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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Serie: Ancient World: Comparative Histories
- Sprache: Englisch
On Human Bondage—a critical reexamination of Orlando Patterson’s groundbreaking Slavery and Social Death—assesses how his theories have stood the test of time and applies them to new case studies.
- Discusses the novel ideas of social death and natal alienation, as Patterson first presented them 35 years ago and as they are understood today
- Brings together exciting new work by a group of esteemed historians of slavery, as well as a final chapter by Patterson himself that responds to and expands upon the other contributions
- Provides insights into slave societies around the world and across time, from classical Greece and Rome to modern Brazil and the Caribbean, and from Han China and pre-colonial South Asia to early modern Europe and the New World
- Delves into a wide range of topics, including the reformation of social identity after slavery, the new historicist approach to slavery, rituals of enslavement and servitude, questions of honor and dishonor, and symbolic imagery of slavery
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2016
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Table of Contents
Cover
Title Page
List of Figures and Tables
Notes on Contributors
Preface
Introduction
References
1 Slavery and Personhoodin the Neo‐Assyrian Empire
Introduction
The Neo‐Assyrian Period: Introductory Remarks
The Ideological Dimension of Assyrian Slavery
The Sources of Slaves
Terminology and Definitions
The Social Order
Conclusions
References
2 Orlando Patterson, Property, and Ancient Slavery
The “Property Definition” and Patterson’s Critique
The Concept of Ownership in Legal Theory
Two Ancient Case Studies
Patterson’s Approach: A Reappraisal
A Further Twist
A Return to the Property Definition
References
3 Slaves or Serfs?
Introduction
Patterson’s Definition of Slavery
Thetes in Pre‐Solonic Athens
The History of the Helots
Helots as Property
Helots as Socially Dead
Prototypical Slaves
Helots as Serfs
Conclusion
References
4 Death and Social Death in Ancient Rome
Slavery, Dominion, and Social Death: Conceptions and Misconceptions
Death, Commemoration, and Roman Slavery
“Liminality,” Process, and the Ideology of Manumission
Three Myths of Slavery and Immortality
References
5 Freedom, Slavery, and Female Sexual Honor in Antiquity
Introduction: The Romance of Freedom
Defining Slavery in Antiquity
Eleutherai
in Ancient Greek Societies
Concluding Thoughts
References
6 Becoming Almost Somebody
The Manumission Statute from Zhangjiashan
The Status of Freedman
Manumission and the Founding of the Han Empire
References
7 Ottoman Elite Enslavementand “Social Death”
Introduction
Ottoman Elite Enslavement, or the Honor of
Kul
/
Harem
Slaves
Social Death and Kinlessness
By Way of Conclusion: Enslavement as a Relationship
References
8 The Locked Box in
Slavery and Social Death
Pandora’s Box: Property and Slaves in Classical South Asia
Respect for Property: Mughal Administrators, Laymen donors, and Ecclesiastical Proprietors of Wealth‐in‐People
Disputed Property: Mughal Guarantees and British Extensions of “Contract” from 1790s
Conclusion
References
9 Honor and Dishonor in the Slavery of Colonial Brazil
Thing or Zumbi?
The Honor of Being a Slave: Slavery as a Negotiated Choice
Slave Ownership among Slaves
African Religiosity as a Form of Power and Solidarity
Conversion to Catholicism
Rosary Brotherhood and the Kings of Congo Feasts
Slave Women in the Household and as Slaves for Hire
Between Social Disqualification and Classification
Concubinage
References
10 (Child) Slavery in Africa as Social Death?
New Trends in History and in the Study of Slavery in Africa
Child Slavery in Nineteenth‐Century Africa: A History of Emotions and Suicidal Ideation
Child Slavery and the Issue of Agency and Context
Conclusion
References
11 Slavery and Freedom in Small‐Scale Societies
Equality and Slavery in Small‐Scale Societies
Slaves and Status in North America
Conclusions
References
12 Rituals of Enslavement and Markers of Servitude
Rituals of Enslavement
The Kalinago of the Lesser Antilles
The Conibo of Eastern Peru
The Guaicurú of the Grand Chaco
Markers of Servitude
Acknowledgments
References
13 Slavery from Rome to Medieval Europe and Beyond
References
14 Revisiting Slavery, Property, and Social Death
Reconsidering Property
Property and Slavery across Time and Societies
Women and Slavery
Revisiting Social Death
References
Index
End User License Agreement
List of Tables
Chapter 10
Table 10.1 Enslaved African children purchased by the North German Missionary Society, including age and origin, 1863.
Chapter 13
Table 13.1 Twenty words that co‐occur most frequently with
mancipium
in 4754 texts printed in Migne 1844–1864 according to eHumanities Desktop www.hucompute.org/ressourcen/ehumanities‐desktop, accessed April 24, 2014. On this date, the occurrences of
mancipium
and its various forms totaled 1410 (the totals change slightly as the editors continue to perfect the content); many of the associated words co‐occur with other associated words in the same passage, hence the percentages overlap.
List of Illustrations
Chapter 04
Figure 4.1 Funerary stele of M. Publilius Satyr from Capua representing two togate figures and the sale of a slave at auction. The inscriptions record (on the epistyle at the top): “[Marcus] Publilius Satur, freedman of Marcus, (had this made) from his own savings for himself and Marcus Publilius Step(h)anus, freedman of Marcus;” (in the middle, between the two figured scenes): “(Done) according to the discretion of Marcus Publilius Gadia, freedman of Marcus, auctioneer, and Marcus Publilius Timot(h)es, freedman of Marcus;” (on the listellum, below the auction scene): “[… Gadi?]ae < et > T(imotis?) lived for twenty‐two years” (
CIL
10.8222; see n. 15).
Figure 4.2 Tombstone of an infant boy, Sextus Rufius Achilleus, from Rome. Achilleus is represented in the guise of Mercury, with tortoise, cock, money bag, and
caduceus
, c. 100–150
CE
. “To the Divine Spirits, to Sextus Rufius Achilleus. He lived seven months, nine days. Sextus Rufius Decibalus made (this) for his sweetest son.” (
CIL
6.25572), see n. 21. After Friggeri
et al
. 2012: 533, no. IX, 4.
Figure 4.3 Schema of van Gennep’s rites of passage with Patterson’s stages of slavery compared with the corresponding stages of dying (after Metcalf and Huntington 1991: 30).
Chapter 12
Figure 12.1 Kalinago high‐ranking woman, 1600s.
