What makes a people marginal? Clearly it is not physical remoteness from the hub of civilization per se. In advanced capitalist society, the most marginalized populations often reside a stone's throw from the seat of modern capitalism, our great financial districts. In Southeast Asia, nevertheless, the most marginalized of a diverse range of marginal populations—upland dwelling ethnic minorities—do reside on the physical as well as social periphery. Moreover, they occupy land that is marginal in an ecological sense. Are these groups, then, made marginal by virtue of their location?
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Philip Hirsch (1990) studied this question.