When I first became interested in livestock herders in Africa, I was told they lived on marginal lands. Fifty years later the refrain is the herders are marginalized–marginalized in politics, by the economy, and now because of the climate emergency.
May I suggest a more positive and apposite analogy:
The illuminators [of medieval manuscripts] enriched the margins of the page, conventionally an empty space, with figurative, vegetal or abstract elements. Sometimes the marginal images were merely decorative, at other times they functioned rather like visual footnotes or sidebars, as serious or comic commentaries on the text. . .
Jed Perl (2021). Authority and Freedom. Alfred A. Knopf: New York
Pastoralists continue to illuminate what others persist calling “the margins.” Indeed, pastoralists are our counter-public for that point.
WHEN COMPLEX IS AS SIMPLE AS IT GETS 