Figure 12.2 Conibo warrior with captive woman, mid‐1800s.
Figure 12.3 Chamacoco slave woman, early 1800s.
Chapter 13
Figure 13.1 The frequency of the words “slavery” and “emancipation” in English‐language books published between 1800 and 2000
CE
, included in Google Books Ngram Viewer: http://books.google.com/ngrams. Smoothing of three years. See Michel
et al.
2011.
Figure 13.2 The frequency of the words “slavery” and “emancipation” in English‐language books published between 1800 and 1900
CE
, included in Google Books Ngram Viewer: http://books.google.com/ngrams. No smoothing. See Michel
et al.
2011.
Guide
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Table of Contents
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The Ancient World: Comparative Histories
Series Editor: Kurt Raaflaub
Published
War and Peace in the Ancient WorldEdited by Kurt A. Raaflaub
Household and Family Religion in AntiquityEdited by John Bodel and Saul Olyan
Epic and HistoryEdited by David Konstan and Kurt A. Raaflaub
Geography and Ethnography: Perceptions of the World in Pre‐Modern SocietiesEdited by Kurt A. Raaflaub and Richard J. A. Talbert
The Roman Empire in Context: Historical and Comparative PerspectivesEdited by Johann P. Arnason and Kurt A. Raaflaub
Highways, Byways, and Road Systems in the Pre‐Modern WorldEdited by Susan E. Alcock, John Bodel, and Richard J. A. Talbert
The Gift in AntiquityEdited by Michael L. Satlow
The Greek Polis and the Invention of DemocracyEdited by Johann P. Arnason, Kurt A. Raaflaub, and Peter Wagner
Thinking, Recording, and Writing History in the Ancient WorldEdited by Kurt A. Raaflaub
Peace in the Ancient World: Concepts and TheoriesEdited by Kurt A. Raaflaub
The Adventure of the Human Intellect: Self, Society and the Divine in Ancient World CulturesEdited by Kurt A. Raaflaub
On Human Bondage: After Slavery and Social DeathEdited by John Bodel and Walter Scheidel
On Human Bondage
After Slavery and Social Death
Edited byJohn Bodel and Walter Scheidel
This edition first published 2017© 2017 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
Registered OfficeJohn Wiley & Sons, Ltd, The Atrium, Southern Gate, Chichester, West Sussex, PO19 8SQ, UK
Editorial Offices350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148‐5020, USA9600 Garsington Road, Oxford, OX4 2DQ, UKThe Atrium, Southern Gate, Chichester, West Sussex, PO19 8SQ, UK
For details of our global editorial offices, for customer services, and for information about how to apply for permission to reuse the copyright material in this book please see our website at www.wiley.com/wiley‐blackwell.
The right of John Bodel and Walter Scheidel to be identified as the authors of the editorial material in this work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, except as permitted by the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, without the prior permission of the publisher.
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Library of Congress Cataloging‐in‐Publication Data
Names: Bodel, John P., 1957– editor. | Scheidel, Walter, 1966– editor. | Brown University, host institution.Title: On human bondage : after slavery and social death / edited by John Bodel and Walter Scheidel.Description: Chichester, West Sussex ; Malden, MA : John Wiley & Sons Inc., 2016. | Papers from a conference, “Being Nobody?”, held at Brown University. | Includes bibliographical references and index.Identifiers: LCCN 2016022486| ISBN 9781119162483 (cloth) | ISBN 9781119162520 (epub) | ISBN 9781119162506 (Adobe PDF)Subjects: LCSH: Slavery–History–Congresses. | Slaves–Social conditions–Congresses. | Patterson, Orlando, 1940– Slavery and social death–Congresses.Classification: LCC HT861 .O64 2016 | DDC 306.3/6209–dc23LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016022486
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Cover image: Sadeugra/Gettyimages
List of Figures and Tables
Figures
4.1
Funerary stele of M. Publilius Satyr from Capua representing two togate figures and the sale of a slave at auction.
4.2
Tombstone of an infant boy, Sextus Rufius Achilleus, from Rome.
4.3
Schema of van Gennep’s rites of passage with Patterson’s stages of slavery compared with the corresponding stages of dying.
12.1
Kalinago high‐ranking woman, 1600s.
12.2
Conibo warrior with captive woman, mid‐1800s.
12.3
Chamacoco slave woman, early 1800s.
13.1
The frequency of the words “slavery” and “emancipation” in English‐language books published between 1800 and 2000
CE,
included in Google Books Ngram Viewer:
http://books.google.com/ngrams
. Smoothing of three years.
13.2
The frequency of the words “slavery” and “emancipation” in English‐language books published between 1800 and 1900
CE,
included in Google Books Ngram Viewer:
http://books.google.com/ngrams
. No smoothing.
Tables
10.1
Enslaved African children purchased by the North German Missionary Society, including age and origin, 1863.
13.1
Twenty words that co‐occur most frequently with
mancipium
in 4754 texts printed in Migne 1844–1864.
Notes on Contributors
Heather D. Baker has been Assistant Professor of Ancient Near Eastern History at the University of Toronto since September 2014, having previously held research positions at the Universities of Helsinki and Vienna. Her work focuses on Mesopotamia in the first millennium BCE, with specific interests in Babylonian urbanism, house and household, the Neo‐Assyrian royal palace, and the integration of textual and archaeological evidence.
Anthony Barbieri‐Low, Professor of Early Chinese History at the University of California, Santa Barbara, specializes in the social, legal, economic, and material‐culture history of early imperial China. His first book, Artisans in Early Imperial China (2007), was awarded numerous international book prizes. His recently published book, Law, State, and Society in Early Imperial China (2015), offers a study and translation of recently excavated legal manuscripts from early China.
John Bodel is W. Duncan MacMillan II Professor of Classics and Professor of History at Brown University. He studies ancient Roman history and Latin literature and has special interests in epigraphy, slavery in antiquity, Roman religion, funerals and burial customs, writing systems, and the ancient novel. His books include two other co‐edited volumes in this series: Household and Family Religion in Antiquity (with S. Olyan, 2008) and Highways, Byways, and Road Systems in the Pre‐Modern World (with S. E. Alcock and R. J. Talbert, 2012). Since 1995 he has directed the U.S. Epigraphy Project, which gathers and shares information about ancient Greek and Latin inscriptions in the United States (http://usepigraphy.brown.edu).
