A QUALIFICATION OF THE MARGINAL MAN THEORY.

This paper suggests a qualification of the theory of the marginal man as conceived by sociologist R.E. Park and elaborated by sociologist Everett V. Stonequist. The concept around which this qualification is oriented is that of the marginal culture. Anthropologists have sometimes used this term to refer to a distant or border culture, but it is used in this discussion as a nongeographical equivalent of the anthropological concept of marginal area. The marginal area is conceived as a region where two cultures overlap and where the occupying group partakes of the traits of both cultures. Here sociologists may review briefly the Park and Stonequist exposition of the theory of the marginal man. When an individual shaped and molded by one culture is brought by migration, education, marriage, or other influence into permanent contact with a culture of a different content, or when an individual from birth is initiated into two or more historic traditions, languages, political loyalties, moral codes, or religions, then he is likely to find himself on the margin of each culture, but a member of neither.