On the Margins

Abstract

IT IS A LONGSTANDING TROPE that observing from the margins affords moral and intellectual clarity. In academia, marginality comes in diff er­ ent forms and can mean diff er ent things. It can be the result of historical shifts in the status of diff er ent disciplines ( today the humanities vis­ à­ vis the domains of science, technology, engineering, and mathe matics), of certain topics or methods within a field or a discipline, or of a set of institutions or nations within academic hierarchies that have been established by long­ lasting traditions or recent rankings. Marginality can also refer to the lower standing accorded to groups facing historical and structural discrimination, notably gen­ der, ethnic, and racial minorities. Of course, these multiple ways of not being fully validated by academic establishments vary across time and from place to place, and in some cases can take highly local and even subjective conno­ tations. Some patterns are nonethless vis i ble, including the tendency of most disciplines to consolidate their bound aries even as they attempt to broaden their scope and membership. The practice of historical writing in the past half­ century has been trans­ formed by a number of diverse and influential scholars, ranging from Natalie Zemon Davis to James C. Scott and from Eric Wolf to Joan W. Scott, to name only a few, who, each from diff er ent standpoints, have brought subjects and approaches that were previously absent from the canon into the mainstream. In the pro cess, they have also given us new paradigms with which to think about culture, power, and economic change.1 More recently, in one of the books of the twenty­ first century most read by historians and social scientists, Kenneth Pomeranz placed eighteenth­ century England and the Yangzi Delta region in a reciprocal comparison and thus challenged the notions of “cen­ ter” and “periphery” as they had been crystallized by Immanuel Wallerstein’s world­ system analysis.2 Some intellectual historians, for their part, have inter preted the margins literally and focused on the margins of the page: by giving equal weight to the authorial text and the copious annotations left by readers in between and around printed and manuscript lines, they have