Misfits: Towards a critical analysis of the in-between

Abstract

This introductory article introduces the concepts of misfit and misfitting as a relational prism for analysing social life in conditions of uncertainty and indeterminacy. Drawing on ethnographic materials from ‘in-between’ places in a multipolar world, it examines how elements that no longer – or not yet – fit dominant orders generate awkward relations that reverberate across cognitive, affective, spatial, and temporal domains. Engaging critically with anthropological debates on categorization, liminality, affect, and repair, the article argues that the in-between is neither unstructured nor merely transitional, but textured by power, historical afterlives, and anticipations of uncertain futures. Misfit/misfitting, we argue, is not simply about being ‘out of place’, but a quality that can reveal how social and political fabrics are strained, realigned, rejected outright, or restitched. Thus, attending to moments of misfitting allows us to see society as an ongoing patchwork constantly made and remade through rupture and repair.

In the early hours of a 2022 summer night in Georgia’s capital Tbilisi, residents are sleeping with their windows open. The loud voices of some Russian-speakers returning from a restaurant pierce the silence, awakening residents, some of whom loudly curse the ‘Russians’ in the street below in Georgian, then admonishing them in Russian to go home. If it was the volume of the sound that had disrupted the nightly silence, it was the foreign language that had disrupted the social fabric. Crucially, it was not just any foreign language. Russian voices felt conspicuously out of place, not just because they had become increasingly absent since the collapse of the USSR, but precisely because they had been more dominant before then, menacingly reminding Georgian residents that their ‘westward drift’ might be coming to an end, representing a threat to a cherished sovereignty. As in this example, the quality of misfit is about more than ‘being out of place’ – it is also about how this quality resonates within minds and bodies, about the potential agency of the misfitting element, and about how the surrounding social and political fabric is being realigned. Following from this, our discussion of misfits looks at how societal patchworks come undone and are being restitched in times of uncertainty.

Uncertainty and indeterminacy appear to be defining features of our times. The grand narratives of secular modernity, in which nation states were assigned secure places and the world understood in bipolar, Cold War ideological terms, have long been shattered. Counter-narratives of globalization and accompanying ‘postmodern’ celebrations of diversity and creativity have also proven to be naïve, perhaps short-lived. The Apostle Paul’s phrase that ‘we see through a glass darkly’ surely has timeless relevance, but it resonates especially well with the current moment. The contours of a new multipolar world may be coming into view, but remain hazy and fragile for now. Simultaneously, we are witnessing the emergence of a tech-industrial complex, the immediate effects of which include a crisis of knowledge itself. While the resonances of indeterminacy are felt across the world, the fallout is especially pronounced on the edges of political constellations.

The political edges covered in this special issue are formed by the embers of the Cold War, reignited by Russia’s violent expansionist ambitions. Russia never left the South Caucasus entirely. It kept a military presence in Armenia, launched a brief yet traumatic war in Georgia in 2008, and more generally has continued to cast its shadow over the region, even more troublingly so since Russia’s full-scale war on Ukraine. The ripple effects of that war are equally felt in the Baltics, the other region featuring in this issue. Although the Baltic countries joined the European Union and NATO already back in 2004, the region finds itself uncomfortably close to Russia at a moment when its military aggression is wreaking devastation. In these in-between places and times, questions around misfit/misfitting have become pertinent and multilayered, triggering numerous practical questions for residents. How to deal with old Soviet monuments that now feel out of place? What to think of Ukrainian refugees and Russian migrants, whose political viewpoints may or may not align with one’s own? And how to deal with pastoralists, ethnic minorities, and border-dwellers who transcend and disrupt the seemingly clear-cut boundaries of the imagined nation.

