Boundary Zone between Cultural Worlds or the Edge of the Dominant Culture? Two Conceptual Metaphors of Marginality

Abstract

Two notions of marginality are distinguished. The polycultural notion implies the existence of a boundary zone between cultural worlds. Its roots lie in Robert Park's notion of ‘marginal man’. The unicultural notion assumes a single referent culture that has a normative centre and a periphery to which the ‘social outcasts’ are relegated. This usage is common in the public and policy discourse and in studies of crime and poverty, for example in Loïc Wacquant's theory of regime of advanced marginality. Conceptual theory of metaphor is used to work out this distinction and to explore the metaphorical foundations of the concept, connecting it to the basic metaphor of society or culture as a bounded entity. The issue of margin is thematised as principal for the notion of marginality. These findings are discussed in the light of John Urry's and others' post-societal concepts of social and cultural life as well as Homi Bhabha's post-colonial notion of hybridity.

Keywords:

• Boundary
• Culture
• Hybridity
• Marginal Man
• Marginality
• Metaphor

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to Svetlana Bankovskaya, Maggie Campbell, Vince Marotta, Vladimir Nikolaev, Jaan Valsiner and the Kitchen Group at Clark University, for their comments on earlier versions of the manuscript. This research was supported by Foundation for Urban and Regional Studies Studentship (2009–2011).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Nikita A. Kharlamov

Nikita A. Kharlamov, MA, is a doctoral researcher at the Department of Psychology, Clark University (USA) and an associated researcher at the Centre for Fundamental Sociology, National Research University Higher School of Economics (Russia). In his research Nikita attempts to integrate cultural and developmental psychology, urban geography and biosemiotics, to examine the process of making sense of multicultural urban environment. He also writes on the history of urban studies (particularly the Chicago and LA Schools) and on the notion of marginality