Defining Marginality and Liminality for the Study of the Ancient Near East
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Marginality and liminality are concepts that are used in the study of the ancient Near East, although formal definitions for these terms are rarely given. This paper explores the history of the uses of these terms in social theory, discussing the origins of the terms in the writings of early twentieth-century thinkers such as Georg Simmel, Robert Ezra Park, and Victor Turner. It details how these ideas and concepts were debated by psychologists, sociologists, and anthropologists throughout the twentieth century, when these terms were adopted into Near Eastern studies. While these concepts were defined by social theorists, investigations of the archaeological, textual, and art-historical evidence from the ancient Near East show that they well reflect emic conceptualizations. Examples from Near Eastern contexts demonstrate the benefits of using flexible and multi-vocalic conceptualizations of marginality and liminality that still recognize the distinctiveness of these two issues. The paper concludes by offering different frameworks for applying these concepts to the study of the Bronze Age Near East.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".