This article situates Van Gennep’s Rites de passage in the contemporary field of migration studies, arguing that his second and third chapters allow us to reformulate how we conceptualize contemporary migratory encounters. Rather than reading Van Gennep’s classical text through the prevalent Turnerian lens of “liminality” in migration, I reread it as offering a conceptualization of migration as deriving from society’s establishment on a delimited piece of earth, constituting itself against and in relation to its own limits. Society’s limit then becomes the center of social inquiry, while the strangers at the gate are seen as an integral part of these fundamental relations between a social grouping and the delimited space it occupies. The article further suggests that Van Gennep’s sociology of the limit offers the field of migration studies three practical analytical contributions: (a) its notion of the multiplicity of limits and sublimits emerging throughout the migratory encounter; (b) its emphasis on the sanctification of the limit, which opens up the possibility of analyzing the relations between migration and emotions; and (c) its pointing to the potential cycle of dread elicited by this sanctification—a notion highly relevant to analyzing contemporary migratory encounters.

中文翻译：

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极限的社会学：通过范热内普重新阐述移民问题

本文将 Van Gennep 的 Rites de pass 置于当代移民研究领域，认为他的第二章和第三章允许我们重新阐述我们如何概念化当代移民遭遇。我没有通过流行的特纳式移民“阈限性”视角来阅读范热内普的经典文本，而是将其重读为提供了一种移民的概念化，它源于社会在一块划定的地球上的建立，构成自己反对并与自己的限制相关. 社会的界限于是成为社会探究的中心，而门口的陌生人则被视为社会群体与其所占据的划定空间之间的这些基本关系的一个组成部分。这篇文章进一步表明，范热内普的极限社会学为移民研究领域提供了三个实际的分析贡献：(a) 它关于在整个迁徙过程中出现的多重极限和次极限的概念；(b) 它强调界限的神圣化，这开辟了分析迁移与情感之间关系的可能性；(c) 它指出了这种成圣所引发的潜在恐惧循环——一个与分析当代迁徙遭遇高度相关的概念。