Subjectivity

, Volume 6, Issue 3, pp 229–253 | Cite as

Liminality and affectivity: The case of deceased organ donation

Original Article
First Online:

Abstract

Building on ethnographic work on deceased organ donation (DOD) in Spain, this article supplements the concept of affectivity at the core of the emerging field of affect studies with a concept of liminality. The article begins by focussing on relevant scenes in Pedro Almodóvar’s 1999 film ‘All about my mother’, using these as a spring-board to discuss the recent ‘turn to affect’ among social scientists and humanities scholars. This ‘turn’ is characterized in relation to a move towards the ‘event’ side of a ‘structure/ event’ polarity. A case is made for a process approach that better integrates event and structure, and better links ontological and empirical dimensions of research. To these ends, a distinction is drawn between an ontological account of liminality (informed by the process philosophy A.N. Whitehead) and an anthropological account (informed by the process anthropology of V. Turner and A. Szakolczai), both of which give a decisive role to affect or ‘feeling’ qua liminal transition at the joints and other interstices of structural order. The article ends with a return to ethnographic observations relevant to the characterization of the DOD dispositif as a novel form of liminal affective technology.

Keywords

liminality affect deceased organ donation process psychosocial studies Whitehead 
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Copyright information

© Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Ltd 2013

Authors and Affiliations

  1. 1.Faculty of Social Sciences, The Open UniversityMilton KeynesUK
  2. 2.School of Applied Social Science, University of BrightonBrightonUK

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