Catherine M. Cameron is a Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Colorado, Boulder. She is an archaeologist whose work focuses on the northern part of the American Southwest during the Chaco and post‐Chaco eras (900–1300 CE). Her Southwestern work has been published as a monograph (Chaco and After in the Northern San Juan, University of Arizona Press, 2009) as well as in articles and book chapters. She also studies captives in prehistory, especially their role in cultural transmission, and has published Captives: How Stolen People Changed the World (University of Nebraska Press, 2016), an edited volume, articles, and book chapters on this topic. She has been a co‐editor of the Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory since 2000.
Indrani Chatterjee is Professor of History at the University of Texas at Austin. Her doctoral dissertation (University of London) was published as Gender, Slavery and the Law in Colonial India (1999). She is the editor of Unfamiliar Relations: History and Family in South Asia (2004) and co‐editor (with Richard M. Eaton) of Slavery and South Asian History (2006). She is also the author of many articles, chapters in edited volumes, and, most recently, of a monograph titled Forgotten Friends: Monks, Marriages and Memories of Northeast India (2013).
Junia Ferreira Furtado is Full Professor of Modern History at the Department of History, Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais (UFMG) and 1A Researcher with the CNPq and Programa Pesquisador Mineiro/FAPEMIG.
Sandra E. Greene, the Stephen ’59 and Madeline ’60 Professor of African History at Cornell University, has published four single authored books and co‐edited four volumes, including Gender, Ethnicity and Social Change on the Upper Slave Coast (1996), Sacred Sites and the Colonial Encounter (2002), West African Narratives of Slavery (2011), African Voices on Slavery and the Slave Trade, Vols 1 and 2 (2013 and 2016), and The Bitter Legacy: African Slavery Past and Present (2013). In addition to writing and teaching courses on African and African Diaspora history, she has served in a number of administrative positions including Chair of the History Department at Cornell, President of the African Studies Association (USA), and Editorial Board member of the American Historical Review. She is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Kyle Harper is Senior Vice President and Provost and Professor of Classics and Letters at the University of Oklahoma. He is the author of Slavery in the Late Roman World, AD 275–425 (2011) and From Shame to Sin: The Christian Transformation of Sexual Morality in Late Antiquity (2013). He is currently working on a study of the environmental history of the high and later Roman Empire.
Peter Hunt is a Professor in the Department of Classics at the University of Colorado, Boulder. His first book, Slaves, Warfare and Ideology in the Greek Historians (Cambridge, 1998), explores the disjunction between the actual extent of slave and Helot participation in Greek warfare and the relative neglect of their role in the contemporary historians (Herodotus, Thucydides, and Xenophon). His second book, War, Peace, and Alliance in Demosthenes’ Athens (Cambridge, 2010), focuses on deliberative oratory as evidence for a more sympathetic and complex view of Athenian thinking and feelings about foreign relations. He is currently finishing a synthetic work, Greek and Roman Slavery: Comparisons and Case Studies, and beginning research on a larger project on the Athenian “frontier” in Thrace.
David M. Lewis has held a Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship at the University of Edinburgh, and took up up the role of Assistant Professor in Greek History at the University of Nottingham in 2016. His forthcoming book Greek Slave Systems and their Eastern Neighbours: A Comparative Study will be published by Oxford University Press.
Michael McCormick studies the fall of the Roman Empire and the origins of Europe. He is the Francis Goelet Professor of Medieval History at Harvard University, where he chairs the Initiative for the Science of the Human Past (http://sohp.fas.harvard.edu). His books include the prize‐winning Origins of the European Economy (2002) and Charlemagne’s Survey of the Holy Land (2011); he recently led the first multi‐proxy scientific and historical reconstruction of climate under the Roman Empire (Journal of Interdisciplinary History 43 (2012): 169–220). He edits the free, student‐created online Digital Atlas of Roman and Medieval Civilizations (http://darmc.harvard.edu), and is active archaeologically in France and Spain.
Orlando Patterson is John Cowles Professor of Sociology at Harvard University. His academic interests include the comparative study of freedom and slavery, and the socio‐cultural roots of poverty and underdevelopment in the Caribbean and US. His books include, The Sociology of Slavery: Jamaica, 1655–1938 (1967); Slavery and Social Death (1982); Freedom in the Making of Western Culture (1991), for which he won the American National Book Award for non‐fiction; and Rituals of Blood: Consequences of Slavery in Two American Centuries (1998). Patterson was, for eight years, Special Adviser for Social Policy and Development to Prime Minister Michael Manley of Jamaica. He has been a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences since 1991.
Fernando Santos‐Granero is a Senior Staff Scientist at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama. Having graduated from the London School of Economics, he has done extensive fieldwork among the Yanesha of Central Peru, as well as historical research of Upper Amazon indigenous societies and regional economies. He is the author of The Power of Love: The Moral Use of Knowledge amongst the Amuesha of Central Peru (1991) and Vital Enemies: Slavery, Predation, and the Amerindian Political Economy of Life (2009), and co‐author with Frederica Barclay of the books Selva Central: History, Economy, and Land Use in Peruvian Amazonia (1998) and Tamed Frontiers: Economy, Society, and Civil Rights in Upper Amazonia (2000).
Walter Scheidel is the Dickason Professor in the Humanities, Professor of Classics and History, and a Kennedy‐Grossman Fellow in Human Biology at Stanford University. He has published widely on ancient social and economic history, premodern demography, and the comparative history of labor and state formation.
Professor Ehud R. Toledano is the Director of the Program in Ottoman and Turkish Studies at the Department of Middle Eastern and African History, Tel Aviv University (TAU), Israel. With a PhD from Princeton University, he conducted extensive research in Istanbul, Cairo, London, and Paris, and taught courses on Middle East history at TAU, UCLA, Oxford, and other leading universities. Noteworthy among the 11 books he has written and edited are The Ottoman Slave Trade and Its Suppression, 1840–1890; State and Society in Mid‐Nineteenth‐Century Egypt; Slavery and Abolition in the Ottoman Middle East; As If Silent and Absent: Bonds of Enslavement in Islamic Middle East; African Communities in Asia and the Mediterranean: Identities between Integration and Conflict (ed.); and Society, Law, and Culture in the Middle East: “Modernities” in the Making (ed., with Dror Ze’evi, in press).
