Orlando Patterson: Authority, Alienation and Social Death, reprinted by
permission of the publisher from: O. Patterson, Slavery and Social Death.
A Comparative Study, 35-76, 375-385, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard
University Press © 1982 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College
Slavery, I intend to show in this chapter, is a highly symbolized domain of human experience. While all aspects of the relationship are symbolized there is overwhelming concentration on the profound natal alienation of the slave. The reason for this is not hard to discern: it was the slave’s isolation, his strangeness, that made him most valuable to the master; but it was this very strangeness that most threatened the community and that most exercised that “primacy of feeling and willing over thinking” which is at the core of the symbolic mind. On the cognitive or mythic level, one dominant theme emerges, which lends an unusually loaded meaning to the act of natal alienation: this is the social death of the slave. On the ritual level, the enslavement process is expressed in terms of well-defined rites of passage.
If the slave no longer belonged to a community, if he had no social existence outside of his master, then what was he? The initial response in almost all slaveholding societies was to define the slave as a socially dead person. Claude Meillassoux and his associates have most thoroughly explored this aspect of slavery. They reject the simplistic materialistic view, which fails to take account of this problem – which indeed does not even recognize the existence of the problem.1 From the structural viewpoint, Meillassoux argues, slavery must be seen as a process involving several transitional phases. The slave is violently uprooted from his milieu. He is desocialized and depersonalized. This process of social negation constitutes the first, essentially external, phase of enslavement. The next phase involves the introduction of the slave into the community of his master, but it involves the paradox of introducing him as a nonbeing. This explains the importance of law, custom, and ideology in the representation of the slave relation. […]
In almost all premodern slaveholding societies, at least some slaves were, locally recruited. The problems these slaves posed were no different from those presented by the more dramatically disrupted captives. What was different, however, was the manner of their social death. I suggest that there were two ways in which social death was represented and culturally “explained”, depending on the dominant early mode of recruiting slaves. Where the earliest and most dominant mode of recruitment was external, the cultural mode of representing social death was what I shall call intrusive and this, was likely to continue even where, later, most slaves were internally recruited. The second way in which social death was represented may be called extrusive and this too was determined by the earliest dominant means of recruiting slaves. It persisted even if, later, there was a shift to external sources.
In the intrusive mode of representing social death the slave was ritually incorporated as the permanent enemy on the inside – the “domestic enemy”, as he was known in medieval Tuscany.2 He did not and could not belong because he was the product of a hostile, alien culture. […]
The Greek word for slavery, doulos, is still an etymological mystery, but it is significant that in spite of the highly commercial nature of Greek slavery in classical times and the fact that from the sixth century B.C. on the vast majority of slaves were bought at slave markets rather than captured, the agent of the state responsible for the public regulation of slaves was the war archon.3 The Roman experience was even more revealing. P.R.C. Weaver, in his discussion of the servus vicarius, tells us that the term “is derived, as is much of the domestic terminology of Roman slavery, from military usage and organization” (emphasis added). A common term for slave was captivus.4 Roman law fully represented the intrusive conception of the slave. The Roman captured by the enemy lost all claims as a Roman citizen, but if he escaped and found his way back home, the principle of postliminium applied: he was fully restored to his original status, subject to a few restrictions and occasionally to a redeemer’s lien.5 The idea of social death was also given direct legal expression in Roman law. The slave was pro nullo. We learn, too, from the comedies of Plautus and Terence that the slave was one who recognized no father and no fatherland.6
Hebrew slavery in law and practice, in both ancient and medieval times, was highly intrusive. Fellow Jews could be and were enslaved in biblical times, but the slave was conceived of as the quintessential enemy within. In Leviticus we read:
“And as for thy bondsmen, and thy bondsmaids, which thou shall have of the nations that are round about you, of them all shall ye buy bondsmen and bondsmaids. Moreover of the children of the strangers that do sojourn among you, of them shall ye buy, and of their families that are with you, which they have begotten in your land; and they shall be your possession. And ye shall make them an inheritance for your children after you to hold for a possession; of them shall ye take your bondsmen forever.”7 […]
In sharp contrast with the intrusive conception of death was the extrusive representation. Here the dominant image of the slave was that of an insider who had fallen, one who ceased to belong and had been expelled from normal participation in the community because of a failure to meet certain minimal legal or socioeconomic norms of behavior. The destitute were included in this group, for while they perhaps had committed no overt crime their failure to survive on their own was taken as a sign of innate incompetence and of divine disfavor. […]
