Liminality at work in Norwegian hotels

ABSTRACT

Hotels are spaces of temporary accommodation, but they are also important temporary spaces for an increasingly mobile and segmented workforce with different backgrounds and motives. In this paper we wish to address the temporary and transitional nature of hotel work by employing the term ‘liminality’. More specifically, we analyse the hotel as a liminal space for transient workers that view this work as a temporary endeavour. By drawing upon data from a study of hotel workers in Norway, we discuss how the liminality of hotel work may be understood. Here, we turn to an important debate within tourism studies on the blurring relationships between consumer and producer identities in resorts, often referred to in terms such as ‘working tourist’ or ‘migrant tourist-worker’. For a relatively privileged group of workers, the hotel becomes a space of liminal lifestyle pursuits as well as a space of work. We also contrast this privileged group with a different and less privileged liminal group of ‘expatriate workers’. Transient lifestyles and consumption of recreation among workers can have problematic effects in terms of reducing solidarity, and we wish to develop this further by investigating how worker representation and solidarity develops in liminal spaces of work. While strategies of liminality may have a transformative impact on the individual, their aggregate effects might simultaneously alter the way in which hospitality work is negotiated – from the collective to the individual level. As such, hotels as employers of working tourists pose a great challenge to collective representation, and may undermine effective worker action for less privileged groups of workers. The final section of this paper addresses this challenge, asking what bearings the individualism that dominates liminal work spaces has for trade unionism in the hospitality industry.     

The Land of Allium: an exploration into the magic of place

Magical. A common adjective used to describe places. But does the magic of place spring from genius loci? Or could it be that we are the magicians, casting spells to transform places into what we desire (or what we fear)? Our sense of place is not a mirror on reality. We come to know places by inscribing our fantasies atop them, by writing onto the landscape our own imagined geographies. C.S. Lewis provides an intriguing glimpse into sense of place through the Pevensie children and their experience in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe: a mere wardrobe becomes a complex fantasy world in which the children play and interact. As adults, and as societies, we take real geographies and treat them as Lewis's wardrobe, creating Narnias in the depths of our most mundane landscapes. In this paper I explore the magic of place through an autobiographical photo essay set in a nature preserve in eastern Kansas. The stories I tell highlight in a literary and artistic way the phenomenological aspects of sense of place and the potential political import of the geographical imagination.     

Theatrical magic and the agenda to enchant the world

This paper addresses the agenda of enchantment as it relates to contemporary theatrical magic (those deliberately enigmatic activities that are performed, experienced and commercialized as a form of entertainment). Magic practice is regularly constructed along a particular teleology: ‘action → effect of impossibility → affect of astonishment’. The paper supplements this teleology in four sections. First, a discussion of magicians’ knowledge and the ignorance required for participant-spectators to apprehend effects of impossibility and become astonished. Second, an examination of two forms of reason: one, an investigation into hidden ‘secrets’; the other, a perception of superficial ‘effects’. Third, a critique of the figure of the magician and its disputed role within magic practice. Fourth, a presentation and discussion of three empirical vignettes – professional magician Jay Sankey’s ‘Unreal Experiments’ – which advocate an evental logic with an experimental ethos; thus, enacting a critique of the figure and teleological structure of practice, and posing a challenge to rethink and invitation to expand theatrical magic practice. In conclusion, the paper highlights some of the ways in which theatrical magic participates in the agenda to enchant the world that has so gripped social science.     

Regional Maritime Contexts and the <Emphasis Type="Italic">Maritorium</Emphasis>: A Latin American Perspective on Archaeological Land and Sea Integration

