sheds a new light on the study of marginality/liminality. This dissertation showcases that there can be a spectrum for the quality of liminality that goes from flexible at one end to inflexible at the other end. Not all exile groups have the same condition of liminality, being an exile community can be beneficial or crippling somewhere in the spectrum. Tibetan exile community has achieved a flexible end of liminality in exile but there are other exile groups who may not have the same maneuvering ability as the Tibetan exile community. This theory of flexible liminality can be used to better understand the lives of exiles by characterizing and measuring the quality of their liminality.

In this thesis, I assert that the mikvah, a Jewish purification ritual, can be understood as a queer ritual in that it has the potential to destabilize the knowledges and structures that it has traditionally been understood to uphold. I draw on queer theory in order to establish Victor Turner’s liminality as a productive analytical tool and then utilize this new queer liminality to illuminate the mikvah’s latent potential for producing new meanings and modes of resistance for its participants.

This is an autoethnographic account of my 1000km journey across The Camino Via de la Plata, framed within transpersonal theory. From my personal account of a peak experience on The Way, this spiritual inquiry attempts to connect myself and the reader to insights into transformation and living through embodied writing while contributing to the exploration of personal flourishing and growth in leisure studies. This process involved moving into and through Romanyshyn’s (2007) six orphic moments found in re-search processes with soul in mind. I then unfold my journey along the Camino and deepen this inquiry by engaging literature that help to explore spiritual aspects of my journey on the Camino. Leisure inquiry frames this transpersonal peak experience in a number of ways: it is an act of empowerment (Arai, 1997), focal practice (Arai & Pedlar, 2000), resistance (Shaw, 2001, 2007), and an experience of liminality (Cody, 2012) with transformation occurring at the flux of it all.

In this essay I refer Eilis Ni Dhuibhne’s narrative construction of the main characters and the theme of the novel The Dancers Dancing, in the context of the anthropologist Victor Turner’s concept of liminality. Thus the summer in the Gaeltacht that five teenage girls experience, can be understood as a depiction of the liminal phase in a rite of passage. Ni Dhuibhne’s differently constructed characters enlighten different aspects of liminality and through the céilí dance their experiences are exposed. Furthermore this essay suggests that Julia Kristeva’s notion of the chora, which can be associated to dance, is also relevant when describing the unbounded and unlimited process that radically can reform social structures. I conclude that the liminal space offers an area of many possibilities. It functions as a free zone where the main characters can freely explore their personal issues that trouble them, or the difficulties of their own society.

This study attempts to better understand gender relations in the process of resettlement among families of Afghan forced migrants in Turkey. In addition it tries to gain an insight into whether those gender relations have been changed by this migration. In order to ascertain these possible changes a field study including participant observation, in depth interviews and interviews with experts was conducted in a city in Central Anatolia to which Afghan migrants are assigned. Since 2007 Afghan asylum-seekers represent a new event in Turkey. They have admitted the right to seek asylum in Turkey very recently. Furthermore, as their population has risen to become the third largest of the non-European asylum seekers in Turkey / there is a need for more research about them and the associated issues. The research findings demonstrate patterns of changes concerning gender relations. Changes can be explained by using the concepts of liminality. Those changes sometimes accommodated emancipation for women / alongside this the opposite occurred too. Liminality produced different patterns of gender relations.

This thesis describes and analyzes the practice of Sufism in a contemporary setting in Ankara from the insider point of view. The research deals critically with various approaches to Sufism in the field of anthropology, and introduces the Sufi scene in Turkey. The subject of the study is a Sufi formation which eludes categories in the field of Sufism, presenting close master/disciple relationships instead of institutional structures and normativity, and avoiding dichotomies such as modern/traditional, sacred/profane or unity/multiplicity. The research focuses on the interaction between its lack of form and the content of this particular Sufi practice, on the levels of the individuals and the group, and contextualizes it within the tradition of Islam. It also analyzes the processes of change occurred in the formation and within individuals during the time with the master and after his death. Plurality, respect for individual and cultural differences, deconstruction of existing categories &ndash / such as being, religion, the self, power and hierarchy-, ambiguity, the processuality and the open-endedness of experience and signification processes are important characteristics of the formation. Participants in the ethnographic research are restricted to the educated middle-class members of the formation. The applied method of research is Multi Grounded Theory enriched with the phenomenological mode of interviewing and collaboration of the members of the formation.

Intersubjectivity is the acknowledgment that the subject of the self, the I, is in direct relations with the subject of the other. There is an immediate correspondence; in fact, one implies the existence of the other as a necessary state of intersubjective experience. This direct relationship negates a need for any external mediation between the two subjects, including the idea of a separate object between the subject of one individual and that of another. The essay proposes that our confrontation with the other occurs not in physical geometric space, but in liminal space, the space outside of the mean of being, at the threshold of relativity. The essay endorses the idea that liminality is not a space between things, but instead is an introjection, an internalization of the reflected world, and a reciprocal notion of the externalized anomaly of the other within each of us. We meet the surface of the world at the edge of our body but the mind is unencumbered by such limitations and as such subsumes the other as itself. Through symbolic language and myth, the surfaces and edges of things, both animate and inanimate, define the geography of the intersubjective mind. Inside the self the other becomes an object and persists as an abstraction of the original subject. We begin to perceive ourselves as the imagined projections of the other; we begin to perceive ourselves as we believe society perceives us. The process applies to the design of architectural space as a rudimentary vocabulary that is consistent with the language of the landscape. / text