Life-as-Lived Today: Perpetual (Undesired) Liminality of the Half-widows of Kashmir

According to Victor Turner, all liminality must eventually dissolve, for it is a state of great intensity that cannot exist very long without some sort of structure to sta-bilize it. This paper takes his lead and attempts to describe the liminal status of those women, the whereabouts of whose husbands are not known (they are locally re-ferred to as 'half-widows') in the conflict zone of Kashmir, India. The article ex-amines the concept of liminality based on life as lived today by these half-widows and shows how the effects of liminality operate in their day to day life, making them extremely vulnerable victims. In this, it is an attempt to expand upon the concept of liminality, originally linked almost exclusively to rites of passage. Furthermore, this paper reflects on the idea of permanent liminality that has been elaborated by soci-ologist Arpad Szakolczai. The narratives of the half-widows of Kashmir provide an example of how they are trapped in a form of 1permanent liminality1 far beyond what was initially defined as a 'temporal state'