Preface
This volume has grown out of two meetings devoted to the impact of Orlando Patterson’s cross‐cultural work on slavery. At a conference held at Brown University on April 13–15, 2012, under the title “Being Nobody? Understanding Slavery Thirty Years after Slavery and Social Death,” 13 scholars were asked to engage with the key concepts of social death and natal alienation under slavery. On this occasion, Patterson delivered a keynote lecture that was in some ways a sequel to his 1991 book on the history of freedom. Much was gained from this meeting: while many of the contributions found their way into the present collection, this event also highlighted the need for further case studies to ensure more global coverage. At a smaller workshop at the University of Colorado at Boulder on September 29, 2013, several other colleagues joined our project. That meeting very fittingly piggy‐backed on a larger conference on slave societies in history organized by Catherine Cameron and Noel Lenski, an event that touched on another core theme of Patterson’s work. We are grateful to them for their support in organizing the subsidiary workshop that was more narrowly focused on Patterson’s own concepts.
The subtitle of our volume is ambivalent by design: like the conference from which it originated, it marks the retrospective nature of its assessment of Patterson’s contribution three decades on; furthermore, one prominent theme, as it emerges from several contributors’ critiques of Patterson’s original formulation, is on what comes after enslavement and social death by way of the reformation of social identity and the integration of slaves and ex‐slaves into society. Not by design, on the other hand, is the absence from our volume of a contribution on the reception of Patterson’s ideas in studies of slavery in America. There has been no lack of good work done in this area, much of which is cited by our contributors, and we regret this gap in our coverage, which a late cancellation by a speaker originally scheduled for the conference at Brown left us in the end unable to fill. Others will notice other areas not covered: our goal was not to be comprehensive but to offer a sufficient range of types of slave society to test the universality of Patterson’s ideas.
Our conference at Brown was made possible by the generous support of a variety of sponsors at Brown University: the Program in Early Cultures, the Colver Lectureship Fund, the Office of the Dean of the Faculty, the Cogut Center for the Humanities, the Joukowsky Institute for Archaeology and the Ancient World, and the Departments of Africana Studies, Anthropology, Classics, East Asian Studies, Egyptology and Assyriology, History, Portuguese and Brazilian Studies, Religious Studies, and Sociology. The Department of Classics at Stanford University provided additional funding to make this event possible and subsequently funded the workshop at Boulder. We are grateful to all our sponsors for their support; to the students enrolled at Brown in spring 2012 in a course on Slavery in the Ancient World, who considered Patterson’s ideas against the realities of ancient Mediterranean slavery; and to Tara Mulder, who compiled the index and provided invaluable editorial assistance during the final stages.
JBWS
Introduction
John Bodel and Walter Scheidel
In 1982, Orlando Patterson published his landmark comparative study, Slavery and Social Death. It quickly became a classic. His conceptualization of the experience of enslavement as a form of “social death” has been widely adopted by historians of slavery. Patterson’s novel definition of the institution of slavery that focuses on the social condition of slaves rather than on their status as property has likewise attracted much attention. To the present day, his study has remained unparalleled in its ambition to establish globally valid categories for our understanding of slavery by processing information from sixty‐six slave‐owning societies from around the world and over 4000 years of history. A generation after Patterson’s breakthrough achievement, our volume is meant to take stock of how well his principal ideas have stood the test of time and to test them through a number of more specialized case studies. Given the prominence of Patterson’s contribution, critical engagement of this kind has long been overdue.
Patterson’s approach emphasizes the coercive nature of slavery and its consequences both for the slaves themselves and for their owners:
Slavery is one of the most extreme forms of the relation of domination, approaching the limits of total power from the viewpoint of the master, and of total powerlessness from the viewpoint of the slave.
(Patterson 1982: 1)
From this perspective, the violent compulsion, natal alienation, and generalized dishonoring of the slave form the three principal constituent elements of slavery, resulting in a state of exclusion Patterson calls “social death.” Violent action – whether latent or exercised – serves as the physical means of enslavement. Patterson notes that the status of the slave is derived from, or at least construed as being derived from, representing a functional substitute for actual death:
Perhaps the most distinctive attribute of the slave’s powerlessness was that it always originated (or was conceived of having originated) as a substitute for death, usually violent death.
(Patterson 1982: 5)
“Social death” is inflicted and sustained by two “symbolic instruments” of domination. One of them, what Patterson labels “natal alienation,” is conceived of as the severing of prior social ties and claims. It underpins the “definition of the slave, however recruited, as a socially dead person… Alienated from all ‘rights’ or claims of birth, he ceased to belong in his own right to any legitimate social order” (Patterson 1982: 5).
The slave was thus “denied all claims on … his parents and living blood relations,” as well as on ancestors more generally. The latent permanence of slavery is regarded as a corollary of natal alienation (Patterson 1982: 5, 9).
The pervasive dishonoring of the slave is the other symbolic instrument:
The slave … could have no honor because he had no power and no independent social existence, hence no public worth.
(Patterson 1982: 10)
These three elements combine in the famous and often‐quoted definition:
Slavery is the permanent, violent domination of natally alienated and generally dishonored persons.1
Patterson’s vision of the condition of slavery has much in common with Claude Meillassoux’s definition of slaves as “unborn and reprieved from death.” The “de‐socialization” of enslaved persons turns them into aliens who were considered “socially dead” or “non‐born,” shorn of existing social links. Their “de‐personalization” interferes with their capacity to establish new ties, while their “de‐civilization” reinforces their dependence on their owners rather than on the collective (Meillassoux 1991: 99–115). However, while Meillassoux stresses the material consequences of this alienation, thought to render slaves totally exploitable, Patterson focuses more on its ideological dimension and social repercussions (Miller 1989: 473–475). In a similar vein, Alain Testart joins the properties of slaves’ “fundamental exclusion from society” and their exploitability as the two key definitional components of slave status (Testart 2001: 23–25).