We may summarize the two modes of representing the social death that was slavery by saying that in the intrusive mode the slave was conceived of as someone who did not belong because he was an outsider, while in the extrusive mode the slave became an outsider because he did not (or no longer) belonged. In the former the slave was an external exile, an intruder; in the latter he was an internal exile, one who had been deprived of all claims of community. The one fell because he was the enemy, the other became the enemy because he had fallen. […]
Institutionalized marginality, the liminal sate of social death, was the ultimate cultural outcome of the loss of natality as well as honor and power. It was in this, too that the, master’s authority rested. For it was he who in a godlike manner mediated between, the socially dead and the socially alive. Without the master, as the Tuareg insist, the slave does not exist. The slave came to obey him not only out of fear, but out of the basic need to exist as a quasi-person, however marginal and vicarious that existence might be. […]
It is not difficult to understand why slaves were never assimilated to the status of outcastes. Slavery, we have seen, was primarily a relation of personal domination. There was an almost perverse intimacy in the bond resulting from the power the master claimed over his slave. The slave’s only life was through and for his master. Clearly, any notion of ritual avoidance and spatial segregation would entail a lessening of this bond. Second, the assimilation of the slave to the status of an occupationally specialized caste would undermine one of his major advantages – the fact that he was a natally alienated person who could be employed in any capacity precisely because he had no claims of birth. Slaves universally were not only sexually exploited in their role as concubines but also in their role as mother-surrogates and nursemaids. However great the human capacity for contradiction, if has never been possible for any group of masters to suckle at their slave’s breast as infants, sow their wild oats with her as adolescents, then turn around as adults and claim that she was polluted. […]
Symbolic ideas are usually given social expression in ritualized patterns. Let us look now at the ritual aspects of the natal alienation of the slave. For all but the most advanced slave systems the acquisition of a slave is a very special event in the master’s household. Even where slave’s number as much as a quarter of the total household, their acquisition may be a once-in-a-life-time event for the members, especially if the pattern of slaveholding is highly skewed. It was common for people in the premodem world to give ritual expression to special events and when one of those events involved the incorporation of a person defined as socially dead, it is easy to recognize that the event should not proceed without ceremony. The ritual of enslavement incorporated one or more of four basic features: first, the symbolic rejection by the slave of his past and his former kinsmen; second, a change of name; third the imposition of some visible mark of servitude; and last the assumption of a new status in the household or economic organization of the master.
Many cultures obliged the new slave to make a symbolic gesture of rejecting his natal community, kinsmen, ancestral spirits, and gods – or, where the slave was of local origin, of rejecting his own kin group and ancestral spirits in favor of those of his master. The ceremony was often simple and brief, but it was always deeply humiliating, sometimes even traumatic, for the slave. […]
In large-scale slave systems where the slave became a unit of production outside the household economy we do not, of course, find such elaborate initiating rituals of enslavement. The newcomer was usually handed over to a trusted older slave to be taught the necessary skills to survive in his new environment. This is not to say, however, that ritual did not play a part even here. For we know that even in the brutal capitalistic slave plantations of the modern Caribbean, slaves had a rich ritual life and found their own ways of incorporating the new recruit.8 The same was very possibly true of slaves on the latifundia of ancient Rome, given the rich and intense religious life of the slave population. But if the slave was not incorporated privately by his master, there was still the need to incorporate him publicly, to give ritual expression to his presence as a large and significant, and potentially dangerous, element in the body politic. We shall see later that in such large-scale systems this task was performed by the state religion.
The second major feature of the ritual of enslavement involved the changing of the slave’s name. A man’s name is, of course, more than simply a way of calling him. It is the verbal signal of his whole identity, his being-in-the-world as a distinct person. It also establishes and advertises his relation with kinsmen. In a great many societies a person’s name has magical qualities; new names are often received upon initiation into adulthood and into cults and secret societies, and the victim’s name looms large in witchcraft and sorcery practiced against him. […]
Thus it is understandable that in every slave society one of the first acts of the master has been to change the name of his new slave. One must reject any simplistic explanation that this was simply a result of the master’s need to find a name that was more familiar for we find the same tendency to change names when slaves come from the identical society or language group as their masters.