The subtitle of this special issue (‘Awkward relations in the Baltics, the Caucasus, and In Between’) suggests that we explore such awkward relations not only in the South Caucasus and the Baltics, but also ‘in between’. This ‘in between’ does more work than might perhaps be expected. It is meant not just to rope in the one contribution situated in the Carpathian Mountains of Central Europe, but also to draw attention to the spatial and temporal in-betweenness of the regions under discussion, particularly in view of the ongoing war. Furthermore, in-betweenness here questions the common fixation on the centre, and the tendency to treat whatever lies in between as lacking agency, overlooking the aspirations of its inhabitants. By contrast, this special issue foregrounds in-betweenness from within, centring the experiences of those living in the seams. Importantly, even if none of the contributors directly carried out fieldwork on Russia’s war in Ukraine, the war is present through the mentioned refugees who arrived in Georgia and Lithuania, through anomalous Soviet monuments in Latvia, and out-of-place soldiers in Armenia. These destabilizing ripples have intensified experiences of uncertainty in both the Baltics and the South Caucasus. Not only do these regions find themselves, as mentioned, uncomfortably suspended between geopolitical centres, suspension here also has an important temporal dimension. The unravelling of the Soviet Union and the uncertain ‘transitions’ that followed produced what Stoler refers to as the aftershocks of empire that ‘reside in the corroded hollows of landscape’ as well as ‘in the micro-ecologies of matter and mind’ (2008: 194). That is, the where and when of ‘in-betweenness’ are complexly intertwined. As the contributions to this special issue show, citizens in these regions navigate thorny questions about belonging, interwoven with their complex histories and ongoing geopolitical tremors.

Situations of uncertainty and indeterminacy intensify the need and desire for clarity or at least direction, as others have argued in relation to morality (such as in Zigon’s [2007] idea of the ‘moral breakdown’), with reference to navigational efforts in situations of existential threat (Vigh, 2009), and in relation to the ambiguity of borderlands (Berdahl, 1999). Of these, Daphne Berdahl’s argument is especially relevant to us, not least because she uses the German term Zwischenraum to draw attention to the interstitial (‘in-between’) connotations of borderlands, in which rearrangements are constantly unfolding (Berdahl, 1999: 46). While acknowledging that borderlands are ‘a site of “creative cultural production” (Rosaldo, 1989: 208)’, Berdahl (1999: 9) warns against the tendency to uncritically ‘celebrate the interstitiality and creativity’ of the in-between for the precise reason that discomfort with disorder may push people in the opposite direction. As she puts it, ‘one of the many paradoxes of the borderland […] is that ambiguity creates clarity’ (1999: 232). It is a paradox because, while clarity is produced by ambiguity, this ambiguity was itself created by efforts to produce unambiguous clarity, that is, by the drawing and imposing of rigid borderlines. It is this two-way movement – of clarity creating ambiguity and ambiguity creating clarity – that requires further unpacking in this introduction. What we aim to advance is a relational approach that analyses the ‘awkward relations’ that transcend such spatiotemporal spaces, to thereby draw attention to the textured nature of the in-between – something that still appears to be a gap in anthropological theorizing.

The ‘misfit’ concept offers useful vantage points to examine awkward relations in ‘in-between’ spaces and periods. Literally, the term denotes an ‘encounter in which two things come together in […] disjunction’ (Garland-Thomson, 2011: 592). Such a literal and attempted value-free use of the term can be useful, for example to emphasize that, in the case of disability, the problem does not inhere in a person or body, but literally in the lack of fit between bodies and the surroundings in which they find themselves (Garland-Thomson, 2011). This situational aspect of ‘misfitting’ needs to remain at the centre of our deliberations, especially because asymmetries and normative overtones of such encounters make this situational aspect often difficult to see. ¹ In common parlance, after all, a ‘misfit’ refers to a person who does not fit fully because of their inappropriate or unusual behaviour or appearance and is therefore considered ‘out of place’. Less common these days, but relevant here, is that a ‘misfit’ can also refer to a piece of clothing that does not fit the wearer, or even to the friction between an analytical framework and the empirical data presented in its support. And when used as a verb, ‘to misfit’ can be used as the equivalent of ‘to fail to fit, to fit badly; to be unfitting or inappropriate for (a person, etc.)’ (Oxford English Dictionary). Whether used as noun or verb, the word implicitly invokes its counterpoint, that is, objects or persons that ‘fit’ or are made ‘to fit’. Paying attention to both misfitting and fitting reveals society as a ‘patchwork’ that is constantly being worked on. It also raises the important question of who or what gets to decide what fits and what doesn’t fit, with what purposes, and what effects.

In this special issue, the theme of misfitting is obviously not just about the word itself. We deploy the concept because we consider it a useful prism to think through real-life problems, specifically those that relate to the human desire for order and predictability in a world that is often resistant to such desires. As such, the concept links up with earlier debates on categorization in anthropology that continue to resonate to this very day. In these debates –born from studies of boundary-maintenance – anthropologists and others paid attention to that which escapes our classificatory models, drawing attention to their anomalous, abominable, and abject qualities (Douglas, 1966; Kristeva, 1982). ² Studies of ritual are equally relevant for our discussion, as they cast a spotlight on how categorization is performed, and moreover, how structures emerge or are realigned in the process. Victor Turner’s deployment of ‘liminality’ offers a valuable ‘process approach’ (Horvath et al., 2015: 2) for studying what happens in ‘unstructured’ spaces, and for probing the processual dimension of exclusion and reincorporation (Turner, 1969). But we also notice that when anthropologists take their cue from Mary Douglas and Victor Turner, they struggle to push beyond their catchy phrases such a ‘dirt is matter out of place’ and the ‘betwixt and between’.

