Livelihoods at the Margins

This book is an edited volume based on selected papers from a two-day interdisciplinary and multi-regional conference held at SOAS in July 2004. Taken individually, each of the chapters offer fine-grained ethnographic analyses of the varying contexts in which particular marginalised groups - such as Bangladeshi street children, Ugandan drug dealers and migrant European sex workers - make a living on the social boundaries of different urban environments across the globe. Taken together, the contributions serve to unpack taken-for-granted understandings of terms like marginality, poverty and deprivation, while offering more nuanced ways of interpreting people's strategies for survival than mainstream economic analyses generally allow. Refusing to pathologise the marginal, the authors collectively demonstrate how the practices they describe - from casual labouring to begging - are embedded both within the broader contexts of global capitalism and within the very specific circumstances in which they occur.
This is reflected in the ordering of the chapters, which aim to take the reader on an informative journey that shifts back and forth from the micro to the macro, encountering broader discussion of salient social scientific concerns along the way. The tensions between explanatory models that favour agency over structure and how we might overcome those tensions, for example, are innovatively dealt with in several chapters, and a number of them address issues of social exclusion; everyday survival-strategies; and the implications of livelihoods at the margins for NGO action and Government policy. Contributors are drawn from anthropology, development studies and cultural studies backgrounds, and between them their research for this collection spans eight countries across four continents.