From the Margins

Abstract

How can anthropology benefit from cultural studies and cultural studies benefit from anthropology? One area in which these two scholarly trajectories work best together is in theorizing the interface of local and global frames of analysis. The challenge here is to move from situated, that is "local," controversies to widely circulating or "global" issues of power and knowledge and back, as this allows us to develop understandings of the institutions and dialogues in which both local and global cultural agendas are shaped. This essay is about margins as a conceptual site from which to explore the imaginative quality and the specificity of local/global cultural formation. Margins here are not a geographical, descriptive location. Nor do I refer to margins as the sites of deviance from social norms. Instead, I use the term to indicate an analytic placement that makes evident both the constraining, oppressive quality of cultural exclusion and the creative potential of rearticulating, enlivening, and rearranging the very social categories that peripheralize a group's existence. Margins, in this use, are sites from which we see the instability of social categories. One way of thinking about this agenda is to imagine a conversation between the approaches of Michel Foucault and Antonio Gramsci. Foucault shows us the discursive construction of social categories and forms of subjectivity. Gramsci reminds us that these categories and their associated kinds of agency have no unquestioned hegemony. Where Gramsci assumes too much about self-evident political interests that produce resistance and social transformation, Foucault, in showing the convention-laden assumptions behind resistance, obscures the suspense that infects possibilities of change. My interest is in the zones of unpredictability at the edges of discursive stability, where contradictory discourses overlap, or where discrepant kinds of meaning-making converge; these are what I call margins. Attention to marginality highlights both the play and constraint of subordinate social positions. In the United States, for example, minorities are marginalized by exclusion from the assumption of being ordinary-and often the jobs, housing, or political opportunities that "ordinary" (white) people expect. At the