Anthropology and the Third World

Rose-Marie Chierici

The term Third World ( tiers etat) was coined in 1952 by Alfred Sauvy, a French demographer, to describe the poor, marginalized, and powerless class of prerevolutionary France. Its meaning expanded rapidly to denote areas of the world that were distinct from the industrialized capitalist countries, the First World, and from communist bloc nations that formed the Second World. This new way of talking about disenfranchised peoples of the world caught on rapidly and was used by social scientists at the 1955 Conference of Afro-Asian Countries in Brandung, Indonesia. A new journal, Le Tiers Monde , launched in 1956, provided a forum to explore the conditions of impoverished peoples of the tiers monde —Africa, Asia, Oceania, and Latin America—who, much like the commoners of the French third estate, le tiers etat , lived under conditions of oppression while their labor supported the more affluent social classes. Discussions about the state ...

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