Читать книгу Antike Sklaverei - Группа авторов - Страница 10

Slavery, I intend to show in this chapter, is a highly symbolized domain of human experience. While all aspects of the relationship are symbolized there is overwhelming concentration on the profound natal alienation of the slave. The reason for this is not hard to discern: it was the slave’s isolation, his strangeness, that made him most valuable to the master; but it was this very strangeness that most threatened the community and that most exercised that “primacy of feeling and willing over thinking” which is at the core of the symbolic mind. On the cognitive or mythic level, one dominant theme emerges, which lends an unusually loaded meaning to the act of natal alienation: this is the social death of the slave. On the ritual level, the enslavement process is expressed in terms of well-defined rites of passage.