Rooted in one year of ethnographic research in the central highlands of Angola, this dissertation examines the distinct cultural and linguistic worlds of girls ages eight to eighteen who are growing up in a centro de acolhimento, one of more than 100 residential centers—or group homes—built in the aftermath of Angola’s 27-year-long civil war (1975–2002) to provide shelter and care for children in need. Currently housing over nine thousand young residents throughout the country, centros de acolhimento have emerged as institutional replacements, or supplements, for traditional family structures. As a result, they have become an integral part of growing up for a generation of Angolan youth, shaping their lived experiences, social networks, and access to resources. The dissertation draws on Victor Turner’s formulation of liminality to provide an anthropological analysis of the residential centers as liminal spaces and to understand the ways in which liminality shapes institutionalized childhood, including children’s sense of identity, relatedness, forms of sociality, and caregiving practices. Using audiovisual recordings of everyday interactions in an all-female center, the dissertation analyzes how girls are socialized to behave, think, feel, and talk in institutionally preferred ways as part of the center’s goal to rear idealized versions of Angolan women. It also investigates what it means to “care” and the paradoxes of caregiving in a setting where resources are very limited, affective ties are fragile, and a sense of security is unstable for both children and adult staff. The dissertation illuminates the complexities of institutionalized childhood in Angola and, more broadly, the global phenomenon of children growing up outside of normative family networks. Since the 1990s, anthropological studies of youth have investigated how the instabilities of economic conditions of the late 20th century impact the lives of young people (Scheper-Hughes & Sargent 1998; Stephens 1995), powerfully unsettling the “convenient fictions” of childhood as a time characterized by belonging to the domestic sphere and dependency upon adults (Lee 2001). Yet, despite this long-standing interest in examining childhood outside of the normative contexts of family, there is a surprisingly small body of long-term ethnographic research on children’s lives in institutional care (Carpenter 2021; Goldfarb 2017; Heying 2022; Khlinovskaya Rockhill 2010; Van Vleet 2019). Recent ethnographic work on migration (Coe et al. 2011; Heidbrink 2014; Statz 2016; Terrio 2015), orphanhood (Cheney 2017), and homelessness (Cox 2015) reveals how contemporary socio-economic structures have reshaped traditional notions of family and home, making extra-familial and transitory settings across different borders important sites of socialization for unaccompanied child migrants, orphaned youth, and homeless youth. This dissertation is a contribution toward understanding children’s lives in, and negotiations of, these challenging liminal contexts. / Anthropology

The poems in Greg Williamson's 2008 sonnet sequence, A Most Marvelous Piece of Luck, all turn toward imagined experiences of death, skirting the line between life and death and illustrating the boundary that one crosses but cannot experience—the liminal, aporetic boundary that occurs at the moment of until (the word marking the turn of each sonnet in Williamson's collection). Throughout this sequence, Williamson also examines the idea of death and its implications for the writer, examining the problematized situation of life after death. In my own collection, Assemblage, I attempt to examine the liminal as well, looking at death in several poems, but also looking at the way one uses the past in understanding the present and the present in understanding the future.

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Scholars such as Jonathan Klawans have distinguished between two types of impurity described in priestly texts: ritual and moral. The former, which denotes bodily pollution, occurs as a result of natural human processes (i.e., birth, death, genital discharge) and can render one temporarily unfit for temple worship, though it bears no clear ethical implications. Conversely, moral impurity refers to the more permanent defilement brought about by ethical transgressions (i.e., murder, apostasy, adultery), and has the capacity to stain the land of Israel itself, in addition to threatening the sanctity of the temple. However, this separation between ritual and moral dimensions of pollution are not absolute, as even Klawans allows that these categories are rather “pliable” (and to a certain extent, intertwined.) This thesis explores the concept of purity (both ritual and moral) in early Jewish literature, through a detailed analysis of water and cleansing language. In particular, I emphasise conceptual links between water for a) ritual washing and b) moral cleansing or sanctification. In this way, I highlight the flexibility of scholarly purity categories, demonstrating how purification can often be understood “holistically,” as encompassing both ritual and moral dimensions. I also illustrate how water seems to embody liminal tensions, oscillating between thresholds of purity and pollution, as well as primordial chaos and cosmic order. The thesis is divided into two major sections: Part One focuses on representations of water in the Hebrew Bible, whereas Part Two examines non-canonical texts from the Second Temple period. / Thesis / Master of Arts (MA)

<p dir="ltr">Based on existing literature on social support, this research study examines the effects of having social support ties– instrumental, informational, emotional, and academic – on international students' sense of belonging and resilience. Additionally, the study explores the relationship between international students’ social support ties and their home and host connectedness as well as the extent to which they experience liminality. Drawing from the concept of acculturation (Berry et al., 1989; Berry, 2005), I establish liminality as a disorienting experience that involves international students existing in the “between and betwixt” or “limbo” space during acculturation to the host community and argue that having access to social support resources is crucial for the well-being of international students within an unfamiliar territory. I administer quantitative surveys and focus groups to examine these phenomena, inviting international undergraduate and graduate students to share personal social support-seeking, adaptation, and belongingness experiences within the college community. </p><p dir="ltr">Based on the findings published in the study, I conclude by presenting the implications for college counselors and organizations tasked with ensuring the overall well-being of international students, and making a case for an extensive acculturation model for international students which centers the role of the host society.</p>

Much of C.S. Lewis’ novel Till We Have Faces can be examined through one of two binaries. The tension between rationality, or reason, and spirituality, or religion, is one of the core facets of both the text and its main character, Orual. Orual feels the pull of both ideas and thus spends most of the novel in a nebulous space between them. This tension is further complicated by the space between the feminine and the masculine which she also inhabits. By covering her face and body, Orual de-emphasizes her feminine identity and takes on a masculine role, dressing as a man and taking a political role relegated to men. She steps into a liminal, genderless state, both socially and in her own identity. My research explores gender in Lewis' Till We Have Faces by focusing on its intersection with the ideas of rationality and spirituality, thus examining how the discussion of gender contributes to the novel as a whole.

