3
It’s All Greek to Me
THE BARBARIAN IN HISTORY
Caught—both seized and entangled—in a binary opposition, one of the terms retains its old name so as to destroy the opposition to which it no longer quite belongs, to which in any event it has never quite yielded, the history of this opposition being one of incessant struggles generative of hierarchical configurations.
—Jacques Derrida, Dissemination
“It’s all Greek to me.” We use this idiom when we have no idea what another person is talking about—when the speech of our interlocutor sounds like “blah blah.” What is intriguing about this phrase is that it succinctly captures the relational nature of the barbarian. At the time of its inception in ancient Greece, the term “barbarian” was the exact opposite of “Greek”: it was applied to foreigners who did not speak Greek and whose language was therefore incomprehensible, sounding like “bar bar.” To say “it’s all Greek to me” today, then, constitutes a firsthand reversal of Greekness as the standard against which the barbarian becomes defined. Being or speaking Greek is clearly no longer the criterion for defining what is civilized. In this idiom, “Greek” becomes a signifier of incomprehensibility and confusion and, as such, occupies the place of the barbarian language, which, based on its Greek etymology, is a language the “civilized” subject does not understand.
The designation of somebody as barbarian takes place only in relation to a subject that assumes the status of the “civilized.” This becomes evident if we follow the barbarian in history. The historical travels of the barbarian reveal the various perspectives within European space (and probably even more perspectives outside European space) from which barbarism has been defined. From a different viewpoint each time, barbarians are the non-Greeks and the Greeks, the Christians and the non-Christians, heathens or Muslims, the Romans, the Germanic nations, the inhabitants of the Orient, the colonized peoples of the Americas, Africa, and Asia, the European colonizers, the Jews, the Nazis, Romany, members of the working class, terrorists, neo-imperialists, and many others. Practically every group in Western history has been tagged as “barbarian” by another group.
Nevertheless, in each period and context this category tends to fix upon particular features assigned to certain people as inherent qualities. The relational aspect of the term is subject to an essentialist logic that dictates a static hierarchization between civilized and barbarian. Thus, the term’s shifting connotations and referents in history highlight the following paradox: Such a protean and relational concept has always sustained one of the most rigid binarisms in Western history. The persistence of the barbarism/civilization dichotomy in the discursive construct we call “Western history” indicates the dependence of civilization on the notion of the barbarian for its self-definition. The barbarian appears as an abjected outside, which, to borrow Judith Butler’s words, is always inside the subject “as its own founding repudiation” (1993, 3).
The changing connotations of the barbarian from Greek antiquity to the present are interdependent with the shifting self-perceptions of the civilized. Therefore, when following the notion of the barbarian historically, the discussion is always also about civilization. Standards that delimit the realm of the barbaric and the civilized are in constant flux. Nevertheless, in history both concepts often appear as naturalized entities. As Joan Scott argues, “History is a chronology that makes experience visible, but in which categories appear as nonetheless ahistorical” (1991, 778). History tends to suppress or “under-state” the “historically variable interrelationship” of categories of identity—in this case, between the “barbarian” and the “civilized” (778).1 Therefore, unpacking the “barbarian” in its historical complexity is a necessary step to question its present or historical moments of objectification.
This chapter follows the connotations of the barbarian in Western history in its relation to the notion of the civilized. In this venture, I have not opted for a chronologically ordered account or a genealogy of the barbarian. Instead, in order to chart the dynamic position that the figure of the barbarian occupies in Western discourses, I relate its changing meanings and uses to the normative standards that established the basis for the antithesis between civilized and barbarian in different eras and social or cultural contexts. To that end, this chapter lays out a tentative typology of what I call “civilizational standards,” which have—in different degrees—determined the definition of the “barbarian” from Greek antiquity to the present: (1) language; (2) culture; (3) political system and ideology (including empire); (4) morality, values, and manners; (5) humanity, humanism, and the human; (6) religion; (7) ethnicity and race; (8) class; (9) gender; (10) progress (including technique and modes of production); and (11) psyche.
These standards constantly shift. If language was the main criterion for the definition of the barbarian in archaic Greece, in other periods the criteria become more political (as, for example, in fifth-century BCE Greece), cultural (as in the Hellenistic period), religious (as in the Middle Ages in Europe), and so on. However, to claim that each standard neatly corresponds to a particular period or cultural context would be an oversimplification. In most periods, even when a certain standard is prevalent, it forms a unique constellation with other standards, which are pertinent to a lesser or greater degree. The construction of the barbarian in Western discourses is premised on intricate constellations of the defining features of self and other.
Adopting the structuring principle of civilizational standards instead of a chronological presentation resists the conception of the history of the barbarian as linear and progressive—an uninterrupted succession of significations. This structuring principle underscores the shifting and contested terrain that the barbarian and the civilized simultaneously occupy. Thus, in this typology the barbarian emerges through a web of cultural, social, political, religious, and (pseudo)scientific discourses and its history unravels as a narrative of contradictions, repetitions, tensions, and unexpected intersections.
The standards brought together here indicate the pervasiveness of the barbarian in various spheres of the Western cultural and ideological space. Further, the multiple standards through which the barbarian is cast reveal multiple histories of the barbarian in the West. There are several ways to tell a history of the barbarian, just as there are at least as many ways to tell a history of Western civilization.2 Thus, this chapter prepares the ground for pluralizing “barbarism” and the “barbarian” and for contesting their dominant uses.
To examine how the barbarian is produced through different standards, I scrutinize a selection of representative case studies—a kaleidoscope of slices of history through which the barbarian is cast in various ways. The focus is particularly on contexts that enabled shifts in the signification of the barbarian: moments when new connotations are attached to this figure; moments of reversal of the hierarchy between civilized and barbarian, when the “civilized” are projected as more corrupt and barbaric than those others on whom they confer the label “barbarian”; and moments of profound critique and renegotiation of the concepts of barbarism and the barbarian. With a focus on such shifts, the discursive mechanisms producing barbarism and civilization emerge as historically contingent and therefore open to critique and negotiation.
Unpacking the Terms
It would be a good idea.
—Gandhi’s reported remark about Western civilization
The barbarian is only one of the countless “others” that the civilized imagination has constructed. Slave, woman, guest worker, migrant, nomad, savage, wild man, cannibal, lunatic, Oriental, Jewish, gypsy, animal, and monster are all categories that enabled (Western) subjects to define themselves in distinction from others, situated beyond the borders of their home, class, society, religion, race, gender, nation, empire, or of humanity. The category of the barbarian is coextensive and imbricated with some of these others.
The “savage” or “wild man” is one of the categories that comes closest to the barbarian, although it is a more recent construction.3 Many ancient and medieval authors often use these categories interchangeably (White 1972, 19). However, in the eighteenth century and during the Enlightenment they develop distinct uses. The savage represents an uncorrupted and pure human state, closer to nature, but because he is a tabula rasa, he is considered capable of being educated and learning European manners.4 The barbarian, on the other hand, cannot be educated—he represents “the liberal project gone awry” (Salter 2002, 22). Thus, the savage is often considered redeemable, whereas the barbarian is not (22). Another difference concerns the kind of threat these figures were perceived to constitute. In different periods, according to Hayden White, barbarians were generally considered to live “under some kind of law” and to be able to organize themselves “into groups large enough to constitute a threat to ‘civilization’ itself.” Wild men, on the other hand, were thought to live alone and thus “represented a threat to the individual” rather than to society in general (White 1972, 20). This difference between barbarians and savages is also reflected in eighteenth-century models of human societal progress. In such models, barbarism and savagery represent two different stages in societal development, with barbarism situated between “savagery” and “civilization” (Salter 2002, 23).
The constant shifts in the content of the barbarian itself make it difficult to pinpoint what distinguishes the “barbarian” from other related categories. The term carries various connotations in history: it has been used to denote simply the foreigner (a person who speaks another language); suggest decadence, moral, cultural, or racial inferiority; cruel, savage, or inhuman behavior; an infantile, natural, or primitive state; lack of education or manners; and the like. However, if we put together a schematic typology of “others” in Western imagination, the barbarian would probably stand out as the opposite of civilization par excellence: the absolute other, which—as a paradox-object—threatens the frontiers of the civilized world and simultaneously sustains the self-definition of the latter.
Although the focus here is on the construction of the barbarian within what we call “Western civilization,” the notion of the barbarian is not an exclusively Western construction. Categories akin to the barbarian appear in the conceptual schemes of many cultures. Such are the Japanese notion of the gaijin for foreigner and the Jewish notions of the goy and gentile, used to denote non-Jews, all of which carry pejorative or even offensive connotations.5
However, terms comparable to “barbarian” in other cultures are often premised on different standards than those delineating the barbarian in the West. In ancient Greece, for example, from the eighth to the fifth century BCE, the main criterion for defining the barbarian was language. The geographical dispersal of the Greeks over various coasts and islands, the varied ways of life, and the differences in tradition, culture, and political allegiances among the (Ionian, Dorian, Aeolian) Greek communities prevented a definition of the barbarian based on habitat and lifestyle (E. Hall 1989, 4–5). Lifestyle and habitat, however, were the main criteria for the barbarian/civilized distinction in ancient China, where equivalent terms for barbarians meant “nomads,” “shepherds,” or “jungle people” (Lattimore 1962, 451, 455).6 The same importance attributed to habitat can be found among the Sumerians, who identified civilized existence with the sedentary urban lifestyle of the plain. They thus used derogatory terms for the “nomads” and “mountain-dwellers” of the steppe and the highlands (Henri Limet, presented in E. Hall 1989, 5). The Hebrews also attached high value to language as a marker of differentiation.7 Nevertheless, in their distinction between themselves and Gentiles, religion had a more central place than in the definition of Greek versus barbarian (5).8 However, as Edith Hall argues, despite the existence of comparable terms, in other ancient cultures there is no equivalent that “precisely and exclusively embraced all who did not share their ethnicity” (4).
Homer’s Iliad (eighth century BCE), according to D. N. Maronitis, may be considered the “womb” of the hierarchical pair barbarian/civilized, although this opposition is only fully shaped and articulated two centuries later (1999, 27). Whether we place the beginnings of the barbarian in the eighth or the sixth century BCE, approximately twenty-five centuries separate the first appearance of the term “barbarian” from that of the term “civilization.” “Civilization” is first documented in French in 1767 and in English in 1772, and it first appeared in an English dictionary in 1775 (Williams 1985, 57; Salter 2002, 15).
The modern term “civilization” derives from the Latin civitas. Although in modernity barbarism is predominantly understood in opposition to the term “civilization,” one should bear in mind that historically the first systematic reference point for the construction of the barbarian was the Athenian polis. Therefore, insofar as the Roman civitas is the notion in which “civilization” is etymologically grounded, this notion needs to be distinguished from the notion of the polis. The Greek polis and the Roman civitas are often used interchangeably to refer to self-governing political communities. However, the conception of citizenship implied in these terms, as well as their antithetical poles, are distinct. Unlike citizenship in the Athenian polis, which was based on a dualism between polites (citizens) and foreigners (barbarians), the Roman civitas was premised on a “complex system of group differentiation” that involved “a gradation of citizenship” (Isin 2002, 6). This difference can also be correlated with the fact that in the Athenian polis foreigners were ostensibly excluded from political life, whereas the Roman civitas included people from different ethnic origins. As a result of the different forms of Roman citizenship, the term “Roman” “became dissociated from a specific ethnic group and came to connote citizens of the civitas irrespective of their ethnic origin” (Samuel E. Finer, quoted in Isin 2002, 95). While members of the Athenian polis shared a common language and culture, against which their “barbarians” were delineated, the Roman civitas accommodated a diversity of cultures, languages, and religions (Román 2010, 25). However, unlike the Greeks, Romans “increasingly thought of themselves as the natural rulers of aliens or barbarians” (Geoffrey E. M. de Ste. Croix, presented in Isin 2002, 94). This aspect of civitas resonates in the universalizing aspirations of its modern derivative: the imperialist ideology that underlies the term “civilization” as a Western construct.