In the field of maritime archaeology, the use of maritime, coastal, riverine, and lacustrine spaces by past societies has been perceived in different and changing viewpoints. These perspectives have flourished in dynamic and varying ways in many countries, and under different theoretical constructs. If in the 1970s the subject was perhaps not recognized as a central research subject by much of our community, it is now not only accepted but it has become a robust area of interest in maritime research. Two concepts in Latin America have been accepted that have had widespread application and influence, namely the regional maritime context and the maritorio. The points of contact between both are so intense that it is possible to speak about a single alternative with two possible names. In this article, their origins, applications, and theoretical influences are presented in a way that unifies these two concepts into a single approach (the maritorium), and examines how these ideas have been applied to research carried out in Mexico, Chile, and Uruguay. These applications are wide ranging, as they include the interconnected complexity between land and sea as used and inhabited by past societies. They have been applied in the study of ship traps, whole fleets, sites of maritime conflict and warfare, exploration activities, and ethnographic research. These will also be presented in light of other concepts of similar interest in the international sphere, such as the widespread concept of the Maritime Cultural Landscape, and also in view of other theoretical frameworks coming from the wider sphere of the profession, such as Landscape Archaeology and Phenomenological Archaeology.     

Cabotage at Aperlae in Ancient Lycia

Aperlae was a small remote maritime city in ancient Lycia with a millennial floruit (late 4th century BC through the late 7th century AD). The harsh terrain of its hinterland forced a reliance on the Mediterranean from its founding to its demise. The Aperlites stabilized and enhanced their urban waterfronts in modest ways over the centuries, but basically they maintained and sustained their intimate relationship with the sea without elaborate docking or harbour installations. Fishing, probably a primary industry, centred on the harvest of murex trunculus , the marine mollusk from which purple dye was made. This valuable commodity appears to have been produced in Aperlae for export to Andriake, the international emporium of nearby Myra, for transshipment to textile centres throughout the Mediterranean. There, coastal traders also acquired the necessities and luxuries the city needed but did not produce. Proxy evidence, impressive archaeological features on land and under the sea, speaks to moments of prosperity for Aperlae well beyond mere subsistence. Cabotage was this secondary port's enduring lifeline.     

Liminality at-sea: cruises to nowhere and their metaworlds

Abstract

The concept of liminality informs the experience of tourism, yet little is known about how liminality is performed in the context of ‘cruises to nowhere’ that sacrifice terrestrial destinations for endless ‘seascapes’ of liminality. Fuelled by alcohol, round-the-clock parties and endless buffets, cruises to nowhere are an increasingly popular addition to the Southern African cruising season. Understood through a sample of South African based multi-day ocean-going cruises without a destination, results take literally the notion that tourist liminality involves boundary crossing into the unknown on the limitless horizon of the high seas. Using netnographic methods, boundary crossings are traced through the intended and practiced activities on-board cruise-to-nowhere experiences. Involving a mix of sun, sea, sex and especially alcohol, cruises to nowhere engineer the destination-free seascape as a liminoid playground. Reflecting on South African-based cruises to nowhere offered during the southern hemisphere summer cruising season, the findings of this research call for a more deliberate focus on the liminal aspects of ship-based tourism. At the same time, conclusions chart a course for what may be termed debauchery tourism. Building from work in cruise tourism geographies, alcotourism and party tourism, findings do not intend to moralise debaucherous shipboard tourism, but rather to explore the liminal setting of the cruise ship and the sea where cruises to nowhere offer round-the-clock drinking and partying as a liminal destination in and of itself.     

Senseless Violence: Liminality and Intertwining

The claim of this article is that the perpetrators of violence are “liminal” figures, being inside and yet outside of the world in which they act. It is this liminality, this existing on the border, that makes their violence senseless. Because of it, their actions can be understood in terms neither of the actual reality of their victims nor of the imagined reality that the perpetrators placed them in. Sense, here, fails, for the lack of a common frame. Liminality exists in a number of forms: economic, religious, and political—each with its potential for violence. What distinguishes political liminality is the scale of its violence. As Carl Schmitt shows, the liminal sovereign or ruler is both inside and outside the state, employing its means for violence even as he is unconstrained by its laws. I contend that this sovereign exists in a continuum with the practitioners of terrorist violence, who are also liminal figures. To analyze this liminality, I explore the intertwining between the self and the world that sets up the common frame that gives sense to actions. I then examine the causes of its breakdown.     

