Читать книгу Antike Sklaverei - Группа авторов - Страница 11

If the slave no longer belonged to a community, if he had no social existence outside of his master, then what was he? The initial response in almost all slaveholding societies was to define the slave as a socially dead person. Claude Meillassoux and his associates have most thoroughly explored this aspect of slavery. They reject the simplistic materialistic view, which fails to take account of this problem – which indeed does not even recognize the existence of the problem.1 From the structural viewpoint, Meillassoux argues, slavery must be seen as a process involving several transitional phases. The slave is violently uprooted from his milieu. He is desocialized and depersonalized. This process of social negation constitutes the first, essentially external, phase of enslavement. The next phase involves the introduction of the slave into the community of his master, but it involves the paradox of introducing him as a nonbeing. This explains the importance of law, custom, and ideology in the representation of the slave relation. […]

In almost all premodern slaveholding societies, at least some slaves were, locally recruited. The problems these slaves posed were no different from those presented by the more dramatically disrupted captives. What was different, however, was the manner of their social death. I suggest that there were two ways in which social death was represented and culturally “explained”, depending on the dominant early mode of recruiting slaves. Where the earliest and most dominant mode of recruitment was external, the cultural mode of representing social death was what I shall call intrusive and this, was likely to continue even where, later, most slaves were internally recruited. The second way in which social death was represented may be called extrusive and this too was determined by the earliest dominant means of recruiting slaves. It persisted even if, later, there was a shift to external sources.

In the intrusive mode of representing social death the slave was ritually incorporated as the permanent enemy on the inside – the “domestic enemy”, as he was known in medieval Tuscany.2 He did not and could not belong because he was the product of a hostile, alien culture. […]

The Greek word for slavery, doulos, is still an etymological mystery, but it is significant that in spite of the highly commercial nature of Greek slavery in classical times and the fact that from the sixth century B.C. on the vast majority of slaves were bought at slave markets rather than captured, the agent of the state responsible for the public regulation of slaves was the war archon.3 The Roman experience was even more revealing. P.R.C. Weaver, in his discussion of the servus vicarius, tells us that the term “is derived, as is much of the domestic terminology of Roman slavery, from military usage and organization” (emphasis added). A common term for slave was captivus.4 Roman law fully represented the intrusive conception of the slave. The Roman captured by the enemy lost all claims as a Roman citizen, but if he escaped and found his way back home, the principle of postliminium applied: he was fully restored to his original status, subject to a few restrictions and occasionally to a redeemer’s lien.5 The idea of social death was also given direct legal expression in Roman law. The slave was pro nullo. We learn, too, from the comedies of Plautus and Terence that the slave was one who recognized no father and no fatherland.6

Hebrew slavery in law and practice, in both ancient and medieval times, was highly intrusive. Fellow Jews could be and were enslaved in biblical times, but the slave was conceived of as the quintessential enemy within. In Leviticus we read:

“And as for thy bondsmen, and thy bondsmaids, which thou shall have of the nations that are round about you, of them all shall ye buy bondsmen and bondsmaids. Moreover of the children of the strangers that do sojourn among you, of them shall ye buy, and of their families that are with you, which they have begotten in your land; and they shall be your possession. And ye shall make them an inheritance for your children after you to hold for a possession; of them shall ye take your bondsmen forever.”7 […]

In sharp contrast with the intrusive conception of death was the extrusive representation. Here the dominant image of the slave was that of an insider who had fallen, one who ceased to belong and had been expelled from normal participation in the community because of a failure to meet certain minimal legal or socioeconomic norms of behavior. The destitute were included in this group, for while they perhaps had committed no overt crime their failure to survive on their own was taken as a sign of innate incompetence and of divine disfavor. […]

We may summarize the two modes of representing the social death that was slavery by saying that in the intrusive mode the slave was conceived of as someone who did not belong because he was an outsider, while in the extrusive mode the slave became an outsider because he did not (or no longer) belonged. In the former the slave was an external exile, an intruder; in the latter he was an internal exile, one who had been deprived of all claims of community. The one fell because he was the enemy, the other became the enemy because he had fallen. […]