The focus of this study is revelation at the limits of communication. It considers the way in which (biblical) apocalyptic literature prominently figures the interconnection between liminality, revelation, and representation. The methodology asserts an indissoluble association between theology, philosophy and literature. As such it is interdisciplinary. A preliminary theory (and theology) of liminality interweaves the theological and philosophical contributions of, amongst others, Karl Barth, Graham Ward, Jürgen Moltmann and Jacques Derrida, thereby initiating a revised perspective on the constitution of literary apocalyptic text production and interpretation. Theorising the limen begins to describe the Trinitarian economy at work in Christian apocalyptic processing of scripture. I begin with the idea that revelation (apokalypsis) is the experience of the limen itself (in a coincidence of opposites). Thus the limen (as an actively divine space) incorporates that which stands on both sides, in vertical and horizontal, linear and cyclical, spatial and temporal movements. I then propose that apocalyptic literature re-presents this complex economy in which the end is rehearsed simultaneously as limit, threshold, and rupture. Theologically, this complicates inter-relational notions of ‘apocalyptic’ and eschatology, and stimulates a debate on a metaphysics of violence in communication (between God, man and Creation). I conclude that, at the extreme limit of human understanding (where words fail), those with faith in God’s love are opened out to revelation in the apocalyptic textual performance of the liminal economy, and thus to hope and forgiveness. Stressing the importance of reading apocalyptically, I begin to demonstrate the relationship between Christian-canonical narratives and the broader western literary canon, the critical process having invited an exploration of those literary characteristics (of tone, mode and genre) shared by (biblical, modern and postmodern) texts. An important principle in the literary analyses is the association between apocalyptic text production and hermeneutics. Christopher Rowland’s description of a ‘visionary mode’ explains how this process works. Thus the preliminary theory leads into a close reading of recent Russian and American works by Mikhail Bulgakov and Thomas Pynchon. These are compared to, and worked through, Mark’s and John’s gospels and the Book of Revelation. The interpretative approach widens the often self-limiting study of apocalyptic literature, and broadens theological debate on revelation. Thus it begins to show how the rhetoric of apocalyptic makes belief compelling.

This study focuses on two areas: alchemy (Part I) and rituals of initiation (Part II) in the works of Miguel de Cervantes, focusing on Don Quijote de la Mancha as my main case study. The first part analyses the function of alchemy and how it can be interpreted throughout the works and various literary genres of Cervantes. It will demonstrate that the texts of Cervantes contain both explicit and implicit allusions to, as well as different aspects of alchemy, such as operative and spiritual alchemy and how these are ultimately used by Cervantes as a means of expression. The author draws from this rich source and modifies these means of expression in order to achieve various results: sometimes with wit or in relation to fraud; at other times it focuses on inner alchemy relating to chivalry in what I have called spiritual chivalry, which has the aim of self-improvement and ultimately, gnosis. Regarding the chivalric rituals of initiation, according to this investigation chivalry serves as both satire and representation of the alchemical process in the case of Don Quijote, which finds its key moments during the rituals. In this sense alchemy and chivalry are studied as two sides of the same coin, in which the search for something higher, an object (the philosopher stone, the beloved), subjects the protagonist to continuous transmutations and puts him in contact with the transitory, that is, liminal states, people and spaces. From this perspective Don Quixote de la Mancha is built upon liminal poetics. My approach, which follows the tenets of analogical hermeneutics, is included within the framework of the Western Esotericism Studies. The 16th and 17th centuries were a fertile age for alchemy throughout Europe. In Spain, alchemy and other esoteric disciplines co-existed with the Spanish Inquisition and its body for the control of ideas and texts: censorship. By being ambiguous and putting into dialogue different ideas of alchemy, Cervantes not only allowed readers to reach their own conclusions, he also protected his work from censorship.

The transitions of young people to adulthood in the UK are a political threshold that has received much public attention. The trend for young people to abstain from elections relative to older generations is one example of the many reasons young people’s politics have come under the microscope of researchers who claim that the manner of young people’s transitions to citizenship represents an incipient crisis for the UK as a democratic system (Farthing, 2010; O’Toole, 2015, p. 175). This thesis responds to calls for more research into young people’s lives as sites for political subjectivity as well as, in the UK, for explorations of the main question in the field of young people’s politics: the extent and nature of young people’s relative disengagement from politics, and their marginalization from institutional politics in general The theoretical basis for this research project is a constructionist framework based on Bourdieu’s methods for uncovering social worlds (Bourdieu, 1996, p. 1) that also attempts to approach young people as equals in a political sense (Rancière, 1991, p. 229). Focus groups with young people at one vocational college, one secondary school and one youth group in the UK, utilizing participant photography as a data generation technique, provide the data for this study in an everyday politics approach. Young people’s perceptions of their everyday worlds are developed into broader discussions of political subjectivity, perceptions and actions.