Slavery and Social Death by Orlando Patterson

First published: 1982

Type of work: History

Form and Content

Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study reflects Orlando Patterson’s West Indian background and his experiences as a resident of the United States since 1970. Stylistically, the work owes much to Patterson’s European training and the European philosophical tradition, but the book’s emphasis is clearly a New World one. Readers may note themes from Patterson’s earlier sociological works as well as a restatement of concerns from his novels such as Die the Long Day (1972). A major strength in Patterson’s work has always been his keen awareness of the psychological and political dynamics of slave systems and his attention to the complexities and ironies of the master-slave relationship.

Patterson himself sees this book as a response and a correction to the enormous growth in the quantitative analysis of slavery. Prior analyses, he accurately points out, centered primarily on the Atlantic slave trade and patterns of slavery in the Americas. The author rejects these concerns and attempts to broaden the framework to include both qualitative and quantitative assessments of the institution of slavery across time and space. Patterson emphasizes that no global analysis of the institution had been attempted since H. J. Niebor’s classic study in 1910.

This volume is a product of twelve years of concentrated historical research (mainly from secondary sources) preceded by six years of archival research in Jamaica. Patterson draws on his earlier studies, most notably The Sociology of Slavery: An Analysis of the Origins, Development, and Structure of Negro Slave Society in Jamaica (1967). Slavery and Social Death also anticipates Patterson’s arguments in Freedom, Volume 1: Freedom in the Making of Western Culture (1991).

Slavery and Social Death is in three parts. A brief introduction provides an overview of Patterson’s argument and outlines what he considers to be the constituent elements of slavery. Slavery, he asserts, is a form of social death, originated as a substitute for physical death. The author also introduces the theme of natal alienation of the slave and explores elements of violence and dishonor as they are brought into play in slave societies.

Part 1 deals with the internal dynamics of slavery. Subsections (chapters 1, 2, and 3) outline idioms of power and the connection between property and slavery. Patterson rejects the notion of the slave as property and seeks to develop a definition of slavery independent of property idioms. He contends that the commonly accepted emphasis on property is misplaced and suggests that researchers should see slaves not only as legal entities but as symbolic entities as well.

The next subsection deals with notions of authority and alienation. Borrowing from British social anthropology—most notably the works of Meyer Fortes, Raymond Firth, and Victor Turner—Patterson makes a case that the slave is a liminal person. Slaves do not belong to any kin group. The problem, then, becomes: How do ordinary people relate to the living who are dead? This theme, a most intriguing one, has been taken up by Wade Davis in his study of the process of zombification in Haiti, Passage of Darkness: The Ethnobiology of the Haitian Zombie (1988).

Patterson also pays particular attention to the rituals and marks of enslavement. He notes name-changing and shaving of heads as well as the physical branding of slaves. Color, he contends, is not as important in most cultures as hairstyle in differentiating slaves from nonslaves. This subsection ends with an erudite presentation of Hegelian dialectics and the master-slave relationship.

Part 2 deals with slavery as an institutional process. The author discusses the complex and varied process by which free persons become slaves. He notes that captivity in warfare has historically been the major means of enslavement. There is a need, however, to differentiate between the original and current mechanisms and rationalizations for enslavement. In most societies, the significance of warfare declines as the proportion of the slave population enslaved through birth increases. The author also observes that the most common fate of prisoners of war was ransom, not slavery. Other mechanisms for procuring slaves have included kidnapping, tribute and tax payment, debt, punishment for crimes, abandonment and sale of children, and self-enslavement as a means to escape poverty. Later subsections (chapters 5 through 10) deal with the conditions of slavery, the status of freed persons, and patterns of manumission.

Part 3 focuses on the dialectics of slavery itself, with special attention to elite slaves in Rome and China and to palatine eunuchs in imperial Byzantium. Such slaves—with their important political, administrative, and military functions—usually have not been included in the scholarly analysis of slavery. The Byzantine case constitutes what Patterson believes to be the cornerstone of his argument. He considers eunuchs to have been the “ultimate slaves” due to their ritual impurity and—borrowing from anthropologist Mary Douglas’s classic study Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo (1966)—explores the complex interrelationship of ritual impurity and power. Slavery, Patterson concludes, is nothing less than a form of human parasitism.

Critical Context

Patterson’s studies have sparked controversy because he finds in slavery not an aberration from the Western ideal of freedom but a necessary condition of the notion of freedom itself. This is a theme taken up again in his National Book Award-winning Freedom, Volume 1: Freedom in the Making of Western Culture (1991). For many readers, Patterson’s argument is made all the more difficult because it is hard to acknowledge freedom as a peculiarly Western value. That is, freedom is not inherent, as many Westerners like to believe. Freedom, for Patterson, is a noble sentiment with a less-noble progenitor. The reader is forced to grapple with the interdependence of good and evil.

Concerns of the book reflect Patterson’s background as a native of Jamaica who received his early education in the West Indies. In addition, his comparative approach reflects his further training at the London School of Economics as well as his anthropological sophistication. His methods and presentation, however, reflect his training as a sociologist; in reading this book, one must keep in mind that Patterson is neither a philosopher nor a historian.

Slavery and Social Death offers a single coherent theory that challenges deeply rooted assumptions in Western culture. It provides new points of departure for future research, and it speaks to contemporary social issues in Europe, the Caribbean, and the United States. The book raises fundamental issues concerning human psychology and the potentials of social organization. The author is to be commended for his skillful use of the past to explicate the present. He has provided a new and creative synthesis that forces readers to see both past and present from a new and often radically different perspective.

Bibliography

Davis, David Brion. Review of Slavery and Social Death, by Orlando Patterson. The New York Times Review of Books, February 17, 1983. A thoughtful, sometimes critical review by an eminent historian of slavery. Points out some of the historical shortcomings in Patterson’s book. Takes Patterson to task for taking some historical evidence out of context.

Davis, Wade. Passage of Darkness: The Ethnobiology of the Haitian Zombie. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988. Takes Patterson’s argument one step further by suggesting that there is a category beyond slavery (“social death”)—namely, that of the zombie (“the living dead”).

Douglas, Mary. Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1966. Classic anthropological study of the relationship between unclear categories and notions of taboo in preliterate societies.

Durkheim, Émile. Suicide: A Study in Sociology. New York: Free Press, 1951. An excellent introduction to the style of sociological argumentation. Durkheim’s classic study inspired the form and structure of Patterson’s presentation in Slavery and Social Death.

Patterson, Orlando. Die the Long Day. New York: William Morrow, 1972. Novel dealing with the psychology of the master-slave relationship.

Patterson, Orlando. The Sociology of Slavery: An Analysis of the Origins, Development, and Structure of Negro Slave Society in Jamaica. Madison, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1967. Anticipates many of the arguments in Slavery and Social Death, with attention to the Jamaican case. Good use of archival materials.

Scott, John, ed. Fifty Key Sociologists: The Formative Theorists. New York: Routledge, 2007. Patterson is one of the included sociologists in this anthology that includes critical and comparative assessments of each theorist.