Introduction: Liminality and the Social Location of Musicians

Abstract

Liminality seems to have become something of a buzzword. Typing ‘liminal OR liminality’ into Google™ produces one and a quarter million hits. That this should be so is not altogether surprising, for the liminal state has much in common with the postmodern age, as scholars as diverse as Homi Bhabha and Sharon Zukin have argued: the blurring and crossing of thresholds and boundaries; the breakdown of historically fixed categories; the exposure of ambiguities; the fluidity and hybridity of identities; play and absurdity; and uncertainty. Indeed, Bhabha has gone so far as to suggest that liminality is the hallmark of postmodernity, that the postmodern age is itself liminal, existing between a dead modernity and a future not yet known.