There are several reasons for, the change of name. The changing of a name is almost universally a symbolic act of stripping a person of his former identity (note for example the tendency among modern peoples to assign a new formal identification, usually a number, to both prisoners of war and domestic convicts). The slave’s former name died with his former self. […]
The situation was different, however, among that small group of kin-based societies where the slave was not incorporated into the household economy but was exploited separately, in a protocapitalist sector, and in most of the advanced premodern slave systems. Here the new name was often a badge of inferiority and contempt. Sometimes the names were either peculiar or characteristically servile. A Greek name in republican Rome, for example, often indicated slave status or ancestry, and many traditionally Roman names eventually became favorite slave names, cognomens such as Faustus, Felix Fortunatus, and Primus.9 […]
In other societies such as China, those of the ancient Near East and pharaonic Egypt, the absence of family names was the surest mark of slavery.10 Much more humiliating, however, were those cases in which insult was added to injury by giving the slave a name that was ridiculous or even obscene. […]
The slave’s name was only one of the badges of slavery. In every slave-holding society we find visible marks of servitude, some pointed, some more subtle. Where the slave was of a different race or color, this fact tended to become associated with slave status – and not only in the Americas. A black skin in almost all the Islamic societies, including parts of the Sudan, was and still is associated with slavery. True, there were white slaves; true, it was possible to be black and free, even of high status – but this did not mean that blackness was not associated with slavery.11
The Greeks did not require their slaves to wear special clothes, but apparently (as in America) the slaves’ style of dress immediately revealed their status.12 Rome is fascinating in this regard. The slave population blended easily into the larger proletariat, and the high rate of manumission meant that ethnicity was useless as a mean of identifying slaves. A ready means of identification seem desirable, however, and a special form of dress for slaves was contemplated. When someone pointed out that the proposal, if carried out, would lead slaves immediately to recognize their numerical strength, the idea was abandoned.13 […]
Religion never played the important role in the development of Greek slavery that it did among the Roman, Islamic, or many Christian peoples. The practice of having the slave worship at the Greek family hearth continued well into the classical period. This hardly met the religious needs of the slaves any more than it would have sufficed for their masters. But slaves again were largely excluded from the extrahousehold religious cults of their masters. What is more, restraints were placed on their attempts to develop their own cults. The religious isolation and confinement of their slaves hardly bothered the Greek masters, for they did not care for any form of incorporation of slaves into the Greek community. […]
Roman slaves had more freedom in every part of their lives than Greek slaves. The Greek polis was an ethnically exclusive unit, whereas Rome was, from relatively early on, an ethnically and politically open system. It was not just slaves who were excluded from the Greek community, but all foreigners.
There were three respects, however, in which Greek religion aided in the adjustment of the slave to his social death. Along with women, slaves were allowed to participate in the state cult of Eleusis. The second important representation of slavery in Greek religion was the saturnalia-type festivals associated with a variety of cults. During these festivities (the oldest being the Cronia ritual) there was a reversal of roles in which slaves ate, drank, and played with their masters.14 The late British anthropologist Max Gluckman has suggested that such rites of reversal both vented feelings of tension in conflictridden relationships and reaffirmed the rightness of the established order: “The acceptance of the established order as right and good, and even sacred, seems to allow unbridled license, even rituals of rebellion, for the order itself keeps this rebellion within bounds. Hence to act the conflicts, whether directly or by inversion or in other symbolical forms, emphasizes the social cohesion within which the conflicts exist.”15 It may be speculated that these rituals of reversal involved not just a means of releasing the tension inherent in the master-slave relationship, and thereby maintaining order, but emphasized the social death of the slave and his total alienation from Greek life. By playing the master, the slave came to realize, however fleetingly, what it was really like to be not just a free man, but more, a truly free man – that is to say, a Greek. When the playing was over and the roles were reversed to normal, the slave would know then with the sinking feeling of the morning after that socially and politically he was dead. The master, in his turn, learned from the role reversal not compassion for his slave, but the bliss it was to be free and Greek. The Cronia, then, was really a death and resurrection ritual: for the master, it was an affirmation of the life principle and freedom; for the slave, it was a confirmation of his living death, powerlessness, and degradation.
