Volume 41, Number 7 · April 7, 1994
Life on the Edge
By Clifford Geertz
In the Realm of the Diamond Queen: Marginality in an Out-of-the-Way Place
by Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing
Princeton University Press, 350 pp., $14.95 (paper)
When the third world (as it was called before the second collapsed and the first lost its power to set the globe's agenda) finally begins to modernize—in China, say, or India, in Mexico, the Middle East, or Southeast Asia—a very old phenomenon, as old as the displacement of the American Indians, the Australian Aborigines, the Bushmen, the Bedouins, the Lapps, or the Gypsies, gets a new lease on life. Those peoples who lack or are denied the means of participating in such modernization, or who simply reject the terms on which it is offered, become marginal, and this leads to the creation of encapsulated societies, societies viewed by the majority populations in the countries in which they live as 'backward,' 'traditional,' 'archaic,' 'static,' or 'primitive.' Go-ahead states, bent on 'take-off,' do not bring all their citizens equally with them when they join the contemporary world of capital flows, technology transfers, trade balances, and growth rates. Some, indeed, they quite ceremoniously push aside.
Review, 3141 words
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