Criticism of Patterson’s work has focused on questions of substance, method, and perspective. Substantive disagreements have been rare and mostly centered on his rejection of conventional definitions of slavery as a relationship of property, an issue addressed by Baker (Chapter 1) and Lewis (Chapter 2) and reprised by Patterson (Chapter 14) in this volume.2 Others have questioned the notion of natal alienation as a defining characteristic of slavery, noting the common hardships to which dependent laborers in general are subjected and the lack of a denial of recognized ties to ancestors and family as a distinguishing feature among them (Tenney 2011: 13–31). Not surprisingly, historians wedded to entrenched ideals of disciplinary expertise, cultural contextualization, and attention to detail have sometimes resisted the sociologist Patterson’s willingness to survey diverse bodies of information through the lens of secondary scholarship and to elide real‐life complexities by coding variables in generic fashion (e.g. Fellman 1984: 329; Finkelman 1985: 508, 511; Franklin 1983: 214). This kind of criticism, however valid on its own terms, disregards the inevitable trade‐off between specialist knowledge and breadth of vision: unless we are prepared to dismiss out of hand the very feasibility of world history, compromises must be made. In the context of narrowly circumscribed case studies, it would not even be possible to ask meaningful questions about broader patterns, let alone to try to answer them.3
In terms of perspective, it has repeatedly been pointed out that Patterson effectively privileges the vantage point of the slave‐owner at the expense of that of the slave.4 To some extent this is a logical corollary of any global survey: hegemonic norms and ideals are inherently more suitable objects of cross‐cultural comparison than lived experiences – of slaves and their owners alike. Moreover, in Joseph Miller’s view it is precisely Patterson’s emphasis on the enslaved that tends to subvert his ostensible focus on masterful domination: “By devotedly and brilliantly celebrating the agency of the enslaved, Patterson’s book as a whole disproves his own defining quality of domination; this definition is thus the perspective of the masters, not of the enslaved, and more an ideological assertion than historical behavior” (Miller 2012: 33).
Thus, Patterson’s emphasis on ideal‐typical concepts such as “natal alienation” and “social death” need not be taken to encompass the existential condition of slaves (Brown 2009). They embody owners’ desire to dominate, the strategies they employed to control their slaves, the “symbolic instruments” invoked by Patterson (Patterson 1982: 8; see also Miller 2012: 32). As David Turley aptly specifies, the notion of “social death” subsumes “their theoretical defenselessness, a product of their virtual non‐possession of any rights that had to be observed” (Turley 2000 3; see also Flaig 2009: 21). As eminent a scholar of slavery as David Brion Davis stresses the normative character of servile status: “At least in theory and in law, the slave has no legitimate, independent being, no place in the cosmos except as an instrument of his or her master’s will” (Davis 2006: 31). That slaves frequently retained memories of their ancestral culture, cherished kinship, and more generally resisted the degradations of slavery in myriad ways is irrelevant to the fact that “natal alienation” and “social death” imposed on them a burden that was highly specific to slavery. Patterson’s description of this burden is characteristically precise:
Slaves differed from other human beings in that they were not allowed freely to integrate the experience of their ancestors into their lives, to inform their understanding of social reality with the inherited meanings of their natural forebears, or to anchor the living present in any conscious community of memory. That they reached back for the past, as they reached out for the related living, there can be no doubt. Unlike other persons, doing so meant struggling with penetrating the iron curtain of the master, his community, his laws, his policemen or patrollers, and his heritage.… When we say that the slave was natally alienated and ceased to belong independently to any formally recognized community, this does not mean that he or she did not experience or share informal social relations. A large number of works have demonstrated that slaves in both ancient and modern times had strong social ties among themselves. The important point, however, is that these relationships were never recognized as legitimate or binding.
(Patterson 1982: 5–6)
“Never recognized” by the slave‐owning society, that is, whose norms ensured the “alienation of the slave from all formal, legally enforceable ties of ‘blood,’ and from any attachment to groups or localities other than those chosen for him by the master” (Patterson 1982: 7). At the same time, for Patterson there can be no doubt that owners’ exercise of violent domination, natal alienation, and generalized dishonoring constraints was met with the “irrepressible yearning for dignity and recognition” and “passionate zeal for dignity and freedom” of their slaves (Patterson 1982: 101):
There is absolutely no evidence from the long and dismal annals of slavery to suggest that any group of slaves ever internalized the conception of degradation held by their masters.
(Patterson 1982: 97)
Unlike Patterson’s ideal‐typical notions of “social death,” his reconstruction of the mechanisms providing for the eventual assimilation and integration of slaves into the captor societies – of what one might perhaps label “social rebirth” – has elicited less disagreement.5 As Miller points out, this frequent process rendered slaves “not socially inert but only liminal,” putting them on a trajectory toward a new socially contextualized existence. The significance of this transition for our understanding of slavery is acknowledged by Patterson, who, like Miller, invokes the language and conceptual framework of cultural anthropology to characterize it:
In cultural terms enslavement, slavery, and manumission were symbolically interpreted as three phases in an extended rite of passage. Enslavement was separation (or symbolic execution), slavery was a liminal state of social death, and manumission was symbolic rebirth.
(Patterson 1982: 293)
The process, however, was self‐perpetuating and recursive.
Freedman status was not an end to the process of marginalization but merely the end of the beginning – the end of one phase, slavery, which itself had several stages. Freedman status began a new phase: the ex‐slave was still a marginal, but the process was now moving toward demarginalization socially, and disalienation in personal terms.
(Patterson 1982: 249)
For Patterson, “social rebirth” was a chimera, merely the continuation of slavery by another name. The reconfiguration of the triadic gift‐exchange relationship effected by the master’s gift to the slave of manumission and the ex‐slave’s obligation of gratitude only initiated “a new dialectic of domination and dependence” (Patterson 1982: 294). Integration into society – and, for individuals, rebirth into a newly contextualized identity (disalienation) – came, if it came at all, only after several generations. Exceptions to this pattern, “true of virtually all slave‐owning societies,” in which the stigma of slavery was immediately erased, are by nature exceptional.6 Indeed, so closely linked are the processes of enslavement and manumission that:
It is not possible to understand what slavery is all about until we understand it as a process including the act of manumission and its consequence. Enslavement, slavery, and manumission are not merely related events; they are one and the same process in different phases. To separate one from the other in an imposed schema is as gross an error as the attempt of the biologist to classify as distinct entities larva, chrysalis, and imago.
(Patterson 1982: 296)
Exceptions of the opposite sort – societies that lacked any possibility for “rebirth” – are thus particularly worthy of attention.7
***
The case studies in our volume address several of these issues. One of Patterson’s aims in exploring slavery as a form of domination rather than a matter of property was to demonstrate the consistent workings of the institution not only in the five large scale slave societies (all central to the development of Europe and European culture) that have dominated scholarly discussion to this day but across the sixty‐six slave‐holding societies identified in Murdock and White’s Standard Cross‐Cultural Sample of 186 human societies around the world.8 Accordingly, our contributors assess the utility of Patterson’s ideas for elucidating not only the ancient large scale slave societies of classical Greece and Rome (Chapters 2–5) and the modern ones of Brazil (Chapter 9) and the Caribbean (Chapter 12) but also a range of more “marginal” slave societies in Asia (Chapters 1, 6, 7, 8), Africa (Chapter 10), and the New World (Chapter 11), ranging in date from the first half of the first millennium BCE (Chapter 1) through classical and late antiquity in the west (Chapters 2–5) and Han China in the east (Chapter 6) to medieval (Chapter 13) and early modern Europe (Chapter 7); the pre‐colonial worlds of South Asia (Chapter 8), the American tropics (Chapter 12), and continental North America (Chapter 11); and colonial era Brazil (Chapter 9) and Africa (Chapter 10).