We propose that the misfitting paradigm can be used as a lever to pry open some of the unhelpful knots in those debates, thereby advancing our understanding of the in-between. More specifically, we aim to advance discussion by zooming in on four relevant aspects, as reflected in the way this introductory article is organized. First, when talking about categorization and the misfitting element, we emphasize the need to see categorizations as situational arrangements with their own dynamics. Second, when we explore the liminal as an ‘in-between’ phase or position, we emphasize not only its unstructured aspect, but also how it continues to be entangled and infused by relations of power. Third, to understand affective responses to that which (negatively) stands out, we explore how instantaneous responses link up with the hopes, fears, and expectations that run through society. And fourth, we use the various counterpoints of misfitting, including ‘fitting’, ‘refitting’, and ‘repair’, to illuminate how coherence is advanced, and by whom, in what situations. Finally, drawing these aspects together, we suggest that the misfit concept can be used to connect the cognitive, spatiotemporal, and affective dimensions of categorization in ways that other concepts struggle to do. Looking at how misfits emerge and at the responses they trigger, and how visceral anger and simmering resentments may prod people into action, we aim to illuminate the complexities of mis/alignment, including the often provisional, and at times contradictory, nature of such efforts.

Categorization and the misfitting element

‘We cannot think about the world unless we assign it to categories’ (Ellen, 2006: 31), ³ something that appears to be equally true for anthropologists and the people they study. Anthropology’s earliest efforts in this direction, such as in Primitive Classification (Durkheim and Mauss, 1963 [1906]), studied how classificatory systems were modelled after society. Through various detours, such efforts arguably culminated in the vast works of Lévi-Strauss, in which he shows that complex ideational structures serve the purpose of enabling communication and reflect the workings of the human brain. Lévi-Strauss certainly paid attention to the in-between. But while acknowledging that each binary system has ternary implications (see Baumann, 2004) and paying considerable attention to ‘trickster’ phenomena in North America (Lévi-Strauss, 1963), he reduced his analysis to showing how ‘in-between’ elements mediate larger structures. In his maniacal (cybernetic) effort to discover elementary structures of thought, the excess of structures and that which escapes such structures, amounted to little more than noise. Hence, even though it is possible to trace precursors, it remains appropriate to credit British anthropologist Mary Douglas with pioneering systematic exploration of non-fitting elements in human categorization and classification.

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Probably Mary Douglas’s best-known phrase is that ‘dirt is matter out of place’ (1966: 36). She presents the phrase as ‘the old definition’, which usefully captures the idea that ‘dirt is essentially disorder’, which ‘offends against order’ (1966: 2). In other words, ‘dirt is the by-product of a systematic ordering and classification of matter’ (1966: 36). Douglas only once uses the term ‘a misfit in a system’ (1966: 84), but she does speak of the feeling of ‘discomfiture’ and of facts that ‘refuse to be fitted in’ when speaking of anomalies. The idea here is that ‘boundary crossings bring about pollution’, requiring a response of some kind.

The cogency of Douglas’s idea has continued to resonate with anthropologists, who have used the phrase ‘dirt is matter out of place’ in discussions ranging from ethnic cleansing (Appadurai, 2006; Hayden, 1996) to studies of waste (Alexander and O’Hare, 2023; Armiero, 2021). Given the framing of Douglas’s original argument around ‘dirt’, it is perhaps not surprising that the negative aspects of misfitting are overemphasized. For example, Appadurai (2006: 44) uses Douglas’s argument ‘that all moral and social taxonomies find abhorrent the items that blur the boundaries’ to shed light on violence against minorities as people who do not fit. ⁴ This negative dimension certainly also explains the dirt metaphor as relevant to studies of waste, which is seen as ‘the antithesis of value’ (Alexander and Sanchez, 2018).

