Students of drama, magazine fiction and novels know that virtually every nationality and minority group has been represented by a stereotype in print and on the stage. Social scientists generally discuss stereotypes as components of prejudiced beliefs accompanied by strong, unexamined reactions of dislike or approval. Historians and specialists in literature do not equate stereotyping with prejudice. Instead, they emphasize the origin of stereotypes as routinized, crude or at least oversimplified classifications of multifaceted characters and situations.

On various occasions civilized man has found himself marching side by side with men at lower (or different) levels of social and cultural development. The great civilizations were accustomed to compare themselves quite favorably with these barbarian neighbors, whom they viewed with varying degrees of condescension, suspicion, scorn, and dread. Civilized man, with his urban institutions, his agrarian way of life, his technological and economic sophistication, and his conspicuous literary and plastic artistry, conceived of himself as superior to these other folk with whom he sometimes competed for domination of the richer parts of the world. Long before the ancient Greeks invented the word ‘barbarian’ to describe the Scythians and other peoples who differed from them in not subscribing to the ideals of Greek culture, other civilized men had expressed similar sentiments toward alien peoples with whom they came into contact. This was the point that the old Akkadian author was trying to make when he spoke of neighboring tribes as people ‘who knew not grain’ and who ‘had never known a city’.* Subsequently, both in Asia and Europe the spokesmen of a civilized style of life expressed their dislike or distrust of the barbarian by means of a stereotyped image of him which was couched in terms favorable to civilization. A Chinese chronicler, for example, remarked of the fierce Hsiung-Nu, who troubled the peace of the Middle Kingdom, that ‘their only concern is self-advantage, and they know nothing of propriety and righteousness’.

The concept of the barbarian in early India arises out of the curious situation of the arrival of Indo-Aryan-speaking nomadic pastoralists in northern India who came into contact with the indigenous population (possibly the remnants of the urban civilization of the Indus) and regarded them as barbarians. The earliest distinction made by the Aryan speakers was a linguistic distinction and, to a smaller extent, a physical distinction. The Indo-Aryan speakers spoke Sanskrit whereas the indigenous peoples probably spoke Dravidian and Munda. However the distinction was not one of binary opposition—in fact it admitted to many nuances and degrees of variation, hence the complication of trying to trace the history of the concept. The distinction was rarely clearly manifest and based either on language, ethnic origins or culture. Political status, ritual status and economic power, all tended to blur the contours of the distinction. Added to this has been the confusion introduced by those who tend to identify language with race and who thereby see all speakers of Sanskrit as members of that nineteenth-century myth, the Aryan race.

This essay is concerned with value perceptions of populations marginal to development. In accord with the usage found in United Nations documents, development here designates the move by a society toward self-sustaining economic growth and institutional modernization. Our interest centers on how marginals view the relationship between their own values and the images they have of visible benefits ordinarily associated with development—better housing and nutrition, easier access to jobs, schooling for all, and the like.

The concept of agrarian reform and its role in economic development have been crucial issues among scholars concerned with Third World problems. However, some clarity with regard to the cause and effect nature of agrarian reform is desirable. The purpose of this article is to critically assess past and current literature dealing with agrarian reform and its impact on agricultural development and social, political, and economic change. We will proceed by surveying the literature to determine: (1) where a consensus exists among scholars and officials regarding the concepts of agrarian reform and agricultural development; (2) the role assigned to agrarian reform in social and political development.