of characteristics.
Identities constructed in exile assimilate new experiences, discover new criteria, and check new targets. Identity thus becomes not an area defined by a boundary, but—to use a Bakhtinian term—it assumes a “chronotopic” quality (since it is being shaped inseparably by spatial and temporal indicators). Identity in exile is not only open to otherness, it is forced to face otherness.
Of course, the opposite experience is also possible. In a foreign land, an exile might attempt to seal off their identity. This attitude will freeze their identity in an imagined state of unpolluted innocence. Travelling mentally towards an imagined homeland, this exile is always absent, creating around themself boundaries even more rigid than those they have escaped or been expelled from. Fighting to preserve this small imaginary enclave of sameness from imaginary or real invasions, an exile of this mindset may thus strengthen the idea of borders as a site of clashing forces—forces that at the same time define and exclude.
What is it that the experience of an exile could reveal about border consciousness? Mainly that social identity is constructed through a process radically influenced by what could be called “the borderline of identity.” This borderline can be permeable or extremely controlled, can be a limit or a starting point, a place to inhabit or the entrance to a no man’s land extending between two opposing worlds that do not share common spaces, even when in contact.
The use of differing borders constructs the character of identity. A fixed and unambiguous identity is a closed identity with rigid borders. An open identity is one that that is enclosed in flexible borders offering meeting points with otherness. This kind of identity could, as we shall see, be described as possessing a threshold quality. Spatiotemporal thresholds would be the places where identities may negotiate encounters with otherness.
This line of thought would give new meaning to the words of David Harvey: “The relations between ‘self’ and ‘other’ from which a certain kind of cognition of social affairs emanates is always … a spatiotemporal construction” (Harvey 1996, 264). Indeed, not only because identities are understood as circumscribed areas defined by the quality and the specific place of their borders but also because concrete space and time relations make identities visible and materially effective. That is why the identity of persons or peoples can be forced to change via modulations of their spatiotemporal awareness.
Thresholds as social artifacts
As social constructions, different ways of defining and controlling space not only mirror different social relations and values but also shape them. Identities are not only sets of beliefs or ideas but are embedded in the social environment, influencing different practices and different ways of life, therefore producing material results. Studying different spatial arrangements as characteristics of specific societies one can discover not only the uses and meanings of space but also the logics of creating and sustaining different social identities.
Pierre Bourdieu observed that in societies lacking “the symbolic product-conserving techniques associated with literacy,” social dispositions “are inculcated through an interaction of inhabited space with the bodies of societies’ new members” (Bourdieu 1977, 89). Space then becomes a kind of “educating system” that creates what we have so far been referring to as social identities. But it is important to realize that such identities are the product of a socially regulated network of practices that weave again and again distinct characteristics.
So when Bourdieu studies the Kabyle house in 1960s Algeria, he does not study it as the material index of social symbols but rather as the sum of the possible practices that produce a world of values and meaning. The Kabyle house is a series of spatiotemporal conditions that define the meaningful movement of social bodies. The house endlessly teaches the body and is erected again and again as a universe of values by embodied performances.
To prove this double relation of the body with inhabited space in the creation of space’s symbolic attributes, Bourdieu chooses to observe the symbolic function of the house’s main door. This threshold is the point where two different worlds meet. The inside is a complete world belonging to a distinct family, and the outside is a public world where the fields, the pastures, and the common buildings of the community lie. The threshold acquires its meaning as a point of both contact and separation through the practices that cross it. These practices create the threshold as meaningful spatiotemporal experience, depending on who crosses it, under what conditions, and in which direction.
In Bourdieu’s example, men cross the threshold of the main door only to leave the house, to go to the fields where they belong, facing the light of daybreak as the door faces east. Women cross the main door only to enter the house facing the wall opposite the main door called the wall of light. Both men and women perform their acts “in accordance with the beneficent orientation, that is from west to east.” And this is possible, as Bourdieu demonstrates, because the threshold establishes a symbolic change of the orientation of the house; that is, in its relation to the outer space. The threshold then “is the site of a meeting of contraries as well as of a logical inversion and … as the necessary meeting-point and crossing point between the two spaces, defined in terms of socially qualified body movements, it is the place where the world is reversed” (Bourdieu 1992, 281–282).
As in the case of the Kabyle house, the spatiotemporal experience of the threshold is produced by this potential communication between two different opposing worlds. Existing only to be crossed, actually or virtually, the threshold is not a defining border that keeps out a hostile otherness, but a complicated social artifact that produces, through differently defined acts of crossing, different relations between sameness and otherness. If inside and outside communicate and mutually define each other, then the threshold can be considered as a mediating zone.
The anthropologist Victor Turner, following Arnold van Gennep, has described these in-between lands as possessing the status of liminality (from the Latin word limen = “threshold”). The condition of liminality is characterized by the construction of transitory identities. In Turner’s words, “liminal entities are neither here nor there; they are betwixt and between the positions assigned and arrayed by law, custom, convention and ceremonial” (Turner 1977, 95).
Every passage creates the conditions of a threshold experience that is essentially the suspension of a previous identity and the preparation for a new one. Passing through a threshold is an explicitly or implicitly symbolic act. It is, therefore, also a gesture towards otherness: not only spatial otherness, as in the case of emerging from a house into the outside world, but also temporal otherness, as in departing from the present for a more or less unknown future.
“Rites of passage,” as van Gennep has named them, accompany the passing of initiands from one social identity to another, and most of the times are connected with a ritually executed crossing of spatial thresholds (van Gennep 1960, 26). If this act of venturing towards otherness is performed in and through thresholds, couldn’t we assume that thresholds are the place of negotiation with otherness? Thresholds can be the schematic system through which societies symbolically construct this experience of negotiation and, at the same time, materially allow the negotiation of identity to take place.
Approaching otherness
Approaching otherness is a difficult act. In all societies, it is represented as full of symbolic and material dangers. But approaching otherness is also a constitutive act of every social encounter. Every society or social group would appear to be characterized by the ways it controls and formalizes these acts of encounter. If the encounter is considered only as a necessary step to verify and deploy hostility between groups of people, then the act of crossing borders will only be an act of symbolic