Others have taken Douglas to task for this narrowly negative view, pointing out that even if ‘dirt is matter out of place’, it does not follow that all matter out of place equals dirt (Arya, 2017; Liboiron, 2019). ⁵ Rather, while keeping with the idea that anomalies require a response, these responses can also be ambivalent or even positive. In fact, in her subsequent writing Douglas herself (1975) acknowledged that not all matter out of place equals dirt. In her revised formulation, the negative or positive valuations of misfitting elements need to be understood in relation to the ‘social systems in which they are used’ (1975: 296). She concludes that this valuation is indicative of a society’s relations with the outside world, and that efforts to preserve purity are especially strong when such outward relations are perceived as dangerous, as is the case in her famous study of biblical food taxonomies (Douglas, 1966). By contrast, anomalous elements may be valued positively when relations with the outside world are cherished, such as among the Lele of the Congo basin who depend on trading relations, which is reflected in the positive valuation of some taxonomic anomalies (Douglas, 1975: 306). But even if Douglas acknowledges the social situatedness of how misfits are evaluated (1966: 36), her analyses remain too static, too reliant on an image of ‘systematic classification’ to do justice to the processual dimensions of ‘mis/fitting’ and the complex relations among and between human and non-human actors, especially so in rapidly changing environments such as the ones reviewed in this special issue.

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The point is that misfits need to be understood in relation to changing orders. This requires the tracing of spatiotemporal processes, and acknowledgement that the act of categorizing is itself inherently fraught. As Roy Ellen (2007: 1) points out in his aptly titled volume The Categorical Impulse, ‘not only is our capacity to create and manipulate categories impulsive’, but references to categories are also often made with categorical resoluteness. This is crucial, because it highlights the tension between categories and the world to which they are applied, something that Edmund Leach (1954) already observed had a destabilizing and thereby transformative potential. ⁶ The relevance of such tensions for a discussion of misfitting, indeed for how the imposition of categories may produce new forms of impurity, has been formulated beautifully by Marilyn Strathern, when she suggests that ‘the more hybrids are suppressed – the more categorical divisions are made – the more they secretly breed’ (1996: 522). The logic here is that any categorical imposition will create new ‘in-betweens’ with generative potential. Hence, the recalibration of dominant orders may generate awkward relations among human actors and with non-human entities, pushing in turn for some sort of resolution. ⁷

The question of when and how human and other entities come to be seen as misfits is central to this volume. But when attending to categorization and classification, we see these ‘cognitive domains’ as flexibly employed and entangled with sociopolitical processes. ⁸ The status of ‘not fitting’ is always in relation to a ‘dominant order’, but it needs emphasis that the lack of fit may well be caused by changes in dominant ordering. Thus, Elina Troščenko discusses the fate of a giant Soviet Victory monument to commemorate the Red Army soldiers who recaptured Latvia from the Germans in the Second World War. The monument had been erected in 1985, a time when the call for Latvian independence had already started to gain momentum, meaning that the monument had been controversial from the start, and became even more so in the following decades. As she shows, it was in response to rising Russian aggression that the monument came to be seen as an aberration, as a dagger in the heart of the nation. By tracing the protests and counterprotests surrounding the monument, especially as it was torn down in August 2022, Troščenko highlights the ‘material and imaginary capacities and potentialities of the monument’ which animated politics and meant that the ‘the monument loomed larger than itself’. That is, the approach taken in this article and in the special issue more broadly is to attempt not a structuralist semantic analysis of misfitting within a broader semiotic structure, but rather to trace how elements come to be seen as misfitting, and to what effect.

Liminality, power, and the in-between

The stranger, writes Georg Simmel (1950: 402), ‘is near and far at the same time’, being both a member of the group and outside of it. Inspired by this conceptualization, anthropologist Pitt-Rivers emphasizes in his discussion of hospitality that the ‘stranger’ is very different from the ‘barbarian’, who is irrelevant because far removed. Instead, we speak of ‘strangers’ when it concerns people from the outside whom we find in our midst. ⁹ Such strangers have an indeterminate status, posing a risk to the group. Hence, their worth needs to be tested, based on which they may be accepted or rejected (Pitt-Rivers, 1977: 94–112). The challenge, it appears to us, is to document and theorize how this intermediate status is being enacted by the ‘strangers’ themselves, and, moreover, how their position is acted upon by forces that impinge on in-betweenness. Useful models for thinking about this issue have been suggested by Victor Turner and Giorgio Agamben, but, as we will argue, their models leave significant gaps in theorizing about the dynamics of in-betweenness.

