polybian

is like an amphibian, one who skillfully adapts to quickly changing social, cultural, and economic conditions.

A polybian (think amphibian) skillyfully adapts to quickly changing social, cultural, and economic conditions. Kearney writes, 'To describe a polybian locally and ahistorically he or she might indeed appear in one context perhaps at one moment in his or her life as a peasant, in another as a plantation worker, and in others as a petty merchant or an urban slum dweller. Each of these identities is reified as the polybian's essential nature by the theories of external differentiation in concert with methodologies that are ahistorical and local in their scope. But these slippery creatures defy constructed social bounds... they cross out of their 'proper' places and enter into marginal spaces. And by populating these border areas they threaten normal social categories that the state has the responsibility to maintain (Kearney 1996, 141f). Kearney, Michael (1996) Reconceptualizing the Peasantry: Anthropology in Global Perspective. Boulder: Westview Press.

polybian, n.Definitions

polybian