Stéphane
Corcuff, one of the world’s most prominent Taiwan Studies scholars, has long
been interested in applying anthropological concepts to political science. In his recent essay (Corcuff 2012), he reinterprets the
familiar concept of “liminality” as an alternative to “marginality.” As Corcuff
notes, he adds a spatial dimension to the concept. Corcuff thus remains close
to the word’s Latin root limen, meaning
“threshold or margin.” Interestingly,
Corcuff refers to Taiwan as “a threshold of China” (2012: 62).
The concept,
however, is very loaded due to its history in anthropology. Arthur Van Gennep crafted
the concept in his 1909 book on rites of passage. In ceremonies related to
marriages, funerals, or transition from one age-set to another, people go
through preliminal rites of separation, liminal rites of transition, and
postliminal rites of incorporation (Van Gennep 1960: 11). Victor Turner elaborated
liminality into “betwixt and between” states of ritual, most elaborate in
initiation rites. Paraphrasing one of Turner’s key articles (Turner 1964), liminal persons are structurally
“invisible,” neither boys nor men, neither living nor dead. In some societies, initiates
might even be treated like corpses. Borrowing from Mary Douglas, Turner showed
that liminal bodies were often perceived as polluted. A further characteristic
of liminal beings is that they have
nothing. Liminal people experience complete submission in relation to authority
and complete equality in relation to each other. Liminality can be a period of
reflection, an encounter with the sacred, endowing people with capacity to adopt
new social roles.
Corcuff
does not attribute all of these characteristics to Taiwan. As a political
scientist, he may be concerned that Taiwan is often invisible in International
Relations discourse – where scholars often assume the island’s fate will be
decided by Beijing and Washington and ignore the perspectives of the country’s
23 million people. Many scholars fail to see that the Republic of China on
Taiwan is an independent, sovereign state; but this means it is the ROC and not
Taiwan that is invisible. Corcuff probably is not suggesting that Taiwan is
polluted, or in a special relationship with the sacred. Indeed, Corcuff is most
concerned about discourse, and hopes that the word “liminal” can somehow
restore to Taiwan the “power of words” (Corcuff 2012: 55).
For anthropologists,
the main issue is that “liminality” evokes a transition from one state to
another, an argument that Corcuff cannot make without falling into teleological
speculation. Is Taiwan in transition from the “Republic of China” to the
“People’s Republic of China,” or from “dependence” (another concept explored in
the same article) to “independence”? Due to the original meaning of the concept,
Corcuff’s description of Taiwan’s liminality as cultural or geographical
proximity to China remains somewhat unsatisfactory as anthropological
analysis. Perhaps borderlands, defined
as “an interstitial
zone of displacement and deterritorialization that shapes the identity of the
hybridized subject” (Gupta and Ferguson 1992: 18) would have been more
appropriate. Corcuff has done an excellent job of showing how Taiwan is
culturally and historically so complex that it cannot be accurately reduced to
the avatar of some trans-historical “China.”
He is less convincing in his use of one anthropological concept, but
this inherent pitfall of interdisciplinary research detracts only barely from his
main argument.
References
Corcuff,
Stéphane. 2012. “The Liminality of Taiwan: A Case-Study in Geopolitics.” Taiwan in Comparative Perspective 4:
34-64.
Gupta, Akhil and James Ferguson.
1992. “Beyond ‘Culture’: Space, Identity and the Politics of Difference.” Cultural Anthropology 7 (1): 6-23.
Turner,
Victor W. 1964. “Betwixt and Between: the Liminal Period in Rites de
Passage.” Internet resource: http://www2.fiu.edu/~ereserve/010010095-1.pdf, last accessed January 10, 2014.
No comments:
Post a Comment