Editor's Introduction

If permanent liminality is at the heart of modernity, this condition is not simply a given, but one actively and continuously generated by the logic of modern institutions. Alchemic science and technology, fairground capitalism, the public sphere, and bureaucratic institutions all encode a similar dynamic – deploying a type of “trickster logic” based on processes of decontextualization and the establishment of mutual substitutability among their objects, and so relentlessly stripping away concrete identities, contexts and limits. One can therefore argue that the central institutions of modernity are all modalities of a permanent, liminal void, which operate through the negation of concrete entities and beings. This void or process of negation at the heart of modern institutions is explored in the first two articles in this issue of International Political Anthropology.