The Pariah in Contemporary Society: A Black Sheep or a Prodigal Child? (Invited Paper)

Martin Marcienne

About the book written by Marcienne Martin, The Pariah in Contemporary Society: A Black Sheep or a Prodigal Child?, Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2017, 145 p.

Be the ugly duckling in a family, the head of a Turk in a group, or the pariah in a society, amounts to living in marked and implicit difference, in indifference, even in cruelty.

The research which this book is dedicated to articulates the concept of the “pariah,” and it is through the various filters presented above that we will proceed to its analysis. Besides these, we will try to study the notion of the “pariah” using the different strata that make up human society, such as wonderful tales and literature. We will also present the perception of lexicologists and psychologists, because behind the word there is the object, which is apprehended differently by the human psyche because it is included in value systems varying from one sociocultural group to another. Even though the project is ambitious, it cannot cover this notion entirely because a large number of questions emerge from it. This amounts to opening a Pandora's Box dedicated to this status constructed by human beings, which is based on the diachronic stratum of the lexicology and the symbolic, but also the very nature of living.

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