The lasting influence of Victor Turner resides in his elevation of the in-between stage as a site of practice, not just as a transitional moment but also as a space of creativity. Inspired by Van Gennep’s model of rites of passage, which interjects a liminal stage between separation from an old and incorporation into a new sphere, Turner draws attention to liminality as an ‘in-between phase’. In his words, ‘liminal entities are neither here nor there; they are betwixt and between the positions assigned and arrayed by law, custom, convention, and ceremony’ (Turner, 1969: 95). His well-known concept ‘communitas’ offers a useful reminder that in such in-between spaces we may find the highest levels of commitment and conviction, as facilitated by egalitarian and unstructured bonds (Turner, 1969). But while it is a valuable reminder of the creative processes that in-between spaces enable, his model does not offer many suggestions for how power continues to run through such spaces, apart from pointing out that processes of exclusion and breakdown are accompanied by ‘processes of growth, transformation, and the reformulation of old elements in new patterns’ (Turner, 1967: 99).

Given Turner’s paucity of attention to the forces that structure in-betweenness, it will be useful to turn to Giorgio Agamben. His concept of the state of exception refers exactly to this, as reflected in his description of the ‘paradoxical status of the camp’ as

a piece of land placed outside the normal juridical order, but [which] is nevertheless not simply an external space. What is excluded in the camp is, according to the etymological sense of the term ‘exception’ (ex-capere), taken outside, included through its own exclusion. (Agamben, 1998: 96) ¹⁰

The paradigmatic dweller of this ‘outside yet inside’ space, or Homo Sacer is, as Diken puts it in a reformulation of Agamben, ‘excluded from, but still subjected to the domain of law’ (2004). In such spaces, the primary example of which is the refugee camp, ‘the fundamental referent becomes bare life [such that] political distinctions disappear in a zone of indistinction’ (Diken, 2004: 90). What is central here is that the ‘zone of indistinction’ is still dependent on and subjected to dominant power, offering us a taste of the forces running through the ‘in-between’.

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If Turner does not pay enough attention to the ways in which dominant power may continue to exert influence over liminal spaces, Agamben pays insufficient attention to the dynamics within excluded spaces. As Thomas Lemke puts it, ‘Agamben is less interested in life than in its bareness’ (2005, in Andersson, 2014: 170). Valuable examples of how these insights can be combined are found in migration studies, where transit is a liminal state that positions migrants simultaneously outside (in transition, not yet arrived), yet inside (traveling through), national spaces (Chavez, 1992). As Coutin (2005) puts it in her discussion of migrant experiences en route from El Salvador to the United States: ‘It is as though a border forms around them, alienating them from their social surroundings and making their very humanity questionable’ (2005: 199), while also discussing the bonds of mutual aid that emerge among groups of migrants. Insightfully, she adds that this liminal or transitional status of being en route does not necessarily result in ‘(re-)integration’, given that ‘unauthorized migrants who reach U.S. territory remain, in key senses, legally outside’ (Coutin, 2005: 200).

As the liminal continues to be an important concept (Thomassen, 2014), the contributions in this issue explore what happens when distinctions are fuzzy, taking a close look at the mechanisms of exclusion and inclusion involved. Beatrice Juskaite does so by looking at Ukrainian refugees and their relationships with Lithuanians who host them in their homes. The Ukrainians are not received exactly as refugees who must conform to a specific image and demonstrate their readiness to assimilate. Instead, Lithuanians welcomed them as those who are already ‘like us’, and with whom they share a history. What the hosts did expect from the guests, however, was that they would be politically ‘like us’ – and have a similar outlook on the war. These rather patronizing expectations were being put to the test in actual encounters, especially so when guests failed to live up to the Lithuanian hosts’ image of being ‘like us’, such as in one case when the guests turned out to be uncomfortably sympathetic to Russia. As such, the article offers a glimpse of how different layers of misfitting come together, in which problematic ambiguity may never be fully resolved, except perhaps in the moment when a hosting agreement was terminated.

