ABSTRACT

Ideas and concepts of liminality have long shaped debates around the uses and practices of space in constructions of identity, particularly in relation to different forms of travel such as tourism, migration and pilgrimage, and the social, cultural and experiential landscapes associated with these and other mobilities. The ritual, performative and embodied geographies of borderzones, non-places, transitional spaces, or ‘spaces in-between’ are often discussed in terms of the liminal, yet there have been few attempts to problematize the concept, or to rethink how ideas of the liminal might find critical resonance with contemporary developments in the study of place, space and mobility.

Liminal Landscapes fills this void by bringing together variety of new and emerging methodological approaches of liminality from varying disciplines to explore new theoretical perspectives on mobility, space and socio-cultural experience. By doing so, it offers new insight into contemporary questions about technology, surveillance, power, the city, and post-industrial modernity within the context of tourism and mobility.

The book draws on a wide range of disciplinary approaches, including social anthropology, cultural geography, film, media and cultural studies, art and visual culture, and tourism studies. It brings together recent research from scholars with international reputations in the fields of tourism, mobility, landscape and place, alongside the work of emergent scholars who are developing new insights and perspectives in this area.

This timely intervention is the first collection to offer an interdisciplinary account of the intersection between liminality and landscape in terms of space, place and identity. It therefore charts new directions in the study of liminal spaces and mobility practices and will be valuable reading for range of students, researchers and academics interested in this field.

chapter |17 pages

Introduction

Re-mapping liminality

part |48 pages

Navigating liminality

chapter |15 pages

Revisiting liminality

The danger of empty spaces

chapter |14 pages

Places remember events

Towards an ethics of encounter

chapter |17 pages

Border crossings

Practices for beating the bounds

part |51 pages

Gleaning and liminality

chapter |18 pages

Walking the edges

Towards a visual ethnography of beachscapes

chapter |15 pages

The Sands of Dee

Estuarine excursions in liminal space

part |48 pages

Urban liminalities

chapter |15 pages

Spinning Lhasa

Ritual circumambulation routes as liminal urbanscapes in China's ‘Western treasure-house’ 1

chapter |16 pages

Urban exploration as adventure tourism

Journeying beyond the everyday

chapter |15 pages

Another place or just another space?

Liminality and Crosby Beach

part |75 pages

Liminality and nation

chapter |16 pages

Shifting borders and dangerous liminalities

The case of Rye Bay

chapter |15 pages

‘Danger zones'

The British ‘road movie' and the liminal landscape

chapter |17 pages

Threat and suffering

The liminal space of ‘The Jungle'

chapter |17 pages

Shards in the landscape

The dispersed liminality of contemporary slaveries in the UK

chapter |8 pages

Afterword