The second chapter confronts Patterson’s most fundamental premise – that slavery is best understood as a relationship of power – most directly. In it David Lewis challenges Patterson’s controversial dismissal of property‐based definitions of the institution and argues that Patterson’s idiosyncratic understanding of property blurs the distinction between rights arising from ownership and those arising from contractual relations. More conventional concepts of property in contemporary legal theory, according to Lewis, mesh better with slave law in two ancient societies, the Neo‐Babylonian empire (700–300 BCE) and classical Athens (500–300 BCE). Lewis argues that most of the constituent elements of Patterson’s iconic definition of slavery – permanence, violence, and alienation – may be interpreted as direct consequences of the property rights exercised by slave‐owners. In substantive terms, therefore, Patterson’s approach can readily be reconciled with standard legal perspectives. Lewis’s contribution moves us closer to a fusion of legal and social definitions of slavery.9
Two contributors explore slavery in small scale societies. An indispensable element of any cross‐cultural perspective, as Patterson recognized, it has rarely received adequate attention in critiques of his work. Deriving from two different worlds and separated by two millennia, the slaving practices of the Amerindian peoples of North America and Neo‐Assyrian Babylonians reveal divergently opposite perceptions of enslaved peoples as outsiders without recognized familial connections. In both cultures social organization was framed around households, which might (but need not) be constituted by kinship relations, but the position of slaves vis‐à‐vis the household structures varied not only between the two cultures but within the slave societies of both.
Heather Baker emphasizes the relative quality of servility in the Mesopotamian world of the early first millennium BCE and the range of dependent statuses embraced by the most common terms for “slave” (Chapter 1). The mass deportation and forced resettlement of conquered peoples during the Neo‐Assyrian period (c. 900–600 BCE) provided a ready source of involuntary labor for public works, but the great majority of the captives working under servile conditions became Assyrian subjects and were settled and helped to become self‐supporting. Manumission is not attested in any Neo‐Assyrian source, which suggests that for those whose servitude was owed to purchase or birth into slavery, death and escape were the only ways out. Family ties among slaves were probably the prerogative of the master, but social and practical considerations influenced slave owners to support slave unions. Integration into society was not possible except through domestic slavery. Natal alienation was therefore not inevitable, and, in a society built around households as institutions, “social death” was reserved for those outside the structures that embraced household dependents.
By contrast, Catherine Cameron, in her review of indigenous practices of slavery in North America before the period of intensive European contact, endorses the concept of “social death,” noting that slaves were normally considered outsiders, owing to their exclusion from the kin groups that constituted the framework of household organization (Chapter 11). Social “rebirth” was only sometimes feasible: while some groups offered little opportunity for re‐integration, others were open to the eventual incorporation of slaves into local kin groups, albeit often in inferior positions.
Like Baker, Peter Hunt in his study of dependent groups in archaic and early classical Greece (800–400 BCE) notes that key features of Patterson’s constituent elements (dishonor, domination, permanence, and violence) do not distinguish slavery from other forms of oppression (Chapter 3). Furthermore, the concept of natal alienation (which does set slavery apart) normally encompasses the same groups of persons as are circumscribed by traditional property‐based definitions of the institution. The condition in archaic Greece of dependent groups such as thetes, who seem to have claimed recognized familial connections (indicated in part by patronymics in personal names), and helots, whose status is debated but who seem to have enjoyed comparatively stable lives within families and communities, more closely resembles that of rural peasants or even serfs than of chattel slaves. A definition of serfdom as “peasantry bound to the soil” better characterizes the condition of helots than either Patterson’s or traditional property‐based definitions of slavery. Failing to discriminate among degrees and modes of servitude in the ancient world renders Patterson’s criteria of social death and natal alienation only partially relevant to interpreting dependent servitude in early Greece.
Ehud Toledano likewise finds Patterson’s characterization of slavery of the Ottoman empire (c. 1400–1900) inappropriately indiscriminate in grouping together with agricultural slaves elite groups such as the kul, mamluk, and gulam, who were not violently dominated, enjoyed recognized kinship relations in families constituted both biogenetically and culturally, and were not generally dishonored (Chapter 7). Drawing from the dyadic and symbiotic relationship of master and slave suggested by Patterson’s metaphor of parasitism, Toledano proposes as more illuminating of Ottoman society an alternative conception of slavery as an involuntary relationship of mutual dependence between unequal partners, in which attachment to a household encompassed the enslaved within the network of kinship and patronal relations that bound the society together. In this, Ottoman society resembles the household‐based societies of Neo‐Assyrian Mesopotamians (Chapter 1) and indigenous North Americans (Chapter 11). Emphasizing the slave–master dynamic as one of mutuality in opposition rather than a contest of wills enables us to recognize the concept of social death as a polarizing abstraction that conceals a more complex relationship of reciprocal accommodation.
Indrani Chatterjee similarly challenges Patterson’s model with regard to slavery in pre‐modern India, which has rarely been studied from the perspective of “social death” (Chapter 8). Arguing that natal alienation and the generalized dishonoring of slaves were a belated product of British colonialism, Chatterjee emphasizes ancient provisions for the heritability of slaves’ property, a custom at variance with notions of formal kinlessness. She draws attention instead to pre‐modern Indian property regimes – the “locked box” of property law in the subcontinent – informed by Buddhist, Hindu, and Sufi beliefs that produced more complex outcomes, most notably modes of joint ownership. In her view, these traditions signal a stronger concern with balancing the honor of free and slave than Patterson’s taxonomy allows for.
Two of our contributors assess the concepts of social death and dishonor as they applied especially to female slaves. In a survey that spans a millennium of ancient Greek and Roman culture (c. 500 BCE – 500 CE), Kyle Harper investigates the nexus of freedom and female sexual honor in a male‐dominated world (Chapter 5). The semantic conflation, for women, of “free” and “sexually respectable” reflects the inverse relationship, the dishonored status of sexually exploitable female slaves, a position illustrated by the Greco‐Roman practice of slave prostitution. This analysis reinforces Patterson’s linkage of slavery and dishonor and adds a gender‐specific nuance to the control of masters over their slaves’ bodies.
