Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

Marginalization is a metaphor that refers to processes by which individuals or groups are kept at or pushed beyond the edges of society. The term outsiders may be used to refer to those individuals or groups who are marginalized. The expression marginalization appears to have originated with Robert Park's (1928) concept of “marginal man,” a term he coined to characterize the lot of impoverished minority ethnic immigrants to a predominantly white Anglo-Saxon Protestant United States. It later became popular, particularly in Latin America (e.g., Germani 1980 ), as a term that captured the supposed “backwardness,” not of immigrants in developed countries, but of people in developing countries who fail or are prevented from participating in the economic, political, and cultural transition to modernity. Modernity, it is argued, constitutes as anomalous the subordinate status and cultural differences of rural peoples and the urban poor who are not properly assimilated to the formal economy or the political or social mainstream. More recently, the term marginalization has been largely superseded by the term exclusion. Nonetheless, marginalization often appears as a synonym for extreme poverty or for social exclusion and it may sometimes be difficult to distinguish between the concepts other than in terms of who is choosing to use them. People may be marginalized from economic production; ... log in or subscribe to read full text