Liminal Politics in the New Age of Disease: Technocratic Mimetism

This book explores the phenomenon of ’liminal politics’, considering the manner in which emergency measures introduced to counter the spread of Covid-19 - and repeated from jurisdiction to jurisdiction - exemplify processes of technological mimetism, that reorganise social life in a manner that threatens its ordinary patterns.

Agnes Horvath is a political theorist and sociologist. Founding editor of the Journal International Political Anthropology, she was an affiliate visiting scholar at Cambridge University from 2011 to 2014. She is the author of Modernism and Charisma (Palgrave, 2013) and Political Alchemy: Technology unbounded (Routledge, 2021), the co-author of The Dissolution of Communist Power: The Case of Hungary, Walking into the Void: A Historical Sociology and Political Anthropology of Walking, and The Political Sociology and Anthropology of the Evil: Tricksterology; and co-editor of Breaking Boundaries: Varieties of Liminality;Walling, Boundaries and Liminality: A Political Anthropology of Transformations;Divinization and Technology: The Political Anthropology of Subversion; and Modern Leaders: In Between Charisma and Trickery.

Paul O’Connor is an Associate Professor of Sociology at United Arab Emirates University in Abu Dhabi, and is a main editor of the Journal International Political Anthropology. His research and writing are centred on the anthropological foundations of home and community, the dynamics of modernity and globalisation, the intersection between society and its physical environment, the emergence and disintegration of structures of meaning, and the mediatisation and virtualisation of contemporary social life. He has published articles in journals including Memory Studies, Mobilities, International Political Anthropology and the Irish Journal of Anthropology, as well as in the Dark Mountain Anthology of ecological writing. He is the author of Home: The Foundations of Belonging (Routledge, 2018), which examines the idea of home from an anthropological and historical perspective as a centre around which we organise routines and experiences, endowing the world with meaning and order. With Marius Benta, he is co-editor of The Technologisation of the Social: A Political Anthropology of the Digital Machine (Routledge, 2022), exploring how technology has shifted from being a tool of communication to a primary medium of experience and sociality.