Governing a Liminal Land Deal: The Biopolitics and Necropolitics of Gender

Over the past decade, there has been a surge in large-scale land acquisitions around the world. Yet, increasing evidence suggests that many of the prominent land deals signed during the global land rush are struggling to materialise. This emergent pattern of liminality has important implications for understanding the everyday, contingent, and gendered processes of land deal governance and subject formation. Drawing on ethnographic research, this article examines the gendered governance of a “liminal” land deal in coastal Tanzania, through a case of the EcoEnergy Sugar Project. It shows how the project's prolonged delay has given rise, over time, to two contradistinctive sets of actors and mechanisms of control: biopolitical interventions of international development consultants focused on livelihood improvements, and necropolitical interventions of district paramilitary forces focused on surveillance and violence. While seemingly contradictory, I argue that both enactments of power fundamentally relied on and reproduced normative gender in rural Tanzania.     

Mobility,Land Use,and Leadership in Small-Scale and Middle-Range Societies

Over the past century, the fields of archaeology and anthropology have produced a number of different theoretical approaches and a substantial body of data aimed at ways to understand hunter-gatherer, horticultural, and agropastoral societies. This review considers four recent edited volumes on foraging and food-producing societies. These books deal in innovative ways with a broad array of issues, including transitions in human prehistory and history, mobility, land use, sharing, technology, social leveling strategies, leadership, and the formation of social hierarchies. Small-scale societies include hunter-gatherers or foragers, while middle-range societies may include complex hunter-gatherer (ones with storage and delayed return systems), horticultural, and agropastoral societies, some of them with institutionalized leadership, status hierarchies, and differential access to power and resources. An important set of themes in these books includes diversity in adaptations to complex social and natural environments, the significance of (1) matter, (2) energy, and (3) information in small-scale and middle-range societies on several continents, the persistence of foraging, and the development of inequality. The roles of sharing, exchange, and leadership in small-scale and middle-range societies are explored, as are explanations for social, economic, and political transformations among groups over time and across space.     

Crafted within liminal spaces: Young people's everyday politics

This paper examines how high school-aged young people from New Zealand are crafting their everyday political subjectivities within the liminal status and liminal spaces they occupy in society. With a specific focus on schooling and the citizenship education curricula in New Zealand, three vignettes are introduced which examine young people's less reflexive and ‘everyday’ forms of political action in the interstitial liminal space between Public/private, Formal/informal and Macro/micro politics. These vignettes underline how young people's everyday politics were embedded within spatial and relational processes of socialisation with adults within their schools and communities, yet, also showed both agency and resourcefulness with these spaces. Young people's liminal status and occupation of liminal spaces provided them with unique perspectives on social issues (such as bullying, racism, water conservation, and obesity) and enabled them to respond in ways that were ‘different’ to adults' Politics, yet nonetheless showed their political and tactical selves (de Certeau, 1984). A focus on young people's political practices in liminal spaces allows for new possibilities and understandings of the political.     

Negotiating gender dynamics in heteronormativity: extramarital intimacy among migrant Filipino workers in South Korea

This article examines the liminal space that exists both as a structural condition engendered by transnational migration and as a state that is self-consciously carved out by migrants. It demonstrates that this space provides the grounds for migrants to develop ‘deviant heterosexuality’, such as extramarital relationships while simultaneously causing dilemmas and contestation of gender dynamics in conjugal and familial relationships. Drawing on ethnographic research and in-depth interviews, I elucidate the extramarital relationships among migrant Filipino workers in South Korea. By incorporating discussions of ‘queer heterosexualities’ and Hubbard's geographical engagement of sexuality into analysis, I argue that migrants' extramarital practices are shaped not only by dominant discourse, but also through the particular social and spatial positioning of individuals. First, I demonstrate that the liminal space gives migrant Filipino workers a certain degree of autonomy from the power and ideological interventions of both sending and host societies. Second, I highlight the liminal space that is extended by migrants themselves, especially through the increasing economic ability and mobility of migrant women, which can reconfigure the modes of heteronormativity and gender structure in conjugal, familial and extramarital relationships. In the end, I argue that transnational migration results not only in provisional liminality but also prolonged liminality through migrants' initiative in pursuing their desired heterosexuality and their endeavour to convert extramarital relationships into long-term intimacy. This study contributes to the discussion of the interplay between heterosexuality/heteronormativity and gender in recent human migration.     