Despite its relatively brief history, “civilization” also has a complex genealogy. According to Raymond Williams, its main use was to describe “a state of social order and refinement, especially in conscious historical or cultural contrast with barbarism” (1985, 57–58). But civilization also denoted a historical process, which carried the spirit of Enlightenment, “with its emphasis on secular and progressive human self-development” (58). In fact, what is specific about the term “civilization,” according to Williams, is the way it combines the meanings of “a process and an achieved condition.” As an “achieved condition,” civilization conveys a celebratory view of modernity as the most advanced state of human society (58). The static and dynamic conceptions of civilization as both a state and a process are, according to Wendy Brown, reconciled within the Western progressivist historiography of modernity:
Civilization simultaneously frames the achievement of European modernity, the promised fruit of modernization as an experience, and crucially, the effects of exporting European modernity to “uncivilized” parts of the globe. European colonial expansion from the mid-nineteenth through the mid-twentieth century was explicitly justified as a project of civilization, conjuring the gifts of social order, legality, reason, and religion, as well as regulating manners and mores. (2006, 179–80)
In the nineteenth century, the term was thus mobilized within the colonial project and used to justify European expansion (Tsing and Hershatter 2005, 36). Within imperialist ideology, the term assisted conceptualizing the European “civilizing mission” of enlightening the “barbaric” worlds beyond Europe.
In modern European history, civilization is often understood specifically as European (or Western) civilization. As such, it expresses a singular European identity, based on the idea of a secular (rather than religious) unity (Gong 1984, 23). However, the word civilization is now also used in the plural as a “relatively neutral form for any achieved social order or way of life” (Williams 1985, 59). As discussed earlier, its use in the plural does not necessarily contradict its singular use for Western or European civilization. As Walter Mignolo argues, “Civilization” is a geopolitically grounded notion that often turns into “a European self-description of its role in history,” while it is simultaneously “disguised as the natural course of universal history” (2005, xvii, 8).
Given that the term “civilization” is a modern construction, its application to premodern periods is inevitably somewhat anachronistic. Thus, when talking about civilizational standards in Greek antiquity, for example, we must realize that the notion of neither civilization nor Western history as we understand it today was part of Greek consciousness. Even the idea of a unitary Greek consciousness is debatable. Although in Herodotus’s account of the Greco-Persian Wars (499–449 BCE) we already have manifestations of the contrast between the West (Greece) and the Asiatic East (the Persian Empire), in ancient Greece identity was generally structured around city-states.
When I refer to “civilizational standards” that determine the identity of Western subjects in history, these standards do not (always) pertain to the term “civilization” as such but to a central self-defining principle on which dominant groups, nations, or empires in Western history built their sense of superiority vis-à-vis barbarian others. This principle determines the perspective from which the rest of the world is viewed and decides which subjects will be excluded from the sanctioned realm of the self by being relegated to the barbaric. Hellenicity and Romanitas, for example, are linguistic incarnations of the principle that can catachrestically be called “civilization.” Thus, throughout history, the hegemonic discourse I call “civilizational” finds its barbarians in “all those who do not belong to the locus of enunciation . . . of those who assign the standards of classification and assign to themselves the right to classify” (Mignolo 2005, 8).
The fact that the term “barbarian” has a longer history than the term “civilization” leads to an intriguing realization: in the age-old dichotomy within which the barbarian is implicated since its inception, the “barbarian” is the stable term, while its positive opposite changes (Greek, Roman, Christian, European, and the like, until the term “civilization” is coined). This suggests that a stable category for the absolute other is even more essential for the discourse of the self than a stable positive category of self-definition. The assumption that a solid denomination of the other is prioritized over a fixed self-defining category finds support in the mechanism White calls “ostensive self-definition by negation” (1972, 4). According to this mechanism, the self defines itself by pointing at what it thinks it is definitely not. Remarkably, Samuel Huntington formulates the same claim but also adds a necessary dimension of conflict and violence to this process: “We know who we are only when we know who we are not and often when we know whom we are against” (1996, 21). Although the persistence of the term “barbarian” in Western history serves the self-definition of dominant groups, it could also turn against this purpose: it could enable us to assert the priority of barbarism over civilization and question the former’s dependence on its positive opposite. In other words, the continuous presence of the barbarian in history also harbors the insight that civilization may in fact be the weakest link in this opposition.
My choice to use “civilization” as the overarching concept for the various standards probed here is motivated by the particularity of the concept of civilization compared with other categories of self-definition. It could be argued that “civilization” is simply one standard for defining the “barbarian” among many. Instead, I argue that there is no other concept before modernity that captures the totality of standards in the way “civilization” does. What distinguishes civilization from each of the eleven standards listed earlier is that in principle it can contain all of these standards, together or separately. Huntington’s definition of “civilization” demonstrates this point. For him, civilization is a “complex mix of higher levels of morality, religion, learning, art, philosophy, technology, material well-being, and probably other things” (1996, 320, emphasis added). In this definition, civilization emerges as an all-encompassing container, accommodating a plurality of standards. As the phrase “and probably other things” suggests, the number of standards under the umbrella of civilization is mobile and open to reordering. The concept of “civilization” thereby turns into a machine for producing different versions of the barbarian tailored to the needs and priorities of the civilized “we.”
In this machine, the contents of “civilization” are kept as broad and flexible as possible in order to secure the stability of the opposition between civilization and barbarism. With the introduction of the term “civilization” in modernity, “barbarism” finds a constant and stable opposite. While the standards contained within civilization remain flexible, one thing becomes fixed: “civilization” becomes a powerful conceptual wall for keeping the “barbarian” at bay. In this sense, the introduction of the concept of civilization constitutes a unique modern phenomenon: for the first time the superiority of the (Western) subject is established through a single term that contains a multiplicity of standards that delineate the realm of the self and the barbaric. As a result, even as the status of particular standards changes through time—if, for example, religion and culture replace political ideology as the key to defining civilization—the opposite of the barbarian does not have to change: it can still be expressed by the term “civilization” as a container of all active standards in a particular context.
Of course, similar concepts in earlier periods also accommodated multiple criteria. Romanitas functioned simultaneously as a marker of culture, education, and virtue. But the concept of Romanitas remains bound to a particular context and empire and is thus not easily transferrable to other contexts or groups that succeeded the Roman Empire. In contrast, “civilization” grants this shifting plurality of standards a permanent conceptual space in language, which did not exist before. “Civilization” is thus paradoxically a chameleonic and dynamic concept meant to solidify a hierarchical opposition in the most steadfast way possible. Whenever the opposition is threatened or weakened, the civilizational machine can shift the defining standards of the self in order to slightly redefine the self and the barbarian without changing the terms—and thus the basic violent structure—of the opposition between them.
“Western history,” just as “civilization,” is a modern construction. The same holds for the globalizing phrase “the West,” which came into general usage over the past two centuries (Sakai and Morris 2005, 372).9 Although the term “the West” is supposed to unify a group of people called “Westerners,” this unity comprises a constellation of heterogeneous ideologies, traditions, races, and cultural practices. The West is a collective heritage, partly constituted by non-European influences as well.10
Despite the diverse forces constituting “the West,” as Edward Said says, the West has “a history and a tradition of thought, imagery, and vocabulary that have given it reality and presence” (2003, 5). Thus, even as a mythical construct, “the West” has pervasive material effects. The terms “the West,” “Western history,” and “Western civilization” are products of a civilizational discourse that has shaped the thought, language, and imagination of Western subjects in common ways and that perpetuates the logic of civilization versus barbarism, and of the West vis-à-vis the non-West.
The idea of Western history as a linear progressive narrative originating in classical Greece is also a product of modernity. My earliest temporal point of reference here is ancient Greece. This choice does not suggest an endorsement of the foundational narrative that views Greece as the origin of Western civilization. Rather, it is premised on the word “barbarian” as it was incepted in ancient Greece. Moreover, given my Greek origin and background, my focus on the Greek context indicates the inevitable implication of the analyst in her object of study.
When I use “barbarism” and “civilization” in this historical exploration, it is not possible to effectively distance myself from discourses that involve these concepts, which are the discourses that have shaped my identity and education as a “citizen of the West.” One option would be to use quotation marks each time I use the term “barbarian” or “civilization” in a way unreflective of my own viewpoint or position. However, quotation marks often create an illusion of objectivity or suggest that the speaking subject is able to distance herself and stand outside a discourse in which she is embedded. This would sidestep my complicity with Western discourses on the barbarian. Therefore, by refusing to position myself on the outside or the margins of this discourse, I see myself as what Mireille Rosello has called a “reluctant witness,” participating in discursive constructions I would “much rather not condone,” while also trying to resist them (1998, 1).11
Civilizational Standards
The standards in this typology do not stand in isolation as strict conceptual frameworks but constitute mutually illuminating and intertwined discursive domains. For example, race, class, and gender are involved in “systems of social stratification” that are “superimposed on one another” and either undermine or enhance each other (Shohat and Stam 1994, 22). Certain standards are applicable only to particular periods, as some of them were not (fully) conceptualized earlier. The standard of “progress,” for example, applies primarily to modernity.
There are also standards formally left out of this typology, which enter the discussion under the rubric of other standards. For instance, “geography” is not treated separately but is nonetheless important in this discussion, insofar as the conceptual borders separating the civilized world from the barbarians often coincide with geographical divisions. The barbarian is usually “appointed” to areas outside the borders of a civilized society or empire. The “Orient” is such a mythically invested geographical space, where barbarians supposedly dwell. Hence, geography is a parameter underlying many other standards examined here.
Finally, certain standards are more inclusive than others, and (partially) overlap with or encompass other standards. “Culture” is a case in point. A notoriously complex concept, it incorporates standards such as “religion,” “political ideology,” or “morality, values, and manners.” These standards are nevertheless examined separately because of their specific role in the definition of the barbarian.
Language
Language is located at the heart of the definition of the barbarian. In ancient Greece, language is the first criterion for distinguishing the barbarian. However, it should be noted that despite the Greek etymology of the word barbarian, scholars locate similar words in other early languages, such as the Babylonian-Sumerian barbaru (foreigner) (E. Hall 1989, 4). There are thus indications that the Greek word barbaros might have been formed under oriental influences.
In the earliest Greek sources, foreignness is already identified with linguistic difference. The word barbarophōnoi, referring to those who speak a language other than Greek, makes a first appearance in Homer’s Iliad, although Homer never uses the word Hellenes. Here, the Carians are called barbarophōnoi because they speak a different language (Munson 2005, 2). Accordingly, the leader of the barbarophone Carians is qualified as a fool, nēpios, which literally means “infantile,” like a baby who has not entered the system of language (2). Notably, some scholars, like Julius Pokorny, relate the word barbarian with Indo-European words that signify the “meaningless” or “inarticulate,” such as the Latin balbutio and the English baby (E. Hall 1989, 4). Thus, even in its early manifestations the term “barbarian” implies inferiority.12 Although at the time of its inception and up until the Persian Wars it primarily signified linguistic difference, this difference was sometimes accompanied by a depreciation of other peoples, based on the perception of their language as nonhuman speech (Long 1986, 131). Linguistic difference had other connotations. The word’s onomatopoetic etymology (the repetition of the “bar bar” sequence) denoted not just the foreign speech of the other but also elocution or pronunciation difficulties, speaking with harsh sounds or inarticulately, stuttering, or lisping (Long 1986, 130–31; Hartog 2001, 80). Although the term is certainly not complimentary, François Hartog argues that its early uses denote “a Barbarian way of speaking” and not “a Barbarian nature” (2001, 80).
Between the eighth and fifth centuries BCE, the linguistic criterion for the definition of the barbarian is more dominant than political or ethnic-based factors, because there is not yet a strong sense of shared ethnicity in the Greek world. Identity in Greece is primarily constructed around city-states, with considerable differences in laws, political systems, lifestyle, and even language. Although language remains the basis of the dichotomy throughout Greek antiquity, the barbarian is enriched with more negative connotations in later texts, especially during and after the Persian Wars, when the Greek/barbarian opposition acquires clear political, ethnic, and cultural connotations. In this context, foreign speech is a sign of primitivism, intellectual or cultural inferiority, and irrationality (Munson 2005, 2; Long 1986, 130–31; E. Hall 1989, 3–5).
