Liminality and ritual order: Italy’s national elections of 2018

Abstract

Citroni and Navarini provide a summary of the relationship between order and liminality and show how this analytical framework facilitates a better understanding of the consolidation of “populist” political forces and their incorporation in Italy’s government. The authors focus on the campaigning prior to the Italian elections of 2018 and their immediate aftermath, a period when the frameworks of ritual order and liminality overlapped; they draw attention to the emergence of threshold zones of political discourse and practice that gradually moved from the periphery to the “symbolic centre”. This process involved subversion of the established rules and changes to the symbols of social ties, such as representations of national cohesion and “the other”, that normally affect the reproduction of community power.