Considering the power dynamics involved, it is essential to examine not only how ‘misfits’ are marginalized, but also how such marginalization might be subverted. A good reminder here is Caroline Humphrey’s point about people who, after the collapse of the USSR, found themselves ‘deprived of property, work, and entitlements’, suggesting that while dispossessed, we can ‘also understand them as people who are themselves no longer possessed’ (2002: 21). And as Sanchez (2025) points out with reference to his own mixed-race background, ‘although it may feel exclusionary to live on the edge of a social order, that experience can also be a liberating one that inspires critical perspectives on the world’ (2025: 114). The two sides of this coin need to be carefully weighed, between the extent to which the excluded are controlled through their exclusion (per Agamben, see earlier), while also considering the possibility that exclusion may foster, or at least allow for, other types of connectedness. In this issue, Nicolette Makovicky’s study of pastoralists traversing national boundaries in the Carpathians offers further insight into the intricacies involved. She shows that these pastoralists – having long been depicted as misfits from the perspective of national centres – were able to subvert the marginalizing effects of ‘sedentarist’ classifications. At least in their own thinking, they position themselves at the centre of an old yet new way of living. They do so not only by presenting mountain life as purer and more honest, but also by presenting transnationalism as central to the ‘supranational’ European project, ultimately casting themselves as the embodiment of the new Europe (without internal borders). It is an important reminder that questions of ‘misfit’ are always also questions of perspective. And because reality is multilayered, there may be other logics available through which marginalization can be subverted or indeed inverted.

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To sum up, people who do not fit may end up being excluded, removed from dominant categories, but they may also end up destabilizing those very categories. ¹¹ This brings us back to the notion of the ‘stranger’, who destabilizes binaries. While the forms of exclusion that ensue can push people into ‘bare life’ from which there is little reprieve, the liminal position can sometimes be exploited through processes of reconnection in alternative directions, potentially turning the world on its head.

The moments and temporal horizons of misfit

Affect ‘arises in the midst of in-between-ness: in the capacities to act and be acted upon’ (Seigworth and Gregg, 2010: 1). The link between affect and ‘in-betweenness’ is relevant to us because it zooms in on the generativity of the ‘in-between’, on the resonances that are produced ‘when the boundaries of the self become porous (or when they have not even been properly drawn to begin with)’ (Slaby and Röttger-Rössler, 2018: 2). Importantly, such resonances have a temporal dimension, or in the words of Stewart (2007: 18), affect ‘draws its charge from rhythms of flow and arrest’. In our take on the matter, these intensities are not merely visceral, or even pre-social (as some affect theorists maintain), but also draw on prevailing ‘structures of feeling’ (Williams, 1977) that have their own histories and their own temporal horizons, as captured in the concept of ‘teleo-affect’ (Bryant and Knight, 2019).

Such links between the immediate and the durational are explored in this issue by Manon Borel’s study of a Russian military base in Gyumri, a city in Armenia located not far from its border with Turkey. To many residents this Russian military base feels anachronistic given Armenia’s thirty-plus years of independence. But, while this out-of-place military base sparks fearful and angry responses, its perceived ability to protect against hostile action also triggers feelings of gratitude and security. Identifying the instantaneous responses prompted by the noise of military jets and the brawling of Russian soldiers, Borel then proceeds to show how ‘these momentary feelings connect with longer-term histories, and how localized affects are entangled with geopolitical events’. In the process, we get to see how the polyrhythms of life gain substance in the ‘in-between’, prompted by an ‘out-of-place’ military base, and resonating with longer held worries, hopes, and desires.

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Attention to events that generate new social realities offers a powerful vantage point to grasp the moments of misfit. As mentioned earlier, attending to misfitting reveals awkward relations, not only across in-between places but also across in-between times, such as those found in times of radical societal change and crisis. This temporal ‘in-betweenness’ can also be conceptualized as a ‘critical threshold’, which Rebecca Bryant (2018) defines as a present in which the future cannot be anticipated, where the present ‘becomes anxiously visceral to us as a moment caught between past and future’ and is both ‘decisive and liminal’ (Bryant, 2018: 20). The contributions in this issue deal with various such defining events or ‘critical thresholds’ – Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine being a prominent example – while also exploring how moments of crisis render past events ‘culturally close’ (Knight, 2012). This intersection of societal transformation, temporality, and misfitting is explored by Giorgi Cheishvili in his article about the influx of Russians in Tbilisi, Georgia, after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. He points out that the negative reactions of Tbilisians about the Russian inflow should be understood not as the usual anti-migrant concerns about job theft, but in relation to residents’ anxieties about the Soviet past potentially re-emerging in the future. Or, as one of his interlocutors put it when talking about Russians: ‘Georgia is the only country where one can be a refugee and an occupier at the same time.’ Conscious of their ‘awkward position’, some Russians have responded by attempting to blend into the urban landscape, ironically doing so by highlighting the prominence of Russian poets and novelists in the city’s history, thereby in effect reclaiming a part of the city’s history, the very thing that Georgian residents are worried about.