Addressing the issue from the opposite perspective, Junia Furtado takes on the challenge of exploring the lived experience of female slaves in their struggle to regain honor and exercise some control over their lives (Chapter 9). The area of conflict between owners’ conceptions of domination and the aspirations and accomplishments of current and former slaves is a natural testing ground for Patterson’s model, and Furtado enters it with carefully developed case studies of slave women and freedwomen in eighteenth‐century Brazil who owned slaves, earned income as concubines or service providers, and purchased their freedom more frequently than did their male counterparts. Both her chapter and Chatterjee’s (Chapter 8) flesh out Patterson’s contention that transcendence of “social death” demanded struggle, which was driven by what he recognized as slaves’ “irrepressible yearning for dignity and recognition” (Patterson 1982: 101).
Two other contributors take on the question of social death as it related to the “rebirth” and integration into society of ex‐slaves in two early empires located at opposite ends of the Eurasian continent at similar stages of their imperial development.
John Bodel explores the implications of Patterson’s characterization of slavery as “institutionalized liminality” for the idea of “social death” as it applies to slavery in ancient Roman society of the classical period (c. 100 BCE – 300 CE) (Chapter 4). The essence of the contradiction inherent in Patterson’s metaphor and his conception of slavery as part of the three‐stage process of recruitment, enslavement, and manumission is crystalized in Roman culture in the deaths of slaves and how they were perceived and managed. According to Bodel, the commemorative funerary practices of Roman slaves and ex‐slaves, fostered by the slave‐owning class, refute the notion that Romans regarded slavery as a form of “social death.” Rather, Roman practice regarding the deaths of slaves reflects a conception of slavery itself as a part of a process. Ideologically, Romans conceived of the condition of slavery as a term sentence and likened slaves who died before manumission to children who perished before they reached adulthood. Three myths involving slaves, overcoming death, and passing into new states illustrate more accurately than Patterson’s idea of social death the Roman conception of slavery as a transitional stage of life leading to manumission and rebirth into a new life.
Anthony Barbieri‐Low deals with the same conception of manumission as resurrection at the opposite end of the Eurasian landmass, in early China. Drawing on newly published documents from the beginning of the Han period (c. 200 BCE), he identifies a remarkable capacity for re‐integration in the legal provision that the slaves of heirless masters were to be freed and to succeed them, even though former slaves were classified among a degraded class of persons. Another edict ordered the freeing of persons who had sold themselves into slavery at a time of crisis. From one of the new sets of statutes it emerges that manumitted slaves and others “released” from a degraded status (shùrén) were able to own land and to constitute legal households. Despite these unusual features of early Han slavery, Barbieri‐Low stresses the close match between this previously unknown evidence and Patterson’s cross‐cultural findings, especially the use of manumission to encourage obedience and productivity, the role of freedmen as dependent clients, and the freedman’s continued obligation to perform services for the master.
Finally, two of our contributors demonstrate the continuing viability of Patterson’s model for illustrating the “symbolic instruments” through which masters sought to control their slaves and the psychic defenses slaves activated against them by refining and elaborating Patterson’s conceptions of natal alienation and social death as they apply to special categories of slaves in the tropical Americas and sub‐Saharan Africa.
Sandra Greene’s pioneering study of the experience of child slavery in nineteenth‐century Africa reveals critical nuance in its deployment of insights from the study of emotions and child psychology to illustrate the particular circumstances under which enslaved children suffered the emotional devastation of natal alienation (Chapter 10). On the one hand, entrenched beliefs that spiritual forces moved together with the living and that enslavement by itself was incapable of severing connections with one’s ancestors interfered with natal alienation as envisioned by Patterson, sometimes to the extent that slave‐owners were expected to acknowledge these spiritual presences. On the other, enslaved children appear to have felt the ruptures of social death very deeply and on occasion to have reasserted their agency by resorting to suicidal behavior: owners’ attempts to inflict “social death” might lead to its physical counterpart. Yet Greene also notes slave children’s desire to reconnect with their natal groups and reject identities tied to their new masters.
Fernando Santos‐Granero adopts the “social death” approach to great effect in his study of the strategies of natal alienation and dishonoring in three tropical American societies that kept slaves on a large scale (Chapter 12). He identifies linguistic and bodily markers, including ritual torture, that stigmatized war‐captives as alien, less‐than‐human, and generally inferior beings. Under slavery, these persons were caught in a state of limbo, severed from their native backgrounds but not (yet) integrated into their captor societies. A “civilizing” process could lead to re‐integration, in keeping with Patterson’s model, but the physical markers of servitude, which identified slaves as social hybrids, inferior persons integrated into society as subordinates, imparted to slaves what Patterson aptly calls “the liminal status of the institutionalized outsider” (Patterson 1982: 46). The link between body modification and linguistic labeling common among tropical American slave societies recalls the association of female corporeal integrity with personal liberty in classical Greco‐Roman society, as discussed by Harper (Chapter 5).
The penultimate chapter points to novel ways of looking at slavery. When Patterson’s book came out more than three decades ago, his sociological approach of global comparative study was unfamiliar to students of slavery and made a profound impression on the field. Even though formal analysis along these lines has remained rare, the recent rise of world history as a field of teaching and research has rendered global perspectives less exceptional.10 Equally rare in the fraught field of slavery studies was Patterson’s appeal to a socio‐biological metaphor of parasitism to characterize the mutual dependency of master and slave, which drew analogy from life sciences without entering the discredited territory of biogenetic determinism.
Today, advances in the study of human genomics have made the vocabulary of cellular chemistry as familiar as that of evolutionary biology was to an earlier generation. Michael McCormick suggests that the time has thus come for a more transdisciplinary approach to investigating the human past, one grounded in the natural, life, information, and (one might add) linguistic sciences, and embracing the possibilities of Big Data, properly aggregated and queried, to illuminate the evolving perceptions and realities of slavery in Europe across the six centuries (c. 400–1000 CE) that witnessed the earliest phase of its post‐classical formation (Chapter 13). Recent gains in digitized technologies across disciplines have enabled and will continue to facilitate ever more refined interrogation of large databanks of words (illustrating changes in linguistic usage over time), things (the material traces of the slave trade and the lived experiences of slaves), and “genomes” (a shorthand reference for a variety of bio‐archeological approaches, including population‐based osteological analysis of human remains as well as genomic studies), that collectively will soon allow us to trace broad population movements and evolving perceptions of slavery across Europe and beyond.