Athenian drama reinforced the Greek/barbarian antithesis and helped consolidate the meanings of both terms. In the plays of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, the word “barbarian” means “non-Greek,” “incomprehensible,” and eventually “eccentric” or “inferior” (Kristeva 1991, 51). Nevertheless, the criterion of language also takes center stage in drama. Comedies, for instance, feature barbarians (foreigners) speaking Greek poorly for the production of comic effects. Moreover, the word “barbarian” is used in both comedies and tragedies to characterize sounds of animals, such as horses and, especially, birds (Munson 2005, 3).13 The understanding of a barbarian (foreign) language as noise, nonsense, or poorly spoken Greek may also account for the association of intelligible (Greek) speech with reason and intelligence. The orator Isocrates, for example, argues that logos is what distinguishes Greeks from barbarians (E. Hall 1989, 199).
However, there are also ambivalent and critical responses to the stereotypes involved in the Greek/barbarian antithesis. The historian Herodotus (ca. 484–425 BCE) is an interesting case in this respect. His Histories, and particularly his ethnographic descriptions, deal extensively with language difference and translation. Although in his account of the Persian Wars Herodotus fully endorses the distinction between Greek and barbarian, in his ethnographic accounts, as he zooms in on “barbarian peoples,” he offers nuanced analyses of barbarian languages and refrains from generalizations (Munson 2005, 23).
Due to his multilingual competency, Herodotus was in a privileged position from which he could challenge Greek linguistic ethnocentrism (67, 69). For instance, he observes that Egyptians, as Greeks do, call “barbarians” all those who speak another language as well as all “noise-makers,” including the Greeks. Within the Greek space, the Spartans confuse barbaros (non-Greek) with xenos (non-Spartan stranger/guest) and thus include other Greeks under the term barbaros.14 His writings therefore invalidate the supposed “linguistic handicap of non-Greeks” and show “that the barbarian/non-barbarian antithesis is relative” (66).
In the Hellenistic period—usually defined as the period between the death of Alexander the Great in 323 BCE and Rome’s annexation of the heartlands of classical Greece in 146 BCE—a simplified version of the Attic dialect known as Alexandrian Koine (common) became the official written and spoken language in the eastern Mediterranean until the sixth century CE. This common language, meant to serve the communicational needs of linguistically heterogeneous populations, emerged as a result of the intense cultural exchanges that followed the establishment of Alexander’s empire. This simplified version of Greek could be seen as a kind of creolization (or even “barbarization”) of the Attic dialect of classical Greece. The spreading of this common language among diverse populations, as well as the processes of hybridization in this period, resulted in the weakening of the role of language in the differentiation between barbarian and Greek.
Even though in the Hellenistic and Roman eras language gradually moves to the background as a standard for defining the barbarian, it does not disappear. It returns in late Roman times, for example, in writers such as Porphyry of Tyre, a Neoplatonic philosopher of the late third century CE. In On Abstinence, Porphyry argues that animals also have language, even though we cannot speak or understand it (G. Clark 1999, 119). In order to build his argument about the language of animals, Porphyry refers to the experience of hearing an utterly foreign language that you cannot understand or even recognize as language while other people can:
Greeks do not understand Indian, nor do those brought up on Attic understand Scythian or Thracian or Syrian: the sound that each makes strikes the others like the calling of cranes. Yet for each their language can be written in letters and articulated, as ours can for us; but for us the language of Syrians, say, or Persians cannot be articulated or written, just as that of animals cannot be for any people. For we are aware only of noise and sound, because we do not understand (say) Scythian speech, and they seem to us to be making noises and articulating nothing. (quoted in G. Clark 1999, 119–20)
In Porphyry’s views, the “problem” of the other’s incomprehensibility is not located with the others (the barbarians) but with the self and its limitations. The suggestion is that everyone is a barbarian to other people. A similar relativization is articulated by Saint Paul in 1 Cor. 14:10–11: “There are, it may be, so many kinds of voices in the world, and none of them is without signification. Therefore, if I know not the meaning of the voice, I shall be unto him that speaketh a barbarian, and he that speaketh shall be a barbarian unto me” (New Testament, 1865).
In the same period that Porphyry writes, the word “barbarism” already had a linguistic meaning, signifying faults in pronunciation (G. Clark 1999, 120). The linguistic standard at the heart of the “barbarian” survives until modernity through this second meaning of barbarism. According to this meaning, barbarism denotes mistakes in speech or writing, inferior linguistic forms, or foreignisms and linguistic hybridizations. During the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, there is an intensification of this linguistic usage of the term in western Europe. Classical languages (Latin in particular) were starkly opposed to the barbaric vernaculars, and foreign linguistic importations were perceived as a barbarization of the pure classical languages. Within Renaissance humanism, linguistic barbarism becomes a negative signifier in the context of a cultural and political program—fed by the nationalist aspirations of the Italian intelligentsia—that sought to defend the purity and superiority of Italian culture against foreign influences (Jones 1971, 403).
Culture
“Culture,” as Williams claims, is “one of the two or three most complicated words in the English language” (1985, 87).15 In a general sense, “culture” is used as a synonym of “civilization” to describe the accumulated habits, attitudes, beliefs, values, behavior, and way of life shared by the members of a society. Specifically, as Edward Said puts it, it involves practices “which have relative autonomy from the economic, social, and political realms, and which often exist in aesthetic forms, one of whose principal aims is pleasure” (1993, xii). In an even more specified sense, the term “culture” is, in Matthew Arnold’s view, reserved for the refined and elevated elements in a society, a “reservoir of the best that has been known and thought” (1966, xiii). In the latter case, culture is identified with what we often call “high culture.”
“Culture” is no less broad and inclusive than “civilization.” Although the two terms partly overlap, they have an intricate relationship. In the nineteenth century, for instance, Mignolo writes, culture “created national unity: national languages, national literature, national flag and anthem, etc. were all singular manifestations of a ‘national culture’” (2005, xvii). Thus, “European civilization was divided into national cultures.” At the same time, the rest of the world’s population was—and still often is—“conceived as having ‘culture’ but not civilization,” because the latter required an advanced level of science and history (xvii). This meaning of civilization in relation to culture has been somewhat relativized since the second half of the nineteenth century when “civilization” started to find use in the plural as a (quasi-)neutral term (Williams 1985, 59). Nevertheless, civilization generally tends to carry universalist claims, while culture poses as more particularistic (Salter 2002, 13). Where civilization is used to express Western identity vis-à-vis the West’s “outside,” culture often denotes a sense of unity, a mode of living, or a level of achievement within a certain nation or group. Hence, certainly in the context of colonialism, civilization has an outward direction, whereas culture tends to emphasize the internal practices and values of a group.16
The conceptual complexity of culture makes it difficult to untangle its shifting interaction with barbarism. Historically, the interrelation of these notions takes different forms, which range from absolute opposition to intimate intertwinement or even identification. At certain moments in history culture is an exclusive site of the “we,” but at other moments, culture becomes almost a bad word and something that belongs to the domain of the barbaric “they.” The following six historical “episodes,” in which the fate of “culture” and “barbarism” is adjoined, are juxtaposed to highlight the dynamic nature of their interrelation.
1. The opposition of culture to barbarism, whereby culture belongs to the “we” and barbarism is situated outside the domain of the “we,” persists throughout Western history.17 In Greece, cultural criteria for the opposition between Greeks and barbarians came to the fore in the fifth century BCE, during and after the Persian Wars. Although in the fifth century the opposition had primarily political dimensions—contrasting Athenian democracy and freedom of spirit to the despotism of the East—in the fourth and third centuries BCE, the Greek/barbarian antithesis was somewhat depoliticized (Hartog 2001, 96). Hellenicity was recast as a cultural category and as a matter of education (paideusis) (97). As the Athenian orator Isocrates declared in 380 BCE,
So far has our city left other men behind with regard to wisdom and expression that its students have become the teachers of others. The result is that the name of the Hellenes no longer seems to indicate an ethnic affiliation (genos) but a disposition (dianoia). Indeed, those who are called “Hellenes” are those who share our culture (paideusis) rather than a common biological inheritance (physis). (quoted in J. Hall 2002, 209)
In the words of Isocrates, Hellenicity—a quintessentially Athenocentric cultural ideal—becomes a matter of enculturation rather than birth. The prominent role of education in the definition of Hellenicity suggests that barbarians could also eventually become “Hellenized” and enjoy the “fruits” of Athenian culture.18
In the Hellenistic era, the individual became the subject of geographically vast states and acquired a “cosmopolitan” consciousness. These (and other) new conditions shaped a completely different framework for self-definition: the city-state system was overshadowed by the “Makedonian dynasts,” and many Greeks were transferred to “barbarian” territories (J. Hall 2002, 220). Alexander the Great’s policy of fusion and integration of populations weakened the dichotomous character of the Greek/barbarian distinction. Culture as an educational ideal was still identified with Hellenicity and barbarism with its outside, but Hellenicity was a “common good” that either Greeks or barbarians could possess.
As Jonathan Hall argues, the cultural definition of Hellenic identity persisted during Roman rule (224). However, the Romans, who still saw Rome as the center of dissemination of political and cultural influence, partly opposed Alexander’s policy of cultural syncretism (Hartog 2001, 152). In the early Roman period, the Greek/barbarian opposition was to some extent revised into a Roman/barbarian dichotomy, although Greek culture remained at the basis of Roman education. Romanitas could be acquired through education (Heather 1999, 241). Being barbarian was thus not an irreversible state but one that could be “remedied.” This idea can be compared with the “civilizing mission” of European colonialism and the attempts by European missionaries to convert colonized peoples. However, unlike the organized character of the latter “mission,” in the Roman Empire there was no systematic plan or intention to (collectively) educate the ignorant barbarians (Goffart 1981, 280). The educational process toward Romanitas took place more often on an individual than a collective level. It was primarily the responsibility of the barbarian rather than a mission for the Roman.19
2. Culture defined as “fine art” has been opposed to barbarism of an intra-European kind. In “Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man” (1794), written at the dawn of German Romanticism, Friedrich Schiller ponders the paradoxical coexistence of rational Enlightenment and (ethical) barbarism.20 If “our age is enlightened” and “the spirit of free inquiry has . . . undermined the foundations upon which fanaticism and deception had raised their throne,” Schiller famously asks, “how is it, then, that we still remain barbarians?” (1995, 106). Subsequently, he wonders, “How under the influence of a barbarous constitution is character ever to become ennobled?” (108). Seeking an “instrument” for the ennoblement of character, Schiller turns to “fine art,” which remains unaffected by the corruption of history and by a “degraded humanity” (108–9). Schiller proposes art as the means for an elevation from the barbarous (immoral) habits and qualities of humankind and from the barbarism of (European) Enlightenment and history. He adds, “Humanity has lost its dignity; but art has rescued it and preserved it in significant stone” (109).
While he puts art on a pedestal, Schiller simultaneously degrades (European) history and reason as the causes for an internal barbarism in European society. For Schiller, art has to be protected from “the corruption of the age,” and the artist has to “leave the sphere of the actual to the intellect” (109). The “sphere of the actual,” which seems to consist of history, rationality, and everyday reality, has led to a degraded human existence. Schiller views art as somewhat detached from its age. Art embodies an ideal of beauty through abstraction and not from human experience (115). Although art and barbarism are here strictly opposed, Schiller sees in art the antidote to barbarism—a kind of barbarism located within the civilized classes of Europe and the “‘refined members of society’ led by the aristocracy” (Früchtl 2008, 12). Thus, the correlation of culture with barbarism, which we later find in Walter Benjamin and other critical thinkers, finds one of its early expressions in Schiller (12).
