Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study
Orlando Patterson
Language: English
Pages: 542
ISBN: B01MXF1254
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
This is the first full-scale comparative study of the nature of slavery. In a work of prodigious scholarship and enormous breadth, which draws on the tribal, ancient, premodern, and modern worlds, Orlando Patterson discusses the internal dynamics of slavery in sixty-six societies over time. These include Greece and Rome, medieval Europe, China, Korea, the Islamic kingdoms, Africa, the Caribbean islands, and the American South. Slavery is shown to be a parasitic relationship between master and slave, invariably entailing the violent domination of a natally alienated, or socially dead, person. The phenomenon of slavery as an institution, the author argues, is a single process of recruitment, incorporation on the margin of society, and eventual manumission or death.
Distinctions abound in this work. Beyond the reconceptualization of the basic master-slave relationship and the redefinition of slavery as an institution with universal attributes, Patterson rejects the legalistic Roman concept that places the "slave as property" at the core of the system. Rather, he emphasizes the centrality of sociological, symbolic, and ideological factors interwoven within the slavery system. Along the whole continuum of slavery, the cultural milieu is stressed, as well as political and psychological elements. Materialistic and racial factors are deemphasized. The author is thus able, for example, to deal with "elite" slaves, or even eunuchs, in the same framework of understanding as fieldhands; to uncover previously hidden principles of inheritance of slave and free status; and to show the tight relationship between slavery and freedom.
Interdisciplinary in its methods, this study employs qualitative and quantitative techniques from all the social sciences to demonstrate the universality of structures and processes in slave systems and to reveal cross-cultural variations in the slave trade and in slavery, in rates of manumission, and in the status of freedmen. Slavery and Social Death lays out a vast new corpus of research that underpins an original and provocative thesis.
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Important question, of course, is not the mere presence of physical differences but their sociological significance for Greeks and Romans. Certainly, when one considers the striking emphasis the Greeks placed on physical beauty in both sexes, especially males, it would be sociologically unlikely that somatic factors did not figure in their treatment of slaves. A beautiful young boy slave who came close to the Greek physical ideal would almost certainly end up as the homosexual lover of his.
Murdock's sample of world societies. If Murdock's list of 186 societies is a valid approximation of the full range of human cultures, then drawing on the slaveholding societies in this sample should provide a reasonable basis for formulating general statements. There has been an enormous growth in slavery studies in recent years. Indeed, the most important developments in quantitative historical methods have been disproportionately concentrated in this area. Almost all have centered on the.
Number Percent Sla very present: Number Percent NOTE: Caste absent 114 66.3 33 19.2 Complex caste differen (ia fio n Occupational groupings Ethnic stratification 6 3.5 1 4 0.6 2.3 2 2 1.2 1.2 10 5.8 Chi square = 14.17, with three degrees of freedom. Significance = 0.0027. 50 The Internal Relations of Slavery pational castes is balanced by a rather weak relation with complex caste systems. More important is what is revealed by the ethnographic data on those societies which have.
Numerical strength, the idea was abandoned. 93 The presence of tattoos also identified slaves. They were universal in the ancient Near East, although apparently removable. 94 Surprisingly few so- Authority, Alienation, and Social Death 59 cieties in the premodern world branded slaves and when they did, as in China, Hellenistic Egypt (where it was eventually forbidden by law), and Rome, only incorrigible runaways were marked. In late medieval and early modern Europe, however, branding of.
Of the world, persons from all classes exposed unwanted children, again with girls being exposed at a disproportionately higher rate. 163 Both Babylonian and Roman law remained ambiguous on the issue of exposed children, especially concerning the restoration of their status as free persons. The only section of the Babylonian code that applied to child exposure, despite its frequency, was the edicts on adoption. From these it has been inferred that the child could be taken back by its parents at.