Invincible blades and invulnerable bodies: weapons magic in early-modern Germany

In the world of the occult, as in other realms, the tools and methods chosen by women and men reflected acceptable ways of ‘doing’ gender. This paper will concentrate on magical spells and blessings intended to give men an advantage in sword fights, make them invulnerable, or turn them into perfect marksmen. Because magical practices associated with guns and blades were related to early-modern thinking about masculine power and performance, they were less harshly treated than the kind of magic more often associated with women. Many of these hypermasculine spells drew on contemporary medical beliefs about natural sympathies, including the idea that sympathies existed between the dead and the living. For this reason, invulnerability and weapon spells usually included materials from male corpses (for example, body parts, moss growing on dead men's skulls, and so on). As learned belief in natural magic waned during the Enlightenment, stories of magic blades and bullets retreated from courts and battlefields into the world of fiction and fantasy.     

Anglo-Saxon charms in the context of a Christian, world view

The following article explores aspects of a Christian world view found in late Anglo-Saxon England, seeking to put such phenomena as magic, miracles and charms in their proper Christian perspective. Previous criticism has had a tendency to accentuate the pagan aspects of the charms and to confuse a modern definition of magic with that of the early medieval Christian view. The view of nature found in Ælfric's sermons, for example, reveals a particular attitude towards magic, miracles and natural remedies such as charms. Magic and miracles are at opposite extremes, while charms are part of an intermediate category of practices not specifically condemned as develish magic, nor fitting into the Christian interpretation of miracles as signs from God.The second part of the article turns to an examination of the charms themselves to demonstrate how they do fit into a Christian view. Charms having to do with elves, as found in the Leechbook, contain large amounts of Christian material. There is an especially strong correlation between these charms and the use of the mass to counteract the influence and effects of elves. Thus the charms, far from being examples of the remnants of paganism, are evidence of the integration of popular material into a Christian view of the world.     

The abandoned seafarer: Networks of care and capture in the global shipping economy

ABSTRACT

Despite its importance, life at sea, as well as the labour of those who toil in these waters, often remains murky to those on land. Based on ethnographic research onboard cargo ships and ashore at Mission to Seafarers (MtS) and other seafarer clubs this essay emphasizes the centrality of care and capture in shaping the global shipping economy. Drawing insights from an anthropological archive of capture, this essay highlight the multi-faceted ways in which care and capture define maritime labour on land and sea and where the ultimate form of captivity is abandonment.     

Dealing with globalisation at the regional and local level: the case of contemporary containerization

This paper considers the challenges that ocean container companies face in developing global operations in the ocean and land realms. The recent horizontal and vertical integration of the ocean carriers and the subsequent formation of global networks have taken place for the transport of goods at sea. Conformity in operations is to be expected in the globalisation process; however, there is less conformity of operations on land. The cooperation strategies at sea appear to break down when the goods reach the port. Each shipping company has its own network of agents and agreements with shippers, freight forwarders or land transportation companies to handle goods on land. Each also has varying logistics provision abilities. Moreover, the land areas vary according to simple geography, economic development, transport infrastructure and institutional constraints. Of these differences, we suggest that institutional constraints create the greatest challenge to the ocean carriers adopting a universal land strategy to service their customers. The paper focuses on three major areas for containerisation—East Asia, Northwest Europe and North America—and draws on interviews conducted with shipping industry executives in Norfolk (Va.), Rotterdam, Le Havre, Hong Kong and Singapore. The paper ends with a look at the land operations of Maersk Sealand as an example of a company with varying capabilities and strategies for the landward transport of containers.     