3. Culture also crosses paths with barbarism in the relation between the German concepts Kultur and Zivilisation, as it took form from the end of the eighteenth century through World War I. The splitting of the meaning of Kultur from Zivilisation in German can be traced back to Johann Gottfried von Herder in his unfinished Ideas on the Philosophy of the History of Mankind (1784–91). As Williams says, Herder argued that we should speak of “cultures” in the plural, to refer to the “specific and variable cultures of different nations and periods,” but also, significantly, to the “specific and variable cultures of social and economic groups within a nation” (1985, 89). The latter sense was taken up by the Romantic movement as an alternative to the “orthodox and dominant ‘civilization’” (89). Kultur was used as a positive term for national or folk cultures but also, later, as a critique of the mechanical character and inhumanity of industrial development, which was identified with the concept of Zivilisation. The terms Kultur and Zivilisation, Williams notes, distinguished “human” from “material” development (89).
In this hierarchical distinction, Kultur is the positive term, whereas Zivilisation carries negative connotations. So much so that the latter is often identified with barbarism—a barbarism of an intra-European kind. As Europe found itself in a period of crisis and cultural pessimism at the fin de siècle—the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth centuries—Europeans started questioning rationalism, positivism, and the Enlightenment ideal of progress. The negativity of Zivilisation reflected this critical attitude to progress and reason, which was thought to have introduced a new kind of barbarism.
The positive connotations of “culture,” as opposed to the association of “civilization” with barbarism, are vividly laid out in Oswald Spengler’s famous historical two-volume epic The Decline of the West (Der Untergang des Abendlandes, 1918–22). Spengler defines Kultur as the healthy and creative energy of a people and Zivilisation as the decadent spirit of decay (Salter 2002, 71). For Spengler, Zivilisation represents a culture’s decline—the remains of a culture when its energy is depleted. The loss of creative energy in the West is linked with the prevalence of reason. Spengler—like Friedrich Nietzsche—uses barbarism not only as a negative signifier, referring to the declining Western civilization, but also as a positive notion. The barbarian is seen as a dynamic figure who could remedy civilization (71). The idea of a kind of barbarism that would revitalize Europe gained ground among many European thinkers at the fin de siècle. The cultural critic Matthew Arnold and the historian Jacob Burckhardt are two exponents of this line of thinking (Tziovas 1986, 170–71). Thus, the questioning of civilization through a positive notion of culture (Kultur) was also accompanied by attempts to positively redefine barbarism. In these recastings, barbarism is not the opposite of culture. Rather, it is invested with a creative force, just as culture is, according to Spengler.
4. The term Kultur in relation to barbarism is also famously used by Walter Benjamin in his dictum from “Theses on the Philosophy of History”: “There is no document of civilization that is not at the same time a document of barbarism” (1999b, 248). Benjamin uses Kultur where the translator uses civilization. Thus, we are not dealing with the old distinction between Kultur and Zivilisation, since in this case Kultur becomes a negative signifier affiliated with barbarism. Benjamin’s statement underscores the exploitation of anonymous masses and subjugated others in the name of Kultur (here, a synonym for civilization).
Along similar lines, Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment (1947) established strong ties between (European) culture and barbarism. The writers explain in the preface that “what we had set out to do was nothing else than to explain why humanity, instead of entering a truly human state, is sinking into a new kind of barbarism” (1988, xiv). Regarding “barbarism,” Adorno and Horkheimer had the totalitarian state in mind, in the form it took under German Nazism and the communism of the Soviet Union. The total annihilation of one’s political enemy in these regimes signaled the complete collapse of reason and a regression to barbarism. For Adorno and Horkheimer, this barbarism is not an exception but an “immanent constituent” of Western history (Früchtl 2008, 10). Barbarism is the flipside of progress, Enlightenment, and European culture. We come across comparable views in Michel Foucault’s Discipline and Punish (1975), Zygmunt Bauman’s Modernity and Ambivalence (1991), and Giorgio Agamben’s Homo Sacer (1998). In the writings of these thinkers, barbarism poses as a structural and inherent principle of culture, specifically of modern European culture as the legacy of Enlightenment.
5. Another attempt to counter the inherent barbarism of a culture based on reason came from a very different corner: the artistic movements of Dada and surrealism.21 Both movements emerged as a response to what was seen as a crisis in modernity. Dada was a revolt against the barbarism of World War I and of new technology. Surrealism was also a reaction to the barbarism to which progress had given birth. Surrealists and Dadaists took issue with nineteenth-century ideals and bourgeois values and became antipolitical and antinationalistic (Kreuter 2006, 41). Surrealism sought to liberate imagination and thereby achieve “a better grasp on the real,” “uninhibited by social, ethical, cultural, and aesthetic restrictions” (Matthews 1991, 115–16). The Dadaists created a new kind of art marked by negativity: antiaesthetic, antirational, antibourgeois, provocative, shocking. But in both movements barbarism also received a positive valuation as a force that resists the rational and conventional structures of European culture. As Stephen Foster writes, Dadaists “turned the negative qualities of crudeness and barbarism into a virtue” (Foster and Kuenzli 1979, 143). Surrealists are regularly referred to as “barbarians hammering at the gates of culture” or as “barbarians storming the gates” of European culture (Vaneigem 1999, 20).
6. In the face of their complex opposition in history, as we move to a more contemporary context, we find the concepts of “culture” and “barbarism” engaged in a constellation that paradoxically makes them synonymous. “Culture is the new barbarism,” writes Marxist critic Terry Eagleton in “Culture Conundrum” (The Guardian, May 21, 2008). This is how Eagleton develops this claim:
These days the conflict between civilisation and barbarism has taken an ominous turn. We face a conflict between civilisation and culture, which used to be on the same side. Civilisation means rational reflection, material wellbeing, individual autonomy and ironic self-doubt; culture means a form of life that is customary, collective, passionate, spontaneous, unreflective and irrational. It is no surprise, then, to find that we have civilisation whereas they have culture. Culture is the new barbarism. The contrast between West and East is being mapped on a new axis.
For Eagleton, the separation of “civilization” from “culture” is the product of a contemporary Western discourse identifying civilization with Western liberal societies and culture with nonliberal, non-Western societies based on collective identifications. In this Western liberal discourse, the West appears as civilized because it promotes individualism, whereas nonliberal societies, “enslaved” to their respective cultures, are identified with barbarism. Eagleton elaborates this argument in Reason, Faith, and Revolution, where he explicitly recasts the clash between civilization and barbarism as a conflict between civilization and culture: today, civilization means “universality, autonomy, prosperity, plurality, individuality, rational speculation, and ironic self-doubt,” whereas culture connotes “the collective, passionate, spontaneous, unreflective, unironic and a-rational” (2009, 155).
Slavoj Žižek and Wendy Brown make the same observation, but where Eagleton sees a split between civilization and culture, they detect two different types of relations to culture. According to Žižek, the liberal vision relies on an opposition between “those who are ruled by culture” and “those who merely ‘enjoy’ their culture” and have the freedom to choose it (2009, 120). This leads Žižek to the same conclusion as Eagleton: From a Western liberal perspective, “the ultimate source of barbarism is culture itself.” Barbarism is defined as a complete identification with one’s culture (120).
If culture is a source of barbarism, Žižek notes, the conclusion would be that the subject has to be extricated from culture. This is the universal liberal “Cartesian subject,” able to step outside its cultural and social roots and assert its autonomy and universality (120–21). According to Brown, Western civilizational discourse presents nonliberal peoples as owned by culture and liberal people in the West simply as having culture(s). Thus, according to this discourse, “‘We’ have culture while culture has ‘them,’ or we have culture while they are a culture” (2006, 150–51). For the nonliberal subject, culture and religion are authoritative, whereas for the rational liberal subject, culture and religion form a kind of “background,” something that can be “entered” or “exited” at will, and is thus considered extrinsic to the subject (153).
In contemporary liberal discourse, barbarism is associated with the condition of being governed by culture. Because Western liberal democracy considers itself “cultureless” or “culturally neutral,” Brown argues, its principles are considered “universalizable,” “above” culture, and thus supposedly applicable to all cultures (170). But the logic of Western liberalism, as Žižek argues, does not reflect a lack of culture; it represents modern Western culture—a culture that becomes intolerant when “individuals of other cultures are not given freedom of choice” (2009, 123).
Political System and Ideology
Systems of governance, regimes, and political ideologies have always drawn strict dividing lines between themselves and their political “other(s).” Designating the political other as barbaric, and thus as an evil enemy and not a worthy interlocutor, is often a means of safeguarding the sovereignty of a regime, whose legitimacy could be challenged if a true dialogue with the political other were to be sanctioned. In the twentieth century, for instance, the setting provided by the Cold War (1945–91) enabled the division of the world along political/ideological lines. In the capitalism/communism divide, both capitalism and communism were tagged as “barbaric,” depending on the camp to which one belonged.22
The construction of one’s political enemy as barbarian varies in degree according to the premises of a political system. Thus, one may argue that a democratic society, founded on the principle of dialogue and participation, is more willing to engage with its others without casting them as barbarians. This would not be the case in a totalitarian or fundamentalist regime, where the political other is a barbarian enemy to be eliminated. Chantal Mouffe sees conflict as a necessary dimension of democratic social life and proposes the notion of the “adversary” as a better alternative to the “enemy.” By turning enemies into adversaries, we acknowledge the legitimacy of the other and his or her standpoint, despite our differences (Mouffe 2005, 15–16, 20). As a result, the “them” is not a barbarian but someone we can oppose in a “common symbolic space” defined by democratic procedures (20). However, Mouffe’s “common symbolic space,” in which conflicts between adversaries can be productive, is only imaginable within the structures of a democratic society. Exactly how democratic societies would engage with adversaries from societies that do not play the political game according to the same rules is a question that remains unanswered. Thus, to my initial proposition about democracies I would add that a democratic society is more willing to engage with its others without casting them as barbarians as long as these others play by the rules of the liberal democratic system. Therefore, the other of democracy—such as the subject of fundamentalist societies today—is often tagged as barbaric from a democratic viewpoint.
The identification of the nondemocratic other with barbarism can already be found in the distinction between Greek and barbarian. The Greek/barbarian opposition in the fifth century BCE reflected the opposed political ideals of Athenians and non-Greeks: the democratic ideal that produces free citizens versus the despotism of the barbarians (Persians) (E. Hall 1989, 13, 16, 154). In his recounting of the Persian Wars, Herodotus’s distinction between Greeks and barbarians is political: it is the opposition between those who live free in the democratic polis, ruled by the law, and those who need masters to rule them (Hartog 2001, 84). These conflicting political ideals define the split between (Athenian) Greeks and barbarians, as well as between Europe and Asia (95).23
The (political) definition of Greeks and barbarians in classical Greece was Athenocentric (J. Hall 2002, 86). Democracy was considered an Athenian invention. Consequently, since the wars against the Persians were presented as an attempt to protect democracy against Asian despotism, the polarization of Greek and barbarian served the legitimation of the Athenian leadership among the Greek allied states. As Jonathan Hall argues, the image of the barbarian was constructed as the exact antipode not of Greeks in general but of the citizens who proclaimed themselves “to be the most free” of all, enjoying a democratic society par excellence: the Athenians (188–89). After the wars, the Athenians posed as the saviors and protectors of Greece (Hartog 2001, 84). The alliance that Athens formed following the retreat of the Persians (479 BCE)—the so-called Delian League—turned Athens into the major power among Greek city-states. Under Athenian leadership, this league was the basis for the economic prosperity and hegemony of Athens over the Aegean. The demonization of the barbarian (the Persian) legitimated demands from Athens for a regular toll from its allies (J. Hall 2002, 186–87).
By the mid-fifth century, the allied states could be characterized as an “Athenian Empire” (454–404 BCE). Therefore, the Greek/barbarian antinomy in classical Greece could to some extent be understood in an imperial context.24 If we place classical Athens in a loosely defined imperial context, empire can be seen as a constant factor in the construction of the barbarian in Western history. Empire holds a key position in this typology of standards, as a political, ideological, and cultural apparatus that produces—and depends on—the discourse on barbarians and civilized.25 A clear-cut distinction between civilized and barbarians is essential for an empire to sustain its political, cultural, and military hegemony. As a result, Brown writes, the barbarian “has been continually established vis-à-vis empire and imperial definitions of civilization” (2006, 181–82).
