ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on references to a number of key anthropological theories, mainly by Appadurai, Arnold, Bourdieu, Holston, Scott, and Wacquant. These comparative theories point to the need to elaborate, theoretically and ethnographically, on the connections between the ideological and the socio-economic marginalisation happening in peripheral cores vis-a-vis the more visible, apparently transparent, state, mainstream and elite society. The discussion of relevant literature, and the way it provides a framework for the people ethnography of the waste pickers of Calcutta, serves to demonstrate two distinctly different models of marginalisation. The traditional view within anthropology is to understand marginalised people within a framework of ethnicity, caste or class. They give their opinions in terms of their 'rewards and benefits, whether they be ideological or material', and in broader terms they can resist or cooperate with hierarchisation or newly imposed ideologies.