This reminds us that attending to misfitting often means attending to change – to disruption, to the abnormal, to the breaking of routine – and requires taking seriously the ‘moments of social life in its very process of formation’ (Kapferer, 2005: 92). Moments of radical societal changes, then, should be regarded not as an anomaly, but to be analysed as central to mechanisms of social reproduction (see Gluckman, 1955). It is in these ‘generative moments’ (Kapferer, 2010) and in the aftermath of ‘critical events’ (Das, 1995) that the emergence of new social realities results in the production of misfits that subsequently trigger new efforts to reproduce order.

Refitting and the shadows of repair

The discussion so far has emphasized that ‘misfitting’ is a dynamic concept: that which belongs today may become an eyesore tomorrow; dominant power works to produce and exclude ‘misfits’, but sometimes these ‘misfits’ are able to turn the table; the generativity of ‘misfitting’ triggers instantaneous affects while also transcending the here and now. Importantly, if these aspects are relevant to ‘misfitting’, then they are also relevant when discussing its counterpoints, including ‘fitting’, ‘refitting’, and ‘retrofitting’. In this section, we focus on such counterpoints, a topic which we suggest resonates with recent discussions of ‘repair’, offering a perspective that can illuminate underexposed aspects of these discussions.

As deployed by anthropologists in recent years, ‘repair’ has been understood mostly in positive terms, as the opposite of discarding or rejecting. ‘To repair is … [to] act on the world’ in a way that foregrounds ‘endurance, material sensitivity and empathy, as well as more altruistic values oriented towards the sustainability of life’ (Martínez, 2019: 2). The focus, that is, has been on ‘repair in sites of ongoing damage’ (Bruno et al., 2024: 6) as well as on fixing the results of ‘imperial ruination’, that is, of the ‘long-term effects of grand-scale projects that outlive the entities that plotted them’ (Szmagalska-Follis, 2008). In the words of Bruno et al., ‘it is this weaving together of insisting on freedom, liberation, and decolonization that is the work of repair’ (2024: 10). Or, as Cousins deftly puts it, drawing on the artistic work of Kader Attia, the work of repair ‘points to the process of healing of a damaged state, whether in the form of bodily injuries, damages to cult or everyday objects, or the wounds of colonization that continue to make themselves felt today’ (Cousins, 2023: 19). These positive dispositions are by and large to be applauded, allowing anthropologists to think in an engaged manner about how colonial legacies are being attended to by the victims of oppression and erasure, in efforts to repair the trauma of subjugation.

Several contributions to this issue can be read in this vein, as they describe and analyse efforts to repair the nation in the aftermath of Soviet oppression. And yet, they also demonstrate the limitations of such a perspective, for example when, in Elina Troščenko’s discussion, it becomes clear that efforts to repair the Latvian nation also include moments of erasure, as when the Liberty Monument was removed, leaving an empty space that the country’s Russian minority experiences as the opening of a wound. Useful here is Douglas’s reminder that ‘why some things are proper and others failures’ (Douglas, 1966) depends on what she calls ‘systems’, but which we might formulate as uneven power relations. Hence, if repair depends on brokenness, then we need to consider who defines what is broken, and what the nature of the break is, and how it ought to be repaired. Clearly, repair can take on dystopian qualities, such as when social or personal features that are treasured (or simply accepted) by some become seen as ‘repairable’ blemishes, imperfections, or problems by others. ¹²

These darker sides of ‘repair’ shine through clearly in Mathijs Pelkmans’ discussion, in this special issue, regarding the fitting and refitting of graves in a village on the Georgian side of the border with Turkey, whose residents used to be Muslim and speakers of Lazuri (related to but different from Georgian), when the border was delineated in 1921. From the perspective of the Soviet state, these villagers stood out as ‘misfits’ and were mistrusted for their potential cross-border loyalties. Against this background of border-dwellers being seen as misfits, Pelkmans traces the efforts of residents to fit in to changing political realities, including by adopting new and better-fitting Georgian-sounding personal names, and by creating graves that minimize or hide the Muslim affiliations of the dead. And in the 1990s, as Georgian national identity was increasingly framed in religious terms, villagers responded by ‘refitting’ or ‘repairing’ graves, efforts that were aimed at reincorporating deceased relatives into their by-now Christian families, while in the process erasing or ‘overwriting’ (Frederiksen, 2013) their Muslim identities.