The third, perhaps most important, way in which Greek religion related to the condition of slavery was by sacred manumission. The problem of manumission will be discussed at length in a later chapter; I am concerned here only with the role of religion in its legitimization. Sacred manumission was the technique of selling the slave to a god who, by not exercising his proprietary powers, allowed the slave to behave like a free man. The interesting thing about this practice is how secular it actually was. Religion was brought in as a means of legitimizing the manumission transaction only where formal legal mechanisms were absent. Where (as in Athens) legal mechanisms existed, we find no trace of sacred manumission. Bömer demolishes the traditional view that Apollo was a defender of slaves and the great symbol of Greek humanity. The idea of finding freedom in servitude to a god remained alien to Greek thought. The slave who was sold to Apollo was not given his freedom by the god; he merely acquired a de facto freedom by virtue of the fact that the god did not exercise his proprietary powers. This was a neat way of solving the problem created by the naturalistic theory of slavery. If the slave was by nature fit for nothing else, how could he become free? If he was socially dead, how could he be made socially alive? It was not possible. Thus selling the slave to a god salvaged the idea of his slaveness and the permanence of his servile status. Apollo was no defender of slaves, no oasis of universal humanity in the desert of Greek chauvinistic tyranny; on the contrary, he was the ideological salvation of the most inhuman product of the Greek mind – the Aristotelian notion of innate slavishness. […]
Rome was different, and the slaves’ religious life a great deal better. Not that Roman masters were any less cruel; they may have been even more brutal. Rather, Rome had a culture that was far more inclusive, with institutions that were incomparably more flexible, and in no area more so than religion. In primitive Rome and even as late as midrepublic times, slaves participated in the religion of the household, especially in the Lares cult. Originally the head of the cult was the paterfamilias. But as the latifundia replaced the household farm, the master withdrew from this role. By Cato’s day the slave villicus or overseer directed the cult. With urbanization and the further growth of the latifundia, toward the end of the republic the Lares cult became increasingly attractive to slaves and freedmen.16 The saturnalia and matronalia (festivals in honor of Mars and Hera originally celebrated by married women) were also important ritual supports for the slaveholding system from early times, the former quite possibly influenced by Greek traditions.17
As the gesellschaft principle of social organization replaced the gemeinschaft principle in Roman life, ritual specialization increased further. The slave-oriented cults, however, could only initiate the new slaves into the slave sector. There remained the urgent need to incorporate the slave and still more, his descendants, into the wider community. Several kinds of religious organizations were adapted to meet both the specific ritual needs of the slaves and the wider super-structural problem of somehow representing the slave system in supernatural terms.
There were, first, the interclass cults. In Jupiter, Juno, and especially Silvanus, we find originally Roman deities who were associated by the slaves with eastern counterparts with which they were more familiar. Many of the cults were of foreign origin – a good number of them brought to Rome by the slaves themselves. Most notable was Mithras, famous for the rapidity with which it attained popularity and the equality of master and slave in the performance of ritual practices.18
In the institution of the collegia, which constituted the organizational aspect of worship, the slave found not only a church but “a social club, a craft guild, and a funeral society”;19 and in holding one of the many offices, he or she experienced some vicarious sense of importance. The names of some of these colleges are very revealing. In the light of what we have said about slavery as a state of social death, it is not unreasonable to suppose that when the members of one college called themselves “comrades in death”, they were referring not solely to their coming physical death.20 […]
Of much greater interest was the phenomenon of emperor worship and the extraordinary role of the slaves and ex-slaves in the imperial cults. The earliest of these, the Augustan Lares, was in fact a revival of the dying Lares cult to which the emperor added his own imprint. Keith Hopkins argues that this cult had been started by ex-slaves, Augustus simply institutionalizing the informal local celebrations into a state cult devoted partly to his worship. “The cult provided rich ex-slaves, as organizers of the cult, with a prestigious and public outlet for social display. And it allowed emperor worship to flourish at street level.”21
It was not long, however, before emperor worship was accepted at all levels of society. It was a major legitimizing force among slaves for the simple reason that the emperor’s cult introduced into Roman law the alien principle of asylum for slaves. The granting of the right of appeal to Caesar’s statue was one of the few ways in which the state intervened between master and slave. The state was, of course, sensitive to this intrusion on the authority of the master, and in practice very few slaves attempted such an appeal. But in enhancing the authority of the emperor in the eyes of all, including even the meanest of slaves, the legitimacy of the system as a whole was reinforced. What the master lost in individual authority, the slave system as a whole gained embodied as it was in the divine protective power of the deified emperor.22
1 C. Meillassoux, L’esclavage en Afrique précloniale, Paris 1975, esp. 11-26.
2 I. Origo, ‘The Domestic Enemy’: The Eastern Slaves in Tuscany in the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries, in: Speculum 30, 1955. 321-366.