The barbarian figured prominently in the context of the Roman, and later of the Spanish, British, French, and the other western European colonial empires. Modern European empires were not focused on warding off the barbarians from the gates of civilization but aimed at territorial expansion, economic exploitation, and the violent subjugation of the colonized peoples, often coated in the logic of the civilizing mission.26 As Aimé Césaire argued, the colonizers’ mission as “the world’s civilizers” relies on turning the other into a barbarian (Césaire presented in Kelley 2000, 9). The idea of the “white man’s burden” determined the image of the barbarian in the colonies: the colonized subjects were seen as ignorant, infantile, and waiting to receive the merits of civilization but also as a dangerous threat to civilization. As Shohat and Stam argue, colonialist discourse “oscillates between these two master tropes, alternately positing the colonized as blissfully ignorant, pure, and welcoming on the one hand, and on the other as uncontrollably wild, hysterical, and chaotic, requiring the disciplinary tutelage of the law” (1994, 143).
The supposed barbarian nature of the colonized justified deviations from European standards of civilization in the colonies. Interestingly, the same double standards in the treatment of barbarian enemies are found in Roman authors as well. The historian Ammianus Marcellinus, for example, records an incident in which the Romans violated a truce with a group of Saxons and brutally slaughtered them. Because the Saxons were not equal enemies but a “destructive band of brigands,” their slaughter is fully justified from the Roman author’s perspective (Heather 1999, 234). The construction of the barbarian as evil and dangerous becomes a ruse for imperial violence.
The gradual decolonization in the mid-twentieth century set off a wave of fierce criticism against European colonialism. The anticolonial movement, with thinkers such as Aimé Césaire (in his seminal polemic text Discours sur le colonialisme, written in 1950) and Frantz Fanon, turned the barbarian/civilized dichotomy on its head. By exposing the barbarism of imperial rule and of the European colonial project, they transferred the tag of the barbarian to the European colonizer.
Morality, Values, and Manners
Although morality, values, and manners could all be placed under a broad definition of “culture,” it is worth probing the specific ways in which they have functioned as markers of civilized behavior—or barbarism.
In ancient Greek drama, barbarians are distinguished from Greek characters not only by language but by specific moral qualities, which deviated from “Hellenic virtue”: Greek monogamy is contrasted with barbarian polygamy, promiscuity, and lax morals, and barbarians are often shown as “emotional, stupid, cruel, subservient, or cowardly” (E. Hall 1989, 17). Cruelty or savageness as a connotation of the term “barbarian” appears on few occasions in Euripides but does not become a standardized connotation until the Roman age and the “barbarian invasions” (Kristeva 1991, 51). It is, however, significant that in classical Greece the term is already an ethical category.27
However, barbarians are not always negatively portrayed in Greek drama. There is sometimes a reversal of roles, as in Euripides’s Trojan Women, where Andromache attributes “barbarian deeds” to the Greeks (J. Hall 2002, 181). The moral distinction between Greek and barbarian is not absolute: Greeks are also capable of lapsing into barbaric behavior. In Trojan Women, for instance, although many Trojan characters embody typical barbarian features, it is also suggested that the real barbarism lies with the Greeks, who burn down Troy (Hartog 2001, 82).
Moral virtues are key in the definition of “Roman” in relation to “barbarian.” One of the main defining qualities of the civilized Roman was rationality, which could be acquired through education (the study of classical literature produces virtue), ethical stance (control of passions), and living according to the rule of law (civilitas) (Heather 1999, 236). The image of the barbarian was constructed as the antipode of Roman virtue: barbarians were slaves to their passions and sexual desires, drank excessively, were unable to form consistent policies and obey written laws, and were not capable of true freedom (libertas) (237–38).
The Roman image of the barbarian, which stressed irrationality and lack of discipline, influenced the late medieval conception of the barbarian as well, as soon as the religious definition of the term began to wane (Jones 1971, 397). Even when applied to non-Christians, like the Ottomans after the fall of Constantinople, the term had both religious and moral connotations. It conveyed an image of the Ottoman as the “rapacious barbarian whose ferocity in battle and whose fanatic hatred for Christianity seemed to place Christian Europe in dire jeopardy” (393).
As a moral category, the “barbarian” was not always negatively tinted. In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, northern European humanist circles sought to reassess their barbarian Germanic origins (404). Since their ancestors—the destroyers of Rome—were indissolubly linked with the term “barbarian,” northern European scholars were stuck with the term as descriptive of their own past. Thus, they tried to endow the barbarian status of their ancestors with connotations of moral principles, virtue, manliness, vigor, and simplicity. Teutonic scholars glorified the barbarian conqueror of the Roman Empire as the “upright, brave and hardy fellow, unencumbered by an articulate but possibly debilitating past” (406).
Although the moral connotations of the barbarian persist throughout Western history, in modernity the concept of civilization becomes particularly associated with a refinement of manners and with social etiquette, both in the English and French contexts (Williams 1985, 58). After the Middle Ages, particularly in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, civilization comes to signify an entire modern social process. In The Civilizing Process (Über den Prozess der Zivilisation, 1939), Norbert Elias traces the “civilizing” of manners and personality in western Europe from the late Middle Ages as a process whereby the standard of human behavior gradually changes “in the direction of a gradual ‘civilization’” (2000, x). Elias examines how post-medieval European standards regarding violence, sexual behavior, bodily functions, hygiene, table manners, and modes of speaking were subjected to increasingly strict thresholds of inhibition and shame and became part of a system of social demands and prohibitions (x). The new standards that came to signify “civilized behavior” also determined a “threshold of repugnance,” which functions as the line between civilized and barbaric behavior.28
In modernity, the negative valuation of the barbarian as a moral category, as opposed to the well-mannered, virtuous, and morally superior civilized subject, has also been subjected to critique and reversal. In the writings of Friedrich Nietzsche we encounter a mobilization of the barbarian as a dynamic figure, capable of revitalizing the decaying European civilization. The figure of the “new barbarian” can be situated within Nietzsche’s radical questioning of the foundations of reason, logic, and language in European Enlightenment thought. According to Nietzsche, the Enlightenment belief system is not based on any truth or fact but manages to invent the moral or intellectual foundations it needs and cast them as truth. Nietzsche debunks the Enlightenment ideals of progress and reason and sees European civilization as corrupt and declining. In his writings, the barbarian poses as the solution to this decadence (Salter 2002, 68).
Nietzsche’s barbarians are individuals with the energy and will to regenerate European culture by disregarding moral inhibitions. In The Will to Power (Der Wille zur Macht, 1901), Nietzsche envisions the barbarians of the twentieth century as “elements capable of the greatest severity towards themselves, and able to guarantee the most enduring will” (1968, 464). He describes the barbarian as belonging to “a species of conquering and ruling natures,” who obeys his natural instincts and gives vital energy back to European society (479). In some of his writings, Nietzsche’s barbarian is equated with his Übermensch: an individual who overcomes moral inhibitions in order to impose his will to power, “re-investing barbaric characteristics with moral value” (Salter 2002, 69). Nevertheless, as Salter argues, despite the radical change in European civilization Nietzsche saw as necessary, in his thought Europe is still “the center for the dissemination of these (new) values and power” (70).
Although in the course of the twentieth century social decorum and manners became less rigid as civilizational standards in Western societies, the association of civilization and barbarism with moral values and modes of behavior holds strong today. As shown previously, contemporary civilizational discourse tends to project liberal values (such as individualism, compassion, or tolerance) as markers of civilization, while their opposites are ascribed to the (fundamentalist) barbaric other. In the West today, “tolerance” emerges as a cardinal civilizational value. Jay Newman, a philosopher of tolerance, writes on the subject: “Intolerance is the most persistent and the most insidious of all sources of hatred. It is perhaps foremost among the obstacles to civilization, the instruments of barbarism” (1982, 3). According to Newman, intolerance can be remedied through education, which he views in terms of a civilizing process (discussed in Brown 2006, 183). In her critical analysis of the contemporary discourse on tolerance, Brown explains how this discourse constructs the non-Western other as incapable of tolerance and thus as barbaric. The fanatic, the fundamentalist, and the barbarian are often seen as premodern figures whose sensibility must be rectified by modern tolerant societies (183–84).
Humanity, Humanism, and the Human
The concepts of “humanity,” “humanism,” and the “human” have functioned not only as criteria for defining the barbaric but also as the opposites of the barbarian and barbarism, just as “civilization” has. But unlike civilization, which finds in the barbarian its perfect antithesis, the notion of the human has found its opposites in several categories, such as the “monster,” “God” or “the divine,” the “mechanical” or the “technological,” and the “animal.”29 “Humanity” can be a synonym for the “human race,” but it can also refer to human nature and, by extension, to virtues or states of being that typify this nature. As Martin Heidegger observes in his “Letter on Humanism” (1947), the opposite of humanity or the human takes shape based on the different views on what constitutes “humanity” as “the essence of man” (1998, 244). Thus, while Marx finds “man’s humanity” in the notion of society, Christianity views humanity in contradistinction to Deitas (244).30
In the Roman republic, homo humanus was opposed to homo barbarus. Homo humanus, according to Heidegger, “means the Romans, who exalted and honored Roman virtus through the ‘embodiment’ of the paideia [education] taken over from the Greeks” (244). Thus, humanitas in this context denotes a specific kind of education leading to virtue, while “barbarian” refers to someone excluded from this educational process. Homo humanus is here another term for homo romanus, and humanitas another term for Romanitas. This notion of humanitas as Romanitas in opposition to the homo barbarus is found in the fourteenth- and fifteenth-century Italian Renaissance (244). However, the makeup of what is considered barbarian changes in this new context: it represents the “supposed barbarism of gothic Scholasticism in the Middle Ages,” which is contrasted to the humanitas of the Greek civilization, as interpreted and filtered through Roman (and Renaissance) humanism (244).
In certain contexts, the barbarian is altogether excluded from the realm of humanity, here defined as “the human race.” In the context of European colonialism, the distinction between the civilized and barbarian is often reformulated as a distinction between human and animal. The so-called Age of Discovery, when Spain and Portugal began colonizing new lands in the late fifteenth century, occasions unique encounters between European civilization and the civilizations of these lands. These encounters generated systematic classifications as well as debates in Europe about the status of these “others.”31 Not only were the others of the colonies considered lesser, inferior human beings but they were sometimes also denied human status and treated as beasts. Africans and Asians were put on display all around Europe in anthropological-zoological exhibits or “freak shows” (Shohat and Stam 1994, 108). Academic and popular debates were held regarding the humanity of nonwhite races (Mills 1997, 20). European humanism, as Charles W. Mills puts it, “usually meant that only Europeans were human” (27).
Tzvetan Todorov has recently proposed a definition of the barbarian as someone who does not acknowledge the humanity of others (2010, 16). Although by “humanity” Todorov means “human nature,” his definition has an ethical undertone: acknowledging the humanity of others, and thus respecting them and refraining from violence against them, is what distinguishes the civilized from the barbarian. In Todorov’s definition, humanity is intertwined with civilization by posing as its distinctive feature and the only valid criterion for recognizing barbaric behavior.
Religion
With the advent of Christianity in the Roman Empire, religion becomes a defining factor in the construction of the barbarian. As the first Christian emperor, Constantine, assumes power, Christianity rises as a powerful force and leads to a rethinking of the categories of self-definition (Miles 1999, 10). Late-antiquity definitions of “Roman,” “Greek,” “barbarian,” “Christian,” and “pagan” are, as Richard Miles notes, complex, unstable, and “deeply problematic,” because each of these terms accommodated several distinct and mutually opposed significations (10).
In late antiquity, the two religious and philosophical codes of Christianity and Hellenism were in tension in their fight for domination. For Christians, Greek or Greek-educated people signified the barbarian other who does not accept the true faith. But for those who identified themselves as culturally Greek (including Romans), it was the Christians, regardless of origin or education, who were seen as barbarian, because they “had rejected Hellenism for barbarian scriptures” (G. Clark 1999, 122). Porphyry of Tyre, for example, a great polemic of Christianity, is reported to have said the following about a Greek-educated man who “went” barbarian: “Origen, a Greek educated in Greek literature, made straight for barbarism, putting himself and his literary training on the market; he lived like a Christian, lawlessly, but thought like a Greek about the divine and about things in general, insinuating Greek ideas into foreign fables.”32 This statement not only demonstrates the identification of Christianity with barbarism by Greek-educated philosophers but also signals the confusion and crisis around identity in late antiquity. The subject of the statement, Origen, seems to be torn between Greek and Christian affiliations, which were both perceived as the domain of either the self or barbarism, depending on perspective.
