ABSTRACT
Scott Lash and John Urry, social theorists, suggest that late twentieth-century societies are characterized by flows of capital, labor, commodities, information, and images. If “flow” suggests some sort of continuity and passage, after all, “boundaries” have to do with discontinuity and obstacles. In a small bundle of geographical metaphors, “boundary” would seem to belong with “frontier,” and with “borderland.” In the case of cultural flows, it is true, what is gained in one place need not be lost at the source. But there is a reorganization of culture in space. “Margins” obviously go with the vocabulary of borders, frontiers, and interstices, and the marginal man is also a part of the intellectual genealogy of contemporary understandings of cultural recombinations. In anthropology, a handful of British diffusionists were inclined to view ancient Egypt as the source of much of world culture – an utterly extreme view, most commentators have since felt, of global center-periphery relationships.