3 On the words used for “slaves” and their sources see W.L. Westermann, The Slave Systems of Greek and Roman Antiquity, in: American Philosophical Society, 1955, 5-12. Also M. I. Finley, Was Greek Civilization Based on Slavery?, in: Finley, Slavery in Classical Antiquity, Cambridge, 1960, 146.
4 P.R.C. Weaver, Vicarius and Vicarianus in Familia Caesaris, in: JRS 54, 1964, 118.
5 W.W. Buckland, The Roman Law of Slavery, Cambridge, 1908, 291-312.
6 See P.P. Spranger, Historische Untersuchungen zu den Sklavenfiguren des Plautus und Terenz, Wiesbaden 1961, 65 (durchges. u. erw. Aufl. 1984 = FAS 17).
7 Lev. 25,44.
8 On Jamaica see O. Patterson, The Sociology of Slavery: Jamaica, 1655-1838, Rutherford/ N.J. 1969, chap. 6. On the U.S. South see E.D. Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll, New York, 1974), esp. bk. 2. See also the detailed discussion of the slaves’ cultural life in: C.W. Joyner, Slave Folklife on the Waccaman Neck: Antebellum Black Culture in the South Carolina Low Country, Pennsylvania 1977, chap. 3.
9 There were, however, many peculiarly servile names, the best-known being perhaps “Rufio”. This and other names suggest the national origins of the slaves, but as Gordon, Solin, and others have pointed out, it is dangerous to draw conclusions about the ethnic origins of Roman slaves on the basis of the available distribution of ethnic names. Slaves were often named for the place of purchase, which tells us nothing about their origin – a good case in point being the common slave name “Corinthus”. Greek or hellenized names were often taken for cultural reasons. In an exceptional case a captive was allowed to keep his original name, the most famous example being Spartacus. Whatever the new name, the overwhelming tendency was for the slave’s master or superior to select it. Principally for this reason slave names “do not often take the form of nicknames derived from physical characteristics.” See M.L. Gordon, The Nationality of Slaves under the Early Roman Empire, in: Finley, Slavery in Classical Antiquity, 171-211; L.R. Taylor, Freedman and Freeborn in the Epitaphs of Imperial Rome, in: American Journal of Philology 82, 1961, 113-132; and, more recently, H. Solin, Beiträge zur Kenntnis der griechischen Personennamen in Rom, Helsinki 1971.
10 On the ancient Near East see I. Mendelsohn, Slavery in the Ancient Near East, Oxford 1949, 31; on China see E.G. Pulleyblank, The Origins and Nature of Chattel Slavery in China, in: JESHO 1 (1958), 217; on Egypt see Abd el-Mohsen Bakir, Slavery in Pharaonic Egypt (SASAE 18), Kairo 1952,103-107, 114.
11 See B. Lewis, The African Diaspora and the Civilization of Islam, in: M.L. Kilson/R.I. Rotberg (Hrsg.), The African Diaspora, Cambridge/Massachusetts 1976, 37-56.
12 For further discussion see V. Ehrenberg, The People of Aristophanes, New York 1962, 184.
13 We do not know when this incident, referred to by Seneca, occurred. See Sen. clem. 1,24,1, Plautus also refers to the slaves’ different style of dress although, of course, the setting is supposedly Greece. Plaut. Amph. 114, in: Plautus, The Rope and other Plays, ed. and trans. E.F. Watling, New York 1964, 232.
14 F. Bömer, Untersuchungen über die Religion der Sklaven in Griechenland und Rom. Teil III: Die wichtigsten Kulte der griechischen Welt. 2., durchges. u. erw. Aufl. (FAS 14), Wiesbaden 1990, 173-195.
15 Custom and Conflict in Africa, Oxford 1955, 125; also chap. 5.
16 F. Bömer, Untersuchungen über die Religion der Sklaven. Teil I: Die wichtigsten Kulte und Religionen in Rom und im lateinischen Westen, 2., durchges. u. erw. Aufl. (FAS 14), Wiesbaden 1981, 32-86.
17 For a good discussion of the saturnalia see E.O. James, Seasonal Feasts and Festivals, London 1961, 175-177.
18 Bömer (s. Anm.14), 87-98.
19 R.H. Barrow, Slavery in the Roman Empire, London 1928, 164.
20 Barrow (s. Anm.19), 168.
21 K. Hopkins, Conquerors and Slaves, Cambridge 1978, 212-213. See also R.E.A. Palmer, Roman Religion and Roman Empire: Five Essays, Philadelphia 1974, 114-120.
22 Hopkins (s. Anm.21), chap. 5.