As a result of the so-called barbarian invasions and the disintegration of the Roman Empire in the West, the distinction between Romanitas and barbarism was recast primarily on the basis of religion. By the end of the seventh century, the barbarian in western Europe was usually the pagan or (Arian) heretic rather than the (Catholic) Christian (Heather 1999, 245). During the Middle Ages, the term “barbarian” generally captured the other of Christendom. However, according to W. R. Jones, for a long time in medieval Europe the term “barbarian” had not been applied to Muslim enemies because the primary stereotype of the medieval barbarian was the pagan. Muslim warriors were often depicted as the “chivalric counterparts of Christian knights”—not as barbarian savages. Even during the Crusades, the term was applied to Muslims only on a few occasions, where it served as a generic synonym for the non-Christian (Jones 1971, 392–93). Only after the fifteenth century and the Ottoman conquest of Constantinople did the word start to be used for the Muslim “antagonists of Christian Europe” (393). However, it is worth noting that from the perspective of the Orthodox Christian writers of Constantinople, the designation “barbarian” was systematically used for the late Roman emperors. Throughout the Middle Ages, these Byzantine writers viewed the West as “barbarian,” lost to “barbarian rulers.”33
From the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, with the gradual secularization of western European life, the “other” of Europe ceased to be predominantly defined on the basis of religion (Salter 2002, 19). Europeans acquired confidence in the ability of human beings to determine “truth” for themselves and consequently stopped thinking about their lives as ruled only by the divine. At the same time, the encounter of Europeans with the native inhabitants of the “New World” brought racial standards for defining the barbarian more to the foreground.
Nevertheless, religion continued to occupy an important place in the ideological apparatus of early European colonialism, especially in the colonization of the Americas. The material exploitation of the conquered people in the Americas was often legitimized on religious grounds. Converting the natives to Christianity would lead to their salvation. But whether or not the natives of the Americas could, in fact, be converted was an object of heated debate in Europe. Many Spaniards contended that the natives of the “New World” were incapable of receiving faith. This reasoning enabled the colonizers’ lack of constraint in the violent treatment of the natives.34 While conversion of the infidels to Christianity served as justification for the conquest of their land, the natives’ rejection of the Christian message was proof of “bestial irrationality” and barbarism and thus legitimized violent intervention (Mills 1997, 22).
At the time of the conquest of the Americas, Christian Europe also had its internal barbarian others. The Jews were among the most common victims of religious demonization and stereotyping. When the colonization of the “New World” started, the religious othering already taking place on European ground was extrapolated to the indigenous “infidels” of America (Shohat and Stam 1994, 60). Thus, a discourse of intra-European religious discrimination against Jews was transfigured into colonial racism (60).
With the secularization of Europe, especially during the Enlightenment, religion receded as a civilizational standard, yielding to race in the divide between Europeans and barbarians (Mills 1997, 23). However, today religion has made a comeback in the rhetoric of civilization versus barbarism. Since the 1990s religion has grown to be one of the key components in the way global divisions and conflicts are perceived. In Western political rhetoric, the “new barbarian” is often associated with the religion of Islam, which is seen as feeding violence and barbarism. Moreover, the religious vocabulary of “good versus evil” was amply employed in Western political rhetoric after September 11, 2001, in order to provide legitimation for military action against the “forces of evil” embodied by terrorists and those who support them.
Ethnicity and Race
“Race” is a category into which one is supposed to be born, whereas “ethnicity” is usually seen as an active affiliation resulting from social and cultural identification with a specific group.35 But the two categories are interrelated. In the nineteenth century, for example, ethnic distinctions became part of a racial discourse, which viewed them in terms of biological difference (Williams 1985, 214). In modern history, ethnic distinctions are often made through the category of the “nation.” The two words are in fact synonyms: nation translates the Greek ethnos. But if ethnicity is usually understood as a “quasi-primordial collective sense of shared descent and distinct cultural traditions,” nation—at least by the end of the eighteenth century—acquires a definition that is political at its basis: “a union of individuals governed by one law, and represented by the same law-making assembly.”36
Ethnicity provides a rather constant basis for the distinction between “us” and “them” in Western history, although it is not privileged equally in every context. In ancient Greece, the Persian Wars played a decisive role in shaping the ethnocentric discourse on Greeks and barbarians by identifying the barbarian with the Persian, located in a specific territory—Asia (Hartog 2001, 81, 84). Confronted with the Persian threat, the Greeks emphasized unifying factors that would set aside the differences among Greek city-states. By constructing the barbarian as the non-Greek, the heterogeneity of the Greeks themselves could appear more uniform (J. Hall 1995, 92–93). However, as Jonathan Hall notes, the notion of “Panhellenism” (the ideal of the Greeks as a unified ethnos) and, accordingly, the perception of all foreign peoples as a collective group, was specific to Athenian rhetoric (2002, 205, 208).
In ancient Greece, race (i.e., “common blood”) was not a stable criterion in the ethnic determination of “Greekness,” because Greeks had varied ethnic composition and, according to some ancient historians, “barbarian” origins (Munson 2005, 15). However, in works by some fifth-century authors the distinction between Greeks and barbarians becomes essentialized and acquires racial (and, from a contemporary perspective, racist) connotations. In Euripides’s Iphigenia at Aulis, Iphigenia tells her mother that “it is right that Hellenes should rule over barbarians and not barbarians over Hellenes, for they are slaves while we are free” (quoted in J. Hall 2002, 180, ll. 1400–1402). As Benjamin Isaac argues, Iphigenia’s assertion here of the natural superiority of Greeks over barbarians serves imperialist ideology, which finds justification in the notion of natural slavery (2006, 278). In Politics, Aristotle also propagates the distinction between natural slaves (the barbarians) and naturally free men (Long 1986, 150).
Nevertheless, the “natural” (racial or ethnic) basis of Hellenic identity was also contested.37 In Statesman, Plato underscores the arbitrariness of the division between Greeks and barbarians:38
Just as if some one who wanted to divide the human race, were to divide them after the fashion which prevails in this part of the world; here they cut off the Hellenes as one species, and all the other species of mankind, which are innumerable, and have no ties or common language, they include under the single name of “barbarians,” and because they have one name they are supposed to be of one species also. Or suppose that in dividing numbers you were to cut off ten thousand from all the rest, and make of them one species, comprehending the rest under another separate name, you might say that here too was a single class, because you had given it a single name. Whereas you would make a much better and more equal and artistic classification of numbers, if you divided them into odd and even; or of the human species, if you divided them into male and female; and only separated off Lydians or Phrygians, or any other tribe, and arrayed them against the rest of the world, when you could no longer make a division into parts which were also classes. (2009, 262a–263a)
In this passage, the generic categorization “barbarians” does not correspond to a natural division of the world but appears arbitrary and even counterintuitive. In fact, the passage suggests that all ethnic divisions are artificially construed and are thus philosophically unsound.39
In late antiquity and particularly in the Hellenistic period, ethnicity plays a very limited role in the definition of the barbarian, overshadowed by the cosmopolitan ideals of the period. In Roman times, as Heather argues, there was no “overriding ethnic content” to Romanitas, since in principle every individual could be educated into becoming “Roman” (1999, 241). Nevertheless, the term “barbarian” still applied collectively to non-Roman nations (barbarae nationes) and in that sense was also an ethnic category. According to Liddell and Scott’s Lexicon, at the beginning of the Roman Empire “barbarian” was used for all non-Roman nations who had not received Greco-Roman education. But as the Roman Empire annexed more people and lands, the term was limited to the Teutonic nations. Walter Goffart argues that “barbarian” as a collective term for these people expresses a Greco-Roman point of view, premised on a flawed perception of the Teutonic nations as homogeneous (1981, 277–78). In fact, these people were “diverse and disunited,” with no “collective mind or collective aspirations” (285).
The conferral of a unified Germanic identity to the barbarians of Rome by modern historians can be related to the desire of modern Germans to construct a coherent national account of their past (279). Notably, northern European humanist scholars in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries embraced the term “barbarian” for their Germanic ancestors and thus also for their own national determination (Jones 1971, 404). A surprising contribution to the German national self-determination—performed not against but through the use of the term “barbarian”—comes from the historians of Constantinople. Whereas historians in the Byzantine Empire portrayed past Roman emperors in a negative light, they praised the barbarians (the Germanic nations) and their heroic leaders (Goffart 1981, 303). Authors in Constantinople even tried to construct a coherent ethnic context and history for the Germanic barbarians—a construction that would provide a foundation for the idea of a unified Germanic identity (303–4).
The rise of nation-states in modern history made “nation” an important factor in the self-determination of Europeans. Nevertheless, the barbarian/civilized distinction in modern Europe, especially in the context of colonialism, is particularly marked by the establishment of race as a civilizational standard. The belief of Europeans in their racial superiority vis-à-vis Native Americans and Africans provided a legitimation for the enslavement and exploitation of those natives. At the same time such practices would be condemned within Europe, especially if directed toward Europeans. Nevertheless, the term “barbarian,” along with other derogatory terms, also came to be applied to Europe’s internal others. There were “intra-European varieties of racism” directed against marginalized European nations or ethnic groups—“white people with a question-mark”—such as the Irish, Slavs, Mediterranean peoples, Romany, and the Jews (Mills 1997, 78–79).
In the nineteenth century, biological racism was established and sanctioned by (pseudo)scientific discourses. It was accompanied by an obsession for classifications, taxonomies, and a general codification of difference. Socioeconomic distinctions among ethnicities, classes, and sexes were recast in biological terms. Nineteenth-century “pure blood” theories foreclosed the possibility of conversion of the other and led to colonial exterminations. Within Europe, these racial theories fed the ideology that led to the Jewish genocide by the German Nazis (Shohat and Stam 1994, 91). Fascism, especially the form it took in Hitler’s Germany, was motivated by the utopian dream of a return to a “mythical past of national-racial purity” (Neilson 1999, 89). The other of the superior race was constructed as barbarian and inhuman, but also as a virus or parasite, threatening to contaminate the “pure race.”
Class
In modern European history, the distinction between civilization and barbarism was also mobilized in class distinctions within European nations. During the Industrial Revolution of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the term “barbarian” was applied to “an underclass of disenfranchised, newly urbanized European peasants”—an application that expressed the fears of the middle and upper classes (Salter 2002, 26). The increasing gap between classes in Europe led to a conception of civilization as “the achievement of aristocratic races” (Tziovas 1986, 179). In this context, the discourses of class and race become intertwined. In the nineteenth century, the barbarism and moral degradation of “the British urban poor,” as Ann Stoler argues, was expressed through the use of racial metaphors, drawn from the “savage tribes” of the colonies (1995, 125). The interpenetration of race and class discourses is eloquently described by British historian Victor Kiernan:
In innumerable ways his [the European gentleman’s] attitude to his own “lower orders” was identical with that of Europe to the “lesser breeds.” Discontented native in the colonies, labour agitator in the mills, were the same serpent in alternate disguise. Much of the talk about the barbarism or darkness of the outer world, which it was Europe’s mission to rout, was a transmuted fear of the masses at home. (quoted in Stoler 1995, 125–26, emphasis added)
The poor classes at home and the primitive barbarians of the colonies were drawn together as the “dangerous classes” that threatened British bourgeois mores (126).40
The strict class structure of Europe and the inequalities it produced were also mobilized for pinpointing barbarism within European civilization. For many Enlightenment thinkers, the injustice of class distinctions was one of the main reasons why European societies were more barbaric than tribal societies. Michel de Montaigne in his 1580 essay “On Cannibals” (Des cannibales) condemns the barbarism of class in Europe by contrasting it with a Native American perspective:
They [the Tupinamba] said . . . that they had noticed among us some men gorged to the full with things of every sort while their other halves were beggars at their doors, emaciated with hunger and poverty. They found it strange that these poverty-stricken halves should suffer such injustice, and that they did not take the others by the throat or set fire to their houses. (1958, 119)
Montaigne’s reconstruction of this Native American outlook on European class inequality illustrates how irrational and arbitrary the European class system appears from an external viewpoint and enhances his critique of European civilization.