Biofuels and the politics of mapmaking

On a world scale companies and governments are acquiring tracts of land from rural communities across the developing world in what some describe as a global “land grab.” Yet looking into local settings reveals that negotiations and arrangements are often piecemeal and halting, with little resemblance to a coordinated seizure of land. Conflicting maps, overlapping territorial claims, and unclear acquisition processes are creating land disputes, mistrust, and ambiguity. Resulting cycles of contention are enabling companies to obtain—even appropriate—some land. Still, in at least some locales the process is doing more to undermine development opportunities for all parties.To probe into these local politics of mapmaking, this article draws on fieldwork from 2010 to 2011 in Tanzania's Rufiji District, located in the lower floodplain of the Rufiji River. Companies, one might surmise, should be able to exploit information asymmetries to wrest control of land from local villagers. Interviews, primary documents, and field observations reveal, however, that this is not occurring as much as one might expect along the lower Rufiji River. The politics of such land acquisitions, we argue, would seem to be better understood in terms of cycles of contentious politics, as an ongoing process in which movements and counter-movements vie for control through the strategic use of images, maps, and discourse.This research extends the understanding of the processes changing global agriculture and energy production by bridging the frames of the “politics of mapping” and “cycles of contention” to more fully reveal how and why control over land and resources is shifting in the global South.     

Moscow in the 1990s: Market Reform and the Central City

The built environmental reflects in tangible ways the values of the societies of which it is a part. Soviet cities developed in accordance with the precepts of socialism for more than half a century, and nowhere were the consequences more palpable than in the central city. The present paper examines changes in urban development and management now under way in Moscow as a consequence of the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the advent of fundamental economic and political restructuring. More specifically it explores the impact of the new political economy on central Moscow's employment structure, housing stock, and land use, and assesses the attitudes of business representatives and residents to these changes. 5 figures, 2 tables, 25 references.     

One world? Many worlds? The place of regions in the study of international society

This article is a revised version of the 2006 Martin Wight Memorial Lecture and examines the placeof regional states‐systems or regional international societies within understandings of contemporary international society as whole. It addresses the relationship between the one world and the many worlds‐on one side, the one world of globalizing capitalism, of global security dynamics, of a global political system that, for many, revolves a single hegemonic power, of global institutions and global governance, and of the drive to develop and embed a global cosmopolitan ethic; and, on the other side, the extent to which regions and the regional level of practice and of analysis havebecome more firmly established as important elements of the architecture of world politics; and the extent to which a multiregional system of international relations may be emerging. The first section considers explanations of the place of regionalism in contemporary international society and the various ways in which the one world aff ects the many. The second section deals with how regionalism might best be studied. The final section analyses four ways in which regionalism may contribute to international order and global governance.     

The People of Northern England and Attitudes Towards the Scots, 1639–1651: ‘The Lamb and the Dragon Cannot be Reconciled’.

Abstract

During the late eighteenth and first part of the nineteenth century, certain moors and fields in south Lancashire and the West Riding of Yorkshire were repeatedly used as sites for meetings, demonstrations, and other political gatherings. Historians have recently indicated how rituals, symbols, and texts helped to shape the political culture of radical societies and trade unions in this period. This article argues that the semirural landscape was another, perhaps more enduring, layer to this culture. Luddites, strikers, radicals, and Chartists employed particular sites, not just as venues for political activity, but also as an essential part of the symbol and ritual of protest. Mass meetings on moors and fields were spectacles: liminal spaces where free speech could be expressed and radical histories could be formed. Yet everyday life also influenced the nature of moorland protests. The daily uses and perceptions of landscape could be as significant in shaping inhabitants' political outlooks as occasional set-piece demonstrations. Demonstrations on moors reflected popular defiance of restrictions on public space and wider awareness of the effects of industrialization upon use of the land and communications.     

“Stuck In-Between”: Placing the Underdocumented Youth Movement in Georgia

This paper draws on participant-observation and a series of focus group interviews with TPS and DACA youth in Northeast Georgia to understand youth activism emerging from their positionality of being “stuck in-between”. “Stuck in-between” captures the liminal legal status of DACA and TPS, denotes the feeling of “stuckness” in mixed-status multigenerational families, and foregrounds the profound ways in which place and race intersect with legal, social, and ideological practices of inclusion/exclusion. Underdocumented youth form multiracial coalitions, guided by Black geographies of the region, to challenge imperial borders that criminalise and (re)produce categories of vulnerability. This place in-between shapes underdocumented youth understanding of the world, informed by, rather than in competition with, Black radical visions of themselves and of the place of the US South.