These contributions suggest the relevance of thinking of ‘refitting’ as analogous to that of ‘repair’, while at the same time warning against any hasty embrace of the latter term. It remains vital to consider who identifies and defines ‘brokenness’, and who is doing the ‘repairing’. After all, colonial, Soviet and other ‘modernizing’ powers have often framed their role as ‘repairing’ that which was faulty or primitive in the societies upon which they operated. This dark side of repair is obviously not what most anthropologists of repair have in mind, but even when we talk about ‘self-repair’, it is important to consider whether ‘repair’ is performed to achieve ‘purity’ of sorts, for example by removing the ‘misfitting’ element, as was the case in both Latvia and Georgia, thereby potentially producing new rifts. This is not to deny the possibility that some forms of repair can facilitate ‘living with the recursive effects of the past in the present by holding on to the moments of rupture’ (Chin, 2024: 8–9, in Thomas, 2024: 103), but rather to ensure that we do not overlook potentially darker sides of repair, including those that amount to erasure.

Elements of the in-between

When it comes to discussions of the ‘in-between’, it appears to us that anthropologists have relied a bit too often on catchy word plays. It is telling that while Mary Douglas’s phrase ‘dirt is matter out of place’ caught the attention of the anthropological community, relatively little attention has been paid to the becoming and unbecoming of dirt itself, or to its dynamic relationship with dominant categories. And, while Victor Turner’s phrase ‘betwixt and between’ easily rolls off the anthropological tongue, our understanding of the denoted in-between spaces and times (captured in the term ‘communitas’) has remained elusive. This is perhaps for good reason. The ‘unstructured’ is resistant to analysis precisely because it is relatively fluid and contingent. And yet, even if we grant the elusiveness of that which is unstructured – of the anomalous, the transitory, and the liminal – it is nevertheless possible to say more about the dynamics, relations, and logics that shape it. Even if the in-between reveals the weakening and sometimes breakdown of structures, this does not mean that it is devoid of elements of structuration. Indeed, this is what our focus on misfits captures, albeit imperfectly.

The in-between is found in the anomalies that slip through our categorizations, in the interstitial zones of life, and in the sentiments and affects that are produced ‘in between’ materialities of human and other kinds. Our take on the ‘in-between’ resonates with Giesen’s (2010) work in cultural sociology that explores how ‘figurations of the ambivalent, uncertain, fluid, and liminal come to constitute identity and differences’ (as cited in Wydra, 2011: 185). The larger point here is that ‘in-between’ times and spaces are fluid but not amorphous, and in fact offer insight into processes of structuration. We thus speak of processes of ordering and disordering, of repair that simultaneously erases, and of perspectives that gain or lose dominance. Ambiguity and transience have their momentum, requiring analytical attention. We draw attention to the technologies and tools that are used to produce and to close down the in-between, because it is here that the work of fitting and misfitting comes into its own. The ‘moments of misfit’ and the instantaneous affective responses they trigger are in fact complexly entangled in broader processes, as discussed in relation to misfitting monuments, guests and refugees, and soldiers. These moments also cause their own ripple effects, from efforts to neutralize that which is strange, to efforts to blend or fit in. The shape of these after-effects, however, depends on the power relations involved. At times, the ‘misfitting’ elements are even able to turn the tables, including by fomenting relationships that destabilize dominant discourses, potentially opening up new spaces.

In short, this special issue looks at how society is constantly being stitched together, how misfitting elements are being dealt with, how ruptures are being repaired or overwritten, as well as how the social fabric may come apart, or be rejected. In doing so, it shows society as a true patchwork, suggesting parallels with what has recently been celebrated as ‘patchwork anthropology’ (Günel et al., 2020). The term is a useful reminder that, at the end of the day, what all anthropologists are ever only able to see, as they work with discontinuous sources, is fragments of our complex reality. ¹³ Some patchworks are clearly sturdier than others, in a way perhaps not so dissimilar to how people across the world are always busy making sense of, connecting, smoothing over, and repairing their fractious experiences. Hence, this special issue advocates paying close attention not only to the ‘patches’ but also to the materials used to ‘patch up’ – to the stitches, the knots – and how these may produce rupture elsewhere in the patchwork. Misfits speak to the in-between, to the undertheorized aspect of social life. According to Marilyn Strathern in her book Relations (2020: 5), this may be due to Western philosophy long having considered relations as epiphenomenal to the ‘discrete phenomena’ they connect, rather than thinking of phenomena as being constituted relationally. In line with this, our prism of misfitting is about theorizing the patchiness of social fabrics, constituted through the awkward relations that manifest themselves in between.