Karl Marx confers the tag of barbarism on the capitalist system of production. In “Estranged Labor” (1844), he lays out how capitalism alienates and enslaves workers to their objects of production. He sees a necessary connection between civilization and barbarism in the relation between the worker and the product of labor in capitalism: the more “civilization” society produces, the more barbarous it becomes for the ones who produce, because workers become entirely alienated from the product and process of production, as well as from their own life activity (Marx 1988, 76). Under capitalism, the life activity of the worker—what Marx calls “species-life” and what distinguishes humans from other animals—becomes just a means for the worker’s physical existence. “The more the worker produces,” Marx writes, “the less he has to consume; . . . the more civilized his object, the more barbarous the worker; the more powerful the work, the more powerless the worker.” Although machines often replace human labor, some of the workers are cast “back into barbarous forms of labor” or turned into machines themselves (72). The barbarism of the capitalist system ironically turns the worker into less-than-human—a machine.
Although class is not one of the most prevalent standards defining barbarism and civilization, it is often a silent factor in civilizational discourse. Thus, class is implicitly involved in one of the definitions of the “barbarian.” According to the Oxford English Dictionary (2nd ed.), the barbarian is “an uncultured person, or one who has no sympathy for literary culture.” This definition encompasses two civilizational standards. The explicit standard here is culture, specifically an elevated form of culture and love for the belles lettres. The underlying standard is class, as Brown also notes, because in this definition civilization is associated with high European culture (2006, 252). This high culture is the privilege of a social and cultural elite—an elite that finds its members among the bourgeois and the upper European classes.
Gender
The figure of the barbarian has often been cast in gendered and sexualized terms. In Western imagination, barbarians are usually invested with features of masculinity and virility, which enhance their supposed unrestrained nature and threat to civilization. The blueprint for this image of the barbarian can be traced back to representations of the Germanic warrior-nations that invaded Rome. Edward Gibbon’s The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, written in the late eighteenth century, is a classic source of masculine barbarian imagery, feeding the European imagination with images of barbarian hordes at the gates of Rome.
Such imagery has sparked a wide range of fictionalizations of the barbarian warrior. “Conan the barbarian” is probably the most famous barbarian in popular fiction. Conan was created by Robert E. Howard in 1932 for a series of fantasy stories. Conan’s long-standing popularity has made him a protagonist in movies such as Conan the Barbarian (1982) and Conan the Destroyer (1984), as well as in television series, comic books, fantasy fiction, video games, and role-playing games. Conan, John J. Miller writes, is “an icon of thick-muscled, sword-wielding manhood.” Although his adventures are usually set in a mythical age, he is often depicted as looking Germanic—an allusion to the Germanic “barbarians” of the late Roman period. Conan “is no knight in shining armor who piously obeys a code of chivalry” (Miller 2006). As Howard writes in one of his Conan tales, “The warm intimacies of small, kindly things, the sentiments and delicious trivialities that make up so much of civilized men’s lives were meaningless to him.”41 In Conan’s words, “I live, I burn with life, I love, I slay, and am content.”42
Despite the heavy dose of masculinity with which the barbarian figure has been injected, women have also claimed this trope. If male barbarians tend to be depicted as hypermasculine, female barbarians are shown as “hyper-feminine” and “over-sexualized” (Salter 2002, 55). Nevertheless, female barbarians also assume male features or roles. In ancient Greek tragedy, the opposition between Greek and barbarian is often presented as analogous to that between man and woman.43 In some cases, transgressive female characters in Greek tragedy either are actual barbarians (non-Greek) or their transgression is considered an endorsement of barbarian customs (E. Hall 1989, 202). The figure of Clytaemnestra in Aeschylus’s Oresteia belongs to the latter category. The woman who murdered her husband, King Agamemnon, as an act of revenge for the sacrifice of their daughter, Iphigenia, is one of the most dominant women in tragedy (204). Clytaemnestra is often referred to as a “manly woman” (205). Her masculinity is also pronounced through the attitude of her weak-willed husband, who, in succumbing to her lavish demands and wishes, is considered to be disavowing Greek values and resorting to barbarian decadence. As Edith Hall argues, this perversion of the natural order regarding man-woman roles, with the woman taking the upper hand, is considered typical only of the barbarian (Persian) world (205). This is also made clear in Agamemnon’s words as he tries to resist the decadence to which Clytaemnestra draws him: “Do not pamper me like a woman nor grovel before me like some barbarian with wide-mouthed acclaim” (quoted in E. Hall 1989, 206, ll. 918–22). Femininity, luxury, excess, hubris, and barbarism are all parts of a “semantic complex” signifying “all that Greek manhood should shun” (206).
Associations between barbarians and femininity also pervade Orientalist discourses. European descriptions of Asian women in the colonies contributed to the construction of a female barbarian figure, typified by lax morals, sexual promiscuity, deceptive seductiveness, the threat of racial contamination, and so on.44 But the ways gender and sexuality are mobilized in the construction of the barbarian in the colonial context are far from stable. For example, whereas African barbarians were often depicted as masculine, Asian barbarians tended to be portrayed in feminine terms (Salter 2002, 55). Moreover, feminine features were attributed both to women in the colonies and to the Orient itself. As Anne McClintock argues, France and Britain posed as masculine nations, while the colonies were effeminized (1995, 54–55). The Orient was constructed as a female space, whereas Europe—the domain of civilization—was cast in masculine terms. In a representational system that, according to Said, finds its beginnings in classical Greece, the Orient appears as defeated, excessive, irrational, dangerous, mysterious, queer, and weak, while Europe is powerful, articulate, mature, rational, and “capable of holding real values” (2003, 40, 45, 49, 57, 103). European civilization is endowed with a stereotypically male sexuality. Its superiority gives civilization the right to penetrate, decipher, and give meaning to the female Asian mystery.45 Thus, the gendering of the barbarian ran parallel to the gendering of the Orient itself vis-à-vis Europe.
A noteworthy reversal of the correlation between civilization and male dominance takes place in the rhetoric of nineteenth-century American feminists. Their feminist discourse drew from the discourse on barbarism and civilization in an attempt to reshape traditional valuations of Western patriarchal societies. Nineteenth-century activists for women’s rights turned to Native American societies, which they viewed as gynocratic, because they were marked by equal gender relations and a social system more just to women (Grinde and Johansen 1991, 226–27). In the eyes of these feminists, Native American societies—traditionally viewed as barbarian from a European perspective—were exemplars of civilization. As Elizabeth Cady Stanton said in an address to the National Council of Women in 1891, “Our barbarian ancestors seem to have had a higher degree of justice to women than American men in the 19th century” (quoted in Grinde and Johansen 1991, 227).
In this reversal of the barbarism/civilization opposition, women appear closer to civilization than men, because male-dominated societies are immersed in barbarism and savagery. Feminists like Matilda Joslyn Gage and Elizabeth Cady Stanton turned away from “civilized” European history and found inspiration in “barbarian” (native) societies. In their rhetoric, gender equality and equal participation in politics and decision making are presented as the ticket for the passage from savagery and barbarism to true civilization (233). Although these feminists deployed the barbarism/civilization discourse in order to challenge male dominance, one must also consider that the patriarchal structures they were trying to overthrow were deeply inscribed in the same discourse.
Progress
The concept of “progress” generally refers to the idea that humanity can gradually become better in various domains such as technology, science, standard of living, modernization, and freedom. In particular, the belief in progress as the cornerstone of European civilization can be attributed to Enlightenment philosophy.
Progressive or evolutionary models often placed barbarism or the barbarian on a scale of development: barbarism was an earlier stage in a course that usually ended with European civilization as the apogee of human progress.46 Thus, under “progress” I lay out various (pseudo)scientific, philosophical, or social models, in which barbarism or the barbarian represents a stage in a process toward a higher civilized state. The criteria on which such models are premised range from technique, modes of production, and economic system, to hygiene, lifestyle, geography, race, and biology.
Although progress is a modern concept, several premodern theories have mobilized the barbarian in accounts of societal development. The Greek historian Thucydides (460–395 BCE), for example, traces the origins of the Greeks of his time through barbarian groups. His view is suggestive of an evolutionary model, according to which barbarians belong to another temporality and thus represent a more primitive stage of human development. Another Greek historian, Hecataeus of Miletus (550–476 BCE), reports that Greece had been inhabited by barbarians in the past. The views of both historians hold a double implication. First, since Greeks emerged from barbarian nations, Hellenicity was not dependent on blood. Second, barbarism and Hellenicity were conceived in terms of a temporal succession: first there were barbarians, who then progressed to Hellenicity. Of course, Thucydides also observes that there is “a current Barbarian world.” Thus, there are barbarians who evolved into Greeks, and barbarians who remained barbarians.47
Other theories consider the evolvement toward civilization as premised on manners and social behavior. The twelfth-century Anglo-Welsh author Gerald of Wales, for instance, uses the term “barbarians” for the Irish, because he perceives their society as less advanced. What he deems barbaric are their uncultivated manners and attitude, their ignorance, pastoralism, isolation from advanced nations, and marginalized way of life (Jones 1971, 396).
While earlier thinkers also placed the barbarian in a temporal frame of development, the systematization of the idea that humanity progresses from barbarism to civilization, as articulated in social, political, or (pseudo)scientific theories, is specific to modernity. Developments in technique and means of production often pose as standards for determining a society’s level of civilization. For instance, in a model developed by French and Scottish philosophers in the mid-nineteenth century, societal development advances in four stages: savage societies (consisting of hunter-gatherers), barbarian societies (consisting mainly of shepherds), agricultural societies, and societies based on the institution of a commercial, capitalist market (European society) (Meek 1976, 14–23; Salter 2002, 16). In the eighteenth century, Johann Gottfried von Herder viewed the stages through which societies acquire culture as the domestication of animals, agriculture, commerce, and the development of science or art (Todorov 2010, 34).48
Another model comes from Rousseau’s “Essay on the Origin of Languages” (1852), in which barbarism is placed between a savage and a civilized society based on alphabet and writing. Rousseau writes: “These three ways of writing correspond almost exactly to three different stages according to which one can consider men gathered into a nation. The depicting of objects is appropriate to a savage people; signs of words and of propositions, to a barbaric people, and the alphabet to civilized peoples” (1966, 17).
Hegel’s Philosophy of History (1837), based on a series of lectures that influenced nineteenth-century European perception of the non-European world, suggests a model in which spatial difference is combined with temporal distance. “The History of the World,” Hegel writes, “travels from East to West, for Europe is absolutely the End of History, Asia the beginning” (2004, 103). In his scheme of historical progress, a spatial divide (East-West) turns into a model of temporal development: the East is the beginning and childhood of History; the West is its mature age and its end. Africa is missing from this model, since for Hegel Africa has no history. Similarly, in the context of European colonialism, indigenous peoples in the conquered lands were perceived as living “allochronically” in earlier stages of human life (childhood) or history (primitivism), far behind European modernity and progress.49
In the face of evolutionary or progressive models, in history we also encounter several reversals of the barbarian/civilized opposition, whereby more primitive or “natural” ways of life are valued more than civilization. After the “discovery” of the “New World” in 1492 and up to the nineteenth century, many European philosophers, travelers, and writers idealized Native American societies. Native Americans were often depicted as dangerous barbarians but also as “noble savages”: close to nature, free, maintaining values such as liberty, happiness, government by consensus, and equality of property (Grinde and Johansen 1991, 2–3). Beginning in the sixteenth century, accounts of societies without class structure and poverty, wherein people lived without jails, judges, or kings, led to a boom of utopian literature in Europe, which lasted until the end of the nineteenth century. In these European narratives, utopian primitive societies functioned as a vehicle for social criticism of a supposedly civilized Europe, aimed both at European colonialism and intra-European social problems (40–41).
