ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the strengths and weaknesses of postmodern contributions to investigations of marginal regions and deals with some suggestions for theoretical and practical reformulation. It explains the contributions, both positive and negative, which postmodernism has made to debates about life and society on the periphery. The chapter provides some of the basic contributions postmodernism has made, as a social science framework, to rethinking the contemporary era. The primary contribution which postmodern social science has made to a serious re-examination of social analysis has been the reassertion, primarily in the discipline of geography, of spatial questions for social investigation. ?. Latour proposes that much of contemporary sociology, but especially postmodernism, has made it virtually impossible to bridge the conceptual gap between nature and culture because the initial premises of sociological theory postulate a fundamental, division between nature and culture. One gets little indication of the substantial work done on marginal cultures of either resistance or creative adaptation.
