Underdevelopment in a North African Tribe: Toward a Psychology of Peripheral Social Orders

Abstract

This paper reconceptualizes the “psychology of modernization” in light of the fact that many Third World societies are underdeveloping rather than developing. It draws on postcolonial research by North African social scientists and the author's ethnographic and life‐narrative research in the Moroccan pre‐Sahara to describe a traditional society that is not “becoming modern,” but “becoming peripheral.” In this society there is a provisional‐made‐permanent character of its household‐based, clientelistic social relations. Three social psychological fields derive from these social relations and define the dimensions along which this society—and perhaps peripheral orders in general—differ from core, industrialized societies: the familial, the persecutory, and the defensive dimensions. These differences may obtain between core and peripheral sectors within the developed nations as well.