So it begins....

by Hari Seldon



Hello. My name is Hari Seldon. In the past few weeks, I have watched a great amount of turmoil, angst, and scathing bitterness within the small protective community world known as America. It seems to me that, the raw emotion comes from our own temerity of the uncertain and has become tangible, even palpable to the hearts and minds of the American republic. It seems that, America, us, the people of it, are on the brink of a precipice awaiting a fall into a pit of vipers and a world of disillusionment.

As a result, great apathy for responsibility, honesty, integrity, and ethics has become an under current of malevolence in the hearts of the citizenry, where the beacon of liberty, democracy, and light for humanity has been shrouded in obfuscation and fear.

This is the type of fear that brings ugliness to the human condition and harms the spiritual nature of the self and a nation. So, when the main writer of The Stewart Consortium (TSC) and I talked of the issues of religion, illegal immigration, sexual abuse, responsibility, and community, we understood that we may not always agree, but how we, as citizens, participate in discourse, argumentation is as important and is a greater in how we ought to be have towards our fellow citizens of the globe.

We, the US citizenry, are only one aspect of this blue marble; and although, our gravitas tend to stoke the ire of some, for the most part, Americans are a grand example of humanity’s potential greatness. So, when the writer of the TSC asked, if we could forge together—a “communitas” (Victor Turner, 1969)—community that illustrated the world in “liminality” (Ibid)—transition.

Both of these words are from the world of anthropology, and from one of our favorite and notable anthropologist, Victor Turner, and although he is work is viewed as significant, he has not been considered as laudable as Durkheim or Geertz. Nevertheless, his contributions, Turner’s, gives us insight that we sometimes overlook in the culture of the human condition. His assertion that, we as humans are in state of “betwixt” and “between” at certain moments of culture, and that some are grand sweeping in macro scale, and while other moments can be observed in the micro. This state in transitory, a moment, if conscious of it, one would notice “crossing of threshold” of liminality, but this moment is fleeting, non permanent, and furthermore is a reflective.

In addition, this reflection is often representative of the popular culture of the “moment”—but also repeatable in the grand scheme of the “core values” of the hegemonic culture itself. Some may term this as the “rites of passage,” or “cycles of revitalization” (Wallace, 1960) that forwards the hegemony of the culture small and grand.

Our admiration of Victor Turner’s perception, prescription, and “postscription” (after affects) of culture as being a “story arc” like “dramas" and cyclical is that, in so being, life as always liminal whether ritualized, socialized, encultured, or for that matter an “opiate for the masses.” We are an ever changing world in transition. Thus, we as authors felt that a page within The Stewart Consortium may better shone the variety of people here in the US, but across the globe.

Therefore, this website will be dedicated to the showing of: how different cultures, different peoples’and their own personal narratives affect their daily lives of friends, families, and society while they navigate from day to day in an ever changing world--The Liminal World...