Читать книгу Antike Sklaverei - Группа авторов - Страница 12

Institutionalized marginality, the liminal sate of social death, was the ultimate cultural outcome of the loss of natality as well as honor and power. It was in this, too that the, master’s authority rested. For it was he who in a godlike manner mediated between, the socially dead and the socially alive. Without the master, as the Tuareg insist, the slave does not exist. The slave came to obey him not only out of fear, but out of the basic need to exist as a quasi-person, however marginal and vicarious that existence might be. […]

It is not difficult to understand why slaves were never assimilated to the status of outcastes. Slavery, we have seen, was primarily a relation of personal domination. There was an almost perverse intimacy in the bond resulting from the power the master claimed over his slave. The slave’s only life was through and for his master. Clearly, any notion of ritual avoidance and spatial segregation would entail a lessening of this bond. Second, the assimilation of the slave to the status of an occupationally specialized caste would undermine one of his major advantages – the fact that he was a natally alienated person who could be employed in any capacity precisely because he had no claims of birth. Slaves universally were not only sexually exploited in their role as concubines but also in their role as mother-surrogates and nursemaids. However great the human capacity for contradiction, if has never been possible for any group of masters to suckle at their slave’s breast as infants, sow their wild oats with her as adolescents, then turn around as adults and claim that she was polluted. […]