Perhaps the greatest value such studies may hold for evaluating the concept of “social death” is in their latent demonstration of the ubiquity of slavery in the history of Europe and the stark contrast between Patterson’s sociological concept of “natal alienation,” which operated systemically but individually, and the thoroughly miscegenated bloodlines of the European, North African, and Western Asian populations of medieval Europe, both slave and free, and their modern descendants. While this contribution takes us far beyond the debate about the themes of slaves’ “social death” and “rebirth” that forms the focus of our collection, it is true to Patterson’s passion for methodological and conceptual innovation. This makes it a fitting contribution to a volume dedicated to his inspiring work.
Orlando Patterson attended the conference at Brown and graciously agreed to reflect on the thirteen contributions offered in response to his work. In the final chapter of the volume he comments on major themes brought out in the essays and elaborates and advances his own thinking in four areas: concepts of property as they relate to slavery; the diverse workings of these concepts, particularly a “bundle‐of‐rights” view of property, in slave‐holding societies ranging in type from the highly personalistic to the highly materialistic; the special connections between women and slavery; and the metaphors of social death and rebirth as reflecting a dynamic conception of slavery and manumission. The discussion concludes with a consideration of the apostle Paul’s development of the symbolic imagery of slavery, death, and rebirth into the foundational metaphor of the Christian faith and thus a cornerstone of European thought.
On balance, the contributors’ essays, and Patterson’s response to them, seem more to refine and to reaffirm than to refute many of his central ideas. Some of Patterson’s sharpest points have been blunted by counter‐example, but others have been honed by provocation into more precise and nuanced instruments of analysis. Patterson’s famous definition of slavery as “the permanent, violent domination of natally alienated and generally dishonored persons” (Patterson 1982: 13) comes under particular scrutiny, and each of its component elements is challenged on grounds of historical inaccuracy or conceptual incongruity. Least controversial is the notion that violent domination underlies originary enslavement and so is innate in the condition of slavery itself, although Toledano finds the concept inappropriate to the condition of kuls and mamluks in Ottoman society (Chapter 7). The permanence of the condition of slavery is questioned directly by Bodel (Chapter 4) and indirectly and implicitly by Barbieri‐Low (Chapter 6) and Furtado (Chapter 9), who explore various modes and capacities for reintegration of ex‐slaves in Han Chinese and colonial Brazilian society. The lion’s share of attention, however, is devoted to the concepts of dishonor and natal alienation.
Several contributors (notably Toledano, Chatterjee, and Furtado) challenge the notion that dishonor is an essential element of the slave condition, finding more nuanced correlations of both honor and dishonor with slavery in pre‐colonial South Asia and colonial Minas Gerais in Brazil (Chapters 8 and 9) and little evidence of it at all among the elite slaves of the Ottoman empire (Chapter 7). Others (notably Harper, Cameron, and Santos‐Granero) see dishonor as central to the devaluation of slaves in Greco‐Roman antiquity (Chapter 5) and the small scale societies of North America (Chapter 11) and the American tropics (Chapter 12). If these discrepancies suggest that generalized dishonor may not be intrinsic to the condition of slavery, the question naturally arises under what circumstances it becomes important in defining servile status and why in some cultures dishonor is inherent in the servile condition whereas in others more calibrated gradations of honor and dishonor prevail. Future investigations in this area may shed further light on this still obscure aspect of slaving practices.
Natal alienation was perhaps the most innovative and successful of Patterson’s conceptual insights, capturing in a single concise phrase the panoply of ways slave‐owners sought to enforce the genetic isolation of their slaves. Its stark conceptual clarity exposed it to criticism, however, and in the years following publication of Patterson’s study an ensuing flood of misplaced counter‐examples threatened to wash away Patterson’s crucial insistence on the distinction between human feelings and societal recognition of relationships as legitimate and binding. Mindful of that distinction, several contributors have chipped away at the foundations of the concept, noting, for example, how special categories of slaves enjoyed recognized familial ties and parentage within their cultures (so Baker, in Chapter 1, on Mesopotomian homeborn slaves; Hunt, in Chapter 3, on thetes and helots in ancient Greece; Toledano, in Chapter 7, on Ottoman kuls and mamluks), or that some non‐western property regimes provided for the heritability of a slave’s property (Chatterjee, in Chapter 8), or arguing that cultural values and social pressures, as well as economic self‐interest, counterbalanced the legal claims of a master to absolute control over his human property and exercised a normative influence on behavior (Bodel, in Chapter 4). Patterson’s reply (in Chapter 14) to the first two objections is that the special categories identified do not properly qualify as slaves and to the third that rigorous analysis of hard data, comparative study, and demographic theory provide a more accurate picture of social reality than do literary sources.
In these two responses, as throughout his substantive reflections on the contributors’ evaluation of his work, Patterson illustrates two tensions inherent in the epistemological divide that separates sociologists and historians, a category to which a majority of our contributors belongs. The first, well recognized if too seldom productively exploited, is between abstract ideals and contextualized situations, or between historical processes and hypothetical abstractions; put simply, where sociologists generalize, historians particularize. In this volume, it may be suggested, confrontation with the well‐chosen particulars of his historicizing critics has spurred Patterson not only to defend but to amplify and further elaborate his views, with the result that the discussion has been advanced.
The second concerns method, specifically the role of taxonomy in analysis. As befits a sociologist, Patterson relies heavily on precise categorization of a wide range of disparate practices, and the formulation of a universal definition of slavery that will encompass all the relevant behaviors is essential to his purpose. Hence the emphasis in Slavery and Social Death on the three constituent elements said to constitute the essence of the institution and the form of his response to critics who find little evidence of dishonoring or natal alienation in certain slave cultures: “There comes a time when a cigar is no longer a cigar” (Chapter 14: 227). Failure to meet the stated criteria of definition results in exclusion from the category. Historians, by contrast, are drawn to situational contingencies and distinctive peculiarities of behavior or practice in specific cultures, and their approach to understanding institutions is oriented toward investigating change over time. Joseph Miller has recently called for a more contextualized approach to the study of slavery world‐wide, one less centered on the dyadic relationship of master and slave (whether the relationship is conceived of primarily as one of domination or as a matter of property) and more attentive to the contexts that shaped the behavior of slavers and the enslaved alike; slavery, in his view, is best approached as a set of historicized human strategies rather than an abstract institution (Miller 2012: 1–35).11
