In modern culture, one can find not only individual individuals, but even entire groups of people who do not fit into the established social structure of society. These are not always representatives of the social "bottom", they can have a high level of education and appropriate status. The difference between such marginal individuals from other people is in a special world of values. Who are the marginals?
Marginalization as a social phenomenon
Wikipedia calls a marginal one who finds himself on the border of opposing social groups or cultures. Such people experience the mutual influence of various value systems, which often contradict one another. In Soviet times, the term “declassed element” was synonymous with the word “marginal”. This was often called people who have slipped to the very bottom of the social hierarchy. But this understanding of marginality should be considered one-sided and not entirely correct.
The concept of "marginality" is also found in sociology. Here it denotes the intermediateness of the social position in which a person finds himself. The first mentions of marginal individuals and groups appeared in American sociology, which described the peculiarities of the adaptation of immigrants to social conditions and orders that were unusual for them, inherent in living in a foreign land.
Marginalized people deny the values of the group from which they left, and assert new norms and rules of behavior.
Beyond the line of your usual life
Marginalization in society increases when social cataclysms begin. If a society is regularly in fever, its structure loses its strength. Completely new social groups and strata of the population are emerging with their own way of life. Not every person in such conditions is able to adapt and stick to a certain shore.
The transition to a new social group is often associated with the need to rebuild behavior and accept a new system of values, which almost always becomes a source of stress.
Coming out of his usual social environment, a person often encounters a situation when a new group does not accept him. This is how the marginals appear. Here is one example of such a social transition. The average engineer who quits his job and decides to go into business fails. He understands that he has not turned out to be a businessman, and a return to his old way of life is no longer possible. To this can be added financial and other material losses, as a result of which a person is left out of life.
But marginality is not always associated with the loss of a sufficiently high previous social status. Quite often, the marginals include quite successful people, whose views, habits and value system do not fit into the well-established notions of "normality." Marginal people may well be fairly wealthy people who have achieved success in their field of activity. But their outlook on life turns out to be so unusual for the average layman that such people are simply not taken seriously or are pushed out of the social community.