One of the most famous reversals of the barbarian/civilized hierarchy is performed in the essay “On Cannibals” by sixteenth-century author Michel de Montaigne, who is said to have introduced the notion of the “noble savage” to the European world of letters. Montaigne portrayed American natives as free, natural, uncorrupted, and more civilized than Europeans. For Montaigne, European practices were more barbarous and unnatural than those of Native Americans. He even showed sympathy for the natives’ anthropophagy: he finds their habit of eating people after they have killed them less barbarous than the practice of Europeans to “eat a man alive” and to do that “under the cloak of piety and religion” (1958, 113).
Montaigne goes so far as to question the essentialist use of the term “barbarian”: “I do not believe, from what I have been told about these people, that there is anything barbarous or savage about them, except that we all call barbarous anything that is contrary to our own habits” (108–9). Thus, barbarism is not an inherent quality of certain peoples but a name for the uncommon or the unfamiliar. In this sense, Montaigne can be considered an early proponent of cultural relativism. Despite his idealization of the natives of America and his critical outlook on European societies, Montaigne still placed these natives in an earlier stage in progress: “These nations, then, seem to me barbarous in the sense that they have received very little moulding from the human intelligence, and are still very close to their original simplicity. They are still governed by natural laws and very little corrupted by our own” (109). Montaigne’s view is contrary to many popular models of progress: he considers lagging behind in progress a desirable state instead of a marker of inferiority. Thus, his essay does not reject the temporal model of progress but reverses its valuation.
In the eighteenth century, thinkers such as Montesquieu and Jean-Jacques Rousseau are also skeptical about the merits of civilization and formulate a critique of their own societies by pleading for the supposed simplicity and purity of savage or barbarian societies.50 Denis Diderot also provided an inversion of the barbarian/civilized hierarchy by depicting Europeans as the real barbarians:
Barbarous Europeans! The brilliance of your enterprises does not impress me. Their success does not hide their injustice. In my imagination I have often embarked in those ships which bring you to distant countries, but once on land, and witness of your misdeeds, I separate myself from you and I join your enemies, taking arms against you, bathing my hands in your blood. (quoted in Shohat and Stam 1994, 89)
But the barbarian as a vehicle for a critique of civilized societies is not exclusive to modernity or Enlightenment thought. Reversals of the barbarian/civilized hierarchy, whereby the progressed civilized appear more barbarous or corrupt than the barbarians, already appear in Homer’s Iliad, in Plato’s Republic, or in the writings of the Roman historian Tacitus (Rawson 2001, 6; White 1972, 27–28). The privileging of a certain kind of primitivism also appears in various philosophical, historical, and literary writings. During the Hellenistic period, the Cynics (445–365 BCE) were advocates of primitivizing life and aimed at releasing “the real Barbarian who lurked at the very heart of the city” (Hartog 2001, 98). Ephorus of Cyme (405–330 BCE) saw primitivism as a more just and pure way of life, and thereby closer to the gods (99).51 The idea of “alien (barbarian) wisdom” was also popular among many Greek intellectuals of that period (99).
Thus, from the ancient Cynics, to Enlightenment thinkers, to primitivism and exoticism in twentieth-century modernist literature and art, the attraction to the barbarian other is almost omnipresent in Western history. Theories of primitivism, the figure of the noble savage, and other attempts to invert the barbarian/civilized hierarchy all challenged discourses of civilization. As Richard Bernheimer writes about the “Wild Man,” “Nothing could have been more radical than the attitude of sympathizing or identifying oneself with the Wild Man, whose way of life was the repudiation of all the accumulated values of civilization” (1952, 144–45). Nevertheless, whether such attitudes focus on the commendable traits of the barbarian or on the barbaric behavior of the civilized, they often feed on the Eurocentric elements they seem to question. By valuing barbarism or primitivism more than civilization, they may question the merits of European progress, but they do not (always) invalidate the idea of progress itself: barbarians may still be used as a vehicle for criticizing European societies and simultaneously remain behind civilization in the scale of progress.52
Psyche
Hayden White argues that in modern times concepts of otherness, such as the barbarian, which have served the process of “ostensive self-definition by negation,” have been relegated to the category of fiction or mere prejudice (1972, 5–6). While the category of the barbarian was generally applicable only to specific groups of people outside the borders of civilization, in modern times, White contends, a partial demythologization and despatialization of the barbarian has taken place, which has led to a “compensatory process of psychic interiorization.”53 According to White, barbarians or wild men have been debunked as essentialist categories and now exist as sociopsychological categories, describing areas of our psychological landscape rather than distinct portions of humanity (35). This interiorization has led to a “remythification” of the barbarian, which finds expression in the trope of “the barbarian within.”54
The trope of “the barbarian within” in modernity is indissolubly associated with Freud’s psychoanalytic theory. Freud’s main contribution to the discourse on barbarism lies in his idea that barbarism is internal to every individual. The barbarian is an aspect of our unconscious, which civilization tries to keep under control. Freud’s introduction of psychoanalysis at the dawn of the twentieth century led to a radical shift in the self-perception of the civilized and revealed civilization as more unstable than previously thought.
The interiorization of the barbarian—the idea that barbarism is the irrational side of the human psyche—is older than twentieth-century psychoanalytic theory. In the Roman republic, for instance, although the distinction between Romans and (external) barbarians was the basis of Roman identity, some authors acknowledged the irrational and barbaric side of the human psyche. In a speech celebrating a deal between the emperor Valens and a group of Goths in 370 CE, the philosopher and political statesman Themistius says, “There is in each of us a barbarian tribe, extremely overbearing and intractable—I mean temper and those insatiable desires, which stand opposed to rationality as Scythians and Germans do to the Romans” (quoted in Heather 1999, 236). The idea that there is a barbarian in each of us but that (Roman) civilization is able to restrain this internal barbarism and is thus more rational than its barbarian others does not seem too far from Freud’s approach to the issue.
Themistius’s rendition of the barbarism within, however, is not issued as a criticism of his Roman peers. On the contrary, it is intended as a reaffirmation of the superiority of the Romans. As Peter Heather argues, Themistius here appeals to the conviction of the Roman elite that its members were more rational than the barbarians from beyond the borders (1999, 236). Remarkably, Themistius makes his point about the internal barbarian by drawing an analogy with the external division between civilized and barbarians as distinct groups. Therefore, even though he observes the barbaric drives within all humans (including the Romans), the understanding of the barbarian as an external other remains his stable reference point. Ironically, his belief in the ability of the Romans to control passions through rationality stands in stark contrast with the brutality of the Roman Empire against its barbarians, which did not show many signs of restraint (238). The idea of the “inside barbarian” was thus not strong enough to challenge the Romans’ belief in the legitimacy of their own barbaric acts. The Roman Empire would not allow its foundations to be challenged by making the (internal) barbarism of its own “civilized” citizens an issue.
Freud’s ideas were certainly more successful in challenging the self-perception of the European subject. Civilization and Its Discontents (1930) is the main source for Freud’s views on this matter. The central theme of this study is the irresolvable antagonism between instinct and the restraints of civilization. Freud sees a progression of humans from an unrestricted satisfaction of instincts (a primitive state) to a repression of instincts, which is the precondition for a civilized society. Love is found at the foundations of civilization: the goal of a civilized society is to make its participants happy (Freud 1962, 48). But there is also a destructive drive in civilization. The two drives form civilization’s struggle between Eros and Death.
For civilization to be sustained, individual instinct needs to be repressed. This condition generates unhappiness, frustration, neurosis, and self-hatred. While civilization uses the law as an external mechanism for regulating aggression, the internal mechanism that prevents the externalization of aggressive impulses in the individual lies in the production of a sense of guilt. Freud elaborates:
What means does civilization employ in order to inhibit the aggressiveness which opposes it, to make it harmless, to get rid of it perhaps? . . . What happens to him [the civilized individual] to render his desire for aggression innocuous? . . . His aggressiveness is introjected, internalized; it is, in point of fact, sent back to where it came from—that is, it is directed towards his own ego. . . . The tension between the harsh super-ego and the ego that is subjected to it, is called by us the sense of guilt; it expresses itself as a need for punishment. Civilization therefore, obtains mastery over the individual’s dangerous desire for aggression by weakening and disarming it and by setting up an agency within him to watch over it, like a garrison in a conquered city. (1962, 70)
The repression of drives is thus effected through guilt. According to Freud, our “loss of happiness through the heightening of the sense of guilt” is the price we pay for civilization’s advances (81). This control mechanism, however, does not always succeed in keeping our aggressive instincts at bay. In Freud’s model, the “return of the repressed” becomes the greatest threat to civilization.
The universalism of Freud’s views—the fact that they were presented as applicable to all individuals—destabilized the prevalent belief that barbarism was external to Europe. The barbarian is not another race, nation, or religious group but part of our unconscious. The suggestion that there are barbaric drives in every human being, which civilization represses, presented a challenge to the colonial project premised on the assumption of a fundamental difference between Europeans and colonized subjects.
However, the tension between barbarism (aggression) and civilization (restraint) does not exist in equal degree within all subjects. The synchronous relation established between civilization and barbarism in Civilization and Its Discontents is elsewhere in Freud associated with a scheme of societal progress from barbarism toward civilization. In Freud’s Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego (1921), barbarism is linked with group identity, while the individuated psyche is a marker of civilization. In Freud, strong group identity is pathologized as dangerous and irrational and is associated with less advanced social formations. Here, Freud builds on views by Gustave Le Bon, whom he also quotes in Group Psychology: “By the mere fact that he forms part of an organized group, a man descends several rungs in the ladder of civilization. Isolated, he may be a cultivated individual; in a crowd, he is a barbarian—that is, a creature acting by instinct” (Freud 1959, 12). Groups represent a state of regression of the psyche. For this reason, groups, even when they consist of civilized individuals, can exhibit mob behavior.55
In many readings of Freud’s progressive narrative, Brown argues, Western liberal values, with their emphasis on individualism and their disavowal of group identity, stand for the “highest state of ‘maturity’ for man and are equated with civilization” (2006, 155). In Group Psychology, Freud normatively draws “maturity, individuation, conscience, repression, and civilization” into the same semantic complex and opposes them to “childishness, primitivism, unchecked impulse, instinct, and barbarism” (157). Civilized individuals are favored vis-à-vis primitive, barbaric groups, who exhibit collective identifications. However, the individuated psyche does not represent a permanent state of civilization because there is always the possibility of regression from the civilized state to barbarism and irrationality. Thus, Freud’s views take away civilization’s confidence in its own power by suggesting that civilization’s restraint of instinct is precarious and fragile. In “Thoughts for the Times of War and Death” (1915), Freud saw World War I as a great example of this fragility (1985, 65). Therefore, Freud’s attitude toward the technological advances of civilization is ambiguous. While he is skeptical of the purported progress of European civilization, he does not reject or condemn it (Salter 2002,74). Whether civilization is a blessing or a curse can be judged only by the outcome of the struggle between instincts and rationality in each particular case.
The barbarian is not a self-identical concept. Its history demonstrates that it carries internal contradictions and diverse narratives that disjoin its identity to itself, unsettle its assumed fixity in Western discourse, and point to its connectivity with several categories and contexts. Its disjoined self-identity guarantees its transformability in the present. According to Mieke Bal, a word or image never forgets where it has been and always carries the memory of its previous uses, but “every re-use of pre-existing material changes it” (1999, 100). The history of the barbarian, then, does not decide the future of this concept in a deterministic, linear manner; its past can also be reshaped from and by the present. Therefore, the history of the barbarian does not only produce its present but also emerges as an effect of the present.
The outcome of the struggle between historical and new potential uses of barbarism or the barbarian is not predetermined. Neither is the outcome of the relation between civilization and barbarism. Barbarism cannot be fully contained by civilized discourse. Not only civilization can define and mold barbarism—the reverse is also conceivable. The following chapters stage the tension between these concepts in an attempt to chart a new space for barbarism, through which—why not?—perhaps a new typology